Attn. Yaron Brook: Your shameful silence on abortion spotlights the Ayn Rand Institute’s intellectual bankruptcy.

As I write this, thirty-seven seventy-eight days have passed since the first of the Planned Parenthood infanticide videos was posted. In that time, I’ve written more than a dozen posts on the fallout. How many essays, do you suppose, has the Ayn Rand Institute posted?

The think tank built to champion the views of strident abortion proponent Ayn Rand has offered up precisely zero observations on the videos.

I find it easy to fault them for this: A casual disregard for the lives of other people is the soul and substance of ‘asking another man to live for my sake,’ number two on John Galt’s short-list of cardinal sins. But at the same time, I do understand their paralysis – plausibly better than they do.

First, Ayn Rand’s anti-objective “piece of protoplasm” claim has now completely fallen apart. Objectivism has always been at war with the obvious, uncontested facts of human gestation. That war is now all the way lost. You’re not clipping your toenails, you are murdering your own child. Who knew?

Second, and much worse, Ayn Rand’s defense of abortion is rank utilitarianism, a puerile hit-’n’-run rationalization for evil. It’s hard to blame the ARIvians for being unable to defend this atrocious rhapsodization of atrocity.

Third, and still worse, by championing infanticide, Ayn Rand made war on the putative egoism she sought to promote. People who uphold abortion lead miserable lives in the end, but the attendant abortion culture retards all human flourishing. There is nothing more “anti-man, anti-mind, anti-life” than slaughtering innocents for convenience.

There’s more. Ayn Rand was a Cautious Tyrant by the end of her life, and the Ayn Rand Institute is built in her image and likeness. It cannot do anything even remotely like admitting error, even though its ignominious silence is itself a resounding confession of intellectual bankruptcy.

Oh, they don’t know they’re being called out? Wanna bet?

There is really nothing left to be said. To the extent that Ayn Rand had an impact on the intellectual marketplace, that impact died with her. Her ‘intellectual errors’ are now fully exposed as impotent, incompetent cowards.