The question is not whether or not Trump has yet violated the Constitution. We are talking about intellectual trends and influences, and Trump and his followers are a dangerous trend in anti-intellectual statism as his mob of followers adulate the 'man on the white horse' who is himself an unprincipled Pragmatist.

Whether Trump. once he takes office, gets away with carrying out some of his threats physically or gets away with the kind of government intrusion in freedom of speech and intimidation practiced by Obama against Fox News and the Tea Party movement through the IRS, Trump is setting new levels of bad precedents for the presidency with his starkly open, sweeping, repeated anti-intellectual intimidation of everyone from journalists to businesses seeking to leave the country to escape regulations and high taxes. He is in principle, behind his threatening outbursts, pushing the premises of the Berlin Wall. Don't wait for it to be built before identifying what his repeated threats are leading to, either now or in the future.

Of course Rather and Breitbart were journalists, and so was James Reston of The New York Times, who Ayn Rand used to quote in her philosophical analyses of political trends and the bad ideas influencing them. If they were not intellectuals there would be no point in discussing them for the influence.

Trump is a whole different critter. You seem to be taking this personally, my position is from a Constitutional standpoint. In that regard, they have not only failed miserably, they have used the armor provided to attack their protector. I am cautiously optimistic about Trump staying inside the lines while speaking clearly to gross bias from the alphabets. No opinion on the above question?

Repeated sweeping attacks on "The media" and Trump's threat to impose stronger "libel laws" against free speech criticizing him are attacks on freedom of speech. This occurs too often and too systematically to be just sloppy criticism of specific journalists or dominant trends among establishment intellectuals. Trump in particular attacks the media with a loutish anti-intellectualism, unable or unwilling to evaluate specific statements or trends in terms of principles.

I think youre missing my point. No one is attacking freedom of speech, to the contrary, the alphabet media s willing suppression of facts and flat out manipulation of facts while refusing to ask obvious pointed questions of government officials simply because you agree with their agenda is a bastardization of freedom of speech and absolutely indefensible if you claim to be a journalist working under the protections the press enjoy as named in the Constitution. Would you consider Dan Rather a journalist? How about Andrew Breitbart? Which one proved to be working for the rule of law and Constitutional responsibility?

Philosophy: Who Needs It made the importance of philosophy the theme of the anthology in 1982, but she emphasized the importance of an intellectual approach in everything she wrote. An explicit philosophical analysis was a hallmark of her articles on politics and everything else. She described the destruction attributed to bad intellectuals as well as the kind of intellectual movement required to reverse their influence.

Two articles at the end of Philosophy: Who Needs It that emphasized the role of intellectual movements in political change -- both good and bad -- were "What Can One Do?" and "Don't Let It Go", from the Ayn Rand Letter, 1972 and 1971. In the same period there were complementary articles on the McGovern presidential campaign and the dominant intellectuals' defeat.

With the kind of uncritical, anti-intellectual euphoric support of Trump we have been seeing for nearly a year as the 'man on the white horse' -- Ayn Rand warned against that, too -- it's especially relevant now to reread those kind of articles.

Good enough, ewv. I believe she covered that in "Philosophy: Who Needs It", which I haven't read in at least 30 years.

Good reporters are publicly appearing despite the bad editors, reporters and commentaries. The bad one's can and should be refuted and rejected without attacking "the media". Trump and his frustrated supporters have been especially bad on this. The answer is better ideas, not attacking freedom of speech and the institution of the press as such.

When Ayn Rand discussed the role of the intellectuals in the evolution of a culture she was talking about the spread of ideas, not just those that are correct. The spread of bad and false ideas from the likes of everything from Plato, to Kant and Hegel, to Marx, to Compte, to today's university professors is an intellectual phenomena.

Re read my reply. We agree there are plenty of good reporters, at a national level, they are overseen by folks that have Obama and Clintons vision of a marxist/communist America. There is no "crusade to destroy the media", their Constitutional protection comes with a heavy responsibility, they are willingly ignoring that - along with actively seeking to harm the Nation by withholding information and altering information required by citizens to make an informed decision. If you know another way to change their approach to their duty, like Ross Perot, I`m all ears.

Nice post, ewv, and we are mainly on the same page. However, your definition of intellectual is different than mine "those whose profession deals in ideas" vs "highly developed intellect" where "highly developed" means rational and correct. Using your definition I can safely say some intellectuals I will embrace and others I will be "frighteningly anti" towards.

It does not have to be slanted for an agenda. A journalist choosing what to write about in selecting facts because he thinks it's more important does not have to spin. He can and should report what he does write objectively.

WSJ and NYT have typical typical left news distortion. WSJ editorials are now more establishment Republican -- John Fund and his great editorials from the early 1990s is long gone from that publication.

CNN news and commentary is blatantly ideological left. Sometimes there will be a decent news report on a particular issue.

NPS is all far left propaganda.

Reading and listening to that nonsense would convince you that Trump is nothing but a clown -- which is why the intellectual left still can't figure out why he won. In both the good and the bad of Trump he is far more serious.

"Each has a slant by whatever stands for a philosophy."
"everyone has a different viewpoint when reporting about objective reality."
This sucks. Maybe there is no way to report pure facts with no bias in selection of facts or how they're presented, but they sure as heck should try.

WSJ - I read it in the 90s and may subscribe again. Op-ed page was really right-wing, but I was okay with that b/c it was clearly separated from the news part.
CNN - I think it's more biased toward entertainment.
NYT - I hold them in high esteem, but I felt like they laughed at Trump too much. I think he's laughable, but I don't want the news outlets doing it. They also joined in in using the language of Trump talking about sexual assault on tape, which I thought was completely bogus. He said "they let you do it." That's not assault.
NPR - I like it, but I've stopped listening lately, mainly b/c I heard too many serious stories explaining how President-elect Trump said contradictory things. I think the president-elect is a clown.
Bloomberg - I like their morning radio show and their website articles.
HuffPo - I don't take them seriously. I've only read a few articles.
BuzzFeed - I've only heard that name.

You should not respect them, but that doesn't make them not intellectuals as long as they are professionally working with ideas. The worst of them are poor journalists, scholars, and thinkers -- and in that sense you can call them pseudo intellectuals and anti-intellectual -- but they are still influencing the culture professionally through ideas. There have been many intellectuals who were anti-intellectual, using ideas to destroy reason.

Most intellectuals today, particularly in the media, have no knowledge of philosophy or the history of its development and influence on society. They have absorbed premises without knowing where they come from or even articulating them coherently, picking them up from what Ayn Rand called the "transmission belts" -- those who disseminate ideas formulated by others, losing track of the source -- and becoming transmitters themselves. Few people know the source of their own ideas and premises.

The orgy of bad principles circulating today and taken for granted as they are put into practice is the result and ongoing state of a culture driven by bad philosophy circulated in many ways. The entire state of the culture is a result of the wrong philosophy spread by intellectuals and then put into destructive practice. Bad ideas should always be rejected, and dishonest and sloppy intellectuals should be denounced. The establishment intellectuals in general must be opposed and identified for what they are doing. The hacks on your local newspaper are the least of it.

But that doesn't mean to denounce "the media" or intellectuals as such. Intellectual argument and dissemination of ideas, and the freedom of thought, speech, and the press, are all we have between us and dictatorship with its censorship. And there are still plenty of reporters and other writers who often do an at least partially decent job against that.

It's not a matter of not "throwing the baby out with the bath water", but replacing the pollution in the tub.

Hi, ewv. I understand what you are alluding to as in: don't throw the baby (media, education, et al) out with the bath water (bad journalists, bad educators, et al). What I'm alluding to is I don't instantly give everyone who has certain credentials the moniker "intellectual", because some (many?) of them are actually anti-intellectuals posing as intellectuals.

The key is the lead in on your last paragraph above: "To abandon reason and philosophy in fighting for freedom...". Many false intellectuals have truly abandoned reason and philosophical discussion and replaced it with very "un-free" ideological despotism and propaganda. They suppress debate and censure opposing views and still want to be viewed as an "intellectual" because they have certain credentials, positions, or a by line in a widely circulated publication. They do not earn my respect and don't care if they go into extinction.

The intellectuals are those whose profession deals in ideas, including all journalists, commentators and educators. It isn't about lashing out at your hometown newspaper, as bad it is.

Ayn Rand emphasized the need to take ideas seriously as the root of the course of a culture and a nation. To influence that, the dominant ideas must be changed for the better.

To abandon reason and philosophy in fighting for freedom, attacking intellectuals as such in contrast to debating and refuting particular media personnel and their ideas, is anti-intellectual and hopeless as a strategy..

Define "intellectual" and let me decide for myself if I want to be "frighteningly anti" towards it. My hometown newspaper is nothing more than a collectivist shill for the Democrat Party and advocate for the great nanny state and can sure posture itself as oh so "intellectual". I stopped buying it years ago and could care less if it went deep six.

There are in fact some good reporters.

A crusade to destroy the media as such is frighteningly anti-intellectual and will nothing to change the bad ideas driving politics.

Good reporters can`t get past bad news desk managers and as we have seen, the top "journalists" are very comfortable wearing the blue dress. The 'alphabet" media giants are the root of the problem, their actions should have consequences - just like the rest of us.

The professional intellectuals have been America's enemies for a long time. The dominant media is only part of that. They are the enemy because of their anti-reason, anti-individualist ideology. Ayn Rand discussed this many times. The answer is to argue for and disseminate better ideas, not destroy the media as such. There are still some good reporters, and destruction of the media leaves no reporting at all. Government would not have to bother with censorship.

Advertising is the lifeblood of media, choke it off. Ive been of the opinion for a very long time that national media is Americas worst enemy, dogs crap on the floor, communists try to overthrow the Constitution - its what they do. It is the medias duty to inform the citizens of those actions, the media have willingly abandoned their duty to the document that protects them. Until we have the will to contact and show up at local business that spend their money with these affiliates and make clear we won`t do business with them - and why, it will hit the media where it hurts. So far, we have not mustered the will. We get what we allow.

Every journalist must report what he thinks is most important. That isn't the same thing as the propagandistic distortions being dished out for an agenda.

Same goes for all news outlets. Each has a slant by whatever stands for a philosophy. So be vigilant to whether what you accept is really about reality because everyone has a different viewpoint when reporting about objective reality. Different brains produce slightly different percepts which can be integrated differently by different people due to different beliefs, etc.

Mobile phones are killing wired phones. VoIP is not expanding much at all, since it depends on wired (or fiber) Internet connections on which to run.

And the only people I know who even still have faxes are accountants and lawyers. Most people would rather just send e-mail with attachments.