I first read Atlas Shrugged when I was 16 years old.

I'm an avid reader. I was reading so many grand masters of science fiction at that age.

And then Ayn fucking Rand was a rock thrown at the window of my mind.

An engine that runs on magic! A miraculous metal never conceived before! Oh, all these sci-fi notes that hooked my brain!

Those sci-fi hooks hooked me but good.

It took me a good decade to finally go......oh, she was genuinely fucked up.

There's a reason I didn't come out as queer until my father died. Because I subconsciously knew that he'd disown me, shun me, kick me out of the family.

I'm happily out now, happily myself, happily radical and leftist and queer.

But I *get* why Gen X is tilting right. The best minds of my generation have been co-opted by Objectivism.

PS: The old saw that "you get more conservative as you get older" is hot bullshit. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that a well-educated, well-compensated community is a good thing.

We need to unionize. We need to have a general strike against our owners. That's the only thing that could possibly get things moving, get things changed.