Ayn Rand With a Ring Light, Max Stirner With a Knife
and the Pornography of Political “Truth”
There is a strange comedy in watching political influencers invoke “principle” after years of living by appetite. The spectacle around Franco Mabanta and his defenders is not merely about free speech, censorship, journalism, or even the alleged extortion case itself. It is also a philosophical farce, though not the kind usually admitted in press conferences, Facebook lives, or emergency statements written in the high fever of damage control. It is the farce of men who sound like Ayn Rand when they defend themselves, but who are better understood through Max Stirner once the costume is stripped away.
They speak as if they are heroes of speech: rugged individualists, independent minds, sovereign commentators standing against the swamp of power. They want the posture of the Randian protagonist — the persecuted creator, the misunderstood man of vision, the productive ego surrounded by parasites, cowards, bureaucrats, liberals, oligarchs, communists, and mediocrities. They want to sound like Howard Roark with a YouTube channel, John Galt with a podcast, a sovereign man besieged by the mob, the state, and the weak-minded public.
But the deeper reality is more Stirnerite and less flattering. The issue is not heroic individualism. It is ownness without honesty. It is ego wrapped in public causes. It is self-interest disguised as “truth,” factional combat disguised as “journalism,” and political appetite disguised as “free speech absolutism.”
Ayn Rand built her mythology around the heroic ego that creates, produces, refuses to bow, and stands against collectivist mediocrity. Max Stirner, colder and more corrosive, did not worship “the heroic man” in the same marble way. He laughed at sacred causes. He distrusted abstractions that demanded devotion: humanity, truth, morality, nation, freedom, people, justice. His question was always more brutal: whose cause is this, really? Who benefits when this thing is declared sacred?
That is why the Mabanta affair, and the online class surrounding it, sounds like Rand fighting against Stirner. The influencer wants to speak in Randian self-defense: "I am independent, I am persecuted, I am the man with a vision, I am the enemy of corrupt mediocrity." But Stirner walks into the room and asks: "is this really freedom, or is this merely your cause wearing a halo?"
The Randian Costume
The political influencer loves the Randian silhouette. It flatters him. It gives him grandeur. It makes his anger look principled and his ambition look philosophical. In that costume, he is not merely a loud partisan. He is a creator. He is a dissenter. He is a producer of forbidden truth. He is a man attacked because he dared to stand apart from the herd.
That is why the language of “free speech absolutism” is so attractive. It allows the influencer to imagine himself as a sovereign individual battling the machinery of state and mediocrity. It turns a legal controversy into a moral drama. It turns an arrest into a stage. It turns a content network into a fortress of liberty.
In this posture, the influencer does not merely publish commentary. He “speaks truth.” He does not merely attack enemies. He “exposes corruption.” He does not merely cultivate factional loyalty. He “awakens the people.” He does not merely monetize outrage. He “builds independent media.” He does not merely enjoy access to power. He “understands the real game.”
It is all very grand. Too grand. The Randian pose works best when the individual is visibly producing something independent of patronage: a building, an engine, a company, a book, a technology, a real institution that exists because of discipline and excellence. But the political influencer’s product is often less impressive. His product is mood. His product is attention. His product is outrage shaped into loyalty. His product is the feeling that the viewer is inside the room where power is supposedly being unmasked.
The Filipino political vlogger often wants the dignity of the builder without the discipline of building. He wants the aura of the independent creator while living inside the factional weather of dynasties, camps, patrons, candidates, and political families. He wants the romance of the outsider while performing proximity to insiders. He wants to be the sovereign man and the palace whisperer at the same time.
That is not Randian heroism. That is brand management — although, to be fair, many Randians, fascinated as they are with free enterprise capitalism, might see brand management itself as a kind of heroism. In their vocabulary, the cultivation of a name, a market, an audience, and a personal mythology can be mistaken for production. The influencer becomes a “creator” because he has built a brand; the brand becomes proof of independence because it attracts followers; the followers become evidence of value because the market has supposedly spoken. But this only deepens the farce. A brand is not automatically a philosophy. A market signal is not automatically moral vindication. Audience capture is not the same as creation, and visibility is not the same as virtue.
The Orderist Ego and the State They Suddenly Fear
The irony is obvious: many of these figures are trying to sound Randian. They posture as absolutists, as sovereign men of speech, as heroic dissenters who refuse to bend before bureaucrats, liberals, oligarchs, communists, and the allegedly weak-minded public. They speak as though they are defending the individual against the collective, the independent mind against the mob, the fearless commentator against the cowardly state.
Yet beneath that libertarian costume sits something more revealing: a fascination with orderism whenever order satisfies self-interest.
That is the contradiction. In one instance, they cry against the Left as “subversive,” “terroristic,” destabilizing, or dangerous to the nation. They demand discipline, punishment, surveillance, loyalty, and state muscle. They praise crackdowns when the target is convenient. They cheer strongmen when the violence of order is directed at their enemies. Some admire the theatrical antics of figures like Argentina’s Javier Milei, not merely because of economic doctrine, but because he performs the fantasy of the chainsaw-wielding individual smashing institutions in the name of freedom.
But when the state counters their own shitstorm, when police language and prosecutorial machinery turn toward their side, they suddenly rediscover civil liberties. This is not principled libertarianism. It is selective anti-statism. It is order for enemies, freedom for oneself. It is the old authoritarian bargain wearing the sunglasses of radical individualism.
That is why their Randian "libertarianism" feels hollow. A real absolutist would defend the principle even when it protects enemies. A true free-speech radical would not discover nuance only when his own faction is touched. But this crowd often treats liberty as private property. Their speech is freedom. Their enemies’ speech is subversion. Their propaganda is truth. Their opponents’ propaganda is destabilization. Their manipulation is awakening. The other side’s manipulation is terrorism, communism, the oligarchy, or simply state interference.
One begins to wonder whether they are trying to be as edgy as the edgelords of the internet without understanding what made the anonymous memer different. Mabanta and his orbit are not the same as the anonymous poster who treats every piece of information as raw material for humor, desecration, and absurdity. The anonymous memer, however ugly or corrosive, often knows he is playing in the sewer. He does not always demand to be called a journalist, patriot, or defender of civilization. He turns politics into a joke because, to him, everything is already a joke.
The political influencer is different. He wants sewer energy with civic honor. He wants to be funny, cruel, factional, and destructive, but also respectable. He wants to wound like a troll, posture like a patriot, negotiate like an operator, and be defended like a dissident. He wants the saltiness of the old “zucc’d” pages, but not their honesty about being creatures of dankness, rage, and bad faith. He wants the edgelord’s freedom with the bourgeois influencer’s legal and moral protection.
This is why the spectacle recalls those moments when lawmakers in the lower house grilled Duterte-aligned vloggers over fake news disguised as “truth.” Many of them, when placed under institutional pressure, suddenly sounded smaller than their online personas. Some apologized. Some softened their claims. Some discovered that a congressional hearing is not the same as a comment section. Others avoided the proceedings altogether, which was perhaps the more honest act: absence as self-preservation. The performance of fearlessness tends to shrink when the audience is no longer made of followers but of officials with microphones, records, and contempt powers.
That earlier spectacle already revealed the structure of the game. The vlogger’s “truth” often survives best in the platform environment, where repetition can masquerade as evidence and engagement can impersonate credibility. Inside a hearing room, where claims can be questioned, dates demanded, sources requested, and responsibility assigned, the magic weakens. The heroic truth-teller becomes evasive. The brave patriot becomes procedural. The digital warrior becomes careful.
Obviously, such activity is not merely ordinary commentary. It is a form of information warfare, and more specifically, cognitive warfare. It civilianizes a military act: demoralizing a population, shaping perception, exhausting the public’s ability to distinguish fact from half-truth, and making people favor one narrative before evidence can stabilize. It does not require tanks or rifles. It uses memes, livestreams, clipped videos, insinuations, emotional repetition, tribal grievance, and the constant recycling of suspicion.
The goal is not always to persuade in the old rational sense. The goal is to condition. To make the audience suspicious of one side before hearing it. To make them laugh at the other side before understanding it. To make them believe that institutions are corrupt only when they threaten one’s faction, and heroic when they punish the faction’s enemies. It is not debate. It is mood management.
That is why many readers of such pages, especially Duterte supporters searching for copium after political setbacks, praise these personalities as though they were John Galts of the Philippine internet. They imagine them as heroic men withdrawing truth from a corrupt world, or brave producers of forbidden knowledge persecuted by mediocrities and parasites.
But this is a fantasy. John Galt, at least in Rand’s mythology, is a creator whose withdrawal reveals the dependence of society on genuine production. The influencer is not that. He is not withdrawing an engine from the world. He is feeding the machine of resentment that keeps him visible.
The better comparison is not Rand’s heroic creator but Stirner’s ego hiding behind a borrowed god. The influencer’s sacred cause is “truth,” but the practical cause is relevance. The sacred cause is “freedom,” but the practical cause is operational space. The sacred cause is “the people,” but the practical cause is audience capture. The sacred cause is “anti-corruption,” but the practical cause is factional damage. The sacred cause is “speech,” but the practical cause is power.
That is the fraud: they want to be Randian heroes while practicing Stirnerite appetite without Stirnerite honesty. They want to be absolutists when speaking, orderists when punishing, libertarians when accused, authoritarians when offended, and revolutionaries when monetizing the chaos. They want the state to be a hammer in their hands and a tyrant in everyone else’s.
And now that the state has answered one of their own storms with its own machinery, they cry as though the weather itself has betrayed them.
The Vulgar Randian Transaction
The incident sounds almost vulgar Randian in the worst possible way: not heroic self-interest, not productive independence, not the grand ego of a builder, but transaction. A price placed beside a truth. A supposed exposé allegedly converted from public revelation into bargaining material. The image is obscene not because money exists in media — all media has economics — but because the alleged logic turns truth itself into inventory.
That is where the public question becomes unavoidable: if they were really for the truth, why would anyone allegedly need to pay just to keep that truth from being blurted out? If the content was a matter of public interest, why would its release depend on anything other than verification, editorial courage, and the public’s right to know? Why would a supposed act of exposure be haunted by the language of tranches, intermediaries, delivery points, hotel meetings, and negotiated silence?
Again, these are allegations, not verdicts. Mabanta is entitled to due process. The NBI must prove its case. But as political imagery, the charge is devastating because it attacks the very mythology of the influencer-truth teller. The brand says: “We reveal what others hide.” The allegation says: “Truth had a price.” The brand says: “We are fearless.” The allegation says: “Fearlessness could be negotiated.” The brand says: “We speak for the people.” The allegation says: “The people might have been only the audience, while the real transaction happened elsewhere.”
This is where Mabanta’s vulgar interpretation of self-interest, if the accusations are proven, makes his brand of journalism or commentary almost pornographic in the older sense of the word. "Pornographos" in Greek meant a writing about prostitutes, from "pornē" and "graphein": the writing of what is sold, the inscription of commerce around exposure. The word is useful here not as sexual insult, but as moral anatomy. It describes a style of publicity in which what should be public interest becomes a spectacle of transaction, where exposure itself is priced, staged, teased, withheld, and potentially exchanged.
That is the obscenity: not nakedness, but the sale of revelation. Not scandal, but the commodification of scandal. Not journalism, but the conversion of damaging information into a kind of political flesh market, where truth is displayed, concealed, previewed, and allegedly offered as leverage.
This is why the Randian pose collapses so badly. Rand’s egoist, at least in myth, creates value through production. The vulgar political egoist creates value through damage. He does not build the engine; he threatens to release the smoke. He does not withdraw his genius from the world; he withholds a video. He does not prove independence through creation; he allegedly prices silence.
Stirner would see the cause stripped bare. The sacred language of truth, freedom, and the people dissolves into the old question: who owns the information, who benefits from its release, who benefits from its suppression, and who is pretending that private leverage is public virtue?
In that light, the alleged transaction is not merely legal evidence to be tested. It is the perfect metaphor for the ecosystem itself: a marketplace where outrage is currency, truth is inventory, silence is negotiable, and every sacred cause comes with a rate card hidden somewhere behind the ring light.
Stirner Enters and Ruins the Party
Max Stirner is useful here because he ruins the solemnity. He does not let people hide too long behind big words. When a faction says “truth,” Stirner asks whether it means truth or advantage. When an influencer says “freedom,” Stirner asks whether he means freedom or immunity. When a camp says “justice,” Stirner asks whether it means justice or revenge. When a network says “public interest,” Stirner asks whether the public was truly the client, or merely the audience.
Stirner’s famous provocation is that men are constantly asked to serve sacred causes while forgetting their own. “Truth,” “freedom,” “the people,” “the nation,” “justice” — all these can become idols. They can be noble in one mouth and fraudulent in another. His suspicion is not that every cause is fake, but that every cause can be used to domesticate the ego while pretending to elevate it.
That suspicion fits the political influencer perfectly. The influencer does not say, “My cause is my relevance.” He says, “My cause is truth.” He does not say, “My cause is destroying my faction’s enemy.” He says, “My cause is accountability.” He does not say, “My cause is surviving the legal blast radius.” He says, “My cause is free speech.” He does not say, “My cause is preserving my audience.” He says, “My cause is the people.”
Stirner would laugh, not because free speech is worthless, but because the sudden sacredness of free speech appears exactly when the speaker needs it most. The abstraction becomes holy at the moment it becomes useful. The banner is raised when the position becomes dangerous.
That is the hidden comedy of the Mabanta spectacle. It is not that the public should dismiss all free-speech concerns. The state can abuse power. The NBI must prove its case. Political timing can be suspicious. Entrapment operations deserve scrutiny. The accused deserves due process. But none of that requires the public to swallow the performance whole.
Stirner’s knife cuts through the halo. It asks whether “free speech absolutism” is principle, tactic, or costume.
Rand Wants the Hero; Stirner Sees the Owner
Rand’s hero says: I stand alone because I refuse to live for others. Stirner’s egoist says something colder: I serve what is mine, and I do not pretend that my appetite is a god.
That is the crucial difference. Rand moralizes ego. Stirner unmasks it. Rand gives the individual a temple. Stirner burns down the temple and asks what the individual does after the smoke clears.
The Mabanta-type influencer wants Rand’s temple. He wants his self-interest to appear noble, productive, persecuted, and civilizational. He wants the audience to see him as a man fighting for a higher moral order. He wants to be treated as a dissident, not an operator; a journalist, not a broker; a truth-teller, not a factional combatant.
But the Stirnerite reading is more ruthless. It sees no temple. It sees a man, a platform, an audience, a factional battlefield, a claim to truth, a claim to persecution, and a sudden appeal to sacred rights. It asks whether all these noble words are merely tools of self-preservation.
That does not automatically make the man guilty. It makes the rhetoric suspect.
There is a difference between defending rights and laundering one’s ego through rights. A real civil libertarian defends due process even for enemies. A factional influencer discovers due process when the handcuffs appear. A real free-speech advocate defends speech even when it damages his own side. A political operator defends speech when his own content is threatened and calls for punishment when enemies speak.
That is where the Randian costume tears. The heroic individualist should be consistent. The factional egoist rarely is.
The Influencer as Second-Hander
Rand despised the “second-hander,” the person who lives through the opinions, approval, and recognition of others. Ironically, that is exactly what much of the influencer class is.
The influencer claims independence, yet lives by reaction. He needs enemies to denounce him, followers to praise him, patrons to notice him, algorithms to reward him, and rival factions to fear him. He is supposedly sovereign, yet his daily oxygen is engagement. His ego is not built in solitude. It is built in metrics.
This makes the Randian pose even more absurd. The influencer is not Howard Roark refusing to compromise his design. He is a man refreshing the feed to see whether the attack landed. He is not John Galt withdrawing his genius from the world. He is a broadcaster of grievance who needs the crowd every hour. He is not the solitary creator. He is the merchant of reaction.
In this sense, Stirner again explains him better than Rand. The influencer is not an independent heroic producer. He is an ego moving through a marketplace of causes, seizing whichever abstraction gives him power: nationalism today, anti-corruption tomorrow, free speech when arrested, due process when charged, public interest when exposed, persecution when cornered. He does not transcend the crowd. He feeds on it.
The supposed individualist is actually a creature of mass attention. Without the audience, he disappears. Without enemies, he softens. Without factional heat, he loses shape. Without outrage, he becomes ordinary. That is not heroic egoism. That is dependency with a microphone.
Free Speech as Property, Not Principle
A Stirnerite reading also explains why “free speech” in this ecosystem often behaves less like a universal right and more like private property. It is “mine” when I use it. It is “abuse” when my enemy uses it. It is “truth-telling” when my faction attacks. It is “destabilization” when the other faction attacks. It is “press freedom” when my platform is threatened. It is “fake news” when another platform wounds my patron.
This is not free speech absolutism. It is speech possessiveness. The influencer treats liberty as something he owns by virtue of his cause. He does not defend the general condition of open discourse. He defends his own operational space within it. That is why the rhetoric becomes so selective. He wants the maximum room to attack, insinuate, dramatize, and mobilize. But when criticism returns, when legal scrutiny arrives, when the public asks whether his methods were clean, he retreats into constitutional grandeur.
The problem is not the invocation of free speech itself. The problem is its sudden sanctification. The right becomes holy exactly when the ego requires shelter. That is Stirner’s point in political form. The sacred cause appears at the moment of use.
This is why the phrase “free speech absolutism” sounds ridiculous when uttered by factional media men. Absolutism requires consistency. It requires defending speech that harms one’s own side. It requires accepting that enemies also have rights. It requires resisting selective outrage. It requires a principle larger than immediate advantage.
What many influencers practice is not absolutism. It is tactical liberty to defend their interests.
Rand Against the State, Stirner Against the Halo
The Mabanta affair also reveals the difference between opposing state power and pretending that all state action is tyranny when it touches one’s own camp.
Rand’s suspicion of state coercion is easy enough for influencers to borrow. The state is oppressive. The bureaucrats are corrupt. The productive individual is being punished. The independent voice is being silenced. It is a ready-made drama, especially in a country where the state often does abuse its power.
But Stirner’s suspicion is wider. He is suspicious not only of the state, but of every halo. He distrusts the moral costume worn by power and by those who oppose power. He would not stop at asking whether the NBI is being used politically. He would also ask whether PGMN’s free-speech rhetoric is being used strategically. He would not merely ask whether Romualdez is powerful. He would ask whether the alleged exposé was public service or leverage. He would not merely ask whether Mabanta is persecuted. He would ask what Mabanta’s “cause” was really serving.
That is the better lens here because every side is trying to sanctify itself. The state sanctifies itself through law and order. Romualdez’s camp sanctifies itself through victimhood. PGMN sanctifies itself through free speech. DDS disowners sanctify themselves through factional distancing. Marcos defenders sanctify themselves through denial of association. Critics sanctify themselves through accountability.
The Stirnerite move is to profane all of them. It does not say all sides are equally guilty. It says all sides are interested. That is a more useful starting point than the childish search for pure heroes.
Information War Is Ego War
The fashionable phrase is “information war,” but beneath it is ego war. Every player wants not merely to speak, but to impose a frame. Every camp wants its interpretation to harden before the facts do. Every faction wants the public to feel the right emotion first: disgust, pity, suspicion, rage, amusement, tribal loyalty.
This is why the Mabanta spectacle feels larger than the case. It is not merely about whether one man committed a crime. It is about who gets to define the meaning of the arrest. Is it proof of extortion? Proof of persecution? Proof of Marcos-Duterte infighting? Proof that PGMN had something explosive? Proof that influencers are frauds? Proof that the state is weaponized? Proof that Romualdez is afraid? Proof that the DDS ecosystem abandons its own?
Every answer is a weapon. As Rand would frame the hero against the collectivist mob while Stirner would see competing egos using collective language. “The people” becomes a mask. “The nation” becomes a mask. “Free speech” becomes a mask. “Anti-corruption” becomes a mask. “Due process” becomes a mask. Behind each mask is a will seeking advantage.
That does not mean truth does not exist. It means truth enters the battlefield already surrounded by men trying to rent it.
The influencer’s genius, if it can be called genius, is to understand that facts are slow and feelings are fast. A case file takes time. A meme takes seconds. A court process takes months or years. A narrative can harden overnight. That is the terrain of cognitive war. It rewards speed, repetition, emotional clarity, and shamelessness.
This is why the old polite liberal vocabulary often fails against it. It assumes that the public square is a debating hall. It is not. It is a market, a cockpit, a revival meeting, a comedy club, a rumor mill, and occasionally a battlefield. The influencer did not create that condition, but he learned how to profit from it.
The Bourgeois Edgelord
The comparison to meme pages and shitposts in social media, including that of Reddit and 4Chan matters because it exposes the class character of local political edginess. The anonymous edgelord often knows he is in the sewer. He does not ask to be mistaken for a statesman. He does not usually demand a civic halo. His ugliness is part of the performance. That does not make him admirable. It makes him legible.
The Filipino political influencer is stranger. He wants sewer energy with drawing-room respectability. He wants to insult like a troll, posture like a patriot, negotiate like an operator, and be defended like a journalist. He wants to be edgy enough to dominate attention but respectable enough to claim persecution when consequences arrive.
That is why the phrase “bourgeois edgelord” fits. He is not raw chaos. He is curated chaos. He is not the anonymous mob. He is the branded personality. He is not merely offensive. He is professionally offensive. He does not simply shitpost. He produces content. He does not merely attack. He frames, packages, monetizes, and networks the attack.
Rand would perhaps admire the self-made posture. Stirner would notice the dependency underneath it. The influencer depends on the crowd, the platform, the faction, the patron, the enemy, the outrage cycle, the illusion of access, and the constant renewal of grievance. His ego is not sovereign. It is algorithmically maintained.
This is why his cry of innocence or free speech can sound so theatrical. He is not wrong to demand due process. He is wrong to expect the public to forget the ecosystem he helped normalize.
The Problem With Sacred Men
Every faction eventually manufactures sacred men. The sacred man is the one whose flaws must be excused because he serves the cause. He may be crude, but he is useful. He may be reckless, but he is brave. He may be partisan, but he is truthful. He may be compromised, but he is ours.
Mabanta’s trouble reveals what happens when a sacred man becomes inconvenient. The sanctity evaporates. The faction begins historical revision. He was not really ours. He worked more with them. The photographs are old. The association was exaggerated. The friendship was misunderstood. The usefulness is quietly deleted.
This is another Stirnerite comedy. The cause claims loyalty, but only while the ego is useful to it. The individual serves the faction until the faction must survive him. Then he is returned to himself, alone, suddenly responsible for his own cause after all.
Rand’s heroic individualist might welcome that solitude. The influencer usually does not. His power came precisely from not being alone. It came from audience, proximity, faction, and amplification. Once those are withdrawn, the supposed sovereign man discovers how crowded his independence used to be.
The Article’s Harder Judgment
The hardest judgment is not that Mabanta is guilty. That belongs to the courts. The harder judgment is that the surrounding rhetoric is shabby. The free-speech defense may contain a valid legal concern, but as political theater it is too convenient. The disowning may contain factual claims about past affiliations, but as public morality it is cowardly. The Palace’s photograph game may be tactically clever, but as governance it is childish. The critics’ popcorn may be satisfying, but it is not a substitute for proof. The NBI’s operation may be legitimate, but it must survive scrutiny. Romualdez may be the complainant, but he is not therefore beyond investigation.
The Randian reading wants heroes and villains. The Stirnerite reading offers something more unpleasant: interests.
Everyone has a cause. Everyone claims it is noble. Everyone insists the public should believe his banner. Yet beneath the banners are egos, factions, fears, calculations, appetites, and transactions.
That is why the Mabanta affair is philosophically useful. It exposes the cheapness of sacred language in a political-media economy built on noise. It shows how quickly “free speech” can become a bunker, how quickly “truth” can become a weapon, how quickly “journalism” can become a costume, and how quickly “loyalty” can become deniability.
It also shows how easily truth can become pornographic in the older, more literal sense: something written around sale, exposure, and appetite. A “truth” teased but not released, previewed but allegedly priced, moralized but potentially monetized, becomes less a public good than a staged commodity. The public is invited to believe it is witnessing courage, but the allegation suggests the possibility of a transaction behind the curtain.
The public does not need to become Stirnerite nihilists to learn from this. It only needs to become less gullible about sacred causes. It needs to ask the old egoist’s question whenever a faction speaks too grandly: whose cause is this, really?
Conclusion: Against the Halo
In the end, Mabanta and his circle do not sound like pure Randians, because Rand’s heroes at least imagine themselves as creators standing on the strength of their work. Nor are they honest Stirnerites, because Stirner’s egoist would not need to pretend that his cause was universal salvation. They occupy a less impressive middle ground: Randian in self-image, Stirnerite in appetite, bourgeois in style, factional in practice.
They want the heroic ego, but not the solitude. They want the sacred cause, but not the discipline. They want the privileges of journalism, but not always its obligations. They want the violence of information war, but not the stigma of being combatants. They want to wound like propagandists and be mourned like dissidents. They want to price the truth, or at least live in an ecosystem where truth can be treated as inventory, while still being praised as men of principle.
That is why the better response is not to worship the state, nor to canonize the accused, nor to treat every influencer scandal as a constitutional apocalypse. The better response is to profane the whole stage. Strip away the halo. Ask for evidence. Ask who benefits. Ask what was published, what was withheld, what was demanded, what was proven, and what was merely performed.
Free speech matters. Due process matters. Public-interest journalism matters. Anti-corruption work matters. But none of these should be surrendered to men who discover sacred principles only when their own cause is endangered.
Stirner’s ghost stands at the edge of the spectacle and smiles at the absurdity. Rand’s hero wants to declare, “I will not live for another man.” The influencer says something less noble but more familiar: “I will live for my cause — and when necessary, I will call my cause the people’s.”
That is the fraud worth naming.