If you haven't already decided to write off Ayn Rand here is a decent example of why you should. I stumbled upon this passage today being upheld as a maxim of wisdom:

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

That is just about exactly wrong. In my experience, most real political issues are far too complicated to reasonably reduce to two sides, and the extremists, not the moderates, are the ones who are almost always evil. Its easy to invent examples where one side is totally wrong but real life is almost never like that. The passage continues:

The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if, only, by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube..."

This sort of black and white thinking is not offered in the service of truth. It seeks to blank out the truth that moral choices involving real people are complicated, in favor of oversimplified thinking that makes people feel comfortable with their actions. The examples given are transparent straw men, from which the reader is urged to extrapolate to difficult issues. Difficult issues are difficult because they don't fit this simple mold. The truth doesn't care if its on a side.

Why Ayn Rand was a fool...