I admire her philosophy and she didn't like people who tried to personalize it by calling it "Randian", it's objectivism. Totalitarian countries use figureheads, Republics should stay away from doing so (we started out that way with our coin and currency).
I've never encountered a critic of Ayn Rand who can pass a simple quiz on her philosophy, most go after her lifestyle, personal attributes or construct caricatures of her positions. If I cite her philosophy without attributing it even liberals/progressives agree with 90-95% of it.
The John Oliver piece is not even worth commenting on. It's interesting that the hard left goes after her personal life while they leave heroes like Karl Marx untouched (spent his whole life extravagantly sponging off of other people). Two of the most common ad hominem attacks on her:
- She was against government programs but collected from Social Security.
1 That's like a bank forcing you to make deposits and then criticizing you for collecting the money later on. Social Security is not a benefit, in fact it's a lousy program, returns on a 401K from 1980-2010 (for example) would be a multiple of what you get from Social Security.
2 She actually wrote about this, said that if the state compelled you to surrender money for purposes other than defending your rights, that you had the right to use every legal means to retrieve it.
- She sympathized with a serial killer.
No...she was writing fiction and was thinking about incorporating one quality she admired of a serial killer into her screenplay. So it's a literary device and moreover just as there isn't a single person who is 100% good, nor is there one who is 100% evil, we all have some good/bad qualities.