> I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago.

No, a group of people have been posting about Rand for years. Here's a thread from 8 years ago people on both sides of the like/dislike divide. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292

Here's a post with over 40 points that's just a quote from Atlas Shrugged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696

But I haven't seen these posts before so your argument is obviously invalid :p

I'm not saying that it never happened but that it wasn't the case that she was mentioned in every other flamewar about politics.

From hn.algolia.com, excerpts from all "Ayn Rand" posts in the last 10 days, except replies to these posts:

Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?

Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land

I had a coworker who was a hardcore Ayn Rand type who had a real harsh point of view like this, until his infant was born with a congenital heart defect that resulted in hospitalization for 3-4 months. [this one actually isn't dumb]

HN is nothing but startup bros, armchair economists, and card-carrying Ayn Rand fan club members.

For an entire generation community-oriented principles, egalitarianism, collectivist ideas, and far-left leaders were demonized as Soviet sympathizers, replaced with rah rah unregulated capitalism, Ayn Rand-ian individualist, and military might. [tl;dr, might be reasonable]

Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.

They do all sound harsh!

I don't even care about harsh, fwiw I've barely suffered through maybe some 40% of The Fountainhead when I tried. What caught my attention was that most of these posts look like mindlessly repeated viral meme. Not that it's anything particularly unusual of course, but boring.