OC's Yaron Brook Waxes Poetic About "The Amazing Randi"

Broward-Palm Beach New Times, one of our Village Voice Media sister papers on the opposite coast, has an exhaustive cover story this week on one of their most-famous residents, James Randi, who is also known as "The Amazing Randi."

Near the end of reporter Michael J. Mooney's piece, "The God of the Skeptics: James Randi has been worshiped by nonbelievers and doubters. So what will free thinkers do when he's gone?" an Orange Countian gets a crack at that question.

It's none other than Yaron Brook, the president of the Irvine-based Ayn Rand Institute and frequent contributor to the Orange County Register's opinion pages.

"Part of his legacy will be the resurgence in atheism and all the debunking he's done, but one of his greatest achievements has been the reassertion of one objective truth," Brook says of Randi. "So many of those influenced by him just want to debunk for the sake of debunking, but Randi is better. He is a defender of the truth."