One day in the early 2000s, a goth teenager by the name of Sohrab Ahmari was perusing the shelves of a Salt Lake City bookstore when his gaze landed upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For a misfit atheist adolescent looking for meaning in life outside the bleak conditions of the majority-Mormon trailer park he resided in, the encounter turned out to be love at first sight. Ahmari recalls in his memoir, “To say that I ‘read’ Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra would be an understatement. I took the book home from the store, lay belly down on my bed, and finished it over three or four days, barely stepping out to eat and wash. I consumed Zarathustra, and it consumed me, in turn.”1 Soon after accepting Nietzsche as his (anti-)messiah, Ahmari became “quite literally a card-carrying communist.”2 Indeed, when the Straussian professor Allan Bloom bemoaned Nietzsche-quoting radicals on college campuses in his classic polemic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), he was referring to left-Nietzcheans like the teenaged Ahmari, those that squared Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism with a grand project of ultimate equality.
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