The core ideas from the Stalinist psychology proclaimed by the bland villain Ellsworth Toohey in the Fountainhead:

Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognise greatness. Great men can’t be ruled …

Don’t deny the concept of greatness. Destroy it from within. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great and small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection … Enshrine mediocrity – and shrines are razed…

… Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. Tell them to laugh at everything … Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul – and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle. He’ll obey and he’ll set no limits to his obedience – anything goes …

Which brings us to Jonathan Ross.

Charles Moore nails it here:

Ross, in BBC eyes, is the valuable one (£18 million over three years: roughly five annual licence fees per hour). They are still determined to put our money where his mouth is.

I find myself in the strange position of recommending that people listen to the full recording of the Ross/Brand BBC broadcast of their telephone calls to Andrew Sachs’s answering machine. You need to do so to understand what we are dealing with.

People keep describing these calls as "mindless", "a mistake", a "prank". If you listen, you realise they are none of these things.

They are, in a revolting way, intelligent, and they are perfectly deliberate, made by people who feel that they have impunity. What they are trying to do, in the name of being "edgy", is to hurt.

Here we have a pinnacle of the corruption of contemporary collectivism.

Every TV viewer in the UK is compelled by law to pay a ‘fee’ enabling the BBC to employ this weirdly unpleasant person for £6 million per year. He plunges his uniquely privileged snout deep into this rich slurry of taxpayers’ money and then broadcasts to the world his ‘edgy’ and ‘contemporary’ humour.

See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snide. Indeed.

This is the greatest and blackest joke of all. That we the British masses have no choice but to pay these people to sneer at and diminish our basic ideals and standards developed through pain and trial and error down the centuries.

As Ayn Rand’s terrifying Ellsworth Toohey puts it:

The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. But we’ll have neither God nor thought. Only voting by smiles…