We will not be discussing the criminal levels of violence so common in computer games today. We will not be discussing how the creators of Halo have taken this to a new level, preying on children’s insecurities to offer than an outlet through the scope of a futuristic rifle. We will save the news reports of mental neurosis, obesity, suicide and even murder associated with the gaming lifestyle for another time. These are simply matters of public record, issues that a moral society will either grapple with or not if we care in the least about projecting those uniquely American values of justice and human decency into the future.

No, today let us pull back the layers of secrecy to reveal what Halo, one of this nation’s most controversial video games, is teaching young people about God and socialist revolution. Never before have we encountered something so unquestionably dangerous as this noxious fantasy scene of simian jack bootery and salacious jezebels conspiring to deliriously manipulate our fragile, lost teens who, in their heart of hearts, may be simply yearning for a warm embrace and a reason to live. Indeed, the story that follows will not be a pretty one.

Plot: Egged on by a half-naked female handler named Cortana, a chemically-enhanced warrior fights against a theocratic alliance called “The Covenant” descended from the heavens. Master Chief joins gangs and employs an arsenal of implausible weapons to viciously wipe out all the ancestors of “the Ark” in an effort to cement the power of a global government called the UNSC.

Setting: Massive structures of fascist design dot dangerous Asiatic landscapes. The hyper-real graphics are drawn with jarring fluorescent colors. This future world is on the cusp of the ultimate judgment, reminiscent of Biblical End Times. There is no grey area here. You’re either lock step with Master Chief’s agenda of anarchy or you die.

Soundtrack: Heavy metal slasher rock at ear-piercing levels.

Influence: For over a decade, this has been the most popular game on the planet. It has spawned children’s books, comic series, costume festivals, television shows, fan videos, spin-off games and a type of animated pornography known as Machinera. Along the way, it has sold over 100 million copies and has made its creators billions of dollars.

One may ask why the story of Halo has never been told before. Could it be the enormous power that the entertainment industry wields over the public discourse? Could it be those billions of dollars that companies like Microsoft throw around Congress? Or could it be just one small cog in the grand scheme of things that international banking cartels use to sell us on the illusion of those frail dollars crumpled damply in our pockets?

A more immediate truth is that the game is extremely off-putting and complicated for adults. Its component “Xbox” shooting console is expensive. And even when one plays the game, it takes incredible effort to understand its larger meaning. Only those who become truly addicted to Halo discover its deepest, most hidden levels.

To get there, you traverse places with names like Blood Gulch, Valhalla, Tombstone and Warlock Wizards. You arm yourself with flamethrowers and plasma cannons, reticule booms and fusion cores. You join gangs of real-life players all across the world wide web and embark on quests to the screams of “Kill! Faster! Kill!” The scene is littered with the skulls of the dead, skulls that give you narcotic boosts of insane power as you tear the heads off your opponents and feast on their gory innards.

The woman Cortana hovers behind, whispering conspiracies in your ear. She uses her big-breasted flirtatiousness to trick you to take on suicidal missions. She may be little more than a cliché of the Cold War communist agent handling the “useful idiots” of the West, but she is extremely effective.

The more you play the game, the more dehumanized you become. You are simply a robot after all, a robot of bits and bytes manifested on a television screen. Compassion and love are cast aside. You have become a killing machine whose sole purpose in life is to crush religion into a bloody mound of puss and gristle for the sake of the End Times collective.

Is this truly the fate that awaits us? How can we so casually cast aside the wisdom of our Founding Fathers? They had a vision of freedom and faith that gave birth to the greatest nation this planet has ever known. Since the 1960s, we have seen our most sacred institutions destroyed in the name of “progress.” Radical sexuality, communism, drugs and inner city violence are the reprehensible results of liberalism’s assault on the primacy of patriotism and family values. Today let us consider how far these people will go to destroy those amongst us who cherish God’s plan for America and our inviolable responsibility to keep the world safe.

Halo is simply that first, furtive step on the long march to the American Armageddon. Yet if we educate ourselves and arm our homefronts with faith, there is always hope. You might even begin by giving your teen that warm, heartfelt hug he so desperately craves.

CHRISTIAN SYMBOLOGY OF HALO

Covenant: Represents the Evangelical Christians of America, those who hold sacred the Biblical covenant to live in harmony with the Gospels. They are depicted as monstrous and fanatical and children are forced to kill them.

Forerunners: These are the Gods who created the videogame. Employing deism to describe our Almighty is a backhanded way to insult the One True God of Christianity.

Halo: God’s Kingdom of Grace on earth that players try desperately to escape. What is outside this circle of saintly light? The answer is the emptiness of atheism and nihilism.

The Ark: In the Bible, Noah’s Ark is the protector of all forms of life yet here it means a star wars space satellite with the capacity to launch extinction. Without any doubt, this contradiction of imagery exposes the radical hatred of true American values in Halo.

Ontological Imperialism: Halo nags you to ponder the ultimate meaning of the game and thereby the ultimate meaning of your existence. In doing so, it is hijacking the traditional role of Christianity in a young person’s education. Sadly, the answer that Halo offers to this question is that you must live out your life in the here and now, destroying every remnant of the Christian faith and fomenting a New World Order in which everyone is godlike.

“God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

A “never-before-seen” novel from the late Ayn Rand, who expounded her personal philosophy of “Objectivism” in the doorstopper work of fiction Atlas Shrugged, is due to be released next year, her publisher has announced.

The book is called Ideal, and was written by Rand in 1934 as a novel, but according to publisher New American Library, an imprint at Penguin Random House, the author “thought the theme of the piece would be better realised as a play and put the novel aside”. The Ayn Rand Institute says that the story “grew out of a conversation with a movie fan who gushed that she would give her life to meet a certain famous actress”. Rand was “dubious”, and came up with a slice of fiction “in which the integrity of those who profess to embrace ideals would be tested. What if their idol suddenly appears in their lives, seemingly desperately in need of help, so that their ideals now demand real action?”

Rand’s most famous work of fiction, Atlas Shrugged, is the story of John Galt, a man who wants to “stop the motor of the world”. Galt lives on the principle that “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”, with the novel – along with another of Rand’s works, The Fountainhead – more fully laying out her theory of Objectivism, “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”, as Rand herself put it.

George Monbiot has said that Rand’s beliefs have “a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced”, while Sam Jordison, blogging about Atlas Shrugged for the Guardian, found that “it’s as unpleasant as it is daft and as a work of literature it’s deeply flawed”. Despite this, Rand’s work and theories have millions of followers, with more than 29.5m copies of her titles sold to date, according to the Ayn Rand Institute.

Ideal will be released next July, as the first novel from Rand since 1957’s Atlas Shrugged. It is, said its publisher, the story of the “beautiful but tormented actress” Kay Gonda, who goes on the run after being accused of murder. Desperate, she turns for help to six fans who have written to her, “each telling her that she represents their ideal – a respectable family man, a far-left activist, a cynical artist, an evangelist, a playboy, and a lost soul”.

“Each reacts to her plight in his own way, their reactions a glimpse into their secret selves and their true values. In the end their responses to her pleas give Kay the answers she has been seeking,” said the publisher.

The work was published as a play in 2005, but according to Publishers Weekly, the novel version of the story was rediscovered in 2012 when the Ayn Rand Institute’s publishing manager Richard Ralston was digitising the writer’s archives. The new edition will include the novel and the play version, giving, said New American Library, the “millions of Ayn Rand fans around the world … a unique opportunity to explore the creative process of Rand as she wrote first a book, then a play, and the differences between the two”.

“The arrival of a never-before-seen Ayn Rand novel will thrill dedicated readers and is a true publishing event,” NAL’s senior vice president and publisher Kara Welsh told Publishers Weekly.

Rand was born in 1905, publishing her first novel, We the Living, in 1936. The Fountainhead was released in 1943, and Atlas Shrugged, her last novel, in 1957. Rand died in 1982.