I’ve had a run-in with this person before too.

Those words sound like psychological projection to me.

Your success is only because nature abhors a vacuum. Peikoff is a tired old man, no one else has risen up to his level of distinction, so the rank and file are simply making due with what’s offered. There’s simply nothing else new that’s worth paying attention to.

Once Peikoff bequeaths his ill-gotten control over Rand’s estate to some kook like that commentator (a particularly ambitious and creative kook, but a kook nonetheless), you will be marginalized and disappear into oblivion (a la David Kelley). Of course, you will have deserved it – because you had a hand in allowing Peikoff to become as unhinged and “drunk on power” as he now is. You unscrupulously sided with his dishonest attack on Kelley because you thought it would help you (which it did, for a time), only to see the same “herd thinning” tactic of blowing up relatively minor, highly contextual disagreements into pseudo-intellectual cause celebres unleashed upon you (which actually had to happen, so long as Leonard was still breathing, didn’t have anything of any significance left to offer, but still wanted to be treated as such).

It was your fealty to Peikoff which made you, and – ironically – is will be what will ultimately bring you down. Enjoy, for now, how pretty your bed looks Diana, because eventually you will have to lie in it.