Among the many humiliations of being American in the current moment is this: Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class continually fetishize objects of nerd culture while also displaying a willful inability to grasp the very basic messages those objects are sending. While there are certainly worse problems (e.g. white nationalism in the White House), the blazing lack of reading comprehension from people who are allegedly smart does give one pause. Put simply, these people are bad nerds.
Probably the text they are most consistently prone to misreading is The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved fantasy trilogy deals with the corrupting influence of power and the necessity of death. Yet, the right keeps using it as a parable for why powerful people should be given more power and human beings should be immortal.
Most recently, Elon Musk posted to his platform X that Tolkien’s peaceful hobbits were able to live idyllic lives on the Shire only because “they were protected by the hard men of Gondor,” referring to the human kingdom entrenched in battle against Mordor. England, Musk declared, must also ally with hard men — in this case, the far right anti-Islamic activist Tommy Robinson — to restore its own peace and tranquility. Robinson is currently on trial in the UK, accused of refusing to comply with counter-terrorism police and says Musk is paying his legal bills.
Following Musk’s lead, the Department of Homeland Security posted an ICE recruitment ad using a screengrab of Merry (played by Dominic Monaghan), one of the hobbits in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. Superimposed over the image is a line of Merry’s dialogue — “There won’t be a shire, pippin.” — and then, below it, the URL join.ice.gov.
The idea here is that the naive hobbits represent the civilians of both the US and the UK, and unbeknownst to them, they’re being menaced by the forces of evil: Muslim migrants from the Middle East, alleged to be invading both countries. The only way to prevent it, the metaphor implies, is for the hobbits to ally with the “hard men of Gondor” — Islamaphobic agitators for Musk and masked militias who attack unarmed civilians for the DHS — before their way of life is gone completely.
However, you do not need to be a deep scholar of The Lord of the Rings — and friends, I am not one — to understand that this metaphor completely falls apart after a single step back.
In Tolkien’s books, it is not the men of Gondor who turn back the forces of evil and save the Shire; it’s those gentle, peaceful hobbits who pull the whole thing off. They’re the only species able to carry the One Ring of Power, because they are, by their nature, unambitious. All they want is to live their peaceful bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they are able to withstand the temptations of the ring and its promises of power, ultimately carrying it far enough to destroy it. The best the men of Gondor can do to help is refuse to ever touch the ring, because they know that if they pick it up, they will not be able to resist temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: If you’re taking Tolkien as your guide, and you believe your homeland to be under invasion by the forces of evil, the solution is not to try to consolidate your power, harden your nature, and glory in needless cruelty. The solution is to refuse power whenever it is offered to you and to fight from a place of humility.
The DHS and Musk aren’t the only members of the new right to use Tolkien to justify their actions. As David French told Today, Explained earlier this fall, JD Vance has described The Lord of the Rings as fundamental to his journey into conservatism, so much so that he named his venture capital firm Narya after one of Tolkien’s magic rings. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel named his own venture capital firm Mithril, after one of Tolkien’s magic metals. Another one of Thiel’s companies — an AI platform Trump is using to surveil and monitor Americans — is named after Palantir, a magical artifact that the Lord of the Rings villain Sauron uses to monitor and deceive the people of Middle-earth.
The darkness of that parallel is more or less par for the course for Thiel, who consistently seems to empathize most with Tolkien’s villains. In a 2023 interview with the Atlantic, Thiel declared that he had read the trilogy at least 10 times, and that he had come to the conclusion that the only difference between Tolkien’s elves and his humans is that the elves are immortal and don’t die. “Why can’t we be elves?” asked Thiel, who has spoken at length about his interest in extending his own life, perhaps to the point of immortality.
One of the recurring plots of The Lord of the Rings is in fact stories about human beings who try to be immortal like the elves and are corrupted by that attempt, their lives ruined. They become undead or insane; they cling onto grotesque caricatures of life. Death in these books is known as The Gift of Men. It is what gives human lives their shape and meaning. Elves are naturally immortal, but humans who try to be immortal are corrupted as surely as those who thirst for power. For Tolkien, mortality is a gift, not something to be fled in terror.
None of these messages are difficult to understand. They are surface level. Children in middle school regularly pull them out of these books without difficulty. Yet, for some reason, a group of incredibly powerful men who pride themselves on their own intelligence and who also consider Tolkien’s philosophy to be fundamental to their worldview seem to be having a lot of trouble.
The Lord of the Rings actually has a pretty decent metaphor for what happens when powerful people decide to willfully ignore the wisdom of people they claim to respect and conclude that the only way they can be of service to the world is by chasing power for themselves. That’s what happens to Saruman the wizard, and he ends up invading the Shire himself. The men of Gondor don’t stop him at all.
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