Current Affairs just posted a pretty deep piece on Tolkien's far-right fans in Silicon Valley. It goes deeper into the business dealings of Palantir and Narya, & it brings in more of Tolkien's own political views. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-right-abuses-tolkien
The heart of the Lord of the Rings revolves around the voluntary rejection of power. The heroes universally reject the One Ring's power - Bilbo when he voluntarily walks away from it; Gandalf, when Frodo freely offers it to him; Sam Gamgee, when he gives it back to Frodo, and Faramir, who never - not for one moment, the adaptation notwithstanding - considers taking the ring from Frodo.
Boromir fails his test when he tries to take the ring from Frodo, but he is redeemed before his death, when he sacrifices himself for Pippin and Merry. Galadriel also redeems her past when she declines to take the ring from Frodo.
Frodo is saved from failure by his compassion in not killing Gollum earlier in the book.
The good guys are the ones who act against power, not for it. They sacrifice themselves for a larger purpose. They show compassion and care for others.
These tech bros should have taken some of those "useless" humanities classes and maybe they would understand that they aren't Tolkien's heroes. They are his villains.
I'd like to think so but I taught a lot of lit classes over the years, including on Tolkien's various novels, and there were students in all of them who absolutely clung to their interpretations in ways that rejected some of these very points. I retired a few years earlier than planned (in 2020) because of the way some of my students in rural Texas felt empowered to express misogyny, homophobia, and racism a lot more openly (I taught primarily online, and all of my classes except the creative writing and technical writing were on marginalized literatures). It was incredibly depressing.
“Instead, like Kakutani, they seem to find his racism and sexism, his indifference to mass violence, his post-human apocalypticism, and his advocacy for a world of neo-monarchical, corporate dictatorships merely troubling.”
You’re spot on here—I’ve been hoping that the little crumbs of investigative journalism we’ve been getting on the tech and theobros in the last few would turn into a flood this last year, and it’s true that they are getting a lot more eyes on them (Yarvin getting a whole fucking NYT interview, for chrissakes), but so many of these recent articles in mainstream sources by folks who haven’t really been watching these folks end up mostly going “wow, weird huh! Anyway!” And while some can serve as good introductions for folks who haven’t heard of any of this, I’m getting more frustrated at pieces like this that shy away from the f-word and take half-hearted swipes at condemnation. I know why it’s happening, but it’s still frustrating!
I do find myself a bit grumpy about "weird" being used in this way (although I understand why it worked when Walz used it, and everybody picked up on it, but I mean, I was weird about Tolkien back in the day (OK, still am, probably). I read it about 100 times (documenting it carefully in my reading notebook between age 10 and 17), did what I later learned were autism monologues at everybody to try to convince them to read it (I had people at my 30th high school reunion in 2003 telling me that they read the book because of me back in our high school days and then had to go to the film). I know my dept. head was a bit freaked out by my seeing _Fellowship_ 45 times in the theatre (and TELLING everybody about it, plus, dragging all my friends to see it even the one who could not tell Boromir and Aragorn apart!!), etc. etc. So that's the weird I was and great up with in the last century.
It wasn't just me, and it wasn't just Tolkien--I was in a Star Trek Outpost (aka fan club) in college, and we dressed up, and went to cons [why do I still remember my group using a trash can and an Enterprise model kit to make an entry into a contest based on the Klingon in that one episode kicking off a bar fight by telling Scotty his beloved ship should be hauled away as trash--we did not win!), did a mimeographed newsletter (a friend and I even invented our own Mary Sue self-insert story!), filmed a Trek episode on campus. I knew two people who had Star Trek weddings (NOT to each other, heh), and a half dozen more who were planning to raise their kids on Star Trek on the grounds it would improve the world. That was our weird (and some of the people were more conservative than others--and none of us were hippies -- this was the mid-to-late 1970s at the time).
I seem to recall the pundits and commenters were so happy to have "weird" to use (as opposed to fascist) because they didn't think "fascism" had much punch (sorry!), that it wasn't taken seriously (well, I think a lot of people didn't take it seriously then!).
It isn't just Tolkien! Have you seen the knots that the far-right twist themselves into, trying to make the Star Trek they watched as children support their adult worldview? Apparently the McCarthyism episode is actually about 'cancel culture' now.
Spot on. Tolkien was very sceptical of technological ideas of “progress”, with Saruman being the emblematic example of where the embrace of that thinking leads. In a wartime letter to his son Christopher, who was serving in the RAF at the time, Tolkien laments the warplanes his son is piloting in the service: "But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, ‘for the liberation of the Shire’." (from Letter 100 in the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter). That's quite an image! It reflects Tolkien's feelings (expressed in another letter) that warplanes, useful as they were, were devices that subordinated the pilots who flew them, putting the machine first, the man second.
Oops, I forgot to sign in as myself when I posted that comment. Not exactly related to your post, Craig, but my book on Tolkien's Orcs is now officially out!
Current Affairs just posted a pretty deep piece on Tolkien's far-right fans in Silicon Valley. It goes deeper into the business dealings of Palantir and Narya, & it brings in more of Tolkien's own political views. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-right-abuses-tolkien
The heart of the Lord of the Rings revolves around the voluntary rejection of power. The heroes universally reject the One Ring's power - Bilbo when he voluntarily walks away from it; Gandalf, when Frodo freely offers it to him; Sam Gamgee, when he gives it back to Frodo, and Faramir, who never - not for one moment, the adaptation notwithstanding - considers taking the ring from Frodo.
Boromir fails his test when he tries to take the ring from Frodo, but he is redeemed before his death, when he sacrifices himself for Pippin and Merry. Galadriel also redeems her past when she declines to take the ring from Frodo.
Frodo is saved from failure by his compassion in not killing Gollum earlier in the book.
The good guys are the ones who act against power, not for it. They sacrifice themselves for a larger purpose. They show compassion and care for others.
These tech bros should have taken some of those "useless" humanities classes and maybe they would understand that they aren't Tolkien's heroes. They are his villains.
I'd like to think so but I taught a lot of lit classes over the years, including on Tolkien's various novels, and there were students in all of them who absolutely clung to their interpretations in ways that rejected some of these very points. I retired a few years earlier than planned (in 2020) because of the way some of my students in rural Texas felt empowered to express misogyny, homophobia, and racism a lot more openly (I taught primarily online, and all of my classes except the creative writing and technical writing were on marginalized literatures). It was incredibly depressing.
“Instead, like Kakutani, they seem to find his racism and sexism, his indifference to mass violence, his post-human apocalypticism, and his advocacy for a world of neo-monarchical, corporate dictatorships merely troubling.”
You’re spot on here—I’ve been hoping that the little crumbs of investigative journalism we’ve been getting on the tech and theobros in the last few would turn into a flood this last year, and it’s true that they are getting a lot more eyes on them (Yarvin getting a whole fucking NYT interview, for chrissakes), but so many of these recent articles in mainstream sources by folks who haven’t really been watching these folks end up mostly going “wow, weird huh! Anyway!” And while some can serve as good introductions for folks who haven’t heard of any of this, I’m getting more frustrated at pieces like this that shy away from the f-word and take half-hearted swipes at condemnation. I know why it’s happening, but it’s still frustrating!
Speaking of Yarvin, this NYM profile does a little better at damning the man: https://archive.ph/2025.06.03-182037/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
Thanks for this; will be sharing it with the Roving Ranger newsletter.
Michiko Kakutani is female.
Wow, thanks. That's what I get for rushing out a post before a weekend offline.
I know what you mean.
I'm doing some work in this direction; more to come https://notesfromplanetliterature.substack.com/p/the-seeing-stones-part-1?r=pp9tg
Speaking of Yarvin, this NYM profile does a little better at damning the man: https://archive.ph/2025.06.03-182037/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
Excellent critique of the article!
I do find myself a bit grumpy about "weird" being used in this way (although I understand why it worked when Walz used it, and everybody picked up on it, but I mean, I was weird about Tolkien back in the day (OK, still am, probably). I read it about 100 times (documenting it carefully in my reading notebook between age 10 and 17), did what I later learned were autism monologues at everybody to try to convince them to read it (I had people at my 30th high school reunion in 2003 telling me that they read the book because of me back in our high school days and then had to go to the film). I know my dept. head was a bit freaked out by my seeing _Fellowship_ 45 times in the theatre (and TELLING everybody about it, plus, dragging all my friends to see it even the one who could not tell Boromir and Aragorn apart!!), etc. etc. So that's the weird I was and great up with in the last century.
It wasn't just me, and it wasn't just Tolkien--I was in a Star Trek Outpost (aka fan club) in college, and we dressed up, and went to cons [why do I still remember my group using a trash can and an Enterprise model kit to make an entry into a contest based on the Klingon in that one episode kicking off a bar fight by telling Scotty his beloved ship should be hauled away as trash--we did not win!), did a mimeographed newsletter (a friend and I even invented our own Mary Sue self-insert story!), filmed a Trek episode on campus. I knew two people who had Star Trek weddings (NOT to each other, heh), and a half dozen more who were planning to raise their kids on Star Trek on the grounds it would improve the world. That was our weird (and some of the people were more conservative than others--and none of us were hippies -- this was the mid-to-late 1970s at the time).
I seem to recall the pundits and commenters were so happy to have "weird" to use (as opposed to fascist) because they didn't think "fascism" had much punch (sorry!), that it wasn't taken seriously (well, I think a lot of people didn't take it seriously then!).
It isn't just Tolkien! Have you seen the knots that the far-right twist themselves into, trying to make the Star Trek they watched as children support their adult worldview? Apparently the McCarthyism episode is actually about 'cancel culture' now.
It's all of popular culture -- see Alexandra Minna Sterns's _Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate_! (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567137/proud-boys-and-the-white-ethnostate-by-alexandra-minna-stern/) which Craig recommended to me some years ago.
There is a neo-Nazi brony fandom (somehow seeing Nazi themes in My Little Pony (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/my-little-pony-nazi-4chan-black-lives-matter/613348/)
Spot on. Tolkien was very sceptical of technological ideas of “progress”, with Saruman being the emblematic example of where the embrace of that thinking leads. In a wartime letter to his son Christopher, who was serving in the RAF at the time, Tolkien laments the warplanes his son is piloting in the service: "But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, ‘for the liberation of the Shire’." (from Letter 100 in the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter). That's quite an image! It reflects Tolkien's feelings (expressed in another letter) that warplanes, useful as they were, were devices that subordinated the pilots who flew them, putting the machine first, the man second.
Here is Robert Reich elaborating on the dangers of Palantir. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/palantir-the-worst-of-the-corporate
I'm opening up an American Id chat thread for people who want to share their thoughts or links on J. R. R. Tolkien's far-right, political appropriations. Here's the link: https://substack.com/chat/2704238/post/4ad3e2a8-d5f6-49d1-9912-5c21230e3dcd
You might want to add Gerry Canavan's article in Dissent -- https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/tolkien-against-the-grain/ -- and Lee Konstantinou's in ARC: https://arcmag.org/tolkien-and-the-tech-world/ to the list of good counter-right-wing Tolkien articles. They're both really good.
Oops, I forgot to sign in as myself when I posted that comment. Not exactly related to your post, Craig, but my book on Tolkien's Orcs is now officially out!