Left Tries to Smear JD Vance with “Lord of the Rings” Connection, Backfiring Bigly
What happens when reckless hate meets today’s realities and social media.
Longtime Legal Insurrection readers may recall my love of the The Lord of the Rings, both the books and movies.
Both the books and the movie series based on them are blockbusters. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has sold over 150 million books. The movies grossed over $2.9 billion worldwide, winning 17 Academy Awards out of 30 total nominations, including Best Picture for The Return of the King.
Logically, given the public’s adoration for this uplifting saga of good triumphing over evil, filled with underdog heroes and beautiful elves, one might think that any politician would welcome being connected to this iconic work of Western Civilization.
Imagine my surprise upon reading that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow tried to smear Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance with such a link.
She endeavored to connect Vance to Hitler (via the term Aryan) by taking a very scary, completely revisionary, and utterly clueless journey through the world of Tolkien.
As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow fretted about Sen. JD Vance being former President Trump’s choice for vice president, she complained about how “Lord of the Rings” is loved by the far-right.
On day three of the Republican National Convention, Maddow commented about Vance’s ties to former PayPal CEO and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who she noted “has named his companies after things in the Lord of the Rings series of J.R.R. Tolkien books.”
“Lord of the Rings is a sort of favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures, both in Europe and the United States. Peter Thiel names all these things after Tolkien figures in places like his company Palantir, for example,” Maddow said.
…While the MSNBC host appeared to try to draw a parallel between Narya, the venture capital firm, and “Aryan” an archaic term that has been associated with far-right racial ideology, Narya is named after one of the rings of power in the Lord of the Rings lore, specifically the ring of fire bestowed to elven kings.
There is so much to unpack here, I hardly know where to start.
To begin with, The Lord of the Rings is loved by people of all political stripes. One of my besties is a Democrat . . . and I borrowed her extended version movie DVDs one Christmas season.
Beyond that, I am still trying to puzzle out why there is this push to connect The Lord of the Rings to the alt-right. For example, an article was just published in Politico, linking the books to the right with one stroke of the pen, and pushing for continued aid to Ukraine with the next stroke.
Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni used to cosplay as a hobbit. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” she has said, though unlike Vance she has supported aid to Ukraine.
Jessica Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, has taught Tolkien in her courses and spent time with Vance in 2019 at a conference focused on the Catholic writer Walker Percy. She told me Vance may have internalized the message that America, unlike Frodo, is not called to intervene abroad.
I sense the image of Vance as a wizard that went with the “analysis” was intended to make Vance look geeky and weird.
It backfired. Bigly.
That feeling when you're Politico and try to cancel JD Vance by saying that he loves Lord of the Rings and that LOTR is far right propaganda but accidentally end up making him the coolest profile photo possible. pic.twitter.com/jwpHriKjek
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) July 19, 2024
It is important to note that The Lord of the Rings movies began to be released in 2001, the year my son was born. This year, 2024, is his first election, in which he will be voting for President. I read the trilogy to him in his tweens, and the movie series extended version set is our “Christmas week” movie.
My son is just one of the millions of LOTR-babies. Let’s now pair this fact with how young voters are thinking about Biden:
For decades, younger voters were a reliable part of the Democratic coalition, including in the 2020 election. But recent polls suggest Biden’s wide advantage with Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 has diminished.
Politico has now opened the door to young voters for checking out Vance. Who knows, it may also inspire some young people to consider Catholicism, which has inspired much of Vance’s views.
Personally, if I were Vance, I would capitalize upon this connection. Perhaps make The Lord of the Rings theme his entrance music. And the ad/visual/meme possibilities are endless.
One last thing to note: J.R.R. Tolkien refused to work with Nazi-leaning publishers.
Maddow and the leftist rush to connect Vance to Hitler is simply delusional.
Perhaps the best quote from the series to wrap up my piece is this one:
Quote of the Day pic.twitter.com/vYQAk3mRcp
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) July 20, 2024
It doesn’t take Galadriel’s Mirror to see the answer:
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) July 20, 2024
Meanwhile, the memes are flowing like the lava on Mt. Doom.
Dems are now calling LOTR racist because JD Vance is a fan pic.twitter.com/Z68Je2WP5t
— 🪐 Star Man (@33Space1) July 19, 2024
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Comments
Read the trilogy the first time when I was 14 years old.
A friend and I saw the first movie when it came out. His comment to me walking out of the theater — “It looked just like what I read.”
Mr. Vance, welcome to the briar patch. You’re in good company.
Read it for the first time about 1970, early high school. Read it again before going to see the movies when they came out. Thanks for reminding me to read it again. I’m beginning to come to terms with the fact that I’m not going to read all the books I want to read before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Nonetheless I must read LOTR once again.
I was 12. The school library had the trilogy in hardback with a big map of Middle Earth in the back of one of them. I sort of got the good vs evil thing but mostly thought it was a cool story.
I know LOTR has a huge following for those of all political stripes, but I also remember it being the realm of “those” guys…the ones geeking in a dorm while we frat boys were getting laid and paid.
Just like with the reaction to the bullet wound, this is why they will be increasingly rejected. Keep talking!
“Vance is a LOTR fan” – oooh, that makes him sooooo scary….
Whereas the quintessential Democrat is a fan of “first-person shooters.”
(“Look! Up on the roof! It’s a bird…”)
Dear Leslie Eastman, I’m a faithful reader of Legal Insurrection in big part because of the outstanding reporting and commentary by it’s impeccable team of contributors. Thanks for your hard work.
Thank you so much. I truly appreciate the support.
They’re going after the Lord of the Rings because most of the millennial and post millennial generation hasn’t read it (or anything else of note for that matter). But they have read Harry Potter. And given it’s the only thing many millennials have read, a lot gets put in the context of Potter. Remember all the “Voldemort is a Republican” bumper stickers? They go on about how great Harry Potter is, then get smacked in the face by the far better Lord of the Rings books.
And Tolkien was Catholic, and he knew and was good friends with CS Lewis and they both wrote lots of religious books. And were far better authors than pretty much anything today.
If course they want to make it alt right. Old, white, Christian men? Must be destroyed.
Harry Potter are good stories… LOTR is great literature… big difference
That’s a great way to put it. I enjoyed Potter. But it’s child’s play compared to other stuff out there.
There’s a Democrat running for Congress here in WA, and she refers to Trump has “he” and “him”, but won’t say his name, like he’s Voldemort.
Here’s what was in my agency’s daily news email at 0800 on the Monday after J13:
Coping with a recent act of violence
You’re encouraged to take advantage of resources to help you cope with any distress you may be experiencing in relation to the act of violence that took place over the weekend at a campaign rally.
The Leftists who run the agency couldn’t even allow themselves to say “in relation to the attempted assassination of former president Trump.”
A follow-up message from the agency director as just as bad. He referenced Trump by name, but only to say that the violence occurred at “Trump’s rally,” as if he was implying Trump was responsible for the violence.
I’m seeing this mealy-mouthed language everywhere. What a bunch of shits.
They’re not equipped to deal with reality. What are books and literature supposed to do if not make us think, teach us, and prepare us for the real world?
Don’t forget they are also supposed to entertain us! 🙂
The left also wants to cancel Rowling, who is doing good work against the trans ideology.
Remember all the “Voldemort is a Republican” bumper stickers?
Actually, no. I can’t say I’ve ever seen one
They’re like Biden/Harris bumper stickers. If you live your life properly, you’ll almost never see one.
“most of the millennial and post millennial generation… have read Harry Potter.”
Well… they’ve SEEN Harry Potter.
In fairness, a very great many have indeed read the series, which is over 3,400 pages. The series made readers of millions of young people and one of the primary concerns of the movie producers was to match the books as precisely as possible because Potter fans were deeply familiar with and attached to Rowling’s stories as written. Ask a librarian – these books almost single-handedly revived many libraries. I’m not particularly a fan of the stories, but I applaud J.K. Rowling for having inspired so many to read.
Ralph Bakshi did his amazing animated/’real life version of The Hobbit back in the late 1970s, I believe. It was a revolutionary movie, having a lot of it drawn over live action so as to have a living cartoon look and feel to it. I know that The Hobbit isn’t part of the LOTR, but it’s close enough, I would say.
Personally, I never cared for the Hobbit or LOTR or much of Tolkien. I know about it because my 5th grade teacher was a big fan and she read The Hobbit to us in class. It was okay, but I’ve never really been into that sort of fantasy tale. I have nothing against people who like it, though. Admittedly, Tokien did come up with some cool names.
You sound like someone who can appreciate talent even if the subject does not interest you. Just so you know Tolkien created an entire language, elven, written and spoken, and then decided he needed a tale to tell with it so he wrote the Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings. The man was talented.
Not to mention The “Silmarillion” – the book which is almost too difficult for mortals to read. It’s a full blown invented mythology.
The Hobbit is the introduction to The Lord of the Rings. It introduces Bilbo & the hobbits, Gandalf, the ring, Gollum, the heroic elves, and so much more (like my fave, Tom Bambodil, based on legends of the Green Man). This is Tolkien’s first venture into Middle Earth, and it is written in a far simpler style than LOTR. I too have seen the animated movie and loved it. In fact, I am the proud owner of about a 2′ vinyl doll which is the spitting image of Bilbo, although not marketed as such. It is a prized possession!
I take Hillbilly Elegy as Vance’s Mein Kampf.
I suggest you read it first before writing your review.
I am about halfway through now and will finish it tonight or tomorrow but thus far the only take aways are the harsh lessons he learned about the important factors to success. Thus far he has highlighted strong families, loyalty (to family, education, hard work and reliability.
Yes, even early in the book he attacks the outsourcing of American business through NAFTA and other pro globalist policies. He is deeply concerned about the plague of broken families, alcoholism and drug addiction which plagues America in the hollowed-out rust belt industrial communities and the devastated urban centers of our once great cities.
The Nazis were all all about decency, love of family, love of country, etc. Ideals were everywhere. Hermann Goring was head of the Tierschutzverein, the humane society.
The warning sign is virtue that goes public. Romney would be a fine example. It turns into evil. They start arresting cruel Jewish scientists.
Private virtue is the way to go.
Comparing Vance to Nazis. Thank you for exposing yourself.
Are you against kindness to animals?
German character was very admirable, and what went wrong is worth thinking about. Hannah Arendt says it was virtue gone public.
In America the most obvious publicly virtuous people are the woke.
Lauding Nazis is no better.
“I take Hillbilly Elegy as Vance’s Mein Kampf.”
Divert with your usual nonsense about virtue. Throw in woke for a bit of protection. The fact is that you compared Vance’s work to Hitler’s.
They don’t start evil. Something about assurance of your own goodness from everybody around sets it off. Some check is lost, like thinking things through independently when new things come up.
Mein Kampf is an account of Hitler’s development by Hitler, things he saw and figured out and goals he developed.
“Mein Kampf is an account of Hitler’s development by Hitler, things he saw and figured out and goals he developed.”
You sound like Fauci saying superficial!
Further, it’s naive and foolhardy to believe that evil is only set off from “Something about assurance of your own goodness from everybody around.” Mexical cartels could care about virtue.
You should hear yourself before you spew. You might shake your head at the nonsense.
Nah, Nazism perverted and twisted everything it touched; only wanted to burn down the old order and replace it with an even older order; northern pagan occultism. Perversions stacked upon perversions. Wagner captured and tortured the Germanic spirit.
Vance is not a latter day Siegfried, no matter how much you torture his story.
Rhhardin –
Even the Devil can quote scripture. That the language of good was used for evil does not destroy the fact that goodness exists .
It’s sad that you fell into the trap of
“You know who else lile puppies? – Hitler….”
What an abominable thing to say. As if it will spur Vance to become a human exterminator. Pathetic!
Whereas yours is published in installments in the comments section of Legal Insurrection.
In the sense it lays out the struggle of his life, yes but much less turgid. Pretty much about it, though don’t you think or are you saying that Hitler Trump picked mini Hitler Vance as a running mate?
And all this is coming from Rachel “Sauron” Maddow?
Madcow is more out of the “Grima Wormtongue” mold. Thoroughly wretched, not really smart enough to be evil herself, but doing evil as she is directed as someone else’s stooge.
I’d call her more Shelob
I had a college class on Tolkien and Lewis’s work
I can’t tell how it changed my life
The vast majority was on the Hobbit and the Trilogy. This was in the 70’s , so you had to use your imagination to visualize everything and everyone in it, although the Professor was dressed everyday like a member of the troop, played music, from a LP, we had to write 8 papers, and I was in nursing school, it was a major output, but I LOVED it so
I had to drive through a large 5 mile park at night home, it got dark at like 4:30pm in Milwaukee in the winter, and darn if I didn’t hallucinate seeing hobbits, dwarfs and such in the bushes.
When Jackson made his trilogy, I was hysterical with appreciation and love… this my my vision, he read my mind, and I fell in love with Aragorn once again.
I was eighteen when I first read LOTR in 1975. I was in the military. I was in love with Galadriel, and imagined a real girl I was in love with was Galadriel herself.
My sets of The Hobbit and LOTR were passed around in my two platoons so much that I went through about four of them, as they kept wearing out. I let my observer Jeff S. (I was the commander of an armored vehicle, and a squad leader) read it. He was not known to have a literary bent, but when he returned the set to me I asked him, “What did you think?” I’ll always remember his reply, “It was too short.”
I have continued to read LOTR every four years or so since then. (Have never read The Hobbit again.) I read the Silmarillion when it was first published, and have done so every two or three years since. I highly recommend the much more recently released The Fall of Gondolin. I wish Christopher Tolkien had worked more of this work into The Silmarillion. The fall of Gondolin, as described in The Silmarillion, unfortunately pales in comparison to the more fulsome account of the battle in TFOG. The Fall of Numenor has much to recommend as well.
No wonder the leftists don’t like LOTR… the ‘gatherers and sharers’ who had overrun the Shire got put to the sword. Then there’s whole angle of defeating Sauron’s plan for a tyrannical one world gov’t…..all in all the story of good(ish) free peoples triumphant over evil (but only when the good get off the couch) can’t be a heartwarming tale for any incarnation of evil totalitarians.
Marxists utterly loathe Tolkien for all the usual reasons.
https://archive.org/details/critical-response-to-tolkiens-fiction
Marxist-academics hate suburbanites.
This is revealing …
Rachel Maddow comes out as pro-orc and pro-Sauron. Okay.
The music of LOTR is epic…. The average wokester would never have survived the trials and tribulations within the three books or movies…
Thinking of the Hobbits back at the Green Dragon after all that has transpired… how could they ever describe what they had seen and done?
To all Tolkien fans who have never read The Silmarillion, I present this image, which is absolutely true. It’s not that LOTR is a lesser work, but it truly is only the tip of the iceberg.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5c/73/a1/5c73a1405ef5787e40633fab5545d2f8.jpg
Well done!
They made a cartoon of Vance *AS GANDALF* to accompany an attack piece?
Do they not know what happens when you strike down the grey wizard?
Like that thing of Trump superimposed on the “Bollywood” character with all of the swinging scimitars…
I might have to bring that one back, depending on the results of Nov. 5th. It’s from my favorite Bollywood movie.
He becomes more powerful than you can imagine?
Oh shit, wrong franchise.
LOTR and Tolkien alt-right?
Tell that to Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and crew and all those Led Zeppelin fans….
(I know, not a profound comment.)
Nancy Isenberg says HIllbilly Elegy is insufficiently Marxist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLlyToprJo
Well, the left has to do something until their auditions for the woman to make a rape charge against him is chosen from the latest batch of gender fluid democrat debutantes.
The vile and stupid Maddow receives an obscene $30 million annual salary from MSNBC parent, Comcast, to spew her utterly noxious and foolish bile and spite.
That is disturbing. And people bitch about the salaries of elite athletes, who actually produce revenue for their employers.
Both Lewis and Tolkien were inspired by George MacDonald, the pioneer of the fantasy genre.
His works are freely available here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/127
and elsewhere on the internet.
Some of Lewis’ favorites are “Phantastes”, “The Princess and the Goblin”, “The Princess and Curdie”, “The Wise Woman”, and “Sir Gibbie”.
Lewis wrote, “I have never concealed the fact that I regard him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.”
And Lewis made him a character in The Great Divorce.
A very important character, too. It is the McDonald character that answers the narrator’s questions after he gets to heaven.
Are these attacks on Vance informed by the fact that Tolkien was a Christian, who was evangelized by C. S. Lewis?
Sorry, I had it backwards. Lewis evangelized Tolkien. :-O
I thought “Trump is Hitler” was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard until the left started up that racist WP hand gesture thing. That was superseded by Don Lemon’s airplane in a black hole thing then by “exercise and being on time for work is racist” and at that I thought they had reached their zenith but LOTR is a work of white supremacy really, really stupid even for the progressives.
Lifetime (69) fan of LOTR, having read and re-read all four books repeatedly.
Best lines from the movies:
Warrior: Too few have come. We cannot defeat the forces of Mordor.
Theoden King: No, we cannot…but we shall meet them in battle, nonetheless.
(After the first part of his answer, the men visibly shrink. Upon the second part, head rise, shoulders are thrown back and looks of relief appear. The men will be allowed to defend the West, perhaps even die for it.)