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........

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