11/10/2025
Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class have The Lord of the Rings completely wrong.
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 in 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.
Read why: https://voxdotcom.visitlink.me/znHs48
📸: New Line Cinema
