[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Immediately in the wake of the announcement at the Republican National Convention that JD Vance is Donald Trump’s pick for running mate, the leftist media predictably launched a fear-mongering campaign to demonize the young populist. The politics of personal destruction – it’s their go-to strategy, rather than addressing the issues. And one of the first scary red flags they warned about is the influence on the future Vice President of Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien.

On Tuesday, MSNBC mainstay propagandist Rachel Maddow suggested that Vance and “his mentor,” venture capitalist Peter Thiel, were both inspired by “alt-right” and “Aryan” messaging in Tolkien’s vastly popular fantasy epic. Maddow stated,

Like Mr. Thiel, who 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, a favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures within Europe and the United States. Peter Thiel names things after Tolkien figures and places like his company, Palantir, for example.

Palantir, to be clear, is the crystal ball used by the wizard Saruman in Lord of the Rings. And for the record, “alt-right” is an absolutely meaningless smear label the Left throws around to fear-monger about a right-wing Threat to Democracy™. They call any and every conservative from Ben Shapiro to Steve Bannon “alt-right.” The more of a political threat someone is to the Left, the alt-righter they’re tagged.

Maddow added,

Mr. Vance also, when he founded his own venture capital firm, with help from Peter Thiel, named it after a Lord of the Rings thing, he called in Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s “Aryan,” but you move the N to the front. Apparently, that word has something to do with elves and rings from The Lord of the Rings series, I don’t know.

Maddow doesn’t know, but more specifically, she doesn’t care to know. Her aim is not to understand or to help her audience understand, but to smear the political threat Vance as a neo-Nazi. In fact, Narya is the name of one of the Rings of Power in the Tolkien books; it inspires its bearer to resist tyranny, domination, and despair, which makes it a perfect symbol for resistance to the leftist agenda. It is not a dog whistle for Aryan racism.

Maddow also wouldn’t know this about Tolkien, because leftists despise culture that smacks of “whiteness,” but he was no closet Nazi. Newbusters, for example, reports that he “had no tolerance for such people.” Asked in 1938 to prove his Aryan ancestry by a German publisher that was considering translating The Hobbit, Tolkien replied,

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.

…

I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Other left-wing outlets also jumped last week on Vance’s apparently alarming admiration of Tolkien. In an article titled, “How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics,” for example, Politico reported that in a 2021 podcast Vance was asked to name his favorite author, and he responded, “I would have to say Tolkien. I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.”

Of Tolkien’s colleague C.S. Lewis, another enormously popular Christian author, Vance added that he is a “[b]ig fan of C.S. Lewis — really sort of like that era of English writers. I think they were really interesting. They were grappling, in part because of World War II, with just very big problems.”

Politico went on to make the same point Maddow did about Thiel and Vance naming their companies from the Tolkien trilogy. As for “Narya,” the outlet quotes John Shelton, policy director for Advancing American Freedom and another Tolkien fan, who explains.

By the time of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Narya has been entrusted to [the good wizard] Gandalf to resist the corrupting influence of evil, preserve the world from decay, and give strength to its wielder. Gandalf, unlike the other great powers in Lord of the Rings, cared for the hobbits and other lowly people of Middle-Earth, and so it is unsurprising that Vance would see himself as a kind of Gandalf, caring for the forgotten people of his hometown, keeping a watchful eye on them against the corrupting effects of the world.

Politico also cites Catholic University of America professor Luke Burgis, who said he suspects

Vance’s appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.

Burgis reportedly told Political that Vance likely took away from Tolkien “an apocalyptic frame of mind” about “a final and all-encompassing battle between good and evil.” Politico added that “at a closed-door speech in September 2021, Vance said, ‘I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.’”

Well, he ain’t wrong. It’s very difficult to look at the degenerate state of our culture today, a culture that has been shaped and dominated for over half a century by the Left, and not see satanic influence everywhere, from demonic drag queens to the gender-ideology rejection of biological truth to the Left’s sexualization of children. But the Marxist Left denies this Christian worldview of the world being a battleground of Good and Evil.

Unlike MSNBC, Politico refrained from smearing Vance as an “Aryan,” but it did claim lamely that “Vance’s love of Lord of the Rings is of a piece with rightward nationalists abroad.” Rightward nationalists, by the way, is a leftist dog-whistle for “deplorables who resist surrendering national sovereignty to globalist authoritarians.” What is Politico’s evidence that rightward nationalists unite over Lord of the Rings? The outlet notes only that “Italy’s Giorgia Meloni used to cosplay as a hobbit.” Wow, that’s damning.

Former senator Rick Santorum, whom Politico calls “a fellow Tolkien-pilled Catholic,” apparently told the outlet he “believes that the message of Tolkien is that evil must be confronted. And so the idea is that well, we can wait until it comes to the Shire, but that is not a very good game plan. You gotta go to [the evil realm of] Mordor.”

Politico concludes by citing conservative author Rod Dreher, who stated that ever since Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, the rising star has been “thinking broadly about how all must join in the great struggle against darkness — there is no avoiding the struggle — and how God can use the humble and the lowborn to do great things.”

The Left is unsettled – terrified, actually – by conservative opponents who acknowledge, as Tolkien and C.S. Lewis did, the eternal conflict of Good versus Evil, who understand the very real nature of spiritual warfare, and who are prepared to arm themselves with the full armor of God. Judeo-Christian morality and spirituality are obstacles to the Left’s utopian schemes and lust for worldly power, and JD Vance is a threat to the Left not only as a politician, but as a spiritual warrior – a potentially greater threat than Donald Trump himself.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior