Identitarianism

DUDES, YOU’RE ORCS:

Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits: Tech power players and the global far-right are learning all the wrong lessons from “The Lord of the Rings.” ( Michiko Kakutani, May 23, 2025, NY Times)

Literary classics, of course, can support myriad interpretations, and we live in an age when the points of view of readers are increasingly prioritized over authorial intentions. At the same time, it’s astonishing how many contemporary takes on classic works of fantasy and science fiction fly in the face of both common sense and authors’ known views of the world.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook as “Meta” — a reference to the so-called metaverse, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” which depicts an alarming dystopian future where corporate power has replaced government institutions and a dangerous virus is on the loose.

Or take Stargate, the name of OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence initiative with SoftBank and Oracle, announced in conjunction with the Trump administration. Its name, weirdly, is the title of a campy 1994 sci-fi movie in which a stargate device opens a portal to a faraway planet, where a despotic alien vows to destroy Earth with a supercharged atomic bomb. Not exactly the sort of magical portal most people would want to open.

Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshipers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.

Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. “They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”

Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today’s military-industrial complex: The data analytics firm Palantir gets its name from the magical “seeing stones” in “Lord of the Rings,” while the artificial intelligence military start-up Anduril refers to Aragorn’s reforged sword.

The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of “transhumanism” — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? This question drives stories set in outer space (from “Star Trek” to “Star Wars” to “Doctor Who”) and stories set in a mythical past. In the case of “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien argued that mortality is part of “the given nature of Men,” and the Elves called it “the Gift of God (to Men),” allowing them “release from the weariness of Time.” Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants.

Many prominent readers of “Lord of the Rings” no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).

In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Thiel traced his fascination with immortality to the elves in “Lord of the Rings,” calling them “humans who don’t die.” Echoing the interviewer he asked: “Why can’t we be elves?”

The neoreactionary ideologue Curtis Yarvin, who thinks American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy or “chief executive,” dismissively refers to the sort of ordinary voters who helped elect Trump as hobbits who only “want to grill and raise kids.”

Tolkien, in contrast, proudly described himself as “a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.” Not only is “Lord of the Rings” told from the point of view of the hobbits, but it’s Frodo’s gardener, the humble Sam Gamgee — not the noble king Aragorn or the great wizard Gandalf — who emerges as the real hero of the epic.

VS IDENTITY:

Why Malcolm Gladwell’s trans retraction won’t ever be enough: If you don’t speak when it counts then it will always be too late (Victoria Smith, 8 September, 2025, The Critic)

It’s not just that it’s far too late. It’s that Gladwell has not changed his mind at all. He — the same, I would suggest, as many a “sceptical” male comic, “curious” journalist or writer of “feminist” dystopian fiction — always knew that trans activist claims were nonsense. Indeed, the claims are so internally incoherent — sex is pure guesswork but some kids will die if they go through the “wrong” puberty — that I don’t think trans activists believe them, either. The damage done by trans activism is not just direct, in terms of harms to gender non-conforming children, same-sex attracted adults and women seeking female-only spaces. It has also changed the way many of us see those we thought of as, if not allies, then essentially principled people.

Until this issue arose, I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits. Maybe I was incredibly naïve, but I thought of my political opponents as people who believed different things to me, not people who believed the exact same things but considered themselves much more special and exempt from responsibility than their fellow believers.

Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support.

Like many a terf, I have had years of people mistakenly believing that they can “support” me by telling me in private that they agree with me, even if in public they say the opposite. This is not support. While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs. Unlike people who have reputations to protect, friends they don’t wish to offend, concerns about playing into the hands of the far-right, women like me are apparently unimportant, insensitive and politically reckless. It’s only right that we should serve as cannon fodder in the gender wars, clearing the way for the “good” people to breeze in later.

ALWAYS BET ON THE DEEP STATE:

Most Trump tariffs are not legal, US appeals court rules (Dietrich Knauth and Nate Raymond, August 29, 2025, Reuters)

“The statute bestows significant authority on the President to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax,” the court said. […]

“It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the President unlimited authority to impose tariffs,” the ruling said. “The statute neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the President’s power to impose tariffs.”

The 1977 law had historically been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets.

Grand Juries in D.C. Reject Prosecutors’ Efforts to Level Harsh Charges Against Residents (Alan Feuer, Aug. 29, 2025, NY Times)

For the third time in slightly more than a week, grand jurors in Washington have rejected efforts by federal prosecutors to obtain an indictment against a resident accused of a felony assault against a federal agent.

The pattern of failure — in what was now three separate cases — suggested that something extraordinary was taking place in the city’s federal courts. It indicated that the ordinary people called upon to sit on grand juries were pushing back against efforts by prosecutors to harshly charge fellow citizens who had encountered law enforcement officers on the streets at a moment when President Trump had flooded them with National Guard troops and federal agents.

REALITY BITES:

What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance? (David W. Blight, August 7, 2025, New Republic)

In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors: One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate; two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe; three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities; four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery; five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy; six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes; seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance; eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town. All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.

Ideology and realty are incompatrible, which is why Left and Right war against history, economics, biology, etc..

JUST THE PANTS, PLEASE:

Why do fascists love yoga? : For more than a century, elements of the far right have been attracted by the rigour of eastern disciplines. But does the connection stand up? (Miles Ellingham, 7/24/25, The Observer)

After reading Home’s book, I met him near his old yoga studio. Home and I sat in the shade of an overhanging tree, meditative but not cross-legged upon a rock. I put it to him that if, say, ping-pong happened to have a number of fascist devotees, it doesn’t necessarily make it fascist. “But what about if the guy who came up with the game of ping-pong had a bunch of fascist and white supremacist followers,” he responds. “Also, ping-pong doesn’t have the mystical trappings of a cult.”

Home argues that fascist yoga continued into the late 20th century, only in a slightly more veiled way. “A lot of the earlier fascist yogis are referred back to,” he says of subsequent followers. “So even someone like Harvey Day, who is explicitly anti-racist in his books, can’t resist mentioning the Aryan origins of yoga and will reference Francis Yeats-Brown and other people, and I think it’s the credulity around the beliefs, it’s what I describe as anti-essentialism and belief in one’s own truth. Also, with QAnon and anti-vax stuff, you see this being discussed more.”

Home sees a telling similarity between the reverence QAnon adherents feel towards their saviour, Donald Trump, and the ardent spiritual devotion for Hitler displayed by the Nazis. “There’s a very clear parallel between the two things,” he says. Whether QAnon’s “esoteric Hitlerism” is consciously borrowed or simply emerges from the same mythic structure, he continues, “hinges on research I haven’t done”.

Travis View, via his QAA Podcast, has been examining the QAnon movement since its origins in 2017. View points out perhaps the most obvious recent collision point between far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and new age beliefs: Jacob Chansley, AKA “the QAnon Shaman”. Chansley became the mascot of the 6 January insurrection after he stormed the US Capitol in facepaint and a fur horned headdress. Having gained access to the Senate chamber, Chansley led the rioters in quasi-Christian prayer but, View explains, he was also fascinated by Native American mysticism and occultism.

“I also think there’s a broad overlap,” View says, “between the hyper-individualism of the far right and new age wellness thinking. There’s a distrust of, for example, public health measures and a belief that you have a moral obligation to take care of your own health entirely. This is why there’s so much overlap in anti-vaccine belief; it’s a far-right belief, but also something you’d see in crunchy yoga circles.”

Another similarity, View says, is that both camps prioritise esoteric knowledge. “If you’re very deeply into spiritualism, there’s a belief that there’s esoteric knowledge that is suppressed and you can ‘awaken’ to it … and then on the far right, they have the same belief, but it’s that the media and the education system is controlled by Jews or whatever, and in order to escape this thinking, you have to awaken to the lies of society. Both promote a personal hero’s journey you have to go through in order to reject mainstream orthodox knowledge.”

APPLYING DARWINISM:

It’s Carl Schmitt’s Moment (James Traub, Summer 2025, Democracy)

Yet those, whether of the left or right, who wish to treat Schmitt as a guide need to fully reckon with what he meant by democracy in the absence of liberalism. With his flair for the resonant opening line, Schmitt begins The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy by declaring, “The history of political and state theory of the nineteenth century could be summarized with a single phrase: the triumphal march of democracy.” But by “democracy” Schmitt does not mean the political and civic institutions through which the wishes of voters shape the policy of the state, or even the deep conviction of human equality that Tocqueville regarded as the essence of American democracy. Schmitt means the idea of “the people” as supreme governing force that descends from the French Revolution. For Schmitt, as for Rousseau, the people are not a pluralistic group of individuals, but a single homogeneous mass possessed of a “collective will.” The leader seizes upon that will to guide the state. Democracy is thus incompatible with pluralism, which Schmitt describes as a form of “liberal individualism” that reduces the state to “a revocable service for individuals and their free associations.”

The whole panoply of individual rights set forth in the great democratic documents—and, indeed, individualism as an ethos—belongs, Schmitt argues, to liberalism rather than to democracy. The collective will is not the sum of individual wills individually expressed, but rather the single will of a unified people. That unity must be forged if it does not naturally exist. In one of his most brutal passages, Schmitt writes, “Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” The “other” must be excluded, he argues, whether by restrictions on immigration or the denial of citizenship.

Democratic homogeneity can in theory be based on any unifying characteristic. But in 1923 one did not have to look far for the deepest sources of identity, which Schmitt saw in “[t]he more naturalistic conceptions of race and descent…the speech, tradition, and consciousness of a shared culture and education.” Homogeneity meant racial identity. Schmitt goes on to ridicule the precept of “absolute human equality” as a meaningless article of liberal hypocrisy. A society that embraces people of every faith, doctrine, and language—that is, a pluralist society—will never cohere around a collective will. Democracy depends on exclusion of the other and of the non-equal. Behind this strange argument is Schmitt’s deep conviction that it is the state that ultimately creates the people rather than the people who create the state. A strong democracy is one in which the state has forged the people into a united force.

He had them at Identitarianism.

EITHER A CHRISTIAN OR AN IDENTITARIAN:

Time With Erich Fromm: A Cautionary Tale (Art Kusserow, 7/18/25, Voegelin View)

Fromm’s comment on the inherent conflict described above might best be summarized here: “There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.”

The ”relief from uncertainty” Fromm describes is to be found in identification with a leader who promises “freedom” from such uncertainty. The identification with such leaders, who are often elevated to “messianic” status, and the fantasied relief they promise, explains the psychological underpinnings of the supposed “populism” broad-based media often struggle to explain.

OTHEFR THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW…:

Autocracy, Corruption, and Decline: Why Hungary and Orbanism Must Never be a Model for the U.S. (Michael Maya, June 30, 2025, Just Security)

Do average Hungarians share the enthusiasm for Orban exhibited by Trump, CPAC, and the Heritage Foundation? In short, no. Here is one telling statistic: from 2010 to 2024, emigration from Hungary rose by 464 percent. In fact, the number of Hungarians leaving their country rose sharply almost immediately after Orban’s April 2010 election victory. For scores of Hungarians, the future looks bleak, with a recent survey finding that 34 percent of recent graduates and 55 percent of 18-40-year-old Hungarians plan to emigrate. In light of Hungary’s aging population – its median age is 43.9 years – Orban can ill-afford to drive out Hungary’s best, brightest, and youngest. That so many Hungarians are eager to flee Orban’s rule provides the first hint that enthusiasm among his U.S-based cheerleaders is misplaced, even suspect.

Even a cursory inquiry into Orban’s record reveals that he has presided not over Hungary’s advancement but rather its alarming decline. For one, he has masterminded Hungary’s transformation from a full democracy to an “electoral autocracy,” according to the European Parliament. Freedom House now rates Hungary as only “partly free.” As noted in Bertelsmann’s 2024 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): “Elections are typically free but not fair, with the ruling Fidesz party benefiting from large-scale gerrymandering, asymmetrical media access and the misuse of state assets.” Today, Hungary is an SGI bottom dweller, ranking 30th out of 30 with respect to: (1) Elections, (2) Quality of the Parties and Candidates, and (3) Access to Official Information.

Adding to Hungary’s woes is its economy, which has stagnated since 2022, with GDP growth rates declining for four years straight and a ballooning budget deficit of 4.9 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the European Union average of 3 percent. Hungary is also plagued by high inflation, forcing the government to take drastic steps such as limiting grocers’ profit margins. Predictably, Hungary’s currency, the Forint, has lost value and both domestic and foreign investors, wary of arbitrary regulatory shifts and opaque enforcement, are rethinking investments in Hungary. More than €20 billion in EU funds that would have come to Hungary have been suspended over rule of law violations, and innovation lags as firms hesitate to invest in research, development, or new technologies. Why? Among other things, they lack confidence in intellectual property protections.

For ordinary Hungarians, Orban’s mismanagement of the economy has translated into living standards significantly lower than many of the other 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Given these and other declines, it is no surprise that, just in the last year, Hungary fell 13 places in Gallup’s World Happiness Report. Hungary now ranks below Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Honduras. Predictably, countries with thriving democracies dominate the list of happiest countries.