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 m

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