The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

What’s up with Maga people using LotR names for their military/panopticon companies?

Anduril, Palantir, Lembas have I seen so far.

Lembas seems unrelated to the MIC, or is there some investor or board member in common?

(EDIT: thanks to a reply for researching; it is the same people.)

As for the rest, I think because it's many of the same people and the same VCs.

Lembas LLC is owned by Peter Thiel.

Here's a 2022 from Quartz article that might have some context on this. Anduril isn't on the list according to the footnote, but Thiel and Lucky have since had a history collaborating on projects with the same naming scheme.

[1] https://qz.com/1346926/the-hidden-logic-of-peter-thiels-lord...

[2] https://fortune.com/2025/07/07/peter-thiel-palmer-luckey-ere...

Is it a MAGA thing, or is it just a Palmer Luckey thing?

It's especially interesting because their philosophy is the opposite of Tolkien's. They seek power at all costs, trying to create 'rings' and dallying with bad people.

One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.

It's the only book they've read, most likely.

I don't know what Tolkien's personal philosophy was but I think a reasonable reading of LOTR would put it at centre right. The culture it valorizes has military capability and heroism at its core.

The LoTR had a great distrust of power as dangerous and corrupting - the Ring corrupted everyone who tried to use it - and a rejection of those who abided with evil. The mission was to destroy the power, not build a super-army.

His personal philosophy was very Catholic. My reading of LotR is that it is consistent with that, valorising faithfulness, the personal in place of the modern, and avoiding the temptation to sin for power. I agree it's centre-right (though idiosyncratically) but not about military capability: the orcs are the most modern military capability and they are decidedly not valorised. The central heros are a member of the rural gentry and his gardener, who barely fight. The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.

Well in fact the raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists. Of course for them the goal is to defeat evil. I'm sure that the people behind Palantir, Anduril and other such companies also believe they are building a military capability that will allow the United States to defeat what they see as evil. Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

All I'm saying is that it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives - whichever side they appear to be on from one's own point of view.

> The Shire is defiantly non-military and pre-industrial.

The Shire stands as a symbol for a rural and peaceful life but their protected way of life is only possible because of the the military might of others and this is explicitly alluded to several times...for example in a conversation between Merry and Pippin (which I just happened to read to my kid yesterday!):

"Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not."

Nerd culture. Def not maga, more silicon valley and tech startup types.

Peter Thiel too

This is not entirely correct. The hobbits were very good with slings and spears and bows according to Tolkien.

Before the events of The Lord of the Rings, hobbits maintained a tradition of archery and other martial skills, partly due to past conflicts such as the Battle of Greenfields (1). By the time of the Scouring off the Shire, Merry, Pippin, and other veterans of the War of the Ring organized quickly taking up arms. According to the appendices, they managed to eliminate nearly two-thirds of Saruman’s invading force , displaying both tactical coordination and surprising courage. (Treebeard also notes this in The two towers) It’s a powerful reminder that, in Tolkien’s world, even the humblest people are capable of heroism when defending their home.

1. https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_the_Green_Fields

JD Vance has a company named after the ring Narya.

I'm not so sure, JD Vance created a company called Narya after Gandalf's ring and Viggo Mortensen has more than once had to call out far-right groups trying to co-opt the fandom or litterature:

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-48187786

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1litq7h/viggo_mort...

https://www.brego.net/article/viggo-mortensen-interview-3/

Narya was a Thiel investment vehicle; Vance is a Thiel employee.

> James J.D. Vance and Colin Greenspon have co-founded a new venture firm called Narya Capital and have already raised $93 million toward a target of $125 million.

That's not employee status.

Officially he's an employee of the US government now, of course.

> One common rhetorical tactic, commonly used by their political allies, is to use their (perceived) enemies' most powerful words and ideas against them, to disarm and counter-attack. 'Woke' was a term on the left; racism became descrimination against white people, diversity becomes affirmative action for conservatives, banning and mocking and even embracing discussions of Nazis, etc.

Heresy is at truth taken too far, or a virtue emphasised to the detriment of others - paraphrasing Chesterton whom Tolkien almost certainly read given their similar locations/religions. It's a theme you see with Sauron's love of order in particular.

I think a lot of the Maga people pretty much take this view of DEI or Nazi hate. That diversity was originally good when it was about helping minorities but not when hurting whites, however tricky those are to separate in zero sum environments.

Thiel gave Vance his first real job. Thiel introduced Vance to Colin Greenspon (who was the managing director at Thiel's VC firm and now runs Narya with Vance). Thiel supported Vance's book. Thiel supported Vance's governor run. Thiel introduced Vance to Donald Trump. Thiel supported Vance's VP run.

It's not an employer/employee relationship, so maybe patronage is a better word.

This is an excellent interpretation but I would put forth that it is also possible that these people simply want to use "cool names" and get on with their business without any kind of deep understanding of the literature.

Tolkien was right-wing even in his own time, for instance he was a supporter of Franco.

From the internet:

> J.R.R. Tolkien had a complex relationship with Francisco Franco, as he expressed some moral support for Franco's Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, primarily due to concerns over the destruction of churches by Communists. However, Tolkien's views were not strictly political and were influenced by his personal connections and Catholic beliefs.

It is maybe considered right wing to not want to destroy churches, but so what? Who cares what the side is, when the point is he didn't like Communists destroying churches.

well, this assumes that the person who created Palantir identifies with the protagonists and not with mordor, and this issue with your interpretation is that peter thiel very explicitly identifies with mordor

“Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - Thiel 2011 Details

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/takedemocracyback.org/post/3lk4u55a... it's an interview from the September issue of details magazine 2011, has largely been scrubbed from the internet

So in the case of Thiel, he read LOTR and identified with the villains, which is about as large a misreading of Tolkien as one can make

> Every centre right libertarian I've encountered also has a "great distrust of power".

While they may be wary of others with power, right "libertarians" are often attracted to wielding the power themselves - falling to the same exact "I will do good" fallacy as wielders of the Ring. Truly being disinterested in concentrated power means acknowledging that larger non- "government" entities are capable of coercing individuals (eg informal force or even just economic stickiness), not definitionally ruling it out to remain ignorant of it.

This is the most "I'm going to build the Torment Nexus" I have seen from a tech billionaire.

Yeah, it's in the introduction written by Tolkien, explicitly making the connection between the Ring and WW2.

Their philosophy is in LOTR, as Morgoth.

> raising of a huge army is indeed one of the goals of the protagonists

It's not. They always acknowledge that their army will be much too small to defeat Sauron's in a war. They luckily win a battle outside Gondor. They defeat Sauruman only with a deus ex machina moment of supernatural aid. But when they march on Mordor they send only a token force; they know they can't win that way. They can only slow down and distract Sauron.

The way they win is trust in innocence, a thing and a plan that Sauron can't even envision - that's explicitly Gandalf's thinking. Sauron never imagines that a couple of essentially civilian hobbits, the least powerful people, would be given the Ring, and that they'd enter Morder on their own, that they'd have the courage, and that the good guys would actually destroy something of that much power when they could use it.

> it only takes a small shift of perspective to see how the LoTR will appeal broadly to anyone who believes in good vs evil narratives

I agree in a way: People who don't read the book with a little thought can just read a superficial action adventure, good guys fight bad and win. And Peter Jackson's films are 90% the latter.

Definitely a possibility, though see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901389

It's been exclusively used by right-wing people, mostly those close to Peter Thiel

His personal philosophy was deeply anti-industrial. He felt as though industrialization was destroying everything good and pure and green in the world. That's why the orcs burn forests to produce their assembly lines.

Very interesting!

> however tricky those are to separate in zero sum environments.

Framing the issue as zero sum environments is the key to defeating DEI, etc. Arguments are won (and lost) in the way they are framed.

Economics, for example, is not at all zero sum. But people work to frame it that way in order to divide and conquer.

Interesting. Right-wing meant something different then. Churchill was right wing, but has nothing to do with current white christian 'masculinist' nationalists.