As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow fretted about Sen. JD Vance being former President Trump’s choice for vice president, she complained about how “Lord of the Rings” is loved by the far-right.
On day three of the Republican National Convention, Maddow commented about Vance’s ties to former PayPal CEO and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who she noted “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 favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures, both in Europe and the United States. Peter Thiel names all these things after Tolkien figures in places like his company Palantir, for example,” Maddow said.
“Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel, who had given him all his jobs in the world, 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 it Narya, N-A-R-Y-A, which you can remember because it’s ‘Aryan,’ but you move the n to the front,” she continued. “Apparently that word has something to do with elves and rings from the Lord of the Rings series, I don’t know.”
While the MSNBC host appeared to try to draw a parallel between Narya, the venture capital firm, and “Aryan” an archaic term that has been associated with far-right racial ideology, Narya is named after one of the rings of power in the Lord of the Rings lore, specifically the ring of fire bestowed to elven kings.
Vance took the center stage at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday where he spoke extensively about his humble origins in Ohio and his rise to become a public figure in American politics.
Vance also touched on Trump’s “America First” agenda, promising to make allies pay their fair share for world peace instead of betraying “the generosity of the American taxpayer.” On foreign policy, Vance promised that the administration would send service members to war “only when we must.”
