There were plenty of outrageous hot takes from MSNBC during the Republican National Convention, but Rachel Maddow might have had the dumbest. On Tuesday, Maddow saw alt-right and possibly Aryan messaging in VP-nominee JD Vance’s Lord of the Rings-inspired venture capital firm.
Maddow was giving her version of Vance’s biograph when she declared, “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.”
Vance, she argued, is similar, “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 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?”
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