Elon Musk

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1…

[image or embed]

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) November 11, 2025 at 9:42 AM

Serwer’s essay is getting much (deserved!) attention. Normally, I’d post this during prime time, but: Too. Much. News. (And also: Elon.) “Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist” Gift link:

… Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as Musk—Musk asked, “How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.

D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds.

And for some fans, that’s a problem…

Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” permeated the era in which The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.

Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business and politics all over the world.The billionaire Peter Thiel named his software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir, founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’ mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his venture-capital firm Narya, after Gandalf’s magic ring. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity” against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien obsessive who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.” When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq…

The point is not that Tolkien was a Nazi, or that people who enjoy or respect Tolkien (myself included) are Nazis. That would be a childish way to approach literature. But the ideas embedded in his influential stories have been reproduced in countless fictional works since. Few examples are more vivid than Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons was born in the early 1970s, a few years after the insurance underwriter and cobbler Gary Gygax and a student named Dave Arneson met at a midwestern tabletop-gaming convention. At the time, war games using miniatures to enact fictional or famous battles were popular. Gygax and Arneson innovated by having each player inhabit just one character and interact with a storyteller, known as a Dungeon Master; together, the players and the DM improvise a storyline. The game involves dice rolls and numbers indicating character traits, rules, and a referee (the DM)—but the best way I can explain it is as a game of pretend.

I was a freak from the jump; I didn’t really have a chance. Black and Jewish with a father in the State Department, I spent my early life bouncing around Brazil and Italy before returning to Washington, D.C., in 1994, when I was 12. Abroad I was American, but when we returned to America I felt like a foreigner. So naturally, I fell in with the nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons—the “dorks, dweebs, freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked geeks,” in the words of Ben Riggs, the author of the D&D history Slaying the Dragon.

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, the meaning was always there…

show full post on front page

Late Night Excellent Read: <em>Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist</em>Post + Comments (92)