Elves, Hobbits, & Loony Law Profs

Berkeley academic shows why it might be time to get Tolkien-pilled

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This woman testifying actually teaches law at Berkeley. Sen. Josh Hawley went all Matt Walsh on her. It’s a thing of beauty to see:

It’s amazing how brittle that woke shtick is outside of the precincts controlled by these people. The Berkeley prof won’t answer the senator’s question, and accuses him of threatening the lives of trans people by asking, in effect, “What is a woman?” We have to stop honoring this crap. Stand up to it. Mock it. Refuse to live by the lie.

Here’s that same kook again, with her septum ring, being arrogant to a senator who is asking a perfectly normal question:

Tonight I had dinner with a visiting American academic in Budapest. He’s a conservative, and had some pretty bleak stories to tell about the soft totalitarianism that has taken over. He said that he once thought that he would be able to go into the humanities field, and be treated like he would treat anybody else: with an open mind, and welcoming debate. Now, mid-career, he has been cured of that illusion. He’s not sure why any intelligent young person who wasn’t a left-wing radical would undertake to be an academic.

He said, “I suspect you and I share the same skepticism of Donald Trump, but I’ll give him this: he forced the Left to drop the mask. They were so freaked out by him that they revealed what totalitarians they had become. When Obama was president, and they thought they had History on their side, they thought they might be able to tolerate us, just barely. Trump forced their hand.”

When I got home from dinner, I checked email, and found this from a reader of this blog:

I increasingly believe that if we are to have order—if we are not just going to cede our cities to a collapse into lawlessness, e.g.—then order will have to be imposed in an illiberal way. And, furthermore, that that will be in the best interests of everyone. Same is true of our precious institutions. Seems like the options are either to let the insaniacs dynamite all the foundations with impunity, or to take our stuff back forcibly. 
Such solutions, which, to reiterate, I increasingly believe to be the only plausible ones, nevertheless strike me as vanishingly unlikely. And it’s not lost on me that such an attitude is the mirror image of what I deplore on the left (packing the court, abolishing the electoral college / senate, eliminating the filibuster, et al.). So: bearishness on the West’s future prospects; new dark age etc. etc.

The reason the liberal elites hate Viktor Orban — who, by the way, is going to be keynoting CPAC Texas next month — is that he understands them and their methods, and doesn’t roll over for them, or satisfy himself by just ticking them off and leaving it at that. He plays hardball, the same way they treat us. I hope his Dallas appearance stiffens the spines and sharpens the minds of the conservatives in the audience.

And yet, is this not true of America today?:

This person is not wrong. You should check out Twitter’s response. Same planet, different worlds. For example:

How on earth do we live together? This law professor thinks even questioning her dogma civilly is an act of violence that will result in deaths. And people like her are the dominant power-holders in this country. You might be thinking, “Seriously, Rod? You seriously believe that a Berkeley law professor is more powerful than two US Senators?” No, not strictly speaking. But Prof. Khiara Bridges speaks as a member of the culturally dominant elite in the US. How many people in positions of power and influence in the national media, in business, in advertising, in entertainment, in medicine, in the US military, and so forth, are more likely to agree openly with Prof. Bridges or either senator? Do students in Prof. Bridges’s classes feel that they have the liberty to disagree with her? Do employees in major companies feel that they have the liberty to say they agree with Sen. Hawley on the matter of transgenderism, without suffering career damage, and even risking being fired? That’s real power. They have it, and they use it.

The only way to protect ourselves is to use the only power left to conservatives (and old-fashioned liberals): political power. Most conservatives I know are like the visiting American professor I had dinner with tonight: they just want to do good work and be left alone, and to leave others alone to care about the things they care about. But that is not how the Left works. I’m old enough to remember a time when normie conservatives genuinely believed the Left would be stopped once we demonstrated to them how illiberal they were acting. Boy, those were the days.

Curtis Yarvin has an interesting essay about being “Tolkien-pilled” about the culture war. Excerpt:

America is a political marriage of blue-state elves and red-state hobbits. The elves are terrified of the hobbits’ pitchforks. They can only survive by ruling the hobbits with an iron hand—or at least, by inundating the hobbits’ brains with pro-elf propaganda—or better yet, both.

Any elf knows that the hobbits could indeed overthrow the elves by force tomorrow. All those guns! But that would require hobbits to be something other than hobbits.

Hobbits just want to grill. Hobbits just want to be governed sensibly, in a way that makes sense to hobbits, so that they can just grill. Hobbits have little desire for power and no great talent for it, which is what makes them so easy for the elves to rule. And hobbits are not—not in their hearts—into telling elves how to live their lives.

How does an understanding of this political geometry help us craft a strategy that works for hobbits? The problem is that elves do not want to be ruled by hobbits, and hobbits do not want to rule elves. Even if the hobbits were not hobbits and so could spontaneously organize a hobbit revolution, this contradiction would prevent victory.

Any elf knows that the hobbits could indeed overthrow the elves by force tomorrow. All those guns! But that would require hobbits to be something other than hobbits.

Hobbits just want to grill. Hobbits just want to be governed sensibly, in a way that makes sense to hobbits, so that they can just grill. Hobbits have little desire for power and no great talent for it, which is what makes them so easy for the elves to rule. And hobbits are not—not in their hearts—into telling elves how to live their lives.

How does an understanding of this political geometry help us craft a strategy that works for hobbits? The problem is that elves do not want to be ruled by hobbits, and hobbits do not want to rule elves. Even if the hobbits were not hobbits and so could spontaneously organize a hobbit revolution, this contradiction would prevent victory.

Read it all. Yarvin has some strange strategery in there, and I can’t go all the way with him, but it’s interesting to ponder, and besides, his Elf-Hobbit distinction is a useful one. I actually don’t care about crazypants Berkeley law profs, but I am forced to care about them, because they are changing the country in ways that present a threat to the stability of family and the nation. Hungary, where I’m staying this week, is a country ruled by hobbits who found a hobbit with elf-like cunning to run the place on their behalf, and to protect their way of life. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s one-quarter honey badger.) Wish we had such a person.

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