Category: Auron macintyre
The collapse of conservatism nobody wants to admit
From its earliest days, the United States saw itself as a nation with intense purpose. Not a static country, not a museum of inherited customs, but a project. Alexander Hamilton envisioned a commercial republic that would rival the great powers of Europe. The doctrine of manifest destiny pushed that ambition across a continent. After World War II, the same impulse extended outward into global leadership.
America, in other words, has always kept its eyes on the horizon.
But once the frontier had been settled, the U.S. seemed to turn inward, focusing its boundless energy and notion of destiny toward a social crusade. The progressive civil rights movement became the story Americans told about themselves more than any other. A nation built on outward expansion turned inward. The energy that once drove settlers westward and engineers skyward was redirected into a different kind of project: a moral and social crusade at home.
This narrative is so powerful that it now dominates both the conservative and liberal mind. This means that the U.S. no longer really has a conservative movement, but rather two competing versions of the same progressive teleology that only disagree about the pace at which the social revolution should be pursued.
Restless people settled the US; we barely complete the conquest of one challenge before some group splinters off to brave the next frontier.
The philosopher Aristotle is famous for his discussion of telos — the end or purpose of a thing. Many modern thinkers have discarded this notion of ultimate purpose in favor of a more materialistic understanding of the world, but Aristotle is right, and they are wrong. America was always a nation in tension, recognizing the need to solidify its identity as the first true product of the New World even as it was immediately compelled forward by ambition. Restless people settled the U.S.; we barely complete the conquest of one challenge before some group splinters off to brave the next frontier. The American advance has always been relentless. Our nation is one of great purpose and great energy that will be directed toward whatever end we put our minds to.
For most of its history, America’s telos was expansion. Not merely territorial, but civilizational. A restless people moved outward, solved one problem, then immediately sought the next. This produced enormous dynamism. It also produced tension. The country had to define itself even as it constantly outgrew its previous definitions.
The civil rights myth
North America is the natural domain of the United States, but once the West had been truly settled, there was nowhere left for that pioneering spirit to expand. World War II proved to be the nation’s most radical period of transformation, during which it emerged as one of only two real superpowers dominating the globe. There were attempts to redirect that impulse. The space race briefly reopened the horizon. The competition with the Soviet Union offered a global stage. But these proved temporary. The deeper shift was happening at home.
The civil rights movement had begun as a reasonable request for legal equality, but was quickly merging with hippie culture and anti-Vietnam protests into a full-blown revolutionary deconstruction of America. The story of the civil rights movement was no longer the effort to seek a temporary solution for a wrong done to a specific group. Instead the movement fully embraced the progressive and Marxist themes of its contemporaries. America was no longer a great nation that needed to make some adjustments to integrate black citizens better; it was an eternal oppressor that had to be entirely reconstructed.
That shift matters because it supplied a new telos. If the old purpose had been expansion, the new one was equality, understood not as a condition to be achieved, but as a process without end. Every disparity became evidence of unfinished work. Every institution became suspect. The project could not conclude because its logic required constant renewal.
Conservatives initially stood against the civil rights revolution. Barry Goldwater famously opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not because he supported Jim Crow, but because he understood the legislation as a revolutionary attack on states’ rights. Many conservatives initially objected to Ronald Reagan enshrining the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday into law because they still remembered that King was a communist sympathizer and serial adulterer who supported what we would later call DEI.
It was very clear that the CRA had already mutated well beyond its initial purpose and that civil rights law was expanding to consume every area of American life. But every movie, television show, novel, and news broadcast was selling the civil rights revolution as the new story of America. Conservatives never stood a chance.
The new telos of America was one of equality. The framers had written that “all men were created equal,” and it was now the purpose of the U.S. to make that a reality. While Thomas Jefferson may have penned those famous words, it is very clear that neither he nor most of the founding generation meant them in the way modern Americans do today. The continuation of slavery is the obvious example, but early American immigration laws restricted naturalization to whites of good character.
Alexis de Tocqueville, author of “Democracy in America,” famously argued that American blacks and Anglos were incompatible and that a race war would likely come before any national civil war. Even Abraham Lincoln was not optimistic about the integration of black and white America, with plans to send former slaves back to Africa once the Civil War was concluded. Whatever previous generations meant by that famous phrase, they obviously did not believe in a never-ending quest to remake society in the name of equality.
Predictably, leftists took the revolution as far and as fast as they could. America’s original sin was slavery, and the country’s entire purpose was now a never-ending mission to atone for this great evil. The suppression of black Americans was systemic, so the United States had to deconstruct all previous hierarchies to avoid oppression. First race, then gender roles, then marriage, then religion, then the concept of biological sex itself. No matter how absurd the exercise proved itself to be, the hunt for one new oppressed minority to grant civil rights to became the telos of America.
Conservatives are the Washington Generals
Conservatives assumed their classic position as beautiful losers. They rejected the speed and intensity of the revolution but accepted the premise. Republicans went from rejecting MLK Day to worshiping the communist as some moderate paragon of the civil rights revolution. The conservative movement rapidly came to believe much of what the left was already asserting, but wanted the revolutionaries to drive the speed limit. Yes, the founders were racist. Yes, they had failed in their promise. Yes, the story of America was its eternal reinvention to achieve social equality. But also, the military and baseball are good, and maybe we can keep some of the Christianity because that also seems important.
This created a strange phenomenon: two competing progressive teleologies, one extreme and one more moderate, came to dominate the American mind. The conservatives began to manifest this ideology in areas of life where they held power. American foreign policy became one of eternal liberation, where our country would conquer the world in the name of liberal democracy.
Despite theoretically opposing feminism or gay rights in the U.S., conservatives would also cite violations of these civil rights as reasons to invade and control other countries. American churches, even conservative ones, began to center their message on race relations, liberation of the oppressed, and care for illegal immigrants. A real right wing no longer existed in America; the new frontier was the eternal civil rights revolution, and the only question was how far and how fast it should go.
This dynamic has created something of an identity crisis for the American right. On one hand, conservatives want to limit the excesses of the left; on the other, they have bought entirely into the progressive premise. American conservatives do not really want to return to the intention of the racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs of the founders. They like the progress, they approve of the revolution, and they are ashamed of their past.
This subversion of the American vision is unfortunate, but it does not have to remain permanent. Instead of wasting our blood and treasure trying to turn every authoritarian backwater into a flourishing Jeffersonian republic, we could once again turn our eyes to the stars. Instead of trying to stamp out every form of inequality in our society, we could embrace hierarchy and the pursuit of greatness.
Instead of being ashamed of our founders, conservatives could follow manifest destiny to Mars and beyond. That requires rejecting the idea that the nation’s highest purpose is to endlessly remake itself in pursuit of abstract equality. It means accepting that hierarchy, excellence, and difference are not pathologies to be erased, but features of any functioning civilization. Before we can pursue the frontier once more, we must believe that we are a people with a purpose, a nation that deserves not just to survive, but to thrive.
Japan’s beautiful love affair with America
For a brief moment, X stopped reading like a machine built to aggravate, divide, and degrade the people using it. Instead of the usual sludge of foreign bots and demoralizing propaganda, American users found themselves, thanks to a new auto-translation feature, staring at something unexpected: a flood of posts from Japan celebrating the United States. Monster trucks, backyard barbecue, Old West revolvers, bluegrass music, country songs, and all the rowdy symbols of American life that our own elites often treat as embarrassing were suddenly being admired from abroad.
It reminded Americans that our culture is not only real, but vivid enough that another people can see its beauty even when we have been taught to sneer at it ourselves. If Americans and Japanese are to continue to enjoy our distinct cultures, we must fight to maintain the true diversity that makes a civilization worth preserving.
Status in the U.S. and many other Western nations is acquired by looking down on the folkways of the average American.
Most Americans know that there is a strong current of appreciation for Japanese culture in the U.S. Americans eat Japanese food, watch anime, read manga, practice karate, and revere samurai movies. While we were once in a brutal war, Americans have come to respect the noble and beautiful traditions of the Japanese. What many Americans did not know is that the Japanese also have a robust subculture of appreciation for American culture.
Americans are constantly told that they have no culture, or that what they do have is shallow, vulgar, and unworthy of defense. In much of elite life, status comes from mocking the tastes and traditions of ordinary Americans. Status in the U.S. and many other Western nations is acquired by looking down on the folkways of the average American.
It is not just that the Japanese love American culture, but that they seem to focus specifically on rural Southern and Western archetypes. Banjos playing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” barbeques grilling comically large steaks, monster trucks crushing everything below them. The Japanese love and celebrate everything that American elites have trained the population at large to sneer at.
Recently, many people have been asking the question “What is an American?” But the Japanese seem to know right away. There is no confusion, no debate. The answer is obvious and plays itself out in the memes, re-enactments, and celebrations the Japanese enjoy while honoring American culture. Sometimes another people can identify your defining traits more clearly than you can, especially after your own institutions have spent years trying to dissolve them.
In a period when many people in the United States feel estranged from their own inheritance, it was oddly heartening to see ourselves reflected in a nation we admire. If the Japanese know who Americans are, then the least we can do is be proud to act like the Americans the Japanese love.
This sudden outburst of cultural appreciation also puts to bed the idea that Americans are xenophobes who hate other countries. Japan’s love for the U.S. is reciprocated with great fervor by Americans. But why are Americans so willing to appreciate and embrace the Japanese while being dismissive of so many other countries? The answer is simple: The Japanese are worthy of admiration. Not all cultures are equal, and the Japanese have emerged from the devastation of war to rebuild a high-trust society on a foundation of rich history and honorable conduct. It turns out that Americans don’t hate other cultures; they simply save their appreciation for those that deserve it.
The social media cultural exchange also highlighted the importance of real diversity and the need to protect distinct cultures. Both the Americans and Japanese hold reciprocal appreciation for each other’s civilizations and want to see them continue into the future. Americans want our grandchildren to be able to visit Japan in 100 years and experience what we celebrate now, and the Japanese feel the same about the U.S. An island called Japan that had the same borders and topography but was filled with Indians, Palestinians, and Somalians would not be the same. If the island chain of Japan were full of Haitians, it would not be Japan; it would be Haiti with some cherry blossoms.
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Blaze Media Illustration
That is the point that modern ideology cannot admit. A nation is not just a market, a legal zone, or a patch of land inside a set of borders. It is the Japanese people, their way of life, and the culture they create that define the nation. Japan has been better than most modern nations in protecting its identity, but the country is under immense pressure to open its borders. Like much of the modern world, Japan is experiencing a massive decline in birth rates and is struggling to care for its elderly population while replacing its workforce. After dabbling in increased immigration to bolster its workforce, the nation has elected a right-wing government to reimpose restrictions. A civilization can survive low birth rates for a time; it cannot survive replacement.
Americans are beginning to understand the same truth about themselves. If Japan would cease to be Japan after demographic replacement, then the United States would cease to be the United States under the same conditions. America is a real, distinct culture with traditions, folkways, and history that are worthy of pride. America is not just an economy or an administrative zone attached to a flag. We need to stop being shamed into rejecting our culture or treating it as the banal background for a global empire. Japan is beautiful because the Japanese have built a civilization worth preserving. America is beautiful because Americans built a distinct culture worth preserving. That culture deserves more than ironic detachment or ritual embarrassment. It deserves loyalty. The Japanese, in their odd and affectionate way, reminded Americans of something many had forgotten: This country is real, its inheritance is beautiful, and it is worth preserving.
‘Subhuman ghouls’: People, WaPo trash Scott Adams hours after his death
On Tuesday, Scott Adams, the creator of the beloved comic strip “Dilbert,” died after a prolonged battle with metastatic prostate cancer. However, some of his opponents in media wasted no time before criticizing Adams and his accomplishments.
Hours after it was announced that Adams had died, People magazine published an article titled “Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68.”
‘You are the scum of the earth.’
The author then claimed in the very first paragraph that Adams “degraded Black people in a 2023 rant.”
People updated the article at 12:33 p.m. ET, including changing the author of the piece. The updated version says it was written by “People Staff.”
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Photo by Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images
However, an earlier, archived version of the article timestamped at 10:47 a.m. ET shows that it was written by Victoria Edel, as many X users, including Eric Daugherty, made sure to emphasize.
Several prominent X users did not try to hide their disgust over the tasteless headline.
“Subhuman ghouls,” BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre said in a reply to People’s post.
“You are the scum of the earth,” Raw Egg Nationalist wrote.
People’s original X post promoting the article also appears to have been deleted.
Other news outlets couldn’t resist the opportunity to drag Adams through the mud either.
An archived article originally published from the Washington Post and apparently shared later by the Boston Globe bore the headline, “Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ creator who veered into racist, far-right commentary, dies.”
Just like the People article, this article wasted no time attacking Adams’ right-wing views. The first paragraph reads: “Scott Adams, who became a hero to millions of cubicle-dwelling office workers as the creator of the satirical comic strip ‘Dilbert,’ only to rebrand himself as a digital provocateur — at home in the Trump era’s right-wing mediasphere — with inflammatory comments about race, politics and identity, died Jan. 13.”
For evidence, critics point to a February 22, 2023, stream of Adams’ show, “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” The “rant” that they are referring to involves Adams’ discussion of a Rasmussen poll of black Americans responding to the statement “it’s okay to be white.” Fifty-three percent agreed, 26% disagreed, and 21% were not sure about the statement.
Adams took issue with the fact that nearly half of black Americans did not agree with that statement. He said in part, “If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people … that’s a hate group. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people … because there is no fixing this.”
Adams’ critics failed to mention that he went on to encourage his viewers to be “friendly” to everyone and that he was not trying to “start a war” with anyone.
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Young white Americans want their own identity politics now — and conservatives shouldn’t be surprised
After years of DEI, affirmative action, and replacement-level immigration, some young white Americans are beginning to demand political representation as a group. Conservatives are panicking about this rise in “white identity politics,” but they shouldn’t be surprised at all, says BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.
“For decades, whites have watched every other group in America successfully demand political action as a block from both the left and the right. Democrats build their entire party around racial grievance, but even conservatives are quick to speak to the needs of minority communities as a collective group,” Auron says.
Even though conservatives are typically anti-identity politics, they nonetheless “cater to them for any group except their core constituency: white Americans.”
Now some of those white Americans are saying, “Enough — we demand the same treatment.”
Massive immigration has brought in large groups of people who naturally stick together ethnically and gain advantages through nepotism and tribalism, Auron explains. This makes pure individual merit, which whites are forced to rely on, a losing strategy, especially when they’re already demonized for their race by universities, corporations, and media outlets.
For years the message has been: “[Whites] aren’t allowed to advocate as a group like everyone else gets to, but they are allowed to be punished as a group.”
The fact that some whites are now calling for ethnic representation is merely “predictable results,” Auron says.
“If conservatives were serious about stopping the rise of collective white identity politics, they would stop lecturing young white people for noticing the obvious. They would instead attack the systemic bias against whites in corporations and academia. … If they were serious, conservatives would initiate an immigration moratorium and would aggressively prosecute ethnic cartels in the United States,” he continues.
“Conservative leaders should be lecturing blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and Jews just as aggressively as they lecture whites about ethnocentrism, if for no other reason than whites, you know, actually vote for the GOP, while all these other groups — outside of Hispanic males in the last election — vote overwhelmingly Democrat.”
“In short, show young white people that they can succeed without ethnocentrism by actually addressing and punishing ethnocentrism that is currently practiced by every other group here in the United States. Gather your courage and talk to the minorities who are already practicing the very behavior you claim to fear.”
To hear more of Auron’s commentary and analysis, watch the video above.
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The Great Replacement isn’t a theory. It’s the plan.
The Great Replacement theory is a conjecture popularized by French writer Renaud Camus in his 2011 book, “Le Grand Remplacement,” claiming that globalist elites are deliberately orchestrating mass immigration of non-white people into Western countries to demographically replace and ultimately disempower or even eradicate white European populations.
It’s often branded as a far-right conspiracy theory, but just look at the evidence:
- Mass illegal immigration is orchestrated or deliberately enabled under progressive administrations, despite polls indicating that most citizens want less immigration.
- Skyrocketing housing costs, student debt, stagnant wages, and taxes make it nearly impossible for young white/middle-class natives to afford children, while many immigrant households (legal and illegal) get access to welfare, EITC, child tax credits, Medicaid, and housing aid that effectively subsidize higher fertility or larger families.
- Politicians, corporate media, and advertising openly celebrate that the country is becoming “majority-minority,” cheering it as a moral and cultural improvement.
- Anyone who complains about the speed or scale of immigration (even mildly) gets instantly branded “racist,” “white supremacist,” or “xenophobic,” faces censorship, bans, and job cancellation, and is shut out of respectable discourse.
So it’s not just a theory. It’s a scheme that’s very much in action right now.
“Demographic replacement of the American stock is the plan in order to manipulate elections in the democracy,” says Auron MacIntyre, BlazeTV host of “The Auron MacIntyre Show.”
He plays a clip from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller telling Sean Hannity the same thing.
“The Biden administration, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, devised a scheme to fly illegal aliens into the country and then to escort them en masse across the border by the millions and to give them something known as parole, which gives them a work permit, which gives them a Social Security number, which gives them access to the voting booth,” Miller declared. “This was the plan all along.”
To its core, the plan is deeply undemocratic, MacIntyre explains. “The whole idea of the democracy is that it represents the beliefs and will of the people and that the popular sovereignty is supposed to guide the politicians,” he says.
“So if instead of the popular sovereignty guiding the politicians, the politicians [via immigration] can create and manufacture popular sovereignty in their favor, then they can control the entire system.”
And that’s exactly what the Democrat Party wants, he says — to secure all future elections by turning the nation into a blue blob of welfare-dependents who will reliably vote Democrat to keep their benefits.
“[The Great Replacement theory] is not a conspiracy theory. This is not some weird internet idea. This is the plan of the Democratic Party. This is what they want. This is their political strategy,” MacIntyre reiterates.
The masses of immigrants from Afghanistan, Somalia, and Venezuela — they’re “here for a reason,” he insists. “They’re here to replace you.”
“You address this, or the country drowns.”
To hear Auron’s in-depth breakdown of the Great Replacement theory, watch the video above.
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The Economist declares war on white babies
Despite the fact that America is in a fertility crisis — the worst ever recorded in the nation’s history — the Economist published a sardonic article on November 6 titled “Make America procreate again: Among the MAGA fertility fanatics.”
Through a cynical and patronizing lens, author Barclay Bram explored the right-wing-propelled pro-natalist movement spearheaded by “tech bros and religious conservatives” who champion having more babies. He cited the Nation’s Joan Walsh — a radical leftist who authored a book titled “What’s the Matter with White People?” — to capture the left’s perspective on this movement: “an insidious project to create a whiter America.”
“White children are the most evil thing that the left can imagine,” says BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.
While lefties would surely deny this, their actions speak volumes — specifically their action of “importing” and protecting illegal immigrants, which they argue is the solution to the country’s plummeting birth rate. But Auron sees through their lies.
“They have no interest in you continuing to exist because they want to replace you,” he says frankly.
Bram’s piece opens with an anecdote recounting his time with a 32-year-old single trucker named Tim Adkinson at NatalCon, a pro-natalist conference in Austin, Texas. He’s painted as a pitiable, desperate figure for his ambition to rear children, and the convention is framed as a pathetic gathering of weirdos — tech bros, religious zealots, and lonely conservatives — desperately trying to engineer a “baby boom” amid America’s fertility collapse.
“[He’s] literally demonizing people who are trying to solve social problems that are keeping us from having families,” Auron says.
Bram went on to paint the billionaires investing in reproductive technologies and the Trump administration’s push for less expensive fertility drugs as futile attempts to manufacture more families.
“Why is this insidious?” asks Auron.
“Because white people might have kids,” he answers. “That’s why it’s evil. Yeah, they care about the future of the United States. Yes, they’re working to reduce drug prices and create situations where people can stay home with their children … but oh, some of those people might be white. And that’s the problem.”
Not only is this overtly racist, it’s also illogical. If we’re serious about fixing the country’s fertility crisis (and the left claims it is), then more white babies are inevitable, as “white people are still the majority in America,” says Auron.
“But the Economist hates white people. It hates white babies. It doesn’t want white people to have children. They are interested in ethnic cleansing. That’s what they support.”
Bram’s article also mentioned (without critique) the protesters who rallied against NatalCon attendees: “A group of protesters, their faces mostly covered, gathered in the museum courtyard. ‘Nazis off our campus!’ they screamed through a megaphone as conference attendees streamed in. One sign read ‘Eugenicists’ with the word ‘Natalists’ crossed through.”
Auron makes it plain: “So if you want to have babies, you are a Nazi. You are doing Nazi race science if you would desire that Americans have more children. And this really just lays it bare. … Every white baby could be a Nazi. Whiteness is something that is inherently fascist, right? Nazism is sitting in white DNA, so we’ve got to get rid of the white people so we get rid of the Nazis.”
“I keep having to hear there is no great replacement theory … no attempts to push white people out of the United States … except for the article is explicitly stating that every white child is an atrocity.”
To hear Auron’s full breakdown of Bram’s article, watch the full episode above.
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Tolkien’s forgotten lesson: Evil wins when good men refuse to rule
Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Auron MacIntyre, BlazeTV host of “The Auron MacIntyre Show,” has been calling for conservatives to get serious about crushing left-wing violence. Inaction, he’s warned, will only invite escalation. That’s why as a political party, we must insist that the Trump administration dismantle Antifa, impose severe consequences on those inciting or celebrating murders, and wage economic war via regulatory and legal levers against complicit media.
In other words, the Trump administration needs to use its power to obliterate left-wing chaos.
Auron gets quite a bit of pushback for this stance. Many will use J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy to argue against the use of power to quell evil. “The one ring is dangerous. … You must reject the call of power because ultimately power corrupts and destroys and divides,” they say.
But Auron says this is a “shallow reading” of the father of modern fantasy’s three-volume series. “Ultimately, while yes, there is a message about power in there, there’s also a message about right authority. The last book is, of course, called ‘Return of the King,’ and this is seen as a good thing,” he counters. “So it doesn’t look like Tolkien is ultimately rejecting the use of power, but he does have some very important things to say about the nature of power.”
To discuss this important distinction, Auron speaks with Evan Cooney, the host and creator of “The Middle-earth Mixer” — a popular podcast that dives into J.R.R. Tolkien’s lore, themes, and Middle-earth universe.
For starters, Tolkien was adamantly opposed to allegory, meaning that the one ring cannot be said to symbolize power alone. Further, in the books, “There is lawful use of lawful authority, which translates to power, that many characters have and have permissions to do so by the creator god Ilúvatar, and then there are characters who commit unlawful use of unlawful authority, and Sauron creating the one ring would be a perfect example of that,” says Cooney.
Auron points to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, as an example. Initially, Aragorn, using the name Strider, runs from his destiny. “And because he’s not in that position of the true king, there are others who are less worthy who are ruling in his place,” says Auron. This is seen by characters and readers alike as a bad thing. Aragorn must wear the crown and wield the sword and scepter, as this is what pushes back darkness and brings order to Middle-earth.
Cooney, unpacking Aragorn’s lineage all the way back to Isildur, who initially took the ring of power from Sauron, says, “This shirking of responsibility from everyone involved and [Arvedui’s, the last king of the North] inability to take power created the political disaster that made for why men were so weak by the time you get to the ‘Fellowship of the Ring.”’
“Ultimately, Tolkien recognizes that power will exist, that this void will be filled, and if it’s not filled with the appropriate people, the worthy people, those who belong in the line … you will be ruled by inferior men,” says Auron. “It’s not that you won’t be ruled; it’s that the stewards are there instead of the kings.”
In the kingdom of Gondor, Denethor — a steward charged with holding the throne in trust until the king returns — is consumed by pride and despair. He refuses to rally with allies, distrusts Aragorn’s claim to the throne, and abandons the city in its darkest hour.
In Rohan, however, King Théoden, who Cooney says is Denethor’s character foil, shows us what it looks like to wield power rightly. With the help of Gandalf, he exiles his corrupt adviser, Gríma Wormtongue — “the quintessential archetype for the sneaky government bureaucrat,” says Cooney — and rides out and meets Sauron’s army in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
The exile of Gríma, says Auron, is a lesson for our current government: “The council [of bureaucrats] is paralyzing. It’s meant to be paralyzing. It’s meant to stop you from taking your rightful authority and taking the honorable action, and you have to remove that influence.”
Once evil advisers have been banished, the next step is to step fully into the role of rightful power. After Gríma is exiled, the first thing Gandalf has Théoden do is pick up his sword. “Your fingers would remember their old strength better, if they grasped your sword,” he tells the old king.
“It’s a very moving symbol,” says Auron.
“What stirs the king back to a noble action is he has to feel the weight of the instrument of his office. The rightful sword he has been entrusted with as the civil magistrate has to be felt in his hand before he can once again truly return to who he is and behave honorably.”
To hear the full conversation, watch the episode above.
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