In the climactic scene of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frodo, and Samwise approach the end of their quest to destroy the great Ring of Power and with it, Sauron’s evil empire. They have survived every kind of danger and have made their way against all odds into the heart of the Dark Land to the volcano, Mount Doom, the only place where the ring can be destroyed.

But having gone through so much, at the last moment, Frodo, who carried the Ring, is finally overcome by the Ring’s greatest danger: It infects the heart, mind, and soul of its bearer with the desire to make its power their own. Standing by the side of the cracks that open onto the seething magma at the volcano’s core, Frodo announces that he will not do what he had pledged to do and that the Ring is now his. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Kamala Shows Us Who She Is)

Seemingly, at the last moment, Evil snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. The Dark Lord becomes aware of his great danger and sends his most terrible servants flying through the air to grab back the Ring. All seems to be lost.

At that moment, Gollum intervenes.

Gollum had once been an ordinary hobbit, but, when his brother found the Ring, he had been seduced and destroyed by the Ring. He murdered his brother, seized the Ring, and hid himself.

In the end, he lost the Ring to Bilbo and it came into Frodo’s hands. It came to the knowledge of the Wise, who knew that only through destroying the Ring could the free peoples of the world survive the Dark Lord’s burgeoning power. As Frodo journeyed forward on that quest, Gollum, driven to madness by the Ring, tracked him down and tried to kill him and regain what he called his Precious.

He was foiled and mastered by Frodo and Sam. Sam had not wanted to spare Gollum’s life and did not trust him; Frodo demurred and did not let him be killed.

In the end, Sam’s influence was not enough and even Frodo’s stalwart spirit succumbed to the Ring. But as Frodo claims the Ring for himself, Gollum attacks, bites off Frodo’s finger with the Ring still on it, and — overcome with ecstasy and blind to everything except the Ring — he slips and galls into the volcano, at last destroying the Ring as well as his own life.

This is Tolkien’s deeply religious vision. No power can overcome evil head-on. We are too implicated in power ourselves to use force of any sort as a final answer. Only Frodo’s act of compassion in sparing Gollum’s life saved him from catastrophic failure in his quest and existential disaster for the world.

Gollum Applied to American Politics

What does this have to do with our politics?

We who desire the structured freedom towards which God has led us in our biblical tradition are in a quest to destroy the ever-encroaching thrusts of self-appointed elites who are contemptuous of that tradition, which is beyond their control. Now, a monstrous crisis looms as that elite is preparing to ally itself with the heirs of the Nazis, Teheran’s mullahs and their orgiastic berserker clients. (READ MORE: Is Walz Worse Than Newsom?)

For a while, it looked as if our quest to defeat this evil, was going to succeed, against all odds. But we relaxed into complacency, and the elites stole a march on us. They are so in thrall to the Hamas Caucus that they deep-sixed the obvious choice for running mate simply because he is Jewish. They have allowed it to leak out that they are ready to strip Israel of arms in the face of looming attacks from Iran and its proxies — and all to no objection from within their party. Step by step, since the Obama revolution began in secret to tilt towards Iran and then, step by step, America has been taught to hate again after Jew-hatred had been banished by a whole nation sickened at the horrors of the Holocaust.

With Harris rising in the polls, with the media monopoly exerting its full power to dictate the narrative, with the Dems all in on appeasing Iran, with the DNC approaching and its boost, it may seem dark indeed.

And yet, there is the Gollum possibility.

Evil Could Yet Snatch Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

There is something about the Hamas-type mindset that, as Golda Meir once said, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Jew-hating radicals that we saw when colleges were in session are ready to come back as the schools open. And they share the mindset of the 60s.

I was a senior in high school during the 1968 campaign, and I was inclined towards the radicals. I heard their line and read their writings. They were done with compromise. They despised liberalism as much as Bill Buckley but for different reasons. They didn’t care about the Democrats at all, even as candidates like Gene McCarthy, for a while, Bobby Kennedy, took up the anti-war cause. The radicals came to Chicago to grab the headlines themselves and to bring as much chaos as possible. They succeeded in destroying the Dems’ chances in 1968 and gutting the old Democratic party.

Barack Obama was groomed by criminal radicals from the 60s and he executed an internal silent takeover. No-Drama Obama knew that if he was disciplined enough and always effectively disguised his aims, a trusting America would want to believe him. Nowhere was this truer than in his policy towards Iran and Israel. He slowly but surely made antisemitism as acceptable as it had been in the company of his old mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who made common cause with Louis Farrakhan and blamed America for Sept. 11. (READ MORE: Obama Decided Biden’s Fate, and Democratic Elite Got Their Way)

But radicals are not by nature content with slow processes. Like Chicago in ’68, they see a prime moment to demonstrate that it is they who hold the power. They believe in the Leninist model of overwhelming by force rather than the social democratic model of building a consensus.

They are the Gollum here, wanting only their own power. They are allied with Teheran only because it suits their own drunken infatuation with power. The mullah’s hatred is just the gasoline for their Molotov cocktails. Their revolution is a gas guzzler, and antisemitism is a hi-test.

It could be — it is just possible — that the Democrats have lost track of the identities they are juggling. It just may be that in Chicago, the hate mongers may try to show who has the whip hand and turn the scripted show and media-designed coronation will be upstaged by people who really hate our democracy and no longer feel any need to cater to the Democrat script of gradual tyrannization.

It could just be that they will bite off the Ring, fall into the fire, and bring the whole dark show tumbling into ruin along with them. It’s a possibility.