Joy Reid’s analogy is such a catastrophic misreading of The Lord of the Rings that it would embarrass even Amazon.

When Joy Reid was finally taken off the air by MSNBC, we all lost a reliable source of content that ranged from the simply overheatedly wrong and conspiratorial to the spectacularly and insanely wrong. Without a television platform, she would really need to raise her game to attract notice. Just ask poor Keith Olbermann, who today is reduced to the role of a “reply guy” — yelling at people in their replies on social media to get the crumbs of their traffic. After all, Reid can stay in the news based on old reports of her saying crazy antisemitic things behind the scenes for only so long.

But fear not for Ms. Reid. She is up to the challenge, as she demonstrated with this gem of cultural illiteracy on Bluesky: “We will never be a monarchy. Know that. To quote the LOTR trilogy: Gondor has no king. Gondor needs no king.” It would be difficult to pack more wrong into fewer words. Reid’s analogy is such a catastrophic misreading of Lord of the Rings that it would embarrass even Amazon. And in the process, she manages to undermine her own argument about modern America.

First, Gondor is a monarchy. In both the films and the books, it is explained to us that Gondor is a legitimate monarchy ruled by stewards who merely await the return of the king. That return is the happy ending of the trilogy for Gondor. This is not a subtle point: the third book and film are literally titled The Return of the King. The whole character arc of Aragorn is that he is the rightful king of Gondor, and ends up as king of Gondor. Everything in his character — his lineage, his rearing in Rivendell, his carrying of the broken sword of Elendil (father of the dynasty), and the healing powers that a king alone can wield — derives from this. Entire chapters are devoted to the topic. If Reid missed all of this, my suspicion is that she doesn’t know the books or the movies and only knows them from an internet meme. That’s consistent with where she gets the rest of her information about the world she lives in.

Second, the line Reid quotes — which is only in the film, not the books — is uttered by Boromir to reflect the roots of his character’s fall into darkness and folly. His family rules as hereditary stewards, of which he is the heir, and he rightly perceives that a return of the king would be bad for his personal position, no matter what it means for Gondor. He expresses this much more subtly in the books, although the tension is still there when Aragorn’s lineage is explained to him at the Council of Elrond. When Aragorn asks, “Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?,” Boromir bristles:

“I was not sent to beg any boon, but to seek only the meaning of a riddle,” answered Boromir proudly. “Yet we are hard pressed, and the Sword of Elendil would be a help beyond our hope- if such a thing could indeed return out of the shadows of the past.” He looked again at Aragorn, and doubt was in his eyes.

Later in the Council, he proposes seizing and using the Ring — a potent but corrupting weapon of absolute power: “Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of our need? Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy.” When warned against this, he takes another subtle jab at Aragorn, while outwardly deferring to accept his aid:

Boromir looked at them doubtfully, but he bowed his head. “So be it,” he said. “Then in Gondor we must trust to such weapons as we have. And at the least, while the Wise ones guard this Ring, we will fight on. Mayhap the Sword-that-was-Broken may still stem the tide – if the hand that wields it has inherited not an heirloom only, but the sinews of the Kings of Men.”

“Who can tell?” said Aragorn. “But we will put it to the test one day.”

“May the day not be too long delayed,” said Boromir. “For though I do not ask for aid, we need it. It would comfort us to know that others fought also with all the means that they have.”

His brother Faramir explains later to Frodo, the Ring-bearing Hobbit, the tension between Boromir’s duty to the rightful king and his own ambition — a tension that the deeply religious J. R. R. Tolkien would have understood as something akin to a Christian’s duty to put the will of God above one’s own will, and even to treat life on earth itself as something over which we are merely temporary stewards:

“We of my house are not of the line of Elendil. though the blood of Númenor is in us. For we reckon back our line to Mardil, the good steward, who ruled in the king’s stead when he went away to war. And that was King Eärnur, last of the line of Anárion, and childless, and he came never back. And the stewards have governed the city since that day, though it was many generations of Men ago.”

“And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that his father was not king. ‘How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?’ he asked. ‘Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty,’ my father answered. ‘In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice.’ Alas! poor Boromir. Does that not tell you something of him?”

“It does,” said Frodo. “Yet always he treated Aragorn with honour.” “I doubt it not,’ said Faramir. “If he were satisfied of Aragorn’s claim as you say, he would greatly reverence him.”

In the end, Boromir can’t resist the lure of the Ring and is killed after trying to seize it, shattering the Fellowship. While the Boromir of the books never quite rejects the legitimacy of Aragorn’s claim to the throne, it is plain that his desire for personal glory makes him both suspicious of being supplanted by the rightful ruler and also susceptible to the corruption of power.

It gets worse for Reid’s effort to posture Gondor and her stewards as models for today’s “resistance” to a supposedly monarchical King Trump. Gondor is not, of course, a democracy or a republic. The stewards are neither the constitutionally legitimate rulers (as is the king) nor accountable to anybody. They are, if anything, the representatives of a permanent administrative state, exercising authority in the name of someone else but ultimately hesitant to surrender it. They rule, de facto, as dictators. We are told that they started as humble and faithful “good stewards” of the realm trying to hold it together until the king could return. But Boromir’s father Denethor, the last steward, has fallen from wisdom into despair and madness. He has done so because he overestimated his own expertise and engaged in his own secret foreign policy. He used the palantír (the seeing stone) to communicate with Gondor’s mortal enemy, Sauron, in what was intended as a combination of diplomacy and espionage. The process of those talks has bent Denethor’s will and robbed him of the courage to put Gondor first. Ironically, Aragorn also uses a palantír to confront Sauron in order to further a diversion, but as the rightful king, he has the strength of will to survive the encounter.

When the wizard Gandalf confronts Denethor, his moral failure is dramatized by his refusal to surrender power to the rightful king and his stubborn insistence on clinging to his administrative position and the status quo:

“But I say to thee, Gandalf Mithrandir, I will not be thy tool! I am Steward of the House of Anárion. I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart. Even were his claim proved to me, still he comes but of the line of Isildur. I will not bow to such a one, last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity.”

“What then would you have,” said Gandalf, “if your will could have its way?”

“I would have things as they were in all the days of my life,” answered Denethor, “and in the days of my longfathers before me; to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.”

“To me it would not seem that a Steward who faithfully surrenders his charge is diminished in love or in honour,” said Gandalf.

Gandalf, of course, is at all times Tolkien’s own spokesman in the narrative. His reproach is the author’s judgment: Denethor’s “wisdom failed,” as Gandalf later comments. And yet, Denethor is so determined to have his power or nothing that he throws himself on a funeral pyre and tries to take Faramir with him, preferring destruction and nihilism rather than yield his position to the rightful power. If that is Joy Reid’s model for how the administrative state should resist the elected president, it would be an understatement to say that she has left the path of wisdom. She probably should have read the book.