There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery, or for the crippling horrors of the woke mind virus:

That's right, my friends. The armies of Wokedor have captured Minas Ithil and pushed across the Anduin at Osgiliath. They now stand outside Minas Tirith, ready to destroy the men of the West.

From the article:

The reader who sent this in cites it as an example of O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." The Tolkien Society has announced its summer seminar — and hoo boy, is it ever woke!

Here's the first of the virtual sessions, just to give you a taste of how the Tolkien Society has abandoned reason for madness:

• Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings

Someone has been looking into the Palantír seeing stones for far too long.

How is that an actual session being sponsored by the Tolkien Society??

We're gonna put The Babylon Bee out of business at this rate.

Oh, but that's just a taste of the insanity. If there were only a few sessions that were woke, you'd think they are simply trying to be relevant.

No, dear friends, the hour is late, and Wormtongue's foul words have nearly taken the entirety of the seminar. I first heard rumors of this insanity a few months ago, but it's far worse than I could have imagined.

Here are the other sessions:

• The Problem of Pain: Portraying Physical Disability in the Fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien
• "The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire": Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien's Middle-earth
• Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings
• Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien's Worlds
• The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Power
• The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic
• Hearkening to the Other: Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth
• The Invisible Other: Tolkien's Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack'
• Desire of the Ring: An Indian Academic's Adventures in her Quest for the Perilous Realm
• Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!
• Hidden Visions: Iconographies of Alterity in Soviet Bloc Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings
• Questions of Caste in The Lord of the Rings and its Multiple Chinese Translations
• Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community
• "Something Mighty Queer": Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien
• Translation as a means of representation and diversity in Tolkien's scholarship and fandom

I think I finally understand how Gimli felt when he discovered Balin's tomb, and the foul truth that all his kin had been slaughtered by the goblins and Durin's Bane.

Where does the Tolkien Society even go from here? They've already hijacked a devout Catholic's epic saga of heroism and hope against all odds.

What's next? Promoting transhumanism? Giving talks on polyamory? Advocating for pedophilia? They've got to be somewhat careful, otherwise they'll cancel the straight, white, Christian author that made the very world they now seek to destroy.

"Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien" comes pretty dang close.

Do they not hear themselves? These people probably fancy themselves free spirits like the elves, without realizing they've been taken by a Dark Power and mutilated, turned into a ruined and terrible form of life.

And what the heck is with "Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings"?

Are they saying Saruman – the demented Istari who savaged the Westfold and the forest of Fanghorn, who built armies of foul things to kill men, women, and children – is gay? Is it because he had a robe that shimmered with many colors? And what the actual heck is this about pardoning him?

Don't even get me started on "Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien's Worlds." Is this a way to grapple with the fact that Tolkien drew largely from Nordic, Germanic, Celtic, and other European lore? Is that too yucky for the mucks at the Tolkien Society??

Tolkien understood the corrupting nature of power. He saw it unfold in Europe several times in his life. He lived some of the darkest days of history. How ironic it is that the society named for him does not understand that same alluring, glittering temptation present through modern Woke theology.

Here's a live shot of one Tolkien Society staff member planning this event:

You want to know the truth? Tolkien was braver and more brilliant than this whole rabble put together. He fought in the trenches of WWI, saw the rise of the Third Reich, studied the deep mythologies of the ancient world amid the dawn of postmodern stupidity, led the famous C.S. Lewis to Christ, and wrote a series that still captures the imagination generations after his death.

He was more – is more – than anything the foul mechanisms Wokeism can touch.

"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

Consider this the lighting of the beacons, but are there any left in Rohan or elsewhere who will heed the call?

We may wish the burden of countering this insanity didn't fall on us, but as Gandalf infamously said: