J. K. Rowling on 10 November 2024, the eve of Armistice Day, elected to go to war with those who insist that she is “far right.”

In a four-paragraph tweet she re-stated her political commitments and core beliefs in something of a manifesto. In brief, she identifies as a “left-leaning liberal,” one who is “fiercely anti-authoritarian,” and a woman who simultaneously “mistrust[s] ideologies” and those captured by their loyalties to same while remaining “an idealist” believing “in human beings” and our natural goodness.

The three most interesting pieces of this twixter declaration to me are (1) the aside vis a vis “anti-authoritarianism” that “if you couldn’t deduce that from my work than you haven’t understood a word of it,” i.e., “my works are transparencies of my core beliefs” (cf. Lake and Shed), (2) her admission that the political left with whom she continues to identify no longer exists but has been replaced by an “identity based strain of politics I consider elitist,” and (3) her insistence that there is “currently an assault on woman’s rights,” one “unparalleled in my lifetime” “coming from both left and right.” This last despite the election of a US President by a profound majority for these times in the popular vote and Electoral College, a candidate who since February 2023 at least has publicly espoused all of Rowling’s TERF war objectives as his platform, not to mention that he is not anti-abortion post Roe but wants UK/EU type limits on infanticide.

That third point suggests she is something of an ideologue herself politically, despite her affirmation that she mistrusts those “who deny a bit of inconvenient truth to keep their world view intact.” And, as for being radically “anti-authoritarian,” Rowling never encountered a Covid interdict and repressive measure that she didn’t applaud and publicly support 2020 to 2024. Can you say “Missing in Action”? There’s quite a bit of willful blindness in these statements, in other words, and my chief take-away is the literary rather than political point that this confusion and mélange of contradictory positions can be “deduced” from a close reading of her work.

The twixter thread beneath the post had some interesting if very cordial push-back on her statement, to which she responded generously and with characteristic good humor: [Read more…]

J. K. Rowling on Twixter today repeated her assertion in April that “the left has fucked up monumentally on gender identity ideology,” and, though she disavowed the idea that this was the difference maker in Trump’s victory this week, she made it clear that the progressive party’s having done “its utmost to alienate people it used to represent” played its part. Here is that explosive long-form tweet and some of the more interesting responses and relevant commentary:

I wrote the words below in April, about the UK left, and I’m retweeting them today for the benefit of some of the numbskulls in my mentions.

Women like me, and there are a lot of us, aren’t and never have been far-right. We simply want the left to wake the hell up, because we’re watching it do its utmost to alienate people it used to represent.

I’m not saying Trump’s win was down to the gender stuff – I’m not an American voter, so can’t judge. In any case, the Labour Party won the last UK election and they’ve embraced gender identity ideology whole-heartedly (although they won against a Tory government so enfeebled and unpopular it would have been miraculous if they hadn’t, and their popularity since gaining office has plummeted.)

What I do know is that millions of women in the UK and across the developed world are extremely angry about men in women’s sport, men in women’s jails and the erosion of single-sex spaces. Parents are angry at being demonised because they don’t want their troubled kids to undergo irreversible medical treatments of extremely questionable benefit. People are sick to the back teeth of being bullied and threatened for refusing to embrace an elitist, academia-generated ideology that’s having severe real world consequences.

Large swathes of the left continue to be threatening and abusive to anybody who resists their attempts to impose ideological language or bully them out of wrongthink. Leftist activists jeer and sneer at erstwhile female allies for the crime of believing biological sex is real and matters. And leftist leaders still appear more interested in sucking up to gender activists than – to take a topical example in the UK – female nurses whose crime is not wanting to undress in front of a fully intact male.

So to those screaming ‘bigot’ and ‘fascist’ at me, you should know two things. Firstly, I’m completely indifferent to your disapproval, as I’d have thought you’d have realised by now. Secondly, and far more importantly, the only thing more harmful to your cause than your pseudo-religious belief in gender identities is your astounding, self-righteous arrogance.

Rowling had a back-and-forth with @KProtein19 about whether this issue tipped the scales in Trump’s favor. The consensus was that Trump had a relatively small budget for ad buys relative to the oligarchs’ candidate but decided to go all in on anti-“transgender” pieces to win the votes of those who would normally vote for the Blue candidate. [Read more…]