I have posted here through the years an irregular feature called ‘Shared Text.’ Those posts were inevitably inspired by someone, somewhere — anywhere, everywhere — using a reference to Harry Potter to make a point. It could be to Snape or Hermione, too often it is to Voldemort (everybody thinks the other guy is the Dark Lord’s minion), more often than not, it’s just a ‘Hogwarts’ call-out. My favorite, the ‘own-goal’ of the Covid unvaccinated, to which group I belong, deciding to promote that status by pushing #PureBloods on Twitter. If you want to scroll through all those Shared Text posts for a taste of the variety, click here.
I am fairly frequently reminded not only of the Harry Potter books being the ‘Shared Text’ of our times but just the enormity of Rowling’s celebrity in the place where I work to pay my bills and student loans. It’s a grocery store and just small enough that almost everyone there knows me and about my ‘Dean of Harry Potter scholars’ Walter Mitty existence. At least once a month, sometimes once a week, an acquaintance there will walk up to me with their ‘smart’ phone saying, “John, have you seen this latest bit about Rowling?” And hold up their phone so I can read the story.
Last Sunday it was my beloved tattooed man in the Produce department. “I suppose you’ve heard that Rowling has black mold in her house? And they’re saying that it’s taken over her mind?” I thought he was kidding, but he showed me the story. You can read here the whole sequence of events about the first tweets on the subject, how it grew into a meme, and the pictures from 2022 that showed the same “mold” growing on her walls.
The take-away? People who hate Rowling because of her resistance to what Elon Musk has called “Woke Mind Virus,” especially with respect to Gender Theory Extremists and ‘transgender’ over-reach into women’s safe spaces, are really on the look-out for avenues to insult and demean her. The first tweet on the subject from @mushycrouton reads: “Sorry but is that black mould growing up the walls of her house? Is that why she’s the way she is?”
“The way she is” means, of course, “not onboard like all my followers are with everything LGNTQ+” and the mold reference becomes his explanation for her being so outlandishly wrong. The black mold, you see, has taken over mind… The internet ball rolled from there. You can read more about this at Rowling-despising sites here, here, and here. The time you spend reviewing that, though, cannot be reclaimed, alas.
The bizarre thing to me about the whole attack-meme charade was that it isn’t hard to see what this mold is. Join me after the jump if you’re at all interested in that. [Read more…]
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