Home » Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling gets a taste of the left’s medicine when she stands up for liberty

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Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling gets a taste of the left’s medicine when she stands up for liberty — 27 Comments

  1. “Although the curtailment of such liberty has been slower to come here, in part for that reason, there’s no reason to think it won’t happen here.”

    There are certainly plenty of people working hard to make it happen here.

  2. Schadenfreude may not be admirable, but one cannot help feeling some satisfaction in the vitriol being directed at the insufferably virtue-signaling Rowling by her fellow leftists, since this billionaire, who has earned much of her money from the devotion of young people to her books, has never once spoken out on behalf of the thousands upon thousands of young girls (some as young as 11 and 12) who have been brutalized by Muslim rape-gangs in towns all over England.

  3. I found it interesting that Rowling wasn’t agreeing that there are only two sexes, but only defending the right of someone else, a woman, to state that opinion.

    Once upon a time liberals would trot out this Voltaire quote (though not his actually) with great self-satisfaction:

    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

    That’s worth self-satisfaction. But not today.

    Liberals will be fascists and fascists will be liberals.
    It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.

    (with apologies to Ray Davies, “Lola” and the Kinks)

  4. She, like Martina…
    Can go relax in their Villa by Lake Como, and give the finger to their critics.
    The rest of us, reliant on employment, are just gonna have to suffer.

  5. The problem with all these rulings, like this employment tribunal, is the formation of parallel legal system. The same thing has happened in US universities when it comes to rape cases. Another interesting case is this one.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/466347-supreme-court-will-take-on-fourth-branch-of-bureaucracies

    …. the three branches of government have surrendered some of their powers to an unofficial “fourth branch” composed of government agencies that combine legislative, executive and judicial powers. This fourth branch doesn’t wield all of the government’s power — the three traditional branches still function — so we don’t live under tyranny in America. But as we allow unaccountable bureaucrats to accumulate more and more power, we move closer to the tyranny feared by Madison.

    On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider the constitutionality of one particularly unaccountable federal agency: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB enjoys vast legislative, executive and judicial powers. And is it virtually immune from oversight.

    Here’s why this is problematic. The CFPB may prescribe rules and regulations under various consumer-protection laws; enforce conduct that it may define as “unfair, deceptive or abusive”; and adjudicate its own enforcement actions and impose legal and equitable remedies. Right away, you’ll notice by that brief description that the CFPB captures the roles and responsibilities of all three branches of government under one roof. So much for separation of powers.

  6. The Revolution eats its own.

    European Revolutions always seem to end with thugs in control. And we saved them THREE times in the 20th Century because…?

  7. Liberalism is divergent. Progressivism is monotonic. That said, trans/homo was politically congruent, and trans/bi was socially awkward, but trans/neo was always weird. Now, to their credit, they are normalizing the full transgender spectrum. Next, other politically incongruent choices, orientations, etc. Finally, after chipping away at their Pro-Choice religion, they will lose it, then deny the spontaneous conception theory of life, never. Baby steps.

  8. I am, and have been, completely opposed to the concept of a “Hate Crime”. How can we possibly know what the defendant feel or felt at the moment of the crime? Even if they tell us, we cannot know with certainty what is or was their state of mind. People lie. The whole concept is too subjective.

    People should be judged based on their actions, not their thoughts.

  9. “She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists.”

    Why is it that so many on the left resort to using such nasty language when trashing those they disagree with? (just a rhetorical question)

  10. J.K.Rowling was already in the left’s crosshairs because she was loudly critical of Corbyn and called out Labour’s anti-semitism. I believe that she worked for the Lib Dems instead of Labour in this election.

    Whatever you think of the Lib Dems (which in my case is ‘not much’), it had to be difficult, even wrenching, for her to leave Labour. I respect her for taking that step and I’m grateful to her for standing up for British Jews.

  11. The Left eats its own and everyone else, when it can get away with it.
    Which it does, far too often, because its own backs down when challenged.
    Choose your favorite browser to look up “mark hamill rowling” and pick a story.

    charles – they use nasty language to everyone all the time.

    lurker – the divergence in opinions on the Left about Jews and transpersons may lead to a serious break-up, but what happens after that is unpredictable.

  12. People are slow learners. We’ve seen Bolsheviks vs SRs, Stalin vs the Old Bolsheviks, Maoist Cultural Revolution (Mao vs Old Long Marchers), and now yet another Leftist factional, fratricidal conflict.

    I say we encourage show trials, twitter storms, denouncing and exile, and immediate executions (even if only metaphorical, e.g., banning from Twitter) of one Leftist faction by another until everyone learns to shun Leftism.

    The attacks on Rowling should be encouraged. She made her bed. Until she renounces Leftism, her lifetime of evil is marred by single statement in favor of liberty. It’s not enough. Until she commits half a billion dollars—she can afford it—against Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, it’s all talk.

  13. The judge has revealed his bias in mischaracterizing her belief. A core component of Forstater’s belief is that biological reality must be acknowledged by all. Any society that denies something as fundamental as biological reality will eventually collapse into an unsustainable level of dysfunction.

  14. “Why is it that so many on the left resort to using such nasty language when trashing those they disagree with?”

    It seems as though they reserve the worst language for denouncing each other. I’m not LGBT but I have many friends who are, and I have found recent wanderings through forums elsewhere to be eye-opening to say the least. I am quite capable of taking part in vicious and vile exchange – which I stifle when I am a guest at civil forums such as neo’s – but even I am a little taken aback by what they call actual lesbians and real transgenders these days.

    I suspect that this is a way of keeping control over their own masses. “Soft” lefties do what they do because they want to go along and get along; they are probably extremely susceptible just to the threat of being on the receiving end of this abuse. Since this sort of attack can be fatal to one’s career, much less social standing, I would not be surprised if there are a lot of unhappy and frightened people who are afraid of stepping up and speaking the truth.

  15. Rowlings was generally a predictable leftist, but she had a bit of a libertarian bent. The Ministry of Magic were generally fools, and the Minister of Magic one of the most foolish. Just as, we know, bureaucratic governments often are. Way back when, I believe that PowerLine had an article about how Rowlings was at least a LITTLE bit Libertarian.

  16. Standing up for liberty, free speech, and reality:
    https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2019/12/22/not-ready-play-nice-j.k.-rowling-refuses-apologize-tweet-endorsing-reality-sex-least-far

    Not Ready to Play Nice? J.K. Rowling Refuses to Apologize for Her Tweet Endorsing the Reality of Sex – At Least, So Far
    Posted at 7:45 pm on December 22, 2019 by Alex Parker

    The advocacy organization [GLAAD] offered to set up a “discussion” between Rowling and some people identifying as the opposite sex.

    What was the specific end goal? Her declaration that sex isn’t real? An apology for the statement’s impact on those who disagree? Her removal of a Forstater endorsement?

    The world may never know.

    J.K. said Naw:

    Backing down:
    https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2019/12/21/outrage-continues-mark-hamill-apologizes-liking-harry-potter-authors-tweet-claiming-sex-real-ignorance-no-excuse/

    The Outrage Continues: Mark Hamill Apologizes for Liking Harry Potter Author’s Tweet Claiming ‘Sex is Real’ – ‘Ignorance is No Excuse’
    Posted at 5:45 pm on December 21, 2019 by Alex Parker

    Luke Skywalker is sorry.

    Mark Hamill — hero to millions of boys in the 80’s — apologized Thursday for click-endorsing remarks by another giant in the world of monumental moviedom, much-revered author J.K. Rowling.

    The woman who created an astounding world of witchcraft and wizardry made a few statements Thursday, one of which indicated that “sex is real.”

    Subsequently, she was #Canceled.

    If I may say so, it’s a real bummer that society’s crumbled into the minutiae of scrutinizing what people give an approving touch to on their cell phone’s screen. Whatever the issue.

    Anyway, upon further consideration, Mark tried to make it right:
    “Ignorance is no excuse, but I liked the tweet without understanding what the last line or hashtags meant. It was the 1st 4 lines I liked & I didn’t realize it had any transphobic connotation.”

    Still doesn’t have any transphobic substance, regardless of the outrage at its alleged connotations.

    However, it is idiotic to retweet anything (or post or comment on) that you haven’t researched first.

    There were some positive responses to Rowling’s Tweet, as shown in the above story; so, I guess the science is not settled quite yet.
    One of the Tweets referenced above resonated with another post I saw today.

    “@PattyArquette
    I am not afraid of being raped by a trans woman in fact I’m afraid FOR trans women as they have the highest likelihood of being raped in any group. I’m afraid of rapist who are -everywhere sadly.”

    Leaving aside her buy-in to the inflated rape “statistics” that have resulted from misclassifying every romantic encounter that doesn’t work out as “rape” — look at what is now happening to legal designations, which certainly has an impact on Arquette’s assertions.

    https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2019/11/09/uk-rapists-now-allowed-identify-women-purpose-lawmaking-crime-statistics/

    In the UK, Rapists are Now Allowed to Identify as Women – for the Purpose of Lawmaking Crime Statistics
    Posted at 3:13 pm on November 9, 2019 by Alex Parker

    The North Wales Police Department allows rapists to select whether they’ll be recorded as men or women.

    So which is it: Are you a man who committed sexual assault with his penis, or are you a woman who committed sexual assault with hers?

    The multiple-choice provision was recently discovered by a group called Fair Play for Women, who accessed the info via Parliament’s 2000 Freedom of Information Act.

    Perhaps the most notable part of this — other than you learning to be on the lookout for women with sinister penises (and, granted, that’s no small revelation) — is that the preferred gender of the convicts is recorded in the official Home Office crime statistics.

    The result, of course — should a number of dudes take the opportunity to be chicks — will be a graphed skyrocketing of female sex criminals in the UK.

    Even though the country defines “rape” as penetration by a penis.

    It’s not nice to try and fool Mother Nature.

  17. Dreher links to this other post of his, in which he makes a reference to Rowling’s Tweet, but it also ties into the way activists distort facts to make up “statistics” that support their worldview, in more areas than just transgenderism.

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/phony-epidemic-anti-trans-murder/

    DECEMBER 20, 2019|7:33 PM
    At last night’s Democratic debate, Elizabeth Warren solemnly declared that if she is elected, she will make a point of coming out onto the White House lawn once a year and reciting aloud the names of all the transgendered Americans who have been killed in the past year.

    Dying While Trans is a big thing on the Left, and in the mainstream media. We keep having stories — Google them, you’ll see — on the “epidemic” of murders of transgendered Americans. The American Medical Association has also labeled it an “epidemic.” According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the leading LGBT lobby, 22 trans persons have been murdered so far in 2019. One is too many, but to put this in perspective, in 2018, there were over 16,200 murders in the US. In my medium-sized city alone in 2019, there have already been 75 homicides — over three times the “epidemic” of trans murders. Nobody is talking about an “epidemic” of murder in Baton Rouge. Nor should they, as awful as the killings are, because to label it an epidemic would be meaningless.

    I did a little digging into the backgrounds of each person on HRC’s list, to see if I could find out the circumstances of their murder. You would think from the way HRC talks about it, and the way the news media talks about it, and politicians like Elizabeth Warren talk about it, that these people were murdered in an anti-trans hate crime. It is not true. Most of them were street prostitutes, which is about the most dangerous work anyone can do. The Trans-Industrial Complex is creating 100 percent propaganda out of their deaths. Here’s what I found. All these people below are on the HRC “epidemic” list:

    Dreher researches all the cases listed, and concludes that (by the reporting), none were known (by documentary and testimonial evidence) to be related to the victims’ transgender identification.
    One death was by natural causes, one occurred during an armed robbery, one in the Ohio mass murder, one in a domestic disputes involving taxes, one in a street assault by a thug; several were killed by their own boyfriends, who supposedly knew their identification and accepted it.

    An additional case was almost certainly based on the transgender situation:

    Also, HRC flags the death of Nikki Kuhnhausen, a MtF transgender, who was 17 years old when he disappeared in June; his body was recently discovered. This week, a man was charged with Kuhnhausen’s murder. According to prosecutors, Kuhnhausen spent the night drinking and partying with David Bogdanov, a Russian immigrant. It is believed by detectives that Bogdanov strangled Kuhnhausen when he found out that he was actually trans.

    To my mind, if those facts bear out in court, that is the kind of thing that can legitimately be called a murder committed because of the victim’s transgender status. But surely we can recognize that pulling a Crying Game surprise reveal on a burly male Russian immigrant is not the same thing as a bigot seeing a trans person on the street and targeting that person for violence. But that complication didn’t stop HRC from blaming Donald Trump and Mike Pence for Kuhnhausen’s murder in its press release:

    Dreher concludes:

    Such lies and slander! Of the HRC list and follow-up material, one one murdered transperson seems clearly to have been in some substantive way targeted because of gender identity — Nikki Kuhnhausen. Paris Cameron might have been too, but that is murky. There are some victims for whom gender identity was entirely incidental to their murders. There are others for whom no information one way or the other is available. But every one of them are claimed by the Human Rights Campaign as victims of anti-trans hate.
    None of these people deserved to die. Every murder is a tragedy for the victim and those who loved him. But let’s be clear: this is a phony “epidemic,” a fake “crisis,” entirely ginned up by LGBT activists and their allies in the news media to advance a political goal. If you spend the afternoon as I did, searching news accounts of these deaths, looking for details, you will find that the news media typically do not report it when these victims worked as prostitutes (“sex workers” is the woke euphemism). This is typical liberal media political correctness, trying to spin the story by eliminating facts that might put the victim in an unflattering light.

    I repeat: nobody deserves to be killed — not street prostitutes, nobody. But transgender activists need to be called out on their propaganda efforts. Politicians like Elizabeth Warren need to be called out on their empty virtue-signaling. And the news media need to be shamed into knocking off the advocacy, and practicing actual journalism when reporting on violence against transgendered people.

    The trans thing is really important, though, because making transgendered people into sacred victims is how activists and allies attempt to destroy any opposition to what they demand. They have monstered this British feminist Maya Forstater for refusing to say that trans people are the sex they claim to be — this, despite the fact that she says she defends their right to present in a chosen gender, and will use their pronouns. The fact that she refuses to share their delusion is enough to make her Public Enemy No. 1. And activists have also now monstered left-wing feminist and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for defending Forstater.

  18. Clear and eloquent, as usual.
    (h/t Power LIne)

    https://www.city-journal.org/gervais-rowling-transgender

    A Matter of Truth
    On Ricky Gervais, J. K. Rowling, and speaking frankly
    Theodore Dalrymple December 23, 2019

    As a result of this tweet, he [Gervais] has been widely condemned as being transphobic—a term implying an irrational fear but used to condemn a person for advocating or supporting bad, aggressive, or even violent conduct toward transsexuals, as if Rowling and Gervais were inciting people to seek out transsexuals and beat them up in the street. This is clearly not the case. Users of the term make no proper distinction between two questions: the nature of transsexuals and how people should behave toward them. A question of truth—whether a transsexual woman is in no respect inherently different from a biological female—is transformed into a question of loyalty to a new doctrine, nonacceptance of which in its totality being taken by the right-thinking as a mark of bad or evil character and intent, such that he or she who fails to accept it should be excommunicated by all decent people, discriminated against, and denied employment.

    Here the question is not whether Rowling and Gervais are right, though most people would think that they are right, albeit that they would also increasingly fear to acknowledge it in public (a mark of creeping totalitarianism, incidentally). The question is, rather, whether they had the right to say what they did as part of the normal give and take of public debate. The reaction to what they said—the veteran feminist, Germain Greer, was another object of such aggressive recrimination for having said something similar—suggests that pressure groups’ attachment to freedom of speech is very weak. They prefer issuing fatwas.

    A textbook of pharmacology that I used as a student suggested a natural history of a newly discovered drug. First it was hailed as a miracle-cure; then, as its side-effects were described, it was reprehended as deadly poison; finally, it was found to be useful in some cases.

    Increasingly in our times, social ideas seem to go through analogous, but different, stages. First, they are too absurd to be entertained; then they are promoted and propagandized; finally, they are made obligatory articles of faith. The cycle seems to have a built-in accelerator. But it remains true, as Bishop Butler had it, that “everything is what it is and not another thing.”

  19. This *everybody worship at the foot of the trans altar* is getting tedious
    They are male homosexuals, they used to be called “fairies”, they typically take a submissive role in
    their encounters. They are not women. I consider them silly guys playing dress up. If they are pathologically in to it then they are delusional & I do not have to support their delusion.

  20. If an XX woman is born without a womb, unable to bear children, this is a handicap. She’s a handicapped woman.
    She’s not a normal, “real” woman, she’s a real, handicapped woman. Abnormal.

    If she thinks she’s actually a man in a woman’s body, she might be suffering from the medical condition of sexual dysphoria or be in some temporary delusion.

    Taking hormones and getting surgery will never make her a “real” man. Funny how little we hear about Chelsea–Chas Bono (daughter-son of Cher and Sonny).

    We don’t have agreed upon words for what these trans folk are, and what is “reality”. The Dems are pushing against Truth, and against objective reality.

    And their desire for the power to punish those who disagree is their sick totalitarianism. Supported by college indoctrination centers.

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