J.K. Rowling and the War on Culture
The left preaches diversity but fights the diversification of our culture with any divergent viewpoints.
On the Monday after the Grammys, Joy Reid praised the ceremony, not for the music or the performances, of course, but for its “diversity, equity and inclusion.” She then added, “So, yeah. Culture wars are over, and the left won, like total defeat.”
It is not often I agree with Joy Reid, but she has a point. The left can be forgiven for taking a victory lap, which Marie and I debate here.
At the Grammys, we saw “nonbinary” Sam Smith and his transgender singing partner Kim Petras sing “Unholy,” a song that narrates the tale of an adulterous husband, while Smith presented himself as a satanic figure wearing a red satin top hat with demon horns, and Petras was in a cage surrounded by nearly nude trans women.
Mind you, this was on network television, not HBO, and proudly sponsored by Pfizer and Jill Biden. For this, Smith and Petras won an award for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, to thunderous applause.
Somehow this was not the only recent example of the left hammering its agenda and values upon the heads of its usually young audience within the culture. In fact, they’ve been floating above us like Chinese spy balloons.
Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, who debuted in 1977, and has had female love interests since, but is now, more than 40 years after his debut, gay.
Harley Quinn, who some reminder from her introduction as the Joker’s girlfriend in the beloved series Batman The Animated Series, now has her own comic book where she was recently seen participating in a lesbian orgy.
We also saw a viral clip from a show called The Proud Family which unintentionally obliterates the argument that critical race theory was solely taught in graduate-level courses. Clearly, it is being taught on Disney+ on shows aimed at pre-teens, as well.
This cartoon heavily promotes White Fragility, a book that essentially mocks white people for being offended when their supposed inherent racism and white privilege is pointed out to them, the way Wile E. Coyote promotes ACME products. In fact, in another clip, we see an interracial gay couple in which the white partner is accused by his “husband” of displaying white fragility before having the book shoved into his hands. Its author, Robin DiAngelo, must be extremely grateful for such an infomercial.
As these examples illustrate, the left feels free to inject its views on race and sexuality upon the culture. I support their right to do so. However, much like how AP African American Studies programs that I wrote about here, there seems to be no willingness to allow the right to do so as well.
Much like in sports the objective is not just to score but to prevent the opponent from scoring. A good defense is vital for victory. The KC Chiefs are not Super Bowl champions because they scored 38 points but because they prevented the Philadelphia Eagles from scoring 39 points as well. It is something AACONS has discussed with both Eric July and Mike Baron, authors who fight censorship of their work because they have right-of-center views.
Or, let’s look at the ongoing J.K. Rowling controversy. Rowling was once a hero to the left for using her platform as the writer of the Harry Potter series to attack Trump on Twitter:
Rowling proved to be an exemplary liberal in other ways too. Unlike the stereotypical wealthy liberal who calls for higher taxes while torturing their accountants to find them tax breaks, Rowling puts her money where her vote is, refusing to leave the UK or to take advantage of elaborate tax breaks. She explains:
“I am indebted to the welfare state... When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major, was there to break the fall."
Whatever goodwill Rowling may have engendered from her side of the political aisle was lost, however, when she began pointing out that trans women were not in fact women.
Because she has yet to apologize for believing that “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased,” Rowling has been accused of being transphobic bigot, or a TERF (“trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). There have been calls to boycott her books and all things based on books.
Even worse, Rowling, and others who do not give an ideological blank check to the trans agenda by agreeing with everything demanded of them by trans activists, are being blamed for the horrific murder of trans teen Brianna Ghay :
This attempt to exploit the murder of Ghay, who, according to the police, may or may not have been the victim of a hate crime, to silence trans activist critics, is neither surprising nor unique. This is what activists do. Anti-police activists exploited the death of George Floyd to demand that the police be defunded, just as anti-capitalism activists point to every unusual weather occurrence to demand that the American economy retreat to before the Industrial Revolution to fight climate change.
When challenged, even reasonably, trans activists often resort to the rate of violence against trans people or suicide within the trans community, as a response. For example, when Senator Josh Hawley asked law professor Khiara Bridges during a Senate hearing about her use of the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy” rather than “women,” Bridges warned him that the question “opens up trans people to violence.”
Strange though how these leftist groups chanting “Pigs in a blanket! Fry them like bacon!” at cops never stop to consider the high rate of suicide among police officers, or how such chants may be opening them up to violence, but that is a story for another day.
I remember once, before I knew the difference between a Dumbledore and a Voldemort, being amazed by the number of people I saw lined up outside of a bookstore waiting to latest Harry Potter installment. It was like the line outside of an Apple store the morning of a new iPhone release. Yet despite her compelling biography as a single welfare mother to a historically successful and beloved author, Rowling is now most referenced for her unwillingness to compromise her beliefs and her inability to be cancelled.
There was even a boycott campaign against the Harry Potter-inspired Hogwart Legacy videogame, which was referenced here earlier, as a means to punish Rowling for being bothered about “forced to share shower areas and cells with trans women convicted of domestic abuse and murder,” for example:
But that failed miserably.
Yet, such efforts against her and many others persist. The left preaches diversity but fights the diversification of our culture with any divergent viewpoints. And, if politics is downstream to culture, as Andrew Breitbart suggested, once they control it, they may control everything else.
—DK