Like many, I was both entertained and somewhat confused by the New York Times‘ decision to run advertisements in the D.C. Metro featuring an individual named Lianna “imagining Harry Potter without its creator.”
While it drew ample criticism for its condescending absurdity, Lianna is hardly the first slack-jawed ghoul to be so emotionally dependent on a children’s fantasy franchise that she is desperate to rebel against JK Rowling.
There have been countless think-pieces dedicated to Harry Potter “moving on” from JK Rowling. A Vox writer suggested that fans simply steal the intellectual property rights to the series and reimagine it as a shitty queer fanfiction. One site wrote a whole guide on how to be a Harry Potter fan without supporting JK Rowling.
And, of course, all of this is because Rowling dared to suggest women don’t have penises. L’horreur!
While ruminating over the situation, I was reminded of a bit from Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix special ‘The Closer.’ Chappelle noted that rapper DaBaby was named, shamed, and canceled after making an edgy “joke” about HIV/AIDS at one of his concerts, but hadn’t faced nearly the same amount of scrutiny after literally murdering someone.
“A lot of the LGBTQ community doesn’t know about DaBaby’s history. He once shot a n*gga and killed him in Walmart. Oh this is true, Google it. Nothing bad happened to his career. Do you see where I’m going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a n*gga, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.”
Chappelle’s comment is specifically one of reflection on where this new system of magical thinking places its priorities.
Murder? Meh.
A homophobic remark? Well now, that’s a step too far.
The JK Rowling saga exemplifies this total incoherence on a meta level.
Rowling’s cultural excommunication has been levied upon her for not affirming specific mantras rooted in theories which sought to deconstruct the “normative.” These theories themselves were largely formulated by a cast of unsavoury characters who have done far worse than simply propose the revolutionary notion that women don’t have penises.
“Gender,” as we currently understand it, was popularized by Dr. John Money, an unrepentant pedophile apologist. Money’s sympathetic stance on pedophilia was so well-documented that his quotes are prominently featured on the North American Man-Boy Love Association’s website to this very day. Money is also infamous for the sadistic sexual experiments he conducted on the young twin Reimer brothers, which included forcing them to simulate sex with each other — often in front of audiences.
“Cis,” as we currently understand it, was coined by German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch, who similarly sympathized with pedophiles and claimed there was “nothing wrong” with pedophilia.
Likewise, some of the most important modern queer theory tenets, including sexuality being “fluid” and existing on a “continuum,” were cemented in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault didn’t just advocate for the elimination of age-of-consent laws, it’s also been written that he raped prepubescent children in Tunisia.
Fast forward in time a bit, and queer theory legend Judith Butler would be given a platform to throw JK Rowling under the bus on the transgender issue while never having lost a platform herself despite her disturbing opinions on incest, pedophilia, or sexual consent.
Simply put, the existence of Rowling’s “transphobia” as a concept in and of itself relies explicitly on a foundation of theory populated by degenerates.
Beyond gender-related gobbledygook specifically, the liberal academic culture which the identity-as-sacrosanct left relies upon for intellectual legitimacy is completely saturated with very bad people who have done very bad things.
Louis Althusser murdered his wife.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s newspaper Libération was among the first to frame pedophiles as a persecuted sexual minority, and even once published child sexual abuse art on the front page.
Jaques Derrida bullied a University into dropping a sexual harassment investigation into one of his friends.
And lest we forget that a veritable library’s worth of French intellectuals signed a petition to abolish the age of consent and fully legalize adult-child sexual relations in 1977.
The list is endless.
Without fail, nearly every thinker that has churned out walls of convoluted text deconstructing or intersectional-izing elements of sex, gender, and/or the body has a cemetery’s worth of skeletons in their closet. Without fail, all of these names have contributed significantly to manufacturing the “woke” pronoun-pin soldiers we are socially policed by today. And without fail, none of them have ever been scrutinized as harshly as many of those who simply pushed back against the ideological systems they helped develop.
There have been and will be no libraries or bookstores refusing to stock Althusser or Foucault like they have with Rowling, and I have yet to see any University host an event on the pedophilia of the very intellectuals they teach entire courses on like some campuses have done with Rowling and her unforgivable ‘transphobia.’
Again, priorities.
But more than that… selective outrage. Inconsistent application. Complete and total cognitive dissonance.
Ultimately, the translation seems to be that lock-step compliance with popular dogma is more important to green-lighting a person’s character than even whether they literally supported the rape of children.
Now, I know… often when presenting these grim facts about popular academics, I am met with some version of “the death of the author,” or a demand to separate the work from the writer.
But surely the sexual proclivities of intellectuals whose theories were dedicated to sexuality have more weight on the intention of their work than the socio-political opinions of a woman who wrote a book about wizards.
While Lianna and her ilk are trying to “imagine” Harry Potter without Rowling, they certainly aren’t rushing to “imagine” their entire worldview without the deviants who helped carve it out, nor are they applying their imagination skills to wondering why so many of the intellectuals who formulated the theories they rely on were truly abhorrent human beings.
As for me, I will simply “imagine” a world without people like Lianna.
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