Clinton Interview: What Sense Does It Make to Depict JK Rowling as a Fascist?

Hillary Clinton’s interview in The Financial Times was published last Friday and it included a mention of J. K. Rowling and efforts by transgender zealots to blacklist and ostracize the author as a transphobe and bigot.

The failed presidential candidate noted that the future looks very bleak for democracy in the United States because there is a growing consensus that voters in the November elections will be expressing their disappointment with their representatives (she neglects to explain why this puts democracy in danger because it is exactly how representative republics are designed to work).

How did J. K. Rowling, a British author living in Scotland, enter this prophecy? From The Daily Mail reporting of Clinton’s conversation with The Financial Times‘ Edward Luce:

Hillary Clinton warned that Democrats’ insistence on focusing on transgender issues and spending their time condemning JK Rowling could cost them the 2024 election – and cost America democracy itself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate agreed with reporter Edward Luce that Democrats are sabotaging themselves by focusing on the wrong issues.   

‘Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority,’ Luce said, ‘What sense does it make to depict JK Rowling as a fascist?’ 

The former first lady and 2016 presidential candidate didn’t dispute Luce’s assertion, and answered: ‘We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window.

‘Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.’ 

To be clear, Clinton did not say anything about J. K. Rowling. She was all but quoting Cicero on how to canvass a crowd to win votes and Machiavelli on the importance of making your principles secondary to achieving and maintaining power. She may very well believe with Rowling’s critics that the writer is a transgressive TERF; now, though, she insists is not the time to talk about issues that will upset voters and thereby lose elections. She effectively threw that part of Harry Potter fandom that has slandered Rowing for three years now under the bus, confident as she is that they will still vote for Democrat candidates in the fall regardless.

Edward Luce seems to get, in contrast, the absurdity of liberals having thrown Rowling, a progressive superstar for decades, under the bus for her holding fast to her feminist principles and defense of children. He calls the “transgender debate” an “activist cause” “relevant only to a small minority,” whence, in an election cycle in which Democrats look likely to lose their majorities in both houses of Congress, ‘What sense does it make to depict JK Rowling as a fascist?’

Indeed. It’s a rhetorical question, of course, and one that is not a defense of Rowling’s stands on the subject but a plea for political calculation. It does, nonetheless, bring up the Rowling case specifically as the most obvious and absurd instance of the political left forming a circular firing squad. I’m counting that as another step towards Rowling’s rehabilitation or plain out victory in the public square on this issue. Democrats in the US are calling on their faithful to leave her alone. Luce and Clinton are almost certainly naive in their estimation of the new Puritans’ willingness to lay down their pitchforks and torches at a politician’s command, but it is a start. That one online news site called progressives’ foot-shooting in the US ‘The J. K. Rowling Effect’ speaks volumes.