J.K. Rowling wants John Oliver to “read the f---ing room,” she posted to X, as she criticized him for “selling out” in his latest brutal takedown of the far-right.
Oliver dedicated his long Last Week Tonight segment Sunday to the issue of trans athletes, a topic on which Rowling has now been updated for years—and she did not miss the opportunity to fire back in a recent social media post Monday, after Oliver called out her lengthy social media reply to his 2022 episode shutting down right wing transphobia.
“After that show aired, J.K. Rowling herself issued the single longest tweets I’ve ever seen in my life,” Oliver said Sunday, “in which she claimed, among other things, that I’m happy to watch females suffer injury, humiliation, and the loss of sporting opportunities to bolster an elitist postmodern ideology.” Oliver quipped, “It feels a bit weird to catch that much heat from the creator of Harry Potter, especially when I clearly look like what would have happened to him if they just left him in that cupboard for the rest of his life.”
Rowling jabbed back in her post, “I understand why men like Oliver, who’ve consistently mocked anti-science people on the right, sold out initially... They didn’t want to blow up their careers. Taking fashionable anti-women’s rights positions was the cost of doing business. But it’s time to read the f---ing room.”
Oliver argued elsewhere in the segment that “bigger and stronger bodies are not automatically advantaged in every scenario.” He joked, “I mean, put The Rock in a pure barre class and see what happens.”
Rowling wrote in a reply to her original post that Oliver’s take was outdated and “loses elections.”
“They’re still regurgitating Twitter TRA [trans rights activist] talking points from 2020,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone being so far up their own backside they haven’t noticed that this nonsensical c--p is facing a massive grassroots backlash” and “that girls and women are being harmed,” she continued.
Though the back and forth is a continuation of Rowling and Oliver’s opposing views on the issue they both agree on one point, and that’s Oliver’s Harry Potter resemblance.
The host recalled on The Daily Beast podcast in October that Rowling “basically heckled me in real time” during his first time on The Daily Show.
“I had spent basically the years since her book was released doing standup, having ‘Harry Potter’ shouted at me before I got to the mic,” he said, just for Rowling to tell him from the audience, “‘Yeah, you look like Harry.‘” He added, “I think I changed my glasses pretty soon.”
