If there’s one thing J.K. Rowling hates, it’s authoritarianism. “It's in literally every book I write,” the author told host Megan Phelps-Roper during this week’s episode of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, a podcast from Bari Weiss’ new media company The Free Press. “If there’s one thing that I stand against more than any other, it is authoritarianism. And that cuts across political persuasions.” It’s an ironic statement to make in a podcast that consistently seems to ignore the power dynamics that underpin its own debate.
Episode 3, ominously titled “A New Pyre,” continues the pattern established in The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’s first two episodes: It provides listeners with a glut of “background” information that’s designed to sound neutral while also appearing to establish a very specific narrative about the controversy surrounding Rowling. Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, the podcast seems bent on obscuring the real-world attacks being made against trans people, while endlessly crying about the “culture wars.”
The first two episodes examined how evangelical Christians organized against the Harry Potter books during the 1990s; they liken that response to the backlash Rowling now faces to her ongoing comments about trans people. This week, we flash forward to the new millennium, when Potter fans and everyone else began to spend a fair amount of their time online—for better and worse. We also get a new false equivalency, as Phelps-Roper explores the moment during the mid-2010s, when discussions from Tumblr and 4chan seemed to simultaneously spread into mainstream discourse.
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With this episode, Witch Trials begins to zero in on gender, as it continues the first installments’ refusal to engage with the real-world attacks being made against the trans community. The episode bogs itself down in online culture wars between 4chan and Tumblr and fixates on the so-called “boutique” gender identities associated with the latter. For all the time we spend on these online discussions, there’s still no acknowledgement of the physical and legal assaults regularly made against the trans community.
Instead, the episode begins with a graphic quote from Rowling. “There have been a lot,” she says, although it’s unclear at first what she’s describing. “As every woman will know who speaks up on this issue, [there’s been] a huge amount of, ‘I want her to choke on my fat trans dick.’”
“I don’t think all of them mean it literally,” the author says, before calling them “attempts to degrade, humiliate.” She describes threats of violence—people coming to her home, where her children live. “The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy; you can afford security; you haven't been silenced,’” Rowling says. “All true. ... But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women. ... I literally had someone say this to me the other day: ‘I was told... look what happened to JK Rowling. Watch yourself.’” (It’s never established what power Rowling’s critics supposedly have to silence anyone else, as Rowling herself admits she herself has not been silenced.)
The introduction feels disjunct from the episode’s early content, which focuses on the explosion of Harry Potter forums and fan fiction online. It seems designed to shock and also, perhaps, to set up a discussion that comes later about the simultaneous mainstreaming of Tumblr and 4chan—one that seems to imply that they’ve somehow had equivalently toxic effects on public life.
The real meat of the episode comes about halfway in, when Rowling and Phelps-Roper begin to discuss “changes” in online culture that “concerned” Rowling. She was “intrigued by the use of the word ‘identify.’” She said, “I don’t see that’s necessarily as a malign thing, because I think we all have an identity, and identity is important to all of us for a stable sense of self. But I was noticing something that I thought was interesting… that then began to disturb me.”
Phelps-Roper’s sources are telling. There’s Angela Nagle, whose sloppily sourced book Kill All Normies advanced the theory that politically correct leftists helped bolster the alt-right’s ascent. There’s The Atlantic critic Helen Lewis—who writes, among other things, about the “culture wars,” and whose “concerns” about trans people have stirred up controversy in the past. Also in the mix is the YouTuber ContraPoints, who disavowed the project on Twitter before it debuted.
The talking points are predictable–mostly gender identity and Tumblr’s fixation on weeding out “problematic” public figures and media properties. Phelps-Roper asks Rowling how it felt when her fans critiqued her writing about Native American wizards, by saying it appropriated the Navajo legend of the skinwalker. Rowling says she didn’t take this personally but also makes sure to compare the impulse to Puritanism. By the time the discussion somehow veers to Milo Yiannopolous, with Rowling insisting that college students were wrong to protest his appearances on their campuses, it’s clear we’ve gone off the rails.
As its title suggests, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling has picked a side, and that side is Rowling’s. So far, the podcast seems to imply that trans people’s cries for dignity are merely talking points in an online discussion—and that Rowling is a major player in that discussion, rather than a shamefully predictable side character.
Given that the episode ends on Rowling talking about “activists” in “black balaclavas” behaving “in a very aggressive way outside feminist meetings,” it seems we’re not headed anywhere more surprising any time soon. For all her concerns about authoritarianism, it seems Rowling will not acknowledge that weaponizing gender is one thing a staggering number of authoritarians have in common.
