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Scott Greer writes about the differences between the millennial "Online Right" and the Zoomer right:
This is essentially the Richard Hanania low human capital theory. While Hanania screams it from the rooftops with the subtly of a hammer pounding on an I-beam, Greer packages it more carefully, reminding his readership that the tatted-up MMA guy podcast-ranting about 5G giving him cancer is not a historical part of the Right; the Right needn't tribalistically defend his antisocial behavior.
I think Greer might be overfitting "TikTok users to "Zoomers." My tech illiterate lifelong Republican MAGA mother regularly sends me boomer-humor tier TikTok clips and she is obsessed with "based Black MAGA conservatives" spouting GOP talking points or praising Trump (sidenote: it is truly bizarre how civil rites fetishism is so prominent in the generation regardless of political leanings). I get similar stuff from my aunts and uncles. I think @Stefferi is right when he calls this as "normies vs fringe," although instead of fringe I'd say "nerds."
"This guy would presumably be on the other side due to their demographics or status but is on our side instead" has always had great appeal, what's weird about it? Put the other way around, it's how Jackson Hinkle can have mass appeal in the Third World.
First, it's a matter of degree. If I saw a black guy with a MAGA hat on YouTube, I would think "huh, interesting" but I wouldn't instantly subscribe and share his videos to my friends and family. Second, at least in my experience, it's only blacks and, every now and then, a homosexual man. I never get videos about based Asians, or Native Americans, or lesbians, or trans people, or recent immigrants from the third world. And that makes sense to me, because the normie idea of Civil Rights seems to be "MLK did some stuff and we realized we should treat black people nicely, and then a few decades later some... other people did some stuff and we realized we should let gay people get married.". So those two groups are the most salient to normies.
I think Stefferi is correct. I can give you just one example - Dave Rubin, a homosexual conservative star who together with his husband bought their children from surrogates. A lot of conservatives use him as a proof that they are not homophobic or whatever. You have more, like Elon Musk or Joe Rogan or lately even Bill Maher. Or take as an example of narcissist OF prostitute Nala Ray, who recently landed a soft interview with Michael Knowles about her newfound faith, and apparently is now some sort of a saint going around and preaching to conservatives how to be proper Christians. Or how J.K. Rowling or other old school leftie ultrafeminists are now conservative heroes, just because of their one particular stance against transgenderism.
If you take it at face value, none of the above deserve to be anything approaching to conservative role models, but conservatives love it if they see even fake semblance of their values reflected by their former opponents. I can guarantee you that if let's say Destiny or Hasan Piker declare that they are now officially conservative, they would be immediately launched into conservative stardom with conservatives gushing all over them - even if they do not even curtail their values and degeneracy. In a sense it is kind of happening with Ana Kasparian already. It is strange.
I don't think that Rowling was ever an "old school leftie ultrafeminist" (if she was, one would have expected her books to have some other plotline than a traditional male-hero-saves-the-day-and-gets-the-girl one that they actually had). Even before the TERF thing she was basically a lib-centrist Blairite and occasionally criticized by actual lefties for the same.
The Overton Window shifted around her, and she did try to keep up.
A lot of the left-wing criticism she got was for publicly supporting left-wing causes after the fact without making it explicit in her works (like saying Dumbledore was gay, or supporting the casting of a black Hermione by pretending she didn't write Hermione as white).
She tweeted as a 2015-era wokester but her writing was normie feminist and didn't actively try to transgress boundaries at the expense of the work.
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From what I know about Rowling's past, I think the "ultra" part is overselling it, but not completely unwarranted from a certain point of view. But the bigger question is, is "so infected with ideological brainrot that they can't help but overtly infect their fictional stories with their ideology" just a part of the definition of "old school leftie ultrafeminist?" I feel like that's more a characteristic of the modern variety.
I don't know what Rowling was thinking when writing the books, but I figured she wanted to tell a good and market-appealing story first, which in this case involved a boy protagonist, and she did put in bits of 90s-feminist messaging like the hypercompetent Hermione as one of the core supporting cast. Like how the Disney cartoons in the 90s were clearly generally feminist but sometimes involved a male protagonist getting the girl as in Aladdin or the female protagonist finding love with a man as in The Little Mermaid.
This is actually worse in the films which were later and managed by WB and male producers and directors (though Rowling had a strong say), interestingly.
Hermione was always competent (this was supposed to be balanced by her neuroticism and Harry's more instinctive skill at some things) but Ron in the films is less appealing and she even takes some of his moments so she becomes even more important.
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Ok, I can even grant you Rowling, although she is at least a liberal. "Fortunately" there are many others, like Camile Paglia - self described admirer of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and all that shtick, who is now supposedly on the right making interviews with Peterson because of her cat fight with Judith Butler and 3rd+ wave of intersectional feminists.
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