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Harry Potter and the Vibe Shift
I actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion - but...just when I thought I was out...some room for optimism: NY Times: In Defense of J.K. Rowling
To give a brief rundown of the situation:
NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter putting pressure on the NYTimes for reporting in a "biased" fashion on trans issues recently and how it's being used by states to pass bills against gender medicine.
The NYT...actually shows some spine and refuses to bend, saying: “...But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.". Who would have thought that we'd get to the point where a basic recognition of the different role of activists and journalists would be noteworthy?
Apparently the NYT also posted an internal memo warning NYT staffers against public working with an activist organization against their own company stating that they: "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."
Then, we see what the bruhaha was likely about and what the open letter was trying to preempt: we get the above op-ed yesterday, basically defending JKR against the criticism she faced - ahead of the release of The Witch Trials of JKR by Megan Phelps-Roper, an escapee from the Westboro Baptist Church.
In essence: the same strategy we've seen from wreckers and ideologues time after time played out, but the Times did the bare minimum and acted like adults. At a certain point - just as with wreckers like Felicia Somnez at WaPo - I suppose it simply became too much for too little gain. The constant fitna was fine when it was in service of popular causes with little cost, but now seems to be in service of a cause that is dragging many people down. So why not put out the op-ed, while also keeping the workers in line?
Said article's content?
...
Nothing here is new to anyone who spent any time checking on the actual words of JKR and her defenders. But it is interesting to see the NYT posting about it and fighting the pushback, especially as it follows the incredible failure of the Hogwarts: Legacy boycott and Sturgeon's fall from power*
The backlash can no longer be written off as the cultural peculiarity of "TERF Island" - a desperate rhetorical ploy used by activists to distract the blind. It's not just a European thing. It's everywhere.
My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.
A good note to leave the trans issue on for at least a while and reset my brain before I become some sort of schizo, hyper-reactionary monarchist or something. Maybe go play a few new games...
* It's been a great month for her, after years of shit, I have to say.
I don't think it's harbinger of much. Left-wing publications occasionally publish counter-narrative stuff, because controversy and debate generates clicks and viralness. An article castigating J.K. Rowling is less likely to go viral, given it's old news, than one praising her. Look at all the articles from The Atlantic, Washington Post, and elsewhere from 2015 or later about the 'coddling of the American mind', overprotective parents, 'how the left has gone too far' etc., yet Covid and post-Jan 6th has seen the most restrictions on discourse to date. There has always been a niche of 'center-left critique of the left'. Reddit and other sites have more censorship than ever. Unless you are already rich, and or famous, or have a big brand, your options are much more limited if you are outside the window. Discussing and debating race vs IQ and crime stats will still get you banned from almost everywhere online.
Agreed. The 'literally violence' rhetoric is bumping up against the reality that publications exist to sell clicks or subscriptions. Which I'm sure feels like a knife in the back of the 'literally violence' faction.
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As ancient as "please read literally any other book" seems now, some senior NYT people simply never got off the 2015 "Gryffindors for Hillary!" train. They overslept and missed the stop all the cool junior staffers got off at.
Lagging cultural updates seems a more likely explanation than this being some watershed cultural moment caused by a retvrn to fundamental principles of journalism.
(I'm sure someone's already written about this, but there's an essay in how much of fandom is now about tearing down the last popular thing and denouncing it as problematic to show how cutting edge you are. Weaponizing "eww, that was so six months ago" fashion-bullying was huge for the cultural revolution.)
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