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I don’t know if this is too post worthy, but many black activists have called the cancellation of Jason Arday and the resulting suicide a lynching. It makes me believe they don’t understand why many people found lynching to be bad.
The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t. Less people would be worried about the irregular justice of lynch mobs if they accurately hung rapists and Till wouldn’t be martyr if he actually raped the white woman. It was his innocence that really made the lynching galling.
In the Arday context, no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges. Instead, they claim accurately castigating Arday repeatedly for his crime is a modern day lynching. So either they believe any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate and blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions or they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks. But that’s destroying their seed capital.
I would he interested in seeing a principled defense of why what happened to Arday was a "lynching" whereas the constant hate for Rowling is not, that doesn't try to define it as "only being lynching if it happens to someone of colour."
Rowling is also at least somewhat guilty. While she is not committing genocide on trans people, she is an anti-trans activist who uses her money to help fund feminist organizations which push for anti-trans laws. That is, laws that don't consider trans-women equal to born women. In the eyes of the far left, this is enough to deserve having her life ruined. So from their POV, this is all fine and deserved. "Lynching" is reserved for situations where this is not the case.
I have seen it unironically repeated on social media, and taken as Gospel, that "Rowling is paying for trans people to be killed".
So excuse me if I don't swallow the "anti-trans activist pushing for anti-trans laws" stuff. That seems to be "unrepentantly holds that chick with a dick is not the same as cis woman, shouldn't be in cis female spaces, how very dare she not grovel before us".
Rowling is fortunate in that she has enough money to not give a damn about all the little foot-stomping tantrums and cancellation efforts, and the vast majority of people who heard of Harry Potter don't know or care about her alleged trans genocide hobby. Other people are not so fortunate, ask the women sued by Jessica Yaniv in Canada back when this whole snowball started rolling down the hill, when Yaniv tried to weaponise the Canadian human rights apparatus to serve what they hoped would be a profitable little con (until reality caught up with them and the bureaucrats). And even then, an activist lawyer was happy to pop up with "Yaniv was badly advised" not "Yaniv is a mentally ill individual dragging down real trans people":
This is based on a very creative interpretation of her actions. She gives money to organizations ran by TERFs. Those organizations push for anti-trans laws and stigmatize being trans. This then legitimizes discrimination against trans people, which makes them more likely targets for violence. Thus, by this line of thinking, Rowling is indirectly causing trans people to be killed.
While the final conclusion is certainly a stretch, the thing that leftists want her punished for is supporting anti-trans legislation. This is something she actually does. The trans murder thing is stretching the truth in order to garner public support.
It's still a stretch, though. The "anti-trans" legislation she pushes for is generally "Trans women cannot be housed in women's prisons, trans women cannot demand to be taken in at women's shelters, trans women should not compete with men in women's sports," etc. That's "anti-trans" in the sense that it denies trans people the right to have everything they want (being considered 100% the sex they say they are in every context), but it's phrased as if this "anti-trans" legislation is meant to literally cause them harm or deny them their civil rights, like people are trying to pass bills making it illegal to be trans. Rowling (and to my knowledge, all so-called TERF organizations) has never tried to deny trans people the right to call themselves trans and live as their self-identified gender.
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