J.K. Rowling, self-professed anti-authoritarian, thinks we should let Milo Yiannopoulos speak

“If there’s one thing that I stand against more than any other, it is authoritarianism,” J.K. Rowling declares without irony in the latest episode of The Witch Trials Of J.K. Rowling podcast. “It’s in literally every book I write.” In her personal life, at least, Rowling has a somewhat contradictory way of representing these beliefs. The increasing social and legal persecution of transgender people, for instance, bears all the hallmarks of that dreaded authoritarianism. Yet Rowling has curiously come out on the other side of that particular debate.

But surely, the author who wrote a whole series about children fighting allegorical Nazis would at least support the shunning of Nazis? Also no. In the same podcast episode, Rowling says critics should have engaged with alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos rather than running him off college campuses. “I’m watching from across the pond as he tries to speak on various campuses and there are protests, riots, ‘We want him de-platformed, we don’t want him to speak at all,’” she recalls (per The Telegraph). “And I thought it was a terrible strategic error. My feeling was, you are giving this man way more power than he deserves by behaving in this way. It made Milo look sexier and edgier than he deserved to look.”

“I thought it was strategically appalling… get on that platform and eviscerate his ideas, get on that platform and expose him for the charlatan that he is. You push back hard. You’ve given him so much power by refusing to talk,” Rowling continues. “In fact, they were serving his purposes because he was able to walk away from that saying, ‘Look, they don’t dare debate me, this is how dangerous and edgy I am.’ And I don’t think we want to cast the alt-right in that light.”

One might reasonably argue that allowing Yiannopoulos a platform would have been giving him power. Even that aside, this opinion represents a troubling evolution of Rowling’s beliefs, even outside the already troubling transphobia situation. We even have the benefit of being able to pinpoint the evolution exactly, because Rowling actually shared her thoughts on the situation back in 2017 when Yiannopoulos was being barred from campuses, having his book deal canceled, and being disinvited from CPAC. At that time, Rowling shared a meme on Twitter explaining that free speech “doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it.” So no, it appears she didn’t find deplatforming “strategically appalling” six years ago. In the intervening years, though, she’s had some experience with critics calling for her to be deplatformed or her work to be boycotted, so small wonder that her opinion on what should be done in such a case has changed.

In 2023, Rowling’s definition of authoritarianism seems to pertain to people disagreeing with her specifically. Fans who bullied her off of a Harry Potter fan forum in the ’90s, where she’d been posting under a pseudonym, “were behaving in a way that I had depicted as one of the worst and most grievous of behaviors” in her books. (Rowling does not reveal the opinion she shared to get ousted from the forum, except that it was “very bland.”) Readers who criticized her for culturally appropriating indigenous customs when she expanded her magical world to America are accused of illiberal puritanism “so very contrary to [Rowling’s] core values.”

Defending vulnerable minorities and speaking truth to power would seem completely in line with Rowling’s values as they’ve supposedly been depicted in the Harry Potter series. And the writer acknowledges that she is a figure of power: “The pushback is often, ‘You’re wealthy, you can afford security, you haven’t been silenced.’ All true,” she says in The Witch Trials. But to criticize J.K. Rowling is, in her eyes, to criticize all women. “The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women. And I say that because I have seen it used that way,” she claims.

What emerges from this conversation is a warped definition of authoritarianism, in which communities are condemned for self-regulating the kind of views they want to platform and minorities are scolded for speaking out against views that are directly harmful to them. This isn’t to say Rowling hasn’t been the subject of abuse and vitriol, because she has, without a doubt. Rather that she’s completely lost sight of what the word means and on which side of the line she falls. Here’s a hint: If you find yourself siding with Milo Yiannopoulos, in any way, you’ve probably taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line.