I am a J. K. Rowling fan, to risk understatement. Bum Phillips once said about Earl Campbell that the running back may not be the only person in his class but “it doesn’t take long to say roll.” I think that can fairly be said of my contributions to Rowling Studies from 2002 to the present day. As one Serious Striker wrote to me last year, one who incidentally is not currently a fan or a friend, “No one has contributed more to the understanding of J. K. Rowling’s work than you have.”

I am the “dean of Harry Potter Scholars,” though, and have invested what time I have in her work only because I think Rowling is a great writer and an important one. C. S. Lewis said once that the 20th Century would be known to literary historians as the ‘Age of Charles Williams’ the way that critics talk about Shakespearean England or Byron’s Era. No sign of that coming about as prescient as Lewis was, sadly; it seems much more likely and merited in terms of reach, depth, and accomplishments, literary and philanthropic, that the 21st Century will be known as the ‘Age of Rowling.’

I lay out those credentials and views in order to introduce a subject that may disturb Rowling-philes as well as her harsher critics. That subject is Rowling’s courage, and, specifically, her lack of courage, call it cowardice, on at least three points.

Courage is important to Rowling’s self-identity so a failing with this respect to this central virtue is no small thing. Remember her comments about why she admired Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., at the Ripple of Hope Award ceremony in 2019:

Robert Kennedy embodied everything I most admire in a human being.

He was morally and physically courageous, and, like Churchill, I believe that courage is the foremost of the virtues because it  guarantees all the others. He looked beyond the invisible but powerful boundaries that can insulate people of privilege from the rest of the world and he looked into those dark corners where poverty and discrimination and injustice breed. He was a man of both empathy and action and he brought about real change and he continues to inspire people beyond the boundaries of his of his own country — and I’m not sure we can ask much more of any politician or indeed of any human being.

Read RFK, Sr’s 1965 Affirmation Day speech in South Africa, the so-called ‘Ripple of Hope’ address, for a good bolt of that moral courage and daring political boldness as well. Rowling finds that selfless spirit, something akin to fearlessness, the “foremost of the virtues.” She clearly has made that a thematic golden thread running throughout her works and in her personal life as well, from the courage it took to leave a violent husband though she had no familial safety net waiting for her and Jessica back in the UK to her stand against the “transgender” and Gender Theory Extremist mobs the last five years.

But she has her blind spots and prudence points, issues about which she has not spoken because of how it would reflect on her. Join me after the jump for a look at three of those issues.

What does Rowling fear? I submit for your consideration the possibility that she fears being called an “Islamaphobe,” being reviled as a supporter of Donald Trump, and what public knowledge of her past will mean in the interpretation of her work.

(1) She is Afraid of Being Labelled an Islamophobe

Rowling tweets regularly about Islamicist crimes against women in Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. [These are usually re-tweets of reports from those countries by brave women reporting the abuses.]

She never comments on or retweets reports about  Islamicist crimes against women and children in the United Kingdom, cf., ‘Asian’ grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford, and “honor killings.”

Why not? The most obvious and therefore likely answer is because she fears being grouped with “Far Right Extremists” or being accused of fostering “Hate Crimes” against innocent Muslim believers and agnostic ‘Asians’ in the UK.

Her only statement about the riots throughout the UK this summer by nativist gangs against immigrant crimes and the blind-eye of government to these crimes was a retweet about the injustice of attacks on housing for immigrants.

This is an issue about which Rowling chooses prudently or out of cowardice not to express her opinion. Islamicist crimes, per her twixter feed, only occur outside the UK.

(2) She is Afraid of Supporting Populist Political Candidates in General and Donald Trump Specifically

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (hereafter ‘RFK’) recently spoke to Tucker Carlson about his decision to endorse Donald Trump. He explained that he was determined not to be prisoner by the political “tribalism” of our times, in which the elites and the media line up with the Democratic Party just as the populists do with the Republican Party wing led by Donald Trump. He explained cogently the great reversal in priorities of the Democratic Party within which he grew up and that of today, most notably with respect to Forever Wars, the Working Class, and Environmental Issues especially as the latter affects the health of children. RFK broke with his family’s tribe to support a candidate with whom he has numerous and significant disagreements in order to advance the causes he thinks most important and about which he and Trump agree and RFK and the Democrats disagree.

That is moral courage, and, given the history of political assassination in the Kennedy family and the recent assassination attempt on Trump, an act of physical courage as well. See Rowling’s comments about another Robert F. Kennedy and courage above.

Rowling in the most recent elections in the UK refused to support the Labour Party because of their siding stubbornly with Gender Theory Extremists on the subjects of “transgender” identity meaning the eradication of biological female safe spaces and of “transitioning” children and adolescents, predominantly female, via chemical castration and surgical mutilation. Rowling does not have the tribal bond with the Labour Party that every Kennedy does with the Democrats but she definitely was stepping aside in her refusal to vote Labour from the position of progressivism and anti-Tory politics that are part and parcel of her  public persona.

What prevents her from doing the same with respect to the American presidential candidates?

Kamala Harris, though a woman, is the voting choice of citizens who want more “transgender” over-reach, more money to the wars in Israel, Ukraine, and Iran, and more power to the government and the American oligarchs of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the military industrial complex (Big Bombs!). Donald Trump, in contrast, advocates an end to the proxy wars globally, an end to men competing in women’s sports and access to women’s safe spaces, and, in alliance with RFK, an end to both “agency capture” and weaponization of the DOJ,  and via that, the end of the de facto corporate-government rule of the people of the United States. Again alongside RFK, Trump has made the health and welfare of children — policy based on medical science rather than the pillmaker’s propaganda — a centerpiece of his future administration’s agenda.

Seems like a no-brainer to me! Rowling’s positions on women’s rights and the well-being of children, not to mention the realities of biological science rather than this week’s academic fashion (and Pharma product), line up with Trump’s platform rather than Harris’. Incredibly, Trump has recently come out for abortion being legal until the number of weeks allowed in the UK for pre-natal infanticide while Harris and the Democrats continue to insist “reproductive rights” must include the murder of children up to their delivery and immediately after. This has naturally infuriated Trump’s pro-life supporters, but he has taken the pro-choice position within limits. That seems to line up with Rowling’s public support of abortion and the embedded thread in her work that the death of an innocent child is never without haunting consequences, i.e., abortion but not without qualification or restriction.

And yet Rowling has remained all but silent on the subject of the American presidential campaign in progress, a real departure from her practice in previous US elections.

Why is she mute on this issue? I think it is because she is still, along with almost all of the UK, under the Confundus Charm cast by ‘Barry Fairbrother,’ Barack Hussein Obama, and, much more tellingly, because she still suffers from an acute case, perhaps irreversible, of Trump Derangement Syndrome. These parallel conditions of delusion with respect to America’s 44th and 45th Presidents often appear together and compound the blinding effects of the other.

She is afraid, in other words, of endorsing Donald Trump for President, though his views on her core issues align with those she champions, because she knows what that endorsement will mean in her current social circle. She remains, perhaps, a prisoner of her lower middle-class insecurities on this point and will not risk being cast out by her current elite admirers and allies for whom Trump will always be a red line that must never be crossed.

(3) She is Afraid to Answer Questions about Her Past

Rowling in her 2019 ‘Lake and Shed’ interview on the BBC4 program ‘The Museum of Curiosities’ and this year in her videos ‘On Writing’ shared that her writing process begins with her unconscious providing her with story material inspired by her unresolved personal issues. Her work is suffused not only with her Shed artistry that crafts this inspired “stuff” of story she likens to “molten glass,” then, but also with biographical material.

The careful Rowling reader for whom this weblog was created, however, notes, there are remarkable repetitions of story elements in JKR’s work, odd points to be found in the Harry Potter and Strike-Ellacott series as well as the Fantastic Beast screenplays, Cursed Child script, Casual Vacancy, Ickabog, and Christmas Pig. Some of these align obviously with what we know of Rowling’s past and present experiences, what we’ve discussed here as the ‘Seven Crises‘ of her life.

Those crises in roughly chronological order are (1) the death of Anne Rowling, (2) the break of the Rowling sisters with their father Peter, (3) Jo’s experience of abuse from her first husband Jorge Arantes, (4) their subsequent divorce and her life as a single mother struggling with mental health issues, (5) the Potter-panic near-hysteria about the supposed occult quality of her Hogwarts books, (6) her re-marriage and new blended family, and (7) her ‘cancellation’ as TERF and transphobe because of her defense of biological women’s reserved spaces.

The ‘Bad Dad’ and ‘Divine Mother’ golden thread in her work as well as the pervasive ‘Violence Against Women’ theme were clear discharges of her foundational experiences as a child, as a first time wife and mother, and as a single mother pre Potter mania. Casual Vacancy more than any other work was a projection screen of her various nightmare experiences.

What are we to make, though, of the theme of lost or dead children, grieving mothers and care-givers, pregnancy traps or coercive love, and abortions? I won’t run through the catalog of how these plot points occur in Rowling’s work as defining points but will leave it at Merope Gaunt, Krystall Weedon, and Margot Bamborough cum Gloria Conti for your reflection.

Why won’t Rowling consent to an interview with her closest readers, those familiar with everything she has written and capable of understanding both the biographical and bibliographical elements, her Lake and Shed artistry, of her work?

The most obvious answer, beyond the admirable reticence of an English woman and the history of Fleet Street intruding on her privacy, is that she is afraid of what people will learn about and think of her if she honestly answered questions about her past. Not so much the gossip quality of the tabloid press; she’s weathered violent storms of that kind both during the Potter Panic years and the ongoing “transgender” cancellation campaign.

I think she dreads what her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor revelations actually invited, namely, the interpretation of her work through the lens of her biography as all other great authors are read today. If Rowling’s past before the 1990 inspiration for Harry Potter includes a failed or successful pregnancy trap or an abortion, those works will never be understood the same way again.

Conclusions

Do I think Joanne Rowling Murray is a coward?

No, I don’t. Her stand on her feminist principles (which I do not share) contra the regime-think of the Gender Theorists has been heroic, sacrificial, and, above all, courageous.

Does she have both blind-spots and an acute allergy to greater exposure for criticism with respect to certain issues?

I think that is all but undeniable with respect to her inability to cry out against Islamicist crimes against women in the United Kingdom, her silence with respect to this year’s American Presidential candidates (except to re-tweet a note about the injustice of criticisms of Harris qua woman), and her refusal to be interviewed by Potter Pundits, Serious Strikers, and Rowling Readers who would press her on the biographical origins of several threads running through her work.

Do I expect her to correct any of these failings in moral courage and honesty?

I do not.

Her plate is full and the enemies are always outside her gates today; to do the courageous thing would invite more distracting onslaught of online-underling rage (from elitists primarily and the political puritans among the progressive tribe) and undermine what support her charities and campaigns for women and children currently enjoy. She is in a coagula season, too, consequent to the great solve experiment of self-transformation she launched in 2019 and it would not be positive or practical to re-visit the nigredo experience of the Covid years when she is at last reaping the fruit of her rubedo chrysalis.

I hope, though, that readers here who believe that Rowling is courageous without qualification will note that, in “choosing her spots” and dodging subjects that will have little to no benefit to her brand, the dyed-red head (or is she blonde this month?) firebrand is simply human, one with priorities and limited social capital to spend.

Two cheers, then, for her courage in speaking ‘truth to power’ as she has and a shoulder shrug and shake of the head for those causes she is afraid to touch or just won’t touch because of her self-preservation calculus.