Listen, here’s the thing.
J.K. Rowling, a novelist and bigot, has established a billion-dollar fund to attack civil rights and freedoms in the United Kingdom, particularly focused on gender presentation. She has pledged to funnel money continuously into this fund, which she is able to do because she happens to be the creator of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment franchise called Harry Potter, which — twenty years after yours truly lined up till midnight to grab a copy of her fifth doorstop, the second it came out of the box — is now heading for its genuine second coming. In the next few years, a 10-season HBO television series, an Audible full-cast book-on-tape series, and the continued expansion of the Harry Potter stage show (now including at least one member of the original film cast) will pump more and more money into Rowling’s coffers, who will then dutifully redirect it towards the destruction of transgender lives.
It’s not complicated, is the thing. I suppose we could quibble on the question of whether the destruction of transgender lives qualifies as “evil” or not, because (as progressives) we can quibble on pretty much anything. Philosophical arguments about whether “evil” is a real thing that exists in the world, or just a childish simplification that makes solving problems harder. Or we can go political with it, and add any of a dozen other “nuanced” contexts around what is, on its face, pretty standard B-movie villainy: a person with unimaginable power, wealth, safety, influence, and access to resources, levelling an unholy assymetric jihad on one of the weakest, most vulnerable, most statistically insignificant cadres of human society. I grew up watching the same movies you did: how is that not “evil”?
This is the question of our time. To keep it to transgender issues for a moment: boy, the bad guys have done a monumental job of making trans rights the wedge issue that has split the progressive left into shards. Here comes the problem of big-tent liberalism again: as I write this, Pete Buttigieg has deemed it politically advantageous to allow that there is validity to some parents’ concerns about transgender athletes in childrens’ sports. To which we can cleanly say,
1/ No there is not, and
2/ Congratulations Pete, you’re no longer progressive. Or anything useful at all, really.
Splitting it wider than just transgender issues, we can use this example to see how “the left” as a broad political project has become utterly undone. By striving towards a phantasmal “middle ground,” these political animals seem to have lost sight of what ground the purported “middle” stands between.
Let us imagine a flat, parade-ground field in a wide, green valley. It’s a perfect place for a tent. And it the field straddles, perfectly equidistant, the two low ridges that flank the valley. And the two ridges are:
1/ Progressive social ideas, and
2/ Fascism.
Really? You want to build your tent there? Within spitting distance of the Nazis??
So close you can smell ’em? So close that the smoke from their cookfires gets into your tent? So close their songs keep you up at night? So close their poorly-dug latrines empty wastewater into your well? All so that one night, maybe, one of them might drunkenly stumble into your tent, while they they thought they were out there to take a piss? That’s why you chose that place for your tent?
Look, I get it, there’s a political reality (and more importantly perhaps, a media reality) that undergirds all this, which is that 98% of people are fuckin’ morons who don’t give a shit about any of this and just want to live lives of maximal frictionlessness — i.e., to not be bothered — at all times. And if those fuckin’ idiots think the “transgender kids in sports” issue doesn’t pass the sniff test for frictionlessness, you don’t want to fuck up your chances of getting elected by disagreeing with them.
But listen, here’s the thing: that’s evil.
It’s spineless, it’s cowardly, it’s politically useless, it does absolutely nothing to move us towards a more perfect and just society, and it probably doesn’t even get you the win, as Kamala Harris recently learned; but also, it’s just fuckin’ evil. Equivocating on the very basic distinction between right and wrong — between assymetric jihad against the vulnerable and, uh, not that — is evil, or as close to it as we’re capable of locating in this human society of ours.
All this, because: evil isn’t something that is. It’s something you choose. You choose where it is and where to situate yourself, relative to it; you choose how bad it is, how powerful it is, how much fight to give it.
As I was writing this, Anthony Oliveira opined on Bluesky that the devil’s gonna knock on your door sooner or later and ask you if you want the big bag of money. (Switch “money” out, here, for any application of “the thing that you want.”) “Fascism has the power and the money, and it wonders if you’d like some,” Oliveira says. To handwave his point away as a kind of performative purity test is to (once again!) attempt to slather some “nuance” all over something that is actually not nuanced. There is no nuance to the question of whether you are going to take the devil’s bag of money: he’s the fucking devil.
There’s no nuance to the question of whether you’re going to help fund J.K. Rowling’s assymetric jihad against transgender people, either. If you’re in it, if you watch it, if you download it, you’re choosing it. This is the moment. This is the choice. It seems so small, the choice! It’s supposed to feel small! It’s supposed to whisper in your ear, “it’s not that big of a deal.” Maximal frictionlessness. It’s just a TV show, based on a book you loved before in your life; and it will make you happy. It’s not that big of a deal, the devil whispers, jingling the coins.
Something we’ll have to deal with at the end of all this is how fundamentally unprepared we were, as progressives, as a culture, as a civilization, for the arrival of this moment. Ironically, artists like J.K. Rowling and her ilk — creatively, not fascisistically — could be construed as part of the problem (see above, re: the movies you and I watched growing up): so many of the totalitarian regimes in fantasy and fiction across the past fifty years, by dint of being, themselves, constructions of artifice, seem to have bafgazzled a whole sector of humanity into believing that when the bad guys finally did show up again, they’d walk up to you, announce they were the bad guys, and dare you to sock ’em in the eye. Toht threatening Marion with a red-hot poker. Stormtroopers gunning down Owen and Beru. Voldemort, murdering the Potters in the dead of night.
Reality always proves more subtle. More “nuanced.” Reality needs you to make the choice. Sometimes, reality is hidden behind the thinnest of lies, which our progressive brains seem to completely short-circuit over. “How can I treat them like Nazis if they refuse to acknowledge they are Nazis?” I don’t know. I think you just do it. I think maybe you stop waiting for evil to set the terms of engagement. I think maybe what the evil government says while they are murdering journalists and pounding the citizens of the open-air concentration camp into the sand does not, perhaps, matter as much as what you can see with your eyes. I think maybe pointing out hypocrisies of inflammatory speech in endless quote-tweets does not, in fact, move the needle on the bad guys’ willingness to commit evil deeds. We’re all over here checking the footnotes and cross-referencing points of interpretation; the Nazis are giving the Nazi salute at the Nazi rally, and then going and doing Nazi things. We aren’t evil in this scenario, per se; but we sure ain’t good.
By way of closing: a lot of people, people we like, people like Anton Lesser and Matthew MacFadyen and Michelle Gomez, took the bag of coins when the devil jangled it. That’s their choice: they chose evil. They were fine with their proximity to evil and with helping to fund further evil yet.
One can construct nuance on this in a thousand different directions: all the studios are generating money that is being used for ill deeds (true!); any given film set has at least one person on it who has committed sexual assault even if no one above the line has been officially “cancelled” (probably not “true” true but, statistically close enough to be true!); if we started drawing these kinds of ethical lines around messy, complicated human beings, we’d have to give up going to the movies or watching TV or reading books or seeing plays or whatever else altogether (well, yes… I suppose that’s true!).
Listen. Here’s the thing. That’s equivocation. I won’t tell you that equivocation is evil, but I will say: it has occurred to me quite forcefully of late that equivocation is the thing that stops us recognizing, and dealing with, evil when evil shows its face.
J.K. Rowling told us what she’s doing. She’s not even being as coy as many of the other Prime Examples of Evil who are ruining or outright ending lives at this moment in time. She said it out loud, in plain English. She’s using the money to hurt trans people. There’s no nuance on this one. She’s whispering “join me.” She’s whispering “help me hurt them.” All you get to choose is whether you do or not.
The only people on Harry Potter, as far as I’m concerned, who didn’t necessarily choose evil — they may have, but this gets into parental responsibilities — are the kids. I feel bad for the kids. On the personal side, I can’t think of anything more evil than conscripting minors into this mess, but this might be the one instance where I’m using the term more emotionally than descriptively. Nevertheless: the kids’ managers, the kids’ parents, the people around the kids… they chose evil. They might have done it with absolute purity of intention and nothing but hope and stars on the walk of fame in their eyes, but they did it.
The kids might not have. What unfolds in the next ten years, however it goes, is not the kids’ fault. They might just have to deal with the burden of other peoples’ choices. All they might be able to do, as they grow up, is choose what to do with whatever unfolds.
Sparks from the blast furnace
It’s fucking hot out.
- I’ve been meaning to call out these folks a while now and this seems as good a time as any: I’m absolutely addicted to Dento’s chili oil. (Instagram)
- Short, and I do mean short, fiction by Roblin Meeks. (Had)
- No one who wasn’t there actually knows or is allowed to know what happened in the creative handover of Rogue One, but I found a podcast that does the forensics as shrewdly as can be done. Here’s the first one. (Going Rogue podcast)
- Given I didn’t particularly connect with the show on its original run (even though I ultimately watched plenty of it), boy, the 14th season of King of the Hill is pretty nearly a masterpiece, and quite the unexpected tonic for this moment in time. Here’s Nicholas Quah on it. (Vulture)