When news emerged the other day that one of J K Rowling’s toxic online critics had ended up in jail…

… I was reminded of something that happened to her almost two decades ago, a decade into her Harry Potter series of novels and almost at the end of it:

The wildly popular Harry Potter books and their author, J.K. Rowling, have already been blasted by Christian conservatives for glamorizing witchcraft and the occult. The fantasy series is now charged with encouraging homosexuality following the author’s announcement that one of the novels’ main characters is gay.

The Left had enormous fun with this, as they’d had for decades with Christians – especially American Christians – on all such matters in film, TV, movies, books and art in general. From concerns about Elvis-The-Pelvis, Lennon’s “we’re more popular than Christ”, advocacy of drug use and “free love” in rock music, movies and books, to Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Jimmy Swaggart’s railing against all popular music, and Falwell’s entire Moral Majority movement, the Christian Right was on the back foot against the Counterculture that cranked up in the 1960’s.

The Harry Potter controversy was just another chance for the Left to gleefully stick it to the Christian Squares who wanted to censor and shutdown all the fun stuff.

But now – San Francisco bookstore to stop carrying ‘Harry Potter’ series:

[T]he tipping point for Booksmith was a move in May by Rowling to use her income from the book series to start an organization called the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund.
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Booksmith acknowledged that many of the staff members’ childhoods were shaped by the series, but that as “a group of queer booklovers,” they did not want to contribute economically to Rowling’s new organization in any way. Instead, they’ve compiled a list of several dozen fantasy novels that fans of the “Harry Potter” series may enjoy instead.

In other words it’s the Jerry Falwell shit, but for a different reason, and a reason that too many on the Left approve of morally and ethically in precisely the opposite way they did of Falwell and company.

The Left are in love with censorship – again, since it’s always been part of that world, as much as the 60’s Left shoved Orwell down the memory hole and claimed for decades that it was the Right who were grim, controlling squares opposed to the Left’s trendy attitude of “Whatever, Man”.

And there’s certainly no gleeful laughter this time as we find that fantasy books are being banned because their author shows a lack of magical thinking.

But this has been coming for some time and it’s not just about the trans issue, as shown by this article from 2018, The New Prudes:

We’re in a strange place culturally today.  Its been quite a while since moralistic prudes have tried so hard to control private and public behavior and instill specific, exact legalistic codes on society.  And the oddest thing about it is that this new push is coming from the exact people who just a few years ago told us “if it feels good, do it.”

The people who gave us raunchy sex comedies like Porky’s in the 80s and American Pie in the 00’s are now telling us that anything remotely like that behavior totally disqualifies you from public service, let alone private life… The people who created Animal House are now wondering if its even okay to laugh at it.  People routinely say “that could never get made today” about films like Blazing Saddles, but could you even make Pretty in Pink?  Not according to its star Molly Ringwald.

The occasion for that article was the massive brawl over Trump nominating Brent Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. All of sudden we were hearing lurid tales from the era of Porky’s and Animal House – and from the same sort of people who had once thrilled to such subversions. Even cucks like the New York Times “conservative” writer Russ Douthat had to point out to the new Pearl Clutchers some truths about the early 1980’s:

….it was a world where a social revolution had ripped through American culture and radically de-moralized society, tearing down the old structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality, replacing them with libertinism. With “if it feels good, do it” and the Playboy philosophy.

The writer of The New Prudes concurs:

I’ve written about this in the past, how the left tore out the skeleton of our culture, leaving it unable to stand or function.  They’ve taken every pain to remove all traces of what was once the system of ethics and behavior the nation generally agreed upon and which makes up the very core of a society.  Now, they want to suddenly replace it all, with something new and even more prudish.

It’s really just another example of what I call the Okhrana-Cheka transition, where the communists in 1900’s Russia howled about the cruelties of the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police – only to set up a vastly more evil secret police, the Cheka, who would go on to exceed the crimes and cruelties of the Czar by several orders of magnitude, as soon as they got hold of the levers of power.

The Trans-Rowling war is just this, which is based in LeninThink:

One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.
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It gradually dawned on him that the Party takes stances not because it cares about them—although it may—but because it is useful for the Party to do so.