Charlie Kirk, J.K. Rowling, and the Dark Forces Unleashed

 

I revisited the topic of an article I published yesterday in Italian on Money.it to write a post in English for my English-speaking friends and readers.

How a single act of violence has unleashed cultural, political, and ideological forces now entangling even J.K. Rowling

Charlie Kirk

Like the ancient myth of Pandora’s box, the assassination of Charlie Kirk has set loose a swarm of dark forces—ideological, political, and personal—that now entangle even figures far from the crime itself, among them J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter saga.

Rowling, for her part, has always been careful to emphasize that she supports the right of transgender people to live free from discrimination, harassment, and violence. Yet she has just as firmly insisted on the importance of preserving the reality of biological sex and of acknowledging the differences between men and women as fundamental to safeguarding women’s rights. This dual position—affirming dignity and equality for transgender individuals while rejecting the erasure of sex-based distinctions—has placed her at the very center of one of the most polarizing debates of our time. Unsurprisingly, her stance has drawn fierce accusations of transphobia from activists and significant segments of the media. But it has also earned her the backing of a broader movement—feminists, conservatives, free-speech advocates, and ordinary citizens alike—who argue that the ability to critically examine gender policies without being silenced or branded as hateful is itself a cornerstone of any free society.

J.K. Rowling

The controversy has left an indelible mark on Rowling’s public image. On one side, she has faced intense backlash—even from longtime admirers of the Harry Potter saga and members of the film’s cast—who accuse her of betraying the inclusive spirit they associate with her work. On the other, her refusal to recant has elevated her into a symbolic figure of resistance against what many view as a new ideological orthodoxy surrounding gender identity. To her critics, she has become a cautionary tale of privilege and prejudice; to her supporters, she represents courage, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to endure professional and personal costs for the sake of principle. In this sense, Rowling now embodies a paradox of modern public life: the more she is vilified in certain circles, the more she is venerated in others, a lightning rod not only for debates about gender but for broader questions of free speech, tolerance, and the limits of cultural conformity.

The latest development, reported by Alex Farber in the London Times, has added a disturbing new dimension. On Bluesky—the social media platform embraced by much of the progressive left as a “liberal” alternative to X after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter—several users celebrated Kirk’s death with grotesque enthusiasm and went so far as to suggest that J.K. Rowling should be “next.” In the fevered rhetoric of these online echo chambers, political opponents are not merely to be silenced but erased altogether. One chilling post read: “I’m glad that guy’s dead, but they’re really overdoing it with the whole ‘Oh, this is a dark day for America’ stuff about someone I’d never even heard of until he got shot. Can we get J.K. Rowling next? The U.K. would be heartbroken, but it’s for the greater good of trans people.” Such words, repellent in any context, reveal not only the brutalization of public discourse but also the extent to which violence has been normalized by the left as a legitimate tool of ideological struggle.

The lists of enemies drawn up in these digital forums are long and telling. Alongside Rowling, they include some of the most prominent figures in American conservatism—Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro, a close friend of Kirk, among others. To see such names casually grouped together in what amounts to a virtual proscription list speaks volumes about the climate of political hostility that now pervades sections of the online left. The spectacle is ignoble, yet not surprising: when the language of annihilation becomes commonplace, when opponents are caricatured as existential threats rather than fellow citizens, the step from rhetoric to justification of violence becomes perilously short. Bluesky, to its credit, eventually intervened, cautioning users against “glorifying violence.” But the very fact that such a warning was necessary illustrates how deeply the poison has seeped into the bloodstream of political discourse.

Rowling herself responded forcefully last Thursday on X, condemning the Bluesky commentators as “illiberal,” incapable of tolerating the free speech of their opponents, and warning that political violence is indistinguishable from terrorism. In a post that quickly circulated across platforms, she offered a taxonomy of extremism with characteristic clarity: “If you believe that free speech applies to you but not to your political opponents, you’re illiberal. If no evidence to the contrary can ever change your beliefs, you’re a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish people for opposing opinions, you’re a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you’re a terrorist.” It was a sharp rebuke, but also a statement of principle: Rowling was reminding her detractors that the real test of liberty lies not in defending speech we welcome, but in tolerating speech we despise. Her intervention thus transformed a personal attack into a broader indictment of a political culture increasingly willing to sacrifice freedom on the altar of ideological purity.

Graham Linehan

Just days earlier, Rowling had already made headlines with a fierce attack on the British government after the arrest of Irish comedian Graham Linehan, accused of posting critical comments about transgender ideology. Linehan was detained at Heathrow Airport by no fewer than five armed officers. He later said he had been treated “like a terrorist,” locked in a cell, and even hospitalized due to stress. Authorities also barred him from using social media. “In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up),” Linehan wrote on his Substack.

Rowling reacted with outrage: “What the fuck has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable,” she posted on X. For his part, Linehan argued the incident shows Britain has become “hostile to free speech and women,” while police “bow to pressure from violent, abusive men pretending to be women.” “I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online—all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers,” he wrote on his Substack..

At this point, the soundest advice for Linehan, Rowling, and all those who refuse to march in lockstep with the orthodoxy broadcast by mainstream media would be to remain vigilant, to measure their public exposure, and, when possible, to avoid unnecessary risks. Such is the paradox of the “free” West—ostensibly the cradle of liberty and civil rights, yet increasingly a place where dissent must be whispered and conviction comes at a cost. Still, one suspects that such counsel will go largely unheeded. People who have already had the courage to alienate their peers, challenge the institutions of the state, and withstand the near-unanimous hostility of the press are not in the habit of retreating. They are, in the truest sense, figures of uncommon moral stature. They are heroes—deeply flawed perhaps, but heroic nonetheless—and as such they deserve to be honored, not posthumously with platitudes, but while they yet stand among us, bearing the weight of their convictions.