Could anyone?

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April 21, 2026

Whatever you think about her books, what J.K. Rowling is doing right now matters more.

She’s one of the most successful authors alive. She could have stayed quiet, protected her empire, and avoided the mob.

Instead, she chose to speak up for women for sex-based rights, for single-sex spaces, for safeguarding.

It gave me pause. I had to think about it. Could she have?

I’m not so sure. I don’t say that to challenge her courage, but to look more closely at the nature of the situation. I’m not sure she could have put up with it forever, for the simple reason that it’s intolerable. Sitting back and staying silent while purported adults talk the most ridiculous destructive nonsense adults have talked since about the 11th century is no picnic, let me tell you. It’s itchy. You want to scratch it. Trying to ignore it gets more difficult every day.

I think she would probably say the same. It’s keeping shtum that would have been the torture, not slapping the challenge onto the table and refusing to budge.

Comments

One response to “Could anyone?”

Bjarte Foshaug

Apr 21, 2026 9:44 PM

I’m not comparing myself to JKR, but on the topic of “could anyone?”, I have pre-written a kind of public statement in case my heretical writings here blow up in my face. It ends like this:

Bottom line, I didn’t seek out this fight. It was brought to me. What happened was not that people like me became “radicalized”, “drunk the kool-aid”, adopted some crazy new “ideology” etc. It’s just that sometime during the last decade, so many of the things we all used to know became heresy. By continuing to know and not pretending otherwise, by not adopting the new orthodoxy, by staying in place rather than following the rest of society over the cliff, we suddenly found ourselves beyond the pale.

So before you join the mob demanding my head on a plate, my question to you is – to quote Judy Dench from her last major appearance as “M” in the James Bond movie Skyfall:

How safe do you feel?

Considering how many of the things we all used to know are already deemed thoughtcrime, considering how many former “friends” and “allies” of the woke crowd have already been thrown under the bus, how safe do you feel? If the biological differences between males and females could go from “obvious” to “thoughtcrime” in less than ten years, what other obvious ideas may be considered thoughtcrime in another ten years? Why should your current “friends” and “allies” be expected to treat you any better when you suddenly find yourself on the wrong side of the next toxic craze or fad? How do you expect to be able to hold your attackers up to any standards of intellectual honesty, charity, and good faith when it’s your name being dragged through the mud all over the internet for, say, once having said something that could be taken to imply that the Earth might not be entirely flat?

Could anyone?

Comments

One response to “Could anyone?”