Nigel Farage has defended JK Rowling against efforts to “cancel” her, despite her past abuse of him and opposition to Brexit.
“Come on, we all love Harry Potter, don’t we?” began Farage in a short video published to social media.
“JK Rowling, the author, I mean what a huge success she is — but because she wants to stand up for women’s rights and she’s a bit worried about trans rights, she’s now becoming a non-person,” he continued, likely in reference to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the hard-left regime had a Stalinesque policy of “unpersoning” dissidents.
“A bookbinder has actually rewrapped the copies of her book without her name on — you might as well go back to book-burning in Nazi Germany,” Farage said.
“This stuff is crackers. We love JK Rowling!”
Farage’s support for Rowling is especially magnanimous given the author, who has won admirers among social conservatives as well as more old-fashioned feminists in recent years for speaking out against allowing biologically male transwomen into single-sex spaces, sometimes with devastating results, is far from politically aligned with the veteran eurosceptic on most issues.
Indeed, Rowling, at one time a seven-figure donor to the leftist Labour Party, has been highly critical of not just Brexit, Farage’s life’s work, but of Farage himself.
In late 2018, for example, after posting a tweet trashing then-U.S. President Donald Trump — a friend and ally of Farage — Rowling urged an American user attempting to apologise for him not to do so “or I’ll have to accept responsibility for Farage, and I refuse to,” while on another occasion she accused the Brexiteer of “cherry pick[ing] history” to make “ludicrous points”.
Farage, for his part, has had firm words of his own for Rowling in the past, taking her to task for suggesting his stance against mass migration helped to radicalise a far-right terrorist.
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