Bokhari: The Secret Rightwing Messages of Harry Potter

It’s the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter book, and it’s high time we reflected on the series’ hidden right-wing messages.

You see, left-wing interpretations of the books have been done to death not least by their virtue-signalling author. The left has written extremely long, glowing columns about the books, with titles like “Turning to Harry Potter During the Trump Regime” and “19 Harry Potter Quotes That Will Get You Through A Trump Presidency”. They’ve even created a Chrome extension that changes the names of Trump’s cabinet to Death Eaters.

All of this is very strange, considering how many secret right-wing messages are hidden within the novels. Let me explain.

1) Walls between different societies are good

One of the ubiquitous elements of the Potterverse is the separation between the world of wizards, like Harry, and non-wizards, known as “Muggles.” This separation is strictly enforced by the wizarding government (the “Ministry of Magic”), which goes to great lengths to ensure that the world of wizards is kept secret from the world of Muggles. In some cases, wizarding communities are actually separated from Muggle communities by a physical barrier, like the magic walls at Diagon Alley and Platform 9-and-three-quarters.

The primary reason for the separation is familiar to anyone well-versed in Potter lore. Muggles, motivated by bloodthirsty religious reasoning, kept trying to kill wizards and witches by burning them at the stake. So, in 1692, the wizarding community established the International Statute of Secrecy, which officially separated the world of wizards and muggles.

Another reason for the separation is explained by Hagrid in the very first Harry Potter book:

‘But what does a Ministry of Magic do?’

‘Well, their main job is to keep it from the Muggles that there’s still witches an’ wizards up an’ down the country.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.’

In other words, if muggles were aware of the advanced capabilities of wizards, they would demand handouts — a kind of redistribution of magic from the haves to the have-nots. One could easily imagine thousands of muggles queuing up at the borders of the magical world, demanding access to their superior healthcare and infrastructure. Who wants that kind of hassle, right?

The message of Harry Potter is clear: if there’s a big enough gap between two societies, the less advanced party will either try to kill you (especially if they belong to militant religions), or demand access to your superior standards of living while being unable to contribute to it. You only have one option — build that wall!

2) Don’t trust establishment politicians (or establishment media)

The Harry Potter books offer a contemptible picture of establishment politicians. The wizarind government (the “Ministry of Magic”) is portrayed as weak, ineffectual and corrupt, home to control-freak bureaucrats like Dolores Umbridge, who delights in using her official powers to meddle in the affairs of private citizens.

Throughout the book, Umbridge is portrayed as the personification of an overbearing government, determined to regulate its citizens into misery. As soon as she arrives at Hogwarts on orders from the Ministry, she starts banning things: most importantly, practical Defence Against the Dark Arts classes, which previously taught young wizards essential spells to defend themselves against the deadly servants of Voldemort. Persecuted by the government, the young wizards of Hogwarts had no choice but to set up their own self-defence club, in secret. They named the club “Dumbledore’s Army,” after the school’s beloved headmaster.

Yes, that’s right: an overbearing, meddling bureaucrat from The Swamp took away Hogwarts’ equivalent of the 2nd amendment, and students responded by establishing a private millitia. Sort of like the Oath Keepers, but with magic wands instead of AR-15s.

It doesn’t end there. For much of the series, the Ministry of Magic is led by Cornellius Fudge, a weak, bumbling leader who spends an entire novel in denial about the return of the evil Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. To maintain his fiction, Minister Fudge wages a frantic smear campaign against Harry Potter, Dumbledore, and others who insist on telling the truth.

Most alarmingly, Fudge is able to enlist the wizarding world’s newspaper of record, The Daily Prophet in his smear campaign. In book five, Fudge is revealed to be “leaning” on The Prophet to print negative stories about Potter.

The lesson? Never trust the establishment, or their lapdogs in the media. They’ll smear the real truth-tellers, take away your right to defend yourself, all the while denying the existence of a growing terrorist threat within your borders.

3) If a group has a terrorist problem, sometimes you have to ban them

Yes, yes, people always talk about the One Good Slytherin, Severus Snape. But even he initially joined the Death Eaters! It took the murder of Snape’s high-school crush, Lilly Potter, at the hands of Voldemort, to finally deradicalize him.

But despite the existence of a few peaceful Slytherins, it is made abundantly clear, throughout the book, that Slytherin House has a serious problem. As Hagrid puts it in the first book, “there’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad that wasn’t in Slytherin.”

Yes, that’s right: dark wizards, the terrorists of the Potterverse, almost always come from just one Hogwarts House — Slytherin. Hagrid’s claim isn’t entirely accurate, because readers do encounter a few non-Slytherin baddies, like Gryffindor’s Peter Pettigrew and Ravenclaw’s Professor Quirrell — but the book still makes it abundantly clear that Slytherin produces the overwhelming majority of terrorist wizards. Lord Voldemort himself was a Slytherin!

By the end of the series, the Slytherin-terrorist problem has gotten so bad that virtually all of the prominent Slytherins in Harry’s year — Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe and Pansy Parkinson among others — had actively tried to assist Voldemort in some way.

As Voldemort and his goons bore down on Hogwarts, this caused a minor crisis for the school’s professors. In addition to the evil intruder outside the castle gates, there were also dozens of Slytherins inside Hogwarts who would actively assist that intruder once his attack begun. They were just sitting there, quietly waiting, hidden among the Peaceful Majority of Good Slytherins.

With no time to vet the Slytherins (or even “extreme vet” them), the professors had no choice: they enacted a Slytherin Ban, locking all students of the house in the dungeons for the duration of the battle.

The message? While an ideological faction with a propensity for terrorism might harbor some good, even admirable people, sometimes – to be on the safe side – you just have to ban them all.

Thanks, J.K. Rowling!

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