J.K. Rowling: Trump Is Even Worse Than Voldemort!
World-famous author J.K. Rowling, the creator of the megapopular Harry Potter series, has taken to Twitter to share her two galleons about the rise of Donald Trump and his descent into rabid demagoguery and racist fear-mongering, declaring him to be worse than Voldemort.
For those who have missed the global phenomenon, the Harry Potter series takes place in a contemporary world where magic exists and is available to certain people, who have hidden their powers from the rest of the world, and follows the story of the titular protagonist in his quest to stop an evil wizard, Voldemort, who is a tyrannical embodiment of evil and is an avowed magic-supremacist with obvious and intentional parallels to Nazism.
Rowling told fans that “I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world. So you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity. So yeah, that follows a parallel to Nazism.”
When one finds oneself openly compared to Hitler and a fictional character notorious for bigoted mass murder, one might want to reconsider the course of one’s political career. Unfortunately, his outrageous proposals have only endeared him further to FOX News America, to the easily influenced and quick to suspicion, to the bigots and racists of our nation. While the comparison collapses after a certain point (stopping Trump will most likely not require a quest for mythical items of great power), the Harry Potter books do provide an interesting metaphor for the havoc that fear-mongering and division can wreak on a society, and the importance of maintaining our social unity in times of crisis. We cannot allow the empty posturing of a carnival barker to distract us from the real issues facing this country.
