Why J.K. Rowling Thinks She’s Speaking Truth to Power

Jessica Mitford ran away from her fascist family to fight in the Spanish Civil War, became a Communist, and exposed the profiteering of the American funeral industry. In her book, the American Way of Death (1963), she showed how the entire system manipulated bereaved families and fought for real meaningful change long afterwards. She defied McCarthyism, segregation, fascism, and Franco. She made a life and journalistic career out of embarrassing the guilty.

Jessica Mitford is JK Rowling’s hero, or she was once. (She probably still is).

JK Rowling (Jake Hay Rowling) named her oldest daughter after Mitford, calling her “the greatest influence” on her life and work. In 2006 Rowling wrote the introduction to a new edition of The American Way of Death, praising Mitford’s courage and irreverence.

And, as you know, JK Rowling also has spent the last 7 years doing the complete opposite of embarrassing the guilty.

As Rowling has gone further and further off the transphobic deep end of Very Online human cruelty, I've often wondered about how she squares it with her admiration of Mitford. I doubt that Rowling ever reflects on this when she is mocking “people who menstruate,” donating to anti-trans legal funds, or cheering on UK court rulings that stripped rights from trans people.

How does Rowling reconcile her increasingly cruel actions with how she once felt about Mitford's sense of justice?

But in 2025, Rowling's sudden transphobic turn (in 2018) no longer feels as shocking as it once was. These days, it’s clear that the algorithms that drive our newsfeeds and outrage cycles are designed to make every fight feel righteous, whether or not they're true. They sell the feeling of defiance severed from solidarity or power analysis.

The internet machine that elevated Rowling to begin with — that turned Harry Potter fandom into the first massive online scale literary brand — now churns out new monsters on every front fairly regularly. Its decayed over decades to fuels dictators, genocides, incarceration, detainment, while ignoring climate collapse and hollowing out public kindness for profit. In 2025, it makes more sense to me that someone can name their child after a hero, memorize their wit, build their persona on their legacy, and still miss the actual politics that made them worth admiring. It’s easy to copy the bravado and lose the compass.At this point, I really believe that in Rowling’s mind everything she does is just Mitford-style truth-telling.

Rowling isn’t special anymore when it comes to cruelty: 2025’s media economy makes conviction a commodity, but the algorithms don’t care if you’re right as long as you feel right. The vibe of defiance — stripped of solidarity, stripped of power analysis — lends itself to both malice and delusion until you start to believe your own weird tweets. And Rowling, one of the first authors to ride the early internet hype wave into a billion-dollar literary empire, to be totally swayed by that internet outrage wave, is a perfect amoral case study.

The best lesson Mitford left for us in 2025 is the one that Rowling abandoned a long time ago: Mitford’s conviction wasn’t to feel righteous — it was to make the powerful sweat.