That’s what I want to say to Alex Gervasi, a paid Zohran Mamdani influencer, who recently posted a social media reel declaring that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series taught her everything she needed to know about “fascism.” Gervasi, who says she volunteers in immigration courts, offered this insightful gem: ICE agents are comparable to Dementors, because both “patrol hallways.” One looks for half-bloods, the other for people illegally residing in the country after bypassing our immigration laws.
Quite the stretch. But I’m glad she made it, because it gives us the opportunity to dismantle her bloody narrative piece by piece.
First, let’s address the premise of her argument: that J.K. Rowling is a “transphobic, right-wing, lunatic.”
Incorrect — on all counts.
Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in an Edinburgh café while her infant daughter napped beside her, having recently fled an abusive marriage. She became a feminist icon. She is, by any serious measure, a formidably intelligent, philanthropic activist who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity. She supported the Labour Party for years, vocally opposed Scottish independence, and was adamantly against Brexit. She was, in short, the liberal establishment’s dream — until she committed the unthinkable: she broke ranks with the progressive vanguard to argue that sex is real, sex is binary, and a woman is not a costume a man can put on.
Rowling is not transphobic. A phobia, by definition, is a fear. She does not fear transgender people — she has explicitly stated she supports their right to live free from harassment. What she maintains, correctly, is that biological sex is real, immutable, and distinct from gender identity, and that self-identification policies can undermine women’s hard-won protections in single-sex spaces, sports, and medical services. She opposes the surgical and chemical alteration of minors. She is commonsensical. She lives in the world of observable reality, not the relativism that insists biological sex is merely a social construct. She is right.
Now, to the Harry Potter-as-an-antifascist-manifesto argument — our influencer seems to have consumed something stronger than Butterbeer, because one simply cannot conflate the half-blood persecution of Voldemort’s regime with American immigration enforcement without abandoning all logical rigor.
Many of the illegal immigrants she is so passionately defending have entered our sovereign nation, bypassed established vetting processes, ignored or fled immigration hearings, and are living among citizens while accessing American housing, education, and healthcare — in some jurisdictions, even participating in elections. Contrast that with the legal immigrant: a cornerstone of this nation, who spent time, money, and genuine effort into assimilation, who learned the language, who embraced American civic culture. Those muggles are welcome. They are, in every meaningful sense, American.
A half-blood — a person born to one magical and one non-magical parent — has no analog to an illegal immigrant. If anything, a half-blood maps far more neatly onto an American citizen with one immigrant parent. The persecution Rowling depicts is irrational bigotry directed at an immutable biological characteristic. Illegal entry into a country is not a birth status. It is a policy violation.
As for ICE agents being Dementors? ICE officers enforce democratically passed federal law. They detain individuals who have violated immigration statutes, often after due process proceedings, and their work directly protects American communities from cartel activity, fentanyl trafficking, and the strain of an overwhelmed immigration system. Dementors, for the record, guard actual criminals and feed on human despair. If we’re hunting for that particular archetype in the real world, I’d suggest looking considerably further left.
The crowning irony is that J.K. Rowling did mock fascism in her books. She did mock racism. She continues to oppose both. She constructed an entire fictional universe as a sustained meditation on the dangers of blood purity ideology, authoritarianism, and mob conformity. She won. The books are beloved the world over — including, apparently, by people who now use them to smear her as a fascist because she won’t agree that biology is a social construct.
We do not live under a fascist regime. Our leaders are not rounding up people for their bloodlines. These are rhetorical cudgels, deployed in lieu of actual argument when policy disagreement becomes too uncomfortable to engage with honestly.
J.K. Rowling simply acknowledges that biological sex is a real and immutable characteristic. In the wizarding world of Harry Potter, perhaps the rules are different. But we do not live in the wizarding world. We live in this one. Pretending otherwise — subordinating observable and scientific reality to ideological comfort — is not progressivism. It is, to borrow a phrase, mental.
