The reaction to this piece, written by Jennifer O’Connell for the Irish Times on Saturday was swift, and almost unanimous: At the time of writing, the original Irish Times tweet advertising the article has been seen on twitter 200,000 times. Just 21 people have “liked” it – normally I wouldn’t put much store by such ratios, but that’s such an extreme level of public opprobrium for an article that it can’t really be left un-noted.
Jennifer O’Connell: JK Rowling’s ‘witch trials’ are of her own making https://t.co/uNafvyGSPt via @IrishTimesOpEd
— Irish Times Opinion (@IrishTimesOpEd) April 1, 2023
As to the article itself, the argument it makes is, in my view, weak:
But what distinguishes her from other victims of online witch-hunts is that Rowling waded into this intentionally…. Rowling made a calculated decision to enter the fray, even calling her management team to warn them in advance of that first tweet. Which raises the question of whether you can really be the victim of a witch-hunt when you chose to orchestrate it; when you keep going back for more.
Feel free to read the whole thing, which is linked above, but that’s really it. That’s the best Jennifer O’Connell can come up with: That if JK Rowling didn’t want to be abused online for her views, she could just keep them to herself.
The odd thing is, of course, that O’Connell’s argument that Rowling could just, well, shut up, doesn’t seem to apply in her mind to other women who also suffer abuse as a result of airing their views in public. Indeed, just ten weeks ago in January, she had this to say about another prominent woman in global public life – ex New Zealand Premier, Jacinda Ardern:
Ardern denied that threats and abuse were a factor in her decision, but they have incontrovertibly been a factor in her life. She was the subject of 50 threats investigated by police in 2021. Her Maori party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer characterised Ardern’s decision as her having been “driven from office for constant personalisation and vilification”.
In that piece, O’Connell went on to write about Irish female politicians:
This is not robust debate. This is not holding people to account. This isn’t fair comment. This is the behaviour of a dangerous, deranged mob who are threatening democracy. And it is happening across the political spectrum. Holly Cairns spoke in a Virgin Media podcast about having an online stalker turn up at her home. “I don’t regret” running for election, she said. “But honestly, had I known… probably, no, I wouldn’t have done it.”
Lynn Ruane told RTÉ Radio about her experience of burnout amid “the pressures of public life”. Elsewhere in The Irish Times, Maria Bailey tells Simon Carswell how her family had her on suicide watch in the aftermath of the 2019 “swing gate” controversy. “I just became unrecognisable. I was just a laughing stock,” she says.
The fact of the matter is this: Irish female politicians, just like Jacinda Ardern, and like JK Rowling, have all “waded into this intentionally”, to use O’Connell’s language. Nobody made Holly Cairns seek election, or forced Lynn Ruane to run for the Seanad, or compelled Jacinda Ardern to become a global icon of the progressive left. And rightly, O’Connell would never dream of blaming them or suggesting that if they did not wish to be abused, they could simply have kept their mouths shut.
That recommendation, strangely enough, is reserved entirely for a person that she disagrees with.
It is interesting too to compare her attitude to the abusers: Those who abuse Irish politicians, she says, are a “dangerous, deranged mob who are threatening democracy”.
Those who abuse Rowling? In her piece she says this:
On one side are people like Rowling, talking with authority, but often in largely academic terms, about things like the importance of biological sex. On the other are a tiny and vulnerable minority whose right to go about their lives with dignity is at stake.
That is literally all she has to say about those who have, amongst other things, published Rowling’s address and threatened her with death more times than you’ve likely had steak dinners. O’Connell can’t actually bring herself, anywhere in her piece, to openly condemn the abuse Rowling gets. The only person that this victim has to blame for her troubles, per O’Connell, is herself.
The double standard here is so obvious and glaring that spending a paragraph discussing it is pointless. You either see it, or you need to go to Specsavers.
What’s more interesting, I think, is the question of whether Jennifer O’Connell herself sees it. And reader: I don’t think she does.
There’s a difference in how the progressive and normal minds think about the world, and that difference seems to be ever growing. The progressive mind tends to see the world as goodies and baddies – with every questionable act by the goodies excused for the sake of the cause, and every questionable thing inflicted on the baddies being something they probably deserved. We see that in the attempted cancellation of Kellie Harrington, for example, and attitudes to the recent prosecution of Donald Trump. Most people I think know that Trump is being prosecuted more for political than legal reasons, but the progressive mind thinks that the ends justify the means.
All of which is a reason, I think, why O’Connell’s January argument about the abuse of women politicians did not mention Senator Sharon Keogan, perhaps the most persistently abused Irish female politician. She, too, like Rowling is on the “wrong side”, and wouldn’t get abused if she just kept her mouth shut.
The trouble for progressives is that most people don’t think like this. Most of us think abuse is bad, no matter what quarter it comes from. And most of us actually agreed with progressives, a few years ago, when they said that “victim blaming” was a bad thing.
All of this and more, I would argue, is why the Irish Times managed 200,000 views, and just 21 likes.