Video: Culture Critic 'Echo Chamberlain' On The Vindication Of J.K. Rowling
A YouTube history of the controversy around her stand for women's rights
Nicholas Sheppard, aka ‘Echo Chamberlain’, is a British writer and musician as well as a popular culture critic on YouTube. He is a frequent guest on on the Critical Drinker channel as well as other panel shows that discuss cultural criticism. I have always found his insights and analysis good. Now he has applied them to the controversy over J.K. Rowling’s public stand for women’s rights in this video.
As he pronounces Rowling his “person the year”, Sheppard uses polling data and petitions to reveal that the controversy over her views has been almost entirely confined to the “cultural establishment”, where the luxury belief in transgender ‘identities’ is strongest. Despite her stand, Rowling remained on the political left, refusing to become the ‘right wing’ enemy that transgender advocacy desperately wanted to frame as its only opposition. It is “the rare instance where the absence of a political flank becomes an asset”, he notes.
From 2019, when she sent her famous tweet supporting Maya Forstater, Rowling remained steadfast. Efforts to frame her as ‘canceled’ only ended after the release of the Hogwarts Legacy video game in 2023. For despite Herculean efforts to inspire a boycott, trans ‘rights’ advocates failed to put a dent in the game’s $1 billion sales. As Sheppard explains, the public at large had simply never adopted the new ideology. Its power was confined to a class of people that Rowling had never been part of in the first place, that does not speak for the masses.
Normal people don’t pay attention to political discourse. Most of us do not have time to keep up with the latest fashion in belief-systems among the elite. This is why Rowling’s enemies always make the mistake of believing their own hype when nobody else cares. Whenever anyone cancels a Hogwarts-themed Halloween party because of so-called ‘transphobia’, they accomplish the opposite of what they intend, impressing on the public just how out of step and irrational their own activist views are in comparison to hers.
At the end of the video, Sheppard discusses Rowling’s recent takedown of actress Emma Watson. Social science data suggests that ‘gender identity’ belief has peaked among youth, which if true, will put J.K. Rowling on the right side of actual history, whereas Watson and Daniel Radcliffe will be on the wrong side. Sheppard might have added that by taking such a strong, public stand, Rowling advanced the debate by years, if not decades. Her courage has been contagious, whereas the attacks on her have been outrageous, and public opinion reflects that.
I was down with a cold this week. Normal posting resumes next week.
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This post was originally published with a ‘hat tip’ at the bottom for Exulansic, who broke the story on X. That’s the way I learned to credit folks back in the day. I linked to her thread on X, linking as well to the specific tweet where she had located the subject of the story on the California Megan’s Law website. Several people linked to this post, but some did not see the hat tip and incorrectly credited me with the scoop. I asked those people to fix the error and they all did — except for one.