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JK Rowling has said that while she does not agree with anything Donald Trump says, he still has her full support to come to the UK and “be offensive and bigoted there”.
JK Rowling
Speaking at Pen America’s annual literary gala in New York, JK Rowling was reported to have said while she personally finds Trump “offensive and bigoted”, Rowling said that his freedom to speak “protects my freedom to call him a bigot”, just as those critics who have claimed that she is trying to convert children to satanism with the Harry Potter books “are at liberty” to do so.
“If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications,” the novelist added.
Rowling was at the Pen event to receive the 2016 Pen/Allen Foundation literary service award, an honour given to a writer who works to “oppose repression in any form and to champion the best of humanity”.
Warning that the growing “intolerance of alternative viewpoints” is making her “most uncomfortable”,
JK Rowling
Rowling reiterated that: “I worry that we may be in danger of allowing their erosion through sheer complacency. The tides of populism and nationalism currently sweeping many developed countries have been accompanied by demands that unwelcome and inconvenient voices be removed from public discourse. It seems that unless a commentator or a television channel or a newspaper reflects exactly the complainant’s world view it must be guilty of bias or corruption.”
Last year, when Donald Trump called for the U.S. to ban all Muslims from entering the country, Rowling took to Twitter to state her objection to people comparing Trump to voldemort.