Vladimir Putin may be increasingly isolated from the world, but he’s kept up with enough pop culture to evoke J.K. Rowling and her controversial views on gender while complaining that the West is trying to “cancel” the entirety of Russian culture. And Rowling wasn’t having it.
Without explicitly endorsing Rowling’s views on gender, Putin raised the way the “Harry Potter” author (who is British, just to be sure) was treated after expressing those views.
“They recently cancelled children’s author J.K. Rowling,” Putin said, according to a translation of the TV appearance by SkyNews. “But her views didn’t satisfy the followers of so-called gender freedoms. Today, they’re trying to cancel our whole country, our people. I’m talking about the progressive discrimination of everything that has to do with Russia.”
Rowling on Friday responded to Putin’s comments, saying that she stands with Ukraine, and even shared a link about Alexei Navalny, Russia’s political opposition leader to Putin who was imprisoned by the Russian government.
“Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics,” she wrote in a tweet.
Putin in his remarks lamented what he called the widespread rejection of Russian art and literature in the Western world since his decision to invade Ukraine without provocation or any apparent regard for civilian life.
“This trend is unfolding in a number of Western states, sometimes with the encouragement of the ruling elites,” he said. “This cancel culture has cancelled the culture itself. They’re now removing Tchaicovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmananoff from concert posters. Russian writers and books are also being cancelled. The last time a similar program of mass destruction of literature was conducted by Nazi Germans almost 90 years ago.”
Rowling has met fierce backlash for her traditional view of male-and-female gender that critics say is anti-trans. She has remained steadfast in her beliefs, despite public pushback from people including prominent “Harry Potter” stars Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe.