J. K. Rowling Spreads False Claim About Trump
How false narratives about Trump start . . . and spread
In yet another example of the anti-Trump contingent creating and spreading misleading stories about President Trump, J. K. Rowling has gone on a Twitter tirade about a video that shows Trump supposedly ignoring a child in a wheelchair.
What the now-viral video fails to show is that at the beginning of this event, Trump entered the room and as he moved toward the podium, he stopped specifically to speak to and to shake hands with the little boy in question.
Here’s that part:
Following his statement, Trump then turns to the assembled children and adults, shaking hands with some, making comments to others as he moved toward the door.
He does not again directly address the little boy he’d singled out for special attention prior to his statement, and Rowling’s Twitter tirade is focused only on the latter part.
There’s clip going around that makes it look like President Donald Trump refused to acknowledge a little boy in a wheelchair at a recent event on Obamacare. But, as you can see below, the clip was edited to omit how President Trump actually did address the kid directly at the beginning of the event.
First up, here’s the edited version:
Child in wheelchair reaches up twice to shake the president’s hand pic.twitter.com/v2cNVwX9Je
— Ansel Herz (@Ansel) July 24, 2017
Editor’s Note: @Ansel deleted his tweet with the clip, but here it is from YouTube:
Rowling went off the rails in response to this part of the video (it’s not clear whether or not she knows—or cares—that it’s not the whole story):
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/890996376980660226
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/890997400290111489
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/891003697509093376
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/891003878568755200
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/891008035698749441
That man occupies the most powerful office in the free world and his daily outrages against civilised norms are having a corrosive effect /3
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/891010955215347713
[WAJ note 7/31/2017]: After three days of intense criticism, Rowling finally deleted most of the tweets. An archived screenshot is below]
The trouble with all of this, of course, is that the President didn’t just acknowledge the child, he bent down to speak to him and to shake his hand. There is no contempt or “fear” that he “might catch his condition.” Quite the opposite.
No. He shook the boy's hand.
What's stunning & horrible is how you lied to viciously smear Trump. https://t.co/toQFxfFiiw— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 29, 2017
Rowling’s initial tweet has 73,972 retweets and over 150k likes.
Thus, yet another blatant misrepresentation of the president makes the social media rounds and becomes absorbed as fact. Just as we heard for almost a decade Tina Fey jokes and one-liners ascribed to Sarah Palin, we’ll be hearing the lie about the president ignoring a child in a wheelchair for years to come.
UPDATE:
JK Rowling Finally Deletes False Anti-Trump Tweets, Apologizes To Everyone But Trump
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Comments
Time to update the old saw. The updated version: “Lies are retweeted 100,000 times before truth even hits send.”
But God still hates Lying Tweets….er….lips… above and more than all other sins.
J. K. Rowling is now Hillary Clinton the 2nd…
Well them, J. K. Rowling showed us who she is and we believe her.
Honestly, I’ve yet to encounter a single Brit who doesn’t imagine their enlightened self top expert on American politics, spoon fed as they are by their State television. And yet, not a single one of them can explain the Trump phenomenon to the satisfaction of any Trump supporter. They’re flatly retarded while maintaining a smug and superior self image. J. K. Rowling is just another arrogant Brit and the value of her mal-informed opinion is nil.
Well said.
And its we Americans who made her filthy rich – book and movie sales…
FYI
Author J.K. Rowling issued an apology Monday after falsely accusing President Donald Trump of refusing to shake hands with a disabled boy by sharing an edited video clip on her social media account over the weekend.
The boy’s mother lashed out at Rowling, saying that the Harry Potter scribe wrongly said Trump ignored and refused to shake her disabled son’s hand during a recent meet-and-greet.
“If someone can please get a message to JK Rowling: Trump didn’t snub my son & Monty wasn’t even trying to shake his hand,” Ms. Kelly Weer wrote in a post on Facebook, slamming Rowling’s inaccurate description of a video showing her son meeting President Trump.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/07/31/jk-rowling-apologizes-after-using-fakes-news-and-a-disabled-boy-to-smear-trump/
How hard would it have been for Rowling to ask to see the entire video? The truth was sitting right there had she cared. Instead, she brazenly goes with easily disproved lie. Whatever fits their narrative is presented as “truth”. Her sense “reality” is as bizarre as her fiction.
poor thing lives in her alternative world… hogwarts broomstick or not…
‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them.’
He has shown us who he is. More than once.
And Rowling has shown us who she is … and it ain’t pretty.
Is that a different “Piers Morgan”?
No. And yeah. He’s kind of reinvented himself since being booted off CNN. He’s gone from gun-grabbing Obot loon to this new, occasionally cogent, slightly right-of-center, still-not-to-be-trusted persona du jour.
Or perhaps he was never a Lefty – he just didn’t understand America, and was surrounded by people who strengthened his misconceptions?
I’ve wanted nothing to do with Rowling ever since she virtue-signaled over Dumbledore after the series was over.
Thanks, J.K.
‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them.’ – Maya Angelou
You have shown us who you are. A liar.
I really enjoyed the Harry Potter books. Read them to my children, read them myself, watched the movies, the whole bit. But then I realized that while Protestants protested the magic, I was Catholic. My objection was “There is no good or evil, just power and those too weak to use it.”, a denial of God.
That, and when asked why Dumbledore never married, J.K. shared that he was a homosexual. That may have been true, but there were many other explanations she could have given. The public didn’t need to know his sexual preferences. But she really wanted us to know.
Isn’t it terribly homophobic to assume that because someone is gay, they can’t get married?
Gay people can fall in love, get married, and stay monogamous. Even asserting Dumbledore is gay tells us nothing about why he didn’t get married – he either didn’t fall in love, had an unrequited love, was unwilling to commit, or could not find a partner who was willing to commit. It’s unfair to blame sexual orientation on the lack of a caring, loving, monogamous relationship.
Now, Terry Pratchett did a much better job of this with Dwarves in Discworld – male and female dwarves look and sound exactly alike, and nobody admits to being female openly. This allows us to imagine the feelings and experiences of homosexual courtship (being very tentative if people aren’t openly displaying their gender preference), without banging people over the head with “gay gay gay gay gay!”
Authors who leave their work ambiguous enough to allow various perspectives to identify themselves within the narrative are much more interesting than ones that have a direct, blunt, SJW message. Like the whole Hunger Games, written as a diatribe against the Iraq war, but fitting very well into the small government libertarian point of view, with the corrupt elites representing the ultimate in big, powerful government.
Rowling definitely wrote some good books, but I don’t think she ever learned anything while doing so.
jhkrischel: Gay people can fall in love, get married, and stay monogamous. Even asserting Dumbledore is gay tells us nothing about why he didn’t get married – he either didn’t fall in love, had an unrequited love, was unwilling to commit, or could not find a partner who was willing to commit.
Or a great tragedy. Dumbledore had fallen in love with Gellert Grindelwald, who led Dumbledore into a belief in wizard domination. Dumbledore’s brother objected, and it led to a duel wherein Dumbledore’s sister was inadvertently killed. According to Rowling, Dumbledore had “lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and I think subsequently became very mistrustful of his own judgement in those matters so became quite asexual. He led a celibate and a bookish life.”
No, there is nothing “homophobic” about what Milwaukee said. Look, there’s a huge communication problem between the left and right.
On the right, we don’t care what two consenting adults do. We really don’t. We also, however, don’t want to hear about it. We also don’t want to hear about everyone’s straight sex lives. We don’t talk about what we do with our husbands, wives, partners, and frankly, we don’t want to hear what you do with yours.
As to the literary nuances . . . if some people thought Dumbledore might be gay, and as Zachriel points out, this is pretty evident, so what? If it adds something to your understanding of the character, then run with it. If it detracts from someone’s reading of the text, ignore it. It’s not overt, and frankly, I doubt Rowling herself thought him gay until much later (when the whole Grindewald subplot developed late in the series).
The point is that this is a non-point. Getting all wee-wee’d up about sexuality is senseless . . . until my tax dollars are going to “sex reassignment” surgery fantasies. That’s a whole new kettle of fish.
I was asserting that JK Rowling was being homophobic, if she ever claimed that the reason why Dumbledore didn’t marry was that he was homosexual. Upon further review googling, I can’t find any reference to her specifically saying that.
As per Zacharial, Dumbledore’s tragic romance and retreat into celibacy had nothing to do with his homosexuality. Could’ve happened to any sexual orientation.
It’s funny – I think all too often the left-wing doesn’t realize that they already won the gay wars, and now, nobody really cares. And then it upsets them that nobody really cares anymore 🙂
A huge industry grows up around every leftist cause. When a cause has been fulfilled, those who profited from the fight are unwilling to admit the job is done, and stir the pot as often as possible to make it seem they are still needed, and that they still need someone else’s money to continue the fight.
“As to the literary nuances . . . if some people thought Dumbledore might be gay, and as Zachriel points out, this is pretty evident, so what? “
Sometimes life is a mystery to be solved, and sometimes life is a mystery to be lived. That Richard the Lion-Hearted was gay is an important part of his story. The King of France had been one of his lovers, and they had had a falling out, and hated each other afterwards. Now both of them went on Crusade in the Holy Land, and were supposed to co-operate with each other. Not talking to somebody sort interferes with the whole “co-operating” thing. That Crusade failed. To leave his homosexual relationship with the King of France is to leave out crucial details. J.K. could have simply responded to inquiries about Dumbledore’s sexuality with something vague and left it to the gentle reader to decide. She let that information out because she wanted the world to know. My point is we could have lived without knowing one way or the other.
Isn’t You’re So Vain better because we don’t know who she is singing about?
Milwaukee: She let that information out because she wanted the world to know. My point is we could have lived without knowing one way or the other.
It’s an important part of Dumbledore’s life that explains who he is as a person, dedicated, but solitary. It explains how he became an anti-supremacist, his dedication, his deep empathy, and his relationship with other characters of the story.
Great comment, Milwaukee, but one thing that I would point out is that it is the villain-Satan figure Voldemort who says, “There is no good or evil, just power and those too weak to use it.”
That’s Milton’s Satan on a really bad day. Milton’s Satan, of course, is far too conniving, smooth, and smarmy to so boldly declare his desire for power to those he hopes to ensnare. Milton’s Satan is elegant and attractive and articulate and lovely. All the things you don’t expect from evil (which was Milton’s point).
Rowling is less creative. Her demonic figure takes the literal figure of a snake, the serpent from the Garden. Nothing wrong with that, but as he’s cast as the Satan figure, we can’t really take his words as the theme of the novels. That’s the antithesis, not the thesis.
We see this in Dumbledore’s demise. He had the power, but he was strong enough not to use it to save himself. He chose to holster his power and save an innocent.
That’s the real power: to choose to be good and moral, even in the face of certain and imminent death.
The power throughout the Harry Potter novels is love and genuine goodness (his mother’s love saved Harry, Dumbledore’s sacrifice of his own life saved young Draco).
Anyway, I could talk all day and night about this, but I just wanted to share my perspective since the line you chose was uttered by the Satan figure. That fact, alone, requires at least some reflection.
Right you are. But, that doesn’t explain the lack of the Creator, who is responsible for all that is true and beautiful and loving.
As for Dumbledore, I put “How do we know Dumbledore is….” and the autofill was “gay”. These books really are delightful. I had a buddy who was a brilliant high school English teacher, and we enjoyed the books. Not a “buy the book at midnight” type, he pre-ordered his for delivery on the day. I bought mine at 9 o’clock, after breakfast out. I recall, I think the 4th book, where my friend said he really didn’t like Harry Potter in that book. Then he said, ‘ah. She has aged the characters really well. In this book Harry is a 9th grader, and they are such disgusting creatures. No wonder I’m not liking him.’ But I digress.
There are older children out there who delight in spoiling the innocence of youth. They are the ones who explain there is not Santa Claus, and the like. So if some precocious 5th grader is a fan of the books, so obnoxious 8th grader will inform them about Dumbledore. I do not envy parents who have to explain to their innocent children about homosexuals. Yes, people at some time in their lives need to learn about what is out there. It doesn’t mean that a lovable book needs to be the vehicle for them learning about some thing. Underwear covers private parts. That is what those are and what is done with them should be private. Is it really necessary for people with same-sex attraction, and same-sex intimacy activities, to keep us informed as to what they do?
Milwaukee: Is it really necessary for people with same-sex attraction, and same-sex intimacy activities, to keep us informed as to what they do?
No more so than any of the sexual attractions of the other characters.
https://www.bustle.com/articles/123422-the-11-most-romantic-moments-in-the-harry-potter-series
Actually, since Ginny had a romantic interest in Harry, and he was developing one in her, that is germane to the story. Perhaps she was being public in her behavior as a way to stick-it-to her brother, not realizing how it was effecting Harry. We don’t get information on the romantic lives of the twins, that wasn’t important. Dumbledore’s orientation wasn’t in the books, it came out afterwards at a public speaking event.
Another easily-debunked slander of DJT. This is how he got elected, in the first place.
The multitude of wild mischaracterizations of his words and past deeds caught the attention of a broad spectrum of American voters, and showed them someone very different from what the talking heads claimed. After that, they saw his policies.
If Rowlings propaganda doesn’t demonstrate how the modern left is a cult, nothing will.
In the leftist cult, Rowling considers herself one of the cult’s elites – the truth for the lower cultists is irrelevant.
For her dutiful work to the cult, she probably got an “attaboy” email from some loon at harvard, where the marching orders are given.
1. Why does JK Rowling care in the slightest what happens at a US event for the US President? She’s British.
2. Why does anybody in the US care what JK Rowling thinks – about anything? She’s British.
3. JK Rowling is a puling leftist twat. That almost goes without saying – she’s British.
Harry Pooper’s author is still just in the Fiction section, along with her greedy head.
Well, having written a series of children’s books, she is of course fully qualified to be Arbiter of All the Things.
Go to JKRs’ tweeter comments and you’ll see that this deception didn’t work…..
Most of the commenters know the video was edited and are calling her out. (Opps!)
Trump supporters need to get a life. We really don’t need another “Defend Trump” post with all the self promotions that he does and all of the willing blogs and commentators who jabber because the perception is that the Mango Moron cannot mount his own defense – but we also know he wants the publicity, now don’t we?
J.K. Rollings, right wrong or indifferent, believed the video told the whole story – so that is the end of the story.
But how can you attack Rollings while giving Trump and the Mooch a pass? All this emphasis on Fake news that is often pitched by Trump and all these leaks which are leaks only when someone other than Trump or his spokesperson do the leaking … all one way streets.
As long as Trump keeps stirring the pot, the West Wing will continue to leak – and the stirring will continue unabated.
tl;dr: Rags dumber brother.
Make valid, cogent, or even insightful points and you don’t get a reasoned rebuttal.
You get called stupid names by people who have crap-all to contribute. It’s the way of the T-rumpian cult.
“You get called stupid names by people…”
Henry, where the heck are you? Ain’t this a good example of that cog/dis thingy?
It is extremely unlikely Rowling lied in the strict sense of the word. She did, however, perpetrate a falsehood, though probably unknowingly. Avoiding the perpetration of falsehood requires care and self discipline.
I think a better description is bigotry. Bigotry is essentially universal among human beings because we are necessarily creatures of habit – including habits of thought.
Rowling has been taught by the media to associate “Trump” with “bad”, and so when she sees a deceptive video, she falls for it.
My personal experience leads me to associate “leftist” with “liar”. Leftists don’t help their reputation when they espouse BAMN. But I have to be careful because some leftists are simply deceived.
Yes, indeed she did lie. It’s called “lying by omission.”
I hate it when people say GWB lied about WMD in Iraq. You are doing something similar. You are assuming she saw the unedited video.
The main perp appears to be Ansel Herz:
http://freebeacon.com/culture/dem-reps-aide-tweets-misleading-video-trump-handicapped-child/
His twitter account has this:
“Deleted an earlier tweet because it turned out to be missing some context. Apologies.”
Well, it’s all OK then.
I am interested in what Rowling will have to say when she realizes her mistake. That will tell us something about what kind of person she is.
If Ansel Herz was honest his twitter statement would had read like this:
“I really hate Trump and I was sure this video was real… Damn, Damn, Damn…Crap…Arggg!!!Maybe next time!”
You’d think people would wait for all the facts before jumping on the outrage train…(but…nooooo)
Herz doesn’t even bother to identify the tweet he is “apologizing” for. Leftism is never having to say your sorry.
the bride of voldemort strikes again –
just because she can write fantasy for kids,
doesn’t mean that she has the right to propagate
fantasy propaganda for adults.
she is quite wealthy, so how much has SHE GIVEN to disabled kids ?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-402027/What-does-JK-Rowling-money.html
she is a billionaire and supposedly gave 15% to charity —
how much plum pudding can she eat for a billion ?
like all LibRules talk big, give little — 15% may souns like a big % — but what are the needs of 1 family compare to ALL those in GB that have needs _ baby Charlies’ for example.
I’ll just offer a word about my perceptions of Rowling…
She screwed up vis T-rump in this instance. This isn’t at all uncommon across the pond. Sherlock Holmes’ first adventure was a searing reflection of gross bigortry towards the LDS. Conan-Doyle was just writing what he’d absorbed in a very biased press, and he never did the least investigation of the facts.
Full disclosure, I am not a close reader of any of her books. In fact, I’ve never read a word of any of them, though I have grandchildren who loved them. I have seen the movies.
One of the things that comes across in them is the triumph of good over evil, honor, bravery, loyalty to friends and teachers, and a very clear loathing of authoritarianism and “the state” gone out of bounds. Humility is another trait I see in her characters. Those are good things, and too little found in much modern literature. My grandkids loved her work, and are pretty conservative thinkers.
She does fall short of Milton, but she was writing for children, and she did a superb job at that.
You know you’re on swampy ground when Piers Morgan bitch slaps you. Piers seems to be maturing (finally).
Seven tweets? Jeez. Brevity is the soul of wit, JK.
Zachriel
These are the Harry Potter books: as in Harry Potter and the Soccer’s Stone. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, etc., etc. Dumbledore is an important but ancillary character. I am sure there could be many paths leading how he turned out to be the way he is, and we don’t need to know everything, or even that much, about his back ground. Had the author never indicated her beliefs about his sexual orientation, there wouldn’t be an issue. She shared that information because she wanted to. She wanted that to be in the public domain.
Milwaukee: Actually, since Ginny had a romantic interest in Harry, and he was developing one in her, that is germane to the story.
Actually, how Dumbledore became a dedicated anti-supremacist is germane to the backstory. In case you didn’t know, the backstory is often integral to the narrative, especially in fantasy fiction where the backstory undergirds the written story. Some of the backstory is now being told in the Fantastic Beasts series, which is set to include the famous duel that led to the death of Dumbledore’s sister.
Rowling has now responded to the calls for an apology to Trump … by not apologizing to Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/books/uk-rowling-twitter-trump.html
The NYT actually gets the headline correct: “J.K. Rowling Apologizes for Anti-Trump Tweets (but Not to Trump)”. The other media bury this lede.
She apologized to the child and his family. However, they were not the person she libeled.
This is a sad data point regarding Rowling’s character.