Their faces were twisted with hatred as they jabbed their fingers at me. They waved placards denouncing me as a hate-speaker, a bigot, someone unfit for public life.
This was Oxford University in 2018, where I had been invited to give an after-dinner speech at Queen’s College.
When I arrived, however, I was greeted not by the reasoning intellects you would expect to find at one of the world’s great universities, but by a mob of blue-haired, red-faced woke censors.
They were assembled outside the building where I was due to give my speech, hurling all manner of abuse. I tried to talk to them but they backed off, as if I were a leper.
To them, I was a leper — a political leper. Someone who had committed the cardinal sin of dissenting from their politically correct ideology.
You lie and smear, assuming you'll live out your days as a hanging judge and never find yourself in the dock. No cultural moment lasts forever. Yesterday's fanatics realise they joined the wrong mob. Populist movements shrivel and fall apart. Robespierre ended on the guillotine. pic.twitter.com/mlQhd22s2i
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 30, 2023