I.
I’m assembling a reading list for my young son. Some inclusions and exclusions are obvious. I can’t wait for him to read C.S. Lewis, Alan Garner, Tolkein, and Frank Herbert.
But no series have I struggled with more than Harry Potter.
To the perceptive and intelligent reader, the Harry Potter stories are right-wing texts. I love them. Bear with me, and I will justify these claims.
I am aware of the damage that the stories have done to my generation. My wife’s family is a microcosmic example: my wife instinctively hated the books, and is now an elegant, religious, young mother. Her sister was (and still is) obsessed with them, and - though she’s a lovely person and a beautiful woman - she’s perpetually single and has fluorescent hair.
It’s incredibly important for the right to understand the mechanisms at play. Harry Potter is the most powerful propagandistic weapon of our age, one that turns our own strengths against us, one that summons tremendous energy from reactionary sources, and uses this energy to captivate and pervert the young.
Other media are now attempting to replicate this strategy; some unsubtle, like Bridgerton, but some more insidious, like that recent target of right-wing ire, Yellowstone.
What’s going on?
II.
To explain the subtle dark magic of Harry Potter, I’m going to bastardize a couple of terms from the philosophy of language: denotation and connotation.
When I refer to ‘denotation’, I mean the literal interpretation of the narrative as explicitly told by the author.
By ‘connotation’, I mean the subtext: the underlying but unstated emotional foundation that makes the story compelling.
Readers sense the connotation of stories even if we aren’t explicitly told them. But - and this is key - there are different kinds of readers that have different relationships with the connotation of a story.
Intellectually curious right-wingers (like you) are able to quickly perceive, dissect, and understand the connotation of stories we like. This is because we spend a lot of time considering values, aesthetics, narratives, and history. A central part of the conservative intellectual disposition is perceiving the value in the unstated but eternal foundations of our order.
We are used to making the implicit explicit.
Normies don’t do this. Normies get a warm feeling when they sense a connotation that agrees with them, but for the most part they understand and remember stories in literal terms. The true influence that a story has on them is derived from the denotation, rather than the connotation, because that’s all they can see.
Harry Potter is an essential case study of how this divide can be manipulated and weaponised, facilitated by a radical discordance between the story’s denotation and connotation.
III.
Before I show how this discordance can be weaponized, let me justify my claim that Harry Potter is a right-wing text, one that draws all its seductive energy - its magic - from reactionary sources.
Harry Potter is fundamentally a tale of yearning for the return of the British class structure, and a rejection of the banalities of modern working class existence. It is a radical defence of inequality.
It is dripping with skepticism of progress (technology and a changing society). The most fully realised villains of the story are not the ‘Death Eaters’ - who have paper-thin motivations and personalities - but the Dursleys.
The Dursleys set the stage for all that is to come, with their crushing parochialism, their seething resentment of those who have broken free of their lower-middle class existence. They desperately attempt to break Harry’s spirit and prevent him from realizing his potential.
But Harry, as it turns out - is a member of the aristocratic elect. He cannot be contained.
Harry is chosen to be rescued from these quaint, obese strivers by a hidden elite. They whisk him away to a boarding school (inspired by the institutions, like Charterhouse, that have educated the British elite classes for generations) where it turns out he’s a star athlete. Before he leaves for the countryside, naturally, it is revealed to him that he is the heir to giant piles of gold in a private bank (run by… goblins?).
The message of Hogwarts is clear and quintessentially aristocratic: there must be an elevated class, set apart from the hoi polloi and from middle class drudgery, free to pursue intellectual endeavors, ritual, beauty, and to explore the mysteries of reality and history. Don’t you wish that you could join them?
But - you might protest - isn’t there a recurring condemnation of attempts to shut ‘muggles’ out of the ‘wizarding world’? Isn’t there a central criticism of class divides and racism?
It is here that we meet our first denotation / connotation divide.
Everything written above is connotation. It is not spelled out in the text. The text - the denotation - says that we mustn’t discriminate, that those that use slurs like ‘mudblood’ are bad - okay?
Discerning readers can just ignore this denotation, because it makes no sense at all, and is an impediment to the otherwise charming world-building. The whole ‘racists against mudbloods are bad’ idea is completely contradictory - the entire wizarding world, including Harry and all our heroes, are gladly complicit in keeping their society secret and inaccessible to muggles at all times!
of expands on the confused portrayal of evil in the Potter-verse in an excellent recent essay "Those Who Walk Away from Hogwarts".Rowling tells us ‘don’t be racist against the muggles’ but then shows the only significant muggle characters - the Dursleys - as completely despicable. Because this is confusing and tiresome, right-wingers skip over it and continue dreaming about being summoned to Hogwarts.
But the normies remember it.
This ‘right-wing connotation’ / ‘left-wing denotation’ continues as Rowling explores concepts of people, place, and politics.
IV.
Harry Potter is fundamentally an English story about English people.
All of the British characters have carefully crafted wizarding names (‘Severus Snape’) in order to elevate the world building. The small number of ethnic characters are treated with hilarious laziness, dismissed with the most stereotypical names imaginable (Cho Chang, Parvati Patil, Anthony Goldstein).
Sure - Cho Chang might be good for a youthful fling - but when it’s time to settle down and have children, Harry naturally finds a ‘pure blood’ wife, Ginny. All the main characters marry and have children, and the wizarding mothers like Molly appear to stay at home.
Continuing with the theme of abject laziness, Dumbledore was labeled ‘gay’ at some point by Rowling, but she never mentions this in the books, and has him live completely chastely. Denotation / connotation.
The portrayal of the media and democratically elected classes in the wizarding world range from incompetent to villainous. Cornelius Fudge and the bureaucracy that sits under them are bumbling and fall to corruption. Instead, the beneficent sources of authority are the unelected elders that reign unquestioned, like Dumbledore.
The journalist Rita ‘Skeeter’ (slang for mosquito - a parasite) transforms into an insect to spy on innocent people.
Reading all this must make kids right-wing, right?
V.
Wrong, actually.
One of the reasons that Harry Potter serves as such a useful case study is that its influence has been extensively studied and documented.
For instance, a 2014 study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology titled “The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice” notes the following:
Recent research shows that extended contact via story reading is a powerful strategy to improve out-group attitudes. We conducted three studies to test whether extended contact through reading the popular best-selling books of Harry Potter improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups (immigrants, homosexuals, refugees). Results from one experimental intervention with elementary school children and from two cross-sectional studies with high school and university students (in Italy and United Kingdom) supported our main hypothesis.
In the paper, the authors hypothesize:
Harry Potter empathizes with characters from stigmatized categories, tries to understand their sufferings and to act towards social equality. So, I and my colleagues think that empathic feelings are the key factor driving prejudice reduction. The world of Harry Potter is characterized by strict social hierarchies and resulting prejudices, with obvious parallels with our society.
Harry has meaningful contact with characters belonging to stigmatized groups. He tries to understand them and appreciate their difficulties, some of which stem from intergroup discrimination, and fights for a world free of social inequalities.
Harry Potter makes people into leftists - something that we all instinctively already knew.
VI.
You might ask why this is important - and fair enough; Harry Potter is less relevant for this generation than the last one.
The Harry Potter case study, however, illustrates a recurring left-wing strategy that the right must always guard against. Contemporary iterations crop up all the time, like the recent example of Yellowstone.
Leftist writers and producers have found that this trojan horse strategy is the most effective way of reaching and undermining those on the right.
Hollywood and the publishers create worlds with right-wing subtexts. Those on the right - starving for sympathetic media - lap these up, because they sense and understand the subtext strongly enough that they’re willing to ignore the woke surface-level details that intermittently appear.
Believing that such implicitly right-wing shows are unlikely to cause any ideological damage, they recommend them to their friends and show them to their kids. What they don’t understand, however, is that if someone is intellectually unprepared to navigate the connotation/denotation inconsistency like they are, they just accept the message as it is presented to them.
This is how right-wing texts turn people left-wing.
I’m not sure I’ll show my son Harry Potter after all.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Dark Magic
Only worth showing the book to your child if he's smart enough to discriminate between the two. Even then, it could encourage him looking for other Harry Potter fans who will likely be woke.
I do not know anything about Yellowstone, but the idea that anything tolerable coming from Hollywood is just a joke, unless its some kids movie or purely action movie (even then have to be very careful). Normie conservatives are still way too attached to the parasites that feed from their souls. Only ever make the most simple sacrifices that are more like trading one vice for a slightly lesser one.
There's enough good hobbies, books, and generally other things to do with your life that will be more fulfilling than consuming anything remotely woke. It is frustrating that people will still even consider entertaining and funding woke media and entertainment. That's the easiest thing to remove yourself from.
Great essay Mr Kurtz! I agree with you entirely as I was a kid myself who throughly enjoyed the HP Books but was never that interested in the films.
This is also the inspiration of for an idea of mine: Based Editing. Scrape off all the rubbish leftist denotation and apply a nice RW one to go with the setting.