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Rowling roasting ‘Trump toady’ Piers Morgan on Twitter is sarcasm at its best

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DailyBiteFeb 12, 2017 | 20:26

Rowling roasting ‘Trump toady’ Piers Morgan on Twitter is sarcasm at its best

You have to admit that wit or irony, humour or sarcasm, nobody packs a punch as strong as a well-versed British. In other words, just any damn Brit. 

So when JK Rowling decides she’d skewer fellow Briton Piers Morgan, who’s taken up the side business of being a "celebrity Trump toady" and generally making himself more odious to the liberal classes than usual, she makes heads stir and garners kudos online as if it were another type of Pottermania.

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Yesterday, Piers Morgan, who famously sided with the “Leave” camp in case of #Brexit - collecting the monicker “Brexiodiot” along the way - had a tiff with his co-panellists on a show on HBO, that is hosted by Bill Maher. 

On popular American current affairs show Real Time with Bill Maher, Morgan got sworn at by not one but two people - namely the Australian comedian Jim Jeffries and Maher himself - because Morgan said that had Hillary Clinton been elected president of the United States, there wouldn’t have been much difference with what's happening under Donald Trump.

Naturally, his saner co-panellists were not just outraged, they couldn’t believe Morgan’s incredulous ability to lie on television. While Maher growled that a Clinton cabinet wouldn’t have nut-jobs like Rick Perry and the education secretary Betsy DeVos, and neither would Washington be picking fights with every foreign power while trying to play second fiddle to Putin’s Russia, Jim Jeffries categorically said: “This is what you do, Piers. You say ‘he’s not going to do this, he’s not going to do that'”, going on to compare Trump with Hitler.

Finally, when both Maher and Jeffries asked Morgan to “f$$k off” on camera, it was a moment that was savoured by the millions of liberals whom Morgan berates in his column, on Twitter and on his shows. 

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On American current affairs show Real Time with Bill Maher, Piers Morgan got sworn at by not one but two people. (Photo: Reuters)

It just happens that one of those liberals happens to be JK Rowling, Britain’s best-selling author and one of its richest litterateurs, who took to Twitter to express her satisfaction at seeing Morgan thus roasted on television.

Piers Morgan wasted no time to hit back. He said: “This is why I’ve never read a single word of Harry Potter.”

Things got seriously heated when Rowling hit right back and she was even more scathing this time around.

Obviously Morgan wasn’t going to take it lying down, as he’s used to bullying, not being bullied. However, he persisted in his ridiculous insistence that he was adhering to facts while Rowling wasn’t.

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To which Rowling said:

Now Morgan resorted to the tired trope of dismissing Rowling's perfectly pitched sarcasm as the expression of the generic arrogance of the liberal classes. He compared Rowling’s criticism of him as the “superior, dismissive arrogance of rabid Remain/Clinton supporters”.

This is when Rowling went on a no-holds-barred evisceration of Morgan:

She added:

and:

Morgan kept re-tweeting some of his rightwing supporters while tweeting out defences that sounded hollower than ever.

And, as usual he brought up instances which had nothing to do with the current context, but were simply meant to score a random point against Rowling.

He clubbed Rowling as part of “hysterical anti-Trump liberals”, while deciding not to brook any thought or idea from the opposing camp, particularly those calling out the xenophobia, racist and anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-immigrant and anti-women policies that Trump is forcing down America’s collective throat.

It’s obvious that in this battle of the British titans, it’s Rowling who’s getting the bouquets while Morgan is being freshly rogered on Twitter and mainstream media alike. But this “fantastic beef” with Morgan has once again proved just how acidic a tongue can get if it happens to be British.

Just like Rowling is now as famous for her liberal credentials - she could be the Meryl Streep of Britain - as she is for her Harry Potter books, Morgan is becoming synonymous with that ragged class of Britain symbolised by Nigel Farage and Theresa May who are busy exploiting the working class angst of a left-behind white Britain only to bring in far graver anti-worker and anti-immigrant policies.

Much like Trump, this class, which also has Boris Johnson and Morgan himself, who get by writing plainly misleading and counterfactual columns in tabloids such as the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror or the Sun - practically the Rupert Murdoch media outlet en bloc - chiefly wants the spoils of a post-Brexit hysteria and economic, political uncertainty to exploit Britain’s masses further.

Morgan, as Rowling correctly points out, is part of the “fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologism of a celebrity toady” class, that parasites on the bodypolitic of a massively self-hurting Britain. While Rowling gets the last word, it’s unfortunate to see that the likes of Morgan having a huge following on Twitter as well, to which they spew their nonsense and spread the xenophobia to terrifying ends.

We can only hope that Camp Rowling ultimately wins over Camp Morgans. But it’s a long war ahead and it ain’t pretty. 

Also read: Don't whitewash the racism underlying Donald Trump's election

Last updated: February 12, 2017 | 20:26
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