Is J. K. Rowling a terrific writer? I have no idea. I’ve never read a word she’s written. I somehow dodged the Harry Potter craze, even as my kids devoured her mega-popular novels.

She’s undeniably one of the most successful writers, though. “Business Insider” estimates Rowling’s  wealth at between $650 million to $1 billion. “Forbes” says she’s the second-highest paid writer in the world after James Patterson.

Lately she’s been writing under the pen name “Robert Galbraith.” Her latest book under that moniker is “Troubled Blood,” a 900-page crime thriller. According to reviews, private detectives are hunting for a killer named Dennis Creed who dresses in women’s clothing and sometimes steals female underwear from his victims.

In interviews, the author claimed that this character was based on two real-life killers, Jerry Brudos who murdered four women in Oregon in the 1960s and Russell Williams who was convicted of killing two women in 2010.

Both had a weakness for women’s undergarments.

And that’s the problem. The trans community has been howling about this villain. Apparently under the new rules of wokeness, trans characters in fiction can only be heroes. 

Of course, they were already gunning for Ms. Rowling who recently Tweeted about a website headline that referred to “people who menstruate.”

“People who menstruate?” Rowling shot back. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

How dare she!

To express their displeasure with the author, Newsweek reports that armies of angry lefties are using the Chinese spyware app, TikTok to record themselves building bonfires out of Rowling’s books. Not just the new novels, but the Harry Potter series, too. Some are burning videos of the Harry Potter movies.

This urge to ignite items already in one’s possession strikes me as especially stupid.  Remember when some of the right were furious that Nike chose Colin Kaepernick as the face of its brand? These nuts burned their own shoes. I’m still not clear how that hurt Nike. 

Burning books puts the angry trans sympathizers in league with the Nike shoe burners and other counterproductive cancel-culture movements that are essentially fascist in nature.

Book burning - mostly book banning - gained popularity during the Cold War, led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the fiery anti-communist politician from Wisconsin.

As the commencement speaker at Dartmouth in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower actually cautioned against jumping into the anti-book movement.

“Don’t join the book burners,” Eisenhower cautioned. “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.” 

This isn’t the first time Rowling as been targeted by pyromaniacs on a mission. In fact, it was an evangelical group in Pennsylvania that first burned Harry Potter books in 2001 due to what they characterized as spreading paganism and witchcraft.

What today’s TikTok illiterates don’t realize is that with their anti-intellectual antics, they’ve actually helped publicize the new Rowling novel and probably ginned-up sales. 

Ms. Rowling seems amused by the dopes threatening to burn her books and videos

 “Well, the fumes from the DVDs might be toxic and I’ve still got your money, so by all means borrow my lighter,” Rowling Tweeted to her firebug critics.