Will J.K. Rowling Do Time?

Plus: Mnuchin’s TikTok folly, Trump’s April Fools’ joke, Andy Warhol’s muse, and more…

LIZ WOLFE

Passed in 2021, the law cracks down on “stirring up hatred” and enshrines all kinds of new minority-group protections in law. “Transgender identity” is explicitly named in the bill (whereas gender is not). The law seems likely to have speech-chilling effects, as conviction of an offense could result in up to seven years in prison.

Rowling took to X (formerly Twitter) with a thread calling attention to how women receive no additional legal protections, but transgender activists—some of whom use violent and threatening rhetoric—do:

“The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex,” she continued. “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.”

She ended her critique with a bit of a taunt: “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.” (More here.)

Conspicuous absence: “The Scottish government has contrived to create a bill which affords greater status and protection to men who cross-dress than it does to actual women,” writes Alex Massie for The Sunday Times. “Being a woman is not a ‘protected characteristic’ and while I doubt this bill is necessary at all, it seems remarkable that those who think it is did not consider women a category worth including within its remit.”

The Scottish Police Federation (SPF), a staff association that represents law enforcement, is opposed to the very law its members will be tasked with enforcing. “Hate crime is an increasingly fluid term with ever increasing sections of society demanding special status for their particular group,” the SPF writes in a press release.

“The SPF is further concerned that the Bill would move even further from policing
(and criminalising) of deeds and acts to the potential policing of what people
think or feel, as well as the criminalisation of what is said in private.”

Rowling has said before that she would rather do prison time than be compelled by the government or activist mobs to affirm something she believes is profoundly untrue. Unfortunately, this conviction may be put to the test.

Your next Zuck: As previously reported here, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been telling possible investors that he’s interested in buying TikTok if the U.S. government forces the Chinese owners, ByteDance, to sell (versus facing a total ban). But ByteDance has dug its heels in and said the app will be stripped of its algorithm. So big-brained Mnuchin has started to talk about how he’ll just…rebuild the algorithm, no big deal.

But “the idea is so far-fetched that it suggests a lack of familiarity with how tech companies work,” reports The Washington Post. “TikTok users flocked to the app because of its surprising suggestions for videos they might like to watch, and there’s no guarantee any Mnuchin-driven version could duplicate that success—or beat rivals like Meta and Google, which have worked for years to mirror the experience within their own respective apps, Instagram and YouTube.”

So, Mnuchin would have to assemble a team to not only secure funds to buy the app, but also to rebuild its algorithm from scratch. And all over the course of six months, as Congress has set a divestiture deadline after which the app will be banned if legislation passes.

All this, according to Pirate Wires‘ Mike Solana, “provide[s] another helpful indication of Washington’s view of tech: a bunch of lucky idiots with too much wealth and power, all of which the swamp creatures want.”

Scenes from New York:

• 50 deaths, half from overdoses
• 1,400 fights (with half resulting in “serious injury”)
• 40 fires (half of which were set on purpose)
• Over 40 rapes/attempted rapes/sexual assaults

QUICK HITS

• I kinda love that Donald Trump pretended he was suspending his campaign for April Fools’.
• California may be liberalizing its assisted-suicide laws, following the controversial Canadian playbook. “Introduced in March by a first-term lawmaker—an attorney with a background in estate planning—the proposal would enable people without a specific terminal prognosis to request life-ending drugs, a lower threshold than any of the other 10 states that currently allow some form of aid-in-dying,” reports Politico.
• The first full-length biography out of Andy Warhol muse Candy Darling, mentioned in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
• Stupid headline alert: “Big Banks are ‘quiet quitting’ their climate promises,” from Bloomberg. Not only is “quite quitting” a dumb turn of phrase that won’t stand the test of time, but also, the big banks were always trying to placate and never going to actually follow through on climate-related demands.
• “Iran vowed revenge on Israel after blaming it for a deadly air strike on its embassy in Syria,” reports Bloomberg, describing Iran’s move as “a rare confrontation in the adversaries’ escalating proxy conflict over the war in Gaza.”
• San Francisco assemblyman tries to make after-hours work emails illegal, as if that’s any of his business whatsoever.
• National Organization for Women seems to be pretty anti-woman:

• Los Angeles lore:

• This should not catch on:

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