Continuing to sell her pompously titled book, The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, millennial Time magazine journalist Charlotte Alter appeared on Wednesday’s CBS Late Show, aired early Thursday morning, to gush over members of the left-wing millennial resistance to President Trump. She even compared them to wizard heroes in the Harry Potter book and movie series.
While promoting the book, host Stephen Colbert cited one of the chapter titles: “Your second chapter in the book is called, ‘Harry Potter and the Spawn of the Boomers.’ What’s up with the millennials and Harry Potter?” Alter proclaimed:
There’s a lot of influence. So, I first started noticing the scope of this influence when I interviewed the Parkland kids after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, the March For Our Lives teenagers. And I noticed that many of them, independently, brought up Harry Potter and were comparing their quest to defeat the NRA to Harry Potter and his friends’ quest to defeat Voldemort. And as soon as I started seeing it, I noticed it was everywhere.
The liberal journalist excitedly declared that the references to the fictional franchise were “all over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram” and touted how “a group of resistors” within the Trump administration “called themselves Dumbledore’s Army,” referring to a group formed by the heroes in the story against the villain, Voldemort.
The 36-year-old Alter claimed that Harry Potter “was an unprecedented cultural phenomenon, literally unprecedented in human history,” and marveled: “So it has fundamentally shaped how many of these young people see their role in the world, and also see their responsibility in terms of what is good and what is evil.”
She argued that young liberals were engaged in a struggle against the “evil” and “authoritarianism” of Trump:
Harry Potter is a story about authoritarianism. It’s a story about young people banding together to fight an authoritarian ruler who was enabled by feckless adults who don’t want to stand up to him. And so in some ways it’s really resonant to what we’re seeing right now.
After hearing all of that incredibly dumb analysis, Colbert replied: “Well, that story and this entire book gives me hope. So thank you for writing it....I recommend it highly.”
On February 18, while pushing her book on MSNBC, Alter hailed Barack Obama for supposedly having “made voting into an act of love” and claimed that liberal Democrats now represented the political “middle” of the country.
Here is a transcript of her exchange with Colbert, aired early on the morning of February 27:
12:32 AM ET
(...)
STEPHEN COLBERT: You have a chapter here – your second chapter in the book is called, “Harry Potter and the Spawn of the Boomers.” [Laughter] What’s up with the millennials and Harry Potter? Because there’s a lot of influence.
CHARLOTTE ALTER [TIME]: There’s a lot of influence. So, I first started noticing the scope of this influence when I interviewed the Parkland kids after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, the March For Our Lives teenagers. And I noticed that many of them, independently, brought up Harry Potter and were comparing their quest to defeat the NRA to Harry Potter and his friends’ quest to defeat Voldemort. And as soon as I started seeing it, I noticed it was everywhere. It’s all over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram. When Mick Mulvaney took over the CFPB, there was a group of resistors inside the agency who called themselves Dumbledore’s Army.
And you have to – in order to understand this, you know, you have to realize that Harry Potter was an unprecedented cultural phenomenon, literally unprecedented in human history. More people consumed Harry Potter in the time that it was being created than Dickens or Shakespeare or nearly any other great work of literature that you could possibly imagine. So it has fundamentally shaped how many of these young people see their role in the world, and also see their responsibility in terms of what is good and what is evil. Harry Potter is a story about authoritarianism. It’s a story about young people banding together to fight an authoritarian ruler who was enabled by feckless adults who don’t want to stand up to him. And so in some ways it’s really resonant to what we’re seeing right now.
COLBERT: Well, that story and this entire book gives me hope. So thank you for writing it. [Cheers and applause] And I recommend – I recommend it highly.
(...)
