// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
It Sure Looks Like the Department of Education Is Promoting a Right-Wing ‘Harry Potter’ Meme
At first glance, the Department of Education’s October 27 X post seems like generic Harry Potter-esque slop.
It shows a trio of students walking toward a sprawling Hogwarts-like castle while a young girl with long, flowing white-blonde hair watches them from the foreground, accompanied with the text “There’s Magic in Learning!” and “Make Education Great Again.”
But for a hyper-online, highly radicalized subset of the internet, the state was not just communicating a vague policy stance—it appeared to be adopting the deeply-coded visual language of the “Malfoid.”
The reaction online was immediate. On X, Bulwark reporter Will Sommer quickly diagnosed the situation, posting that the Department of Education was “embracing the ‘malfoid’ meme, a right-wing fan fiction idea about a female Draco Malfoy who Harry Potter could fall in love with.” Others responded with Malfoid art and AI-generated clips, including some featuring President Donald Trump.
The Malfoid concept did not come from conservative think tanks but began in creatively chaotic fan fiction websites like Archive of Our Own (AO3). Gender-bending characters—taking a canonically male character and rewriting them as female or vice versa—is a time-honored tradition in fandoms. However, in these specific stories, the gender-flipped female Malfoy character is not just a narrative experiment for someone’s crackship. She is a potent avatar for toxic elitism, with a ruthless obsession with “blood purity.”
The term Malfoid is a portmanteau combining “Malfoy”—the last name of Harry Potter’s school nemesis Draco—with “foid,” which is short for “femoid” or “female humanoid”—a highly offensive incel term used to describe women.
In the original books, Malfoy is prejudiced against wizards whose heritage is mixed with muggles (non-wizards), but it’s framed as a moral failing to be overcome or punished. In Malfoid fan fiction, however, the character's bigotry is romanticized, transforming her into a right-wing aesthetic vehicle actively propagated by far-right meme channels and Telegram groups. Potter is no longer a traditional hero, but a stand-in for disaffected young men who fantasize about a relationship with a beautiful, cruel silvery-blonde girl.
A quick search of platforms like Reddit and Tumblr for the term brings up a wide range of art, AI-generated and drawn in heavily stylized anime aesthetics, featuring a busty wide-eyed blonde demeaning a blushing and devoted Potter.
The character is also depicted as explicitly anti-queer and anti-trans, as the word “foid” becomes a way for the far right to claim that this gender swapping is correcting an error.
For young, radicalized internet users, the Malfoid provides a ready-made, pop-culture-literate mascot for ethno-nationalism. She is the ultimate “guy’s girl” updated for the digital age, injected with a dark, pop culture edge that makes her more appealing to a terminally online demographic than traditional political propaganda. It’s an effective way to package white supremacy and conservative purity ideals into a highly shareable, visually appealing internet aesthetic.