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Rebellion, Activism, Imagination: Why We Need Witches More Than Ever

Witches teach us how to push back — and raise hell — in the face of authoritarianism.

By Asa West

If you want to find a witch these days, you don’t have to look far. Elphaba, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West, is barreling down on us in Wicked: For Good, the sequel to last year’s blockbuster adaptation of Wicked. Wednesday is back on Netflix, and Yellowjackets finished up its third season earlier this fall. Last year’s Agatha All Along was a phenomenon, and the witchy Sanrio character Kuromi, currently co-starring in another Netflix series, makes weird concoctions and sports an adorable devil tail. Hell, even Marvel’s Ironheart—a show centered on a high-tech suit with an AI navigator—managed to work a teen witch into its plot.

In the book world, witches are even more prevalent. In the tiny neighborhood branch library where I work, a catalog search for “witch” produces over 300 results. Look at any Halloween display in a bookstore, and you might find a few werewolves and vampires alongside a metric ton of witches. I’d say witches are having a moment.

Except… hasn’t that moment been going on for a while now? Robert Eggers’ The Witch (or The VVitch, for purists) came out in 2015. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is about the same age as my third grader. Then there’s the steady diet of witches that ’90s teens like me grew up on: Nancy Downs from The Craft, Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina, the central trio in Charmed. People aren’t just hungry for stories about witches right now—we’ve been hungry for years. And no matter how many witchy movies, shows, and books come out, that hunger seems bottomless. (Did you know, for instance, that they’re making a Practical Magic sequel? Look it up! I’m not lying!)

Genre fads come and go, and you could argue that witches are just an extremely long-lived one, but it seems like their popularity has increased even more over the past few years. Meanwhile, real life in the U.S. is getting worse and worse, as Trump and the MAGA movement launch wave after wave of attacks on women, queer folks, immigrants, and other marginalized people. It’s interesting that the faster the U.S. slides into right-wing authoritarianism, the more witches seem to burst from the seams of American media and culture. What if stories about witches aren’t just a form of spooky escapism? What if they’re providing a much-needed counterpoint to fascist thought—and even offering us a way to imagine what resistance could look like?

The day before I began the final draft of this essay, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled from the air after Kimmel very mildly criticized Republicans’ response to the death of Charlie Kirk. (Thankfully, the cancellation was reversed after public outcry, although local stations owned by Nexstar and Sinclair are still refusing to air the show as I’m writing this.) In the city where I live, masked gangs of ICE agents are jumping out of trucks and grabbing people off the streets. I can’t tell you how many Gazans will have been killed, with American-made bombs, by the time you read this. American fascism isn’t just a specter on the horizon. It’s here.

Most people recognize fascism by its biggest, most obvious signs: ultra-nationalist displays like military parades; one-party systems and dictatorships, with or without sham elections; secret police and concentration camps; genocides. Anyone who’s already marginalized, like immigrants, are fascism’s first targets. By the time they work their way up to challenging wealthy white men like Jimmy Kimmel, you know you’re already pretty far down the road to an authoritarian state.

What helps keep all this machinery humming, though, is a war on the imagination.

In 1937, after the Nazis had risen to power in Germany, they put on a now-infamous art exhibition: Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art. The exhibition displayed abstract and expressionist works by artists including Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, along with art by Jewish artists like Marc Chagall. The point of the exhibition was to mock and ridicule modern art, encouraging the public to reject it. The art itself was hung haphazardly, accompanied by slogans like “Revelations of the Jewish racial soul” and “An insult to German womanhood.”

Meanwhile, another art exhibition nearby, called the Great German Art Exhibition, showed off the only kind of art that Hitler himself was capable of producing: aggressively bland landscapes and nudes.

If this kind of propaganda strikes you as ham-fisted and silly, then congrats: you’ve unlocked the deepest secrets of the fascist mind. Fascists are oafs. They’re scared of smart things and repulsed by nuance. Hitler himself denounced modern art as “works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence.” To understand how a fascist works, imagine the loudest, most obnoxious dude you can think of, standing in the Met and screaming at a Jackson Pollack painting, “I don’t like it! I don’t get it! Anyone could do that!” We think of fascists as diabolical masterminds, but really they’re just big enough bullies to get a critical mass of other bullies to follow them.

You can probably see the parallels to the Trump regime by now. Within the first few weeks of his term, Trump forcibly took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ousting its board of trustees and installing himself as chair, even though he’d boasted about never attending a performance there. He fired Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress. He’s begun censoring signs and exhibits in national parks and the Smithsonian under the guise of “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” which apparently means removing all references to Black history and white supremacy. Meanwhile, right-wing book bans have increased to a number not seen since the McCarthy era. The MAGA movement has made a war on “woke” art and history foundational to their ideology.

So what kind of art does Trump like? Why, soulless AI slurry, of course. As The Atlantic pointed out in 2024, AI memes seem to be MAGA’s preferred aesthetic. Trump’s social media accounts have posted AI-generated pictures of him as a Jedi and the Pope. MAGA Facebook groups abound with AI images of sobbing immigrants being arrested, and of Jesus lovingly endorsing various right-wing figures. Perhaps the most putrid MAGA AI meme yet is “Trump Gaza,” a video depicting Trump and Elon Musk being showered with money at a luxury resort on a Gazan beach after a successful genocide. What better aesthetic to capture the fascist imagination than art that involves no actual artist (other than the ones whose work is poached in order to train the AI), and has no point other than to glorify the fascists themselves? In MAGA art, all marginalized people—BIPOC, queer folks, immigrants, disobedient women—can be conveniently demonized, erased, and replaced with white Evangelical monoculture.

Outside of art, MAGA is managing to make reality itself increasingly weird. Trump has taken to wearing a variation on the MAGA hat that says “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” to press events, in his official capacity as the literal President of the actual United States. Reporters and pundits struggle to make sense of speeches and sound bites that are now routinely nonsensical (one of my favorite lines from a recent New York Times article: “[Trump] did not specify who or what he was talking about”). Republicans have launched a frenzied campaign to anoint an openly racist podcaster as some kind of saint, and one of the latest right-wing talking points is that empathy is a weakness and a sin. These are all very weird things to do, and the national conversation has largely drifted away from how deeply weird they are. The more fascists can forcibly normalize bizarre behavior, the more they destabilize everyone’s reality. The more they destabilize reality, the more they can control it. Basic decency starts to feel like a hazy, unattainable fantasy.

19th-century occultist Aleister Crowley defined magic as “the art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.” You don’t have to believe in metaphysics to see this phenomenon play out in politics, although if you’re not paying attention, the process can certainly look like magic. The twin forces of propaganda and censorship erode the public imagination so that all that’s left—on the surface, anyway—is the fascist worldview. In an authoritarian regime, the dictator’s imagination is the public imagination; there is not, and cannot be, any distinction between the two. After all, if the public can imagine a different, better reality, then they can make it happen.

Enter the witch.

I probably don’t need to give you a beginner course on why the witch is such a potent archetype. The witch is unruly, rebellious, and powerful. The witch is Baba Yaga from Slavic folklore: a frightening and ambivalent figure who lives on the fringe of society, capable of both healing and cursing. The witch is Billy from Agatha All Along: a queer teen searching not just for magical skill, but identity and belonging. The witch is Tituba from The Crucible, later reimagined by novelist Maryse Condé in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem: an enslaved healer and mystic who helps her fellow slaves revolt. The witch bucks all the strictures that society places on them, refusing to bow to arbitrary authority, seeking nourishment in the wild and profane. Author Bri Luna puts it thusly in her book Blood Sex Magic: “The Witch, bruja, healer, mother, sister, daughter, lover, artist, creative, bitch, wild woman, visionary, goddess. Transcendent of time and space. Reclaiming power, and ancestral bloodlines of magick from the heavens and the Earth. I come from dirt and blood, jewels and bones, moon and sun […] I am birthed of fire and lava and death and decay.”

To put it another way: if fascism is a tightly controlled lawn that’s sprayed with herbicides and mowed into uniformity, then witches are the thorned and flowering weeds that won’t stop sprouting up.

If we’re lucky, the depictions of witches we get on the page or screen are positive, with writers and directors who do their research and approach the subject with respect. But as I wrote in my recent book Witch Blood Rising, even if a depiction isn’t positive, we grasp at the crumbs we’re given because we can see something more powerful underneath.

Consider, for instance, the ’90s movie The Craft, which tells the story of the rise and fall of a teenage coven. The girls worship a deity named Manon, using invocations and rituals taken from actual Wiccan sources. At first, everything goes great, and the girls get revenge on the bullies, rapists, and abusers who are making their lives miserable. Then they get greedy and things go south. By the end of the movie, Nancy is raving in a psychiatric hospital, Bonnie and Rochelle lose their powers, and Sarah ends up bitter and alone. The moral of the story is clear: messing around with witchcraft will fuck you up. Female power is dangerous, the movie tells us, and it will ruin the life of any teen girl who tries to tap into it.

Or how about The Witch, in which a Puritan family is exiled from their community for being too pious, and find themselves at the mercy of a coven of witches? The family’s only survivor is the young Thomasin, who watches Satan and the witches pick off her family one by one until her only option for survival is to sign over her soul. There’s no way you can construe the witches in that film to be the good guys, but Eggers doesn’t hide his fascination with witchcraft as a practice, and neither do the filmmakers behind The Craft. In both movies, viewers are treated to firelit rituals on rocky coasts, in oak woodlands, and in dark forests. Thomasin loses her whole family, but once she follows Black Phillip into the forest, she gets to live deliciously.

Around the time The Witch came out, I was at a public Beltane ritual when a group of young girls dressed all in black showed up. They giggled happily, took selfies, and called themselves baby witches, telling us that this was their very first ritual. They reminded me of myself after I’d seen The Craft as a teenager, living in a heavily Evangelical suburb where megachurches were the norm and witches were only ever the villains in cartoon fairy tales. Holy crap, I remember thinking, watching Nancy and the others prick their fingers at an altar in the dappled shade of an oak tree. What is this? I’ve gotta try it!

When I think of those girls, I think about Zelma, the teen witch in Ironheart, and not just because she’s one of my favorite characters in Marvel comics. Her introductory scene is lovingly rendered, with an herb-filled sanctuary, magical goggles, and a good-natured argument with her mother (also a magic worker) about where she should train in sorcery. I keep thinking about Elphaba, for whom power doesn’t involve getting a makeover to make her more palatable to the powers that be, but a fierce embrace of the very qualities that made her an outcast. She refuses to hide her green skin; when she finds out the black hat Glinda gave her was a prank, she adopts it as her signature look. She aligns herself with the oppressed Animal citizens of Oz and rebels without hesitating. If storytelling—especially speculative stories—function partly as wish fulfillment, then the wish here is clear. Audiences want the beauty of the margins, of tangled and feral places, of power that doesn’t need to be mediated through an authority figure.

And the more authoritarians try to sterilize the media landscape, the more popular witches seem to become.

It’s one thing if a fascist monoculture makes people crave stories of witches, rebellion, and magic. But can these stories actually do any good? Are they just a release valve for frustration, or can they lead to real, tangible change?

Art has always been a powerful force against authoritarianism, of course. If it wasn’t, Hitler would never have felt the need to put on his exhibitions, and MAGA wouldn’t be waging its war on books and art and cultural institutions. Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer, for instance, was the most challenged book of 2021 precisely because it revealed a reality that right-wing politicians wanted buried. “People told me they related to Gender Queer more than any other book they’d ever read,” Kobabe told NPR in 2023. “They told me it made them feel less alone. They told me they had shared the book with a parent, or a partner, or a friend, and it had opened up conversations they’d never been able to have before.” These kinds of revelations, the blossoming of empathy and the unfolding of new ways of being, are poison to fascism.

But what about witches specifically?

The most well-known example of the witch archetype being tied explicitly to activism is W.I.T.C.H., short for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, a movement in the ’60s that worked to tie feminism into broader social causes like the labor and anti-war movements. W.I.T.C.H. wholeheartedly embraced aspects of witchcraft like hexes and covens, so much so that the movement is believed to be one of the precursors to modern Wicca and neo-Paganism. Like Elphaba, W.I.T.C.H. leaned hard into everything that they were taught was undesirable. “By choosing this symbol,” writes researcher Cynthia Eller, “feminists were identifying themselves with everything women were taught not to be: ugly, aggressive, independent, and malicious.”

More recently, in 2015, the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot released a music video called “Witches of Pussy Riot Clean Manezhka,” in which the members dressed as witches ahead of the protests in Manezhnaya Square against the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The band had already become notorious in Russia for their performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, for which two members were imprisoned.

Even if you don’t bring obvious witchy themes into your activist work, those themes can plant the seeds of resistance, or even offer thinly veiled how-to guides on how to protest. Witches, in fiction and often in real life, tend to embrace nature and mysticism, which flies in the face of industrialization and right-wing Christianity. Stories of witches feature independent women sticking up for themselves, queer people being unapologetically queer, and marginalized people fighting back against authority. In the fantasy novels The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, witchcraft is a vehicle for movements like ecojustice and women’s suffrage. In the horror novels Goddess of Filth by V. Castro and Slewfoot by Brom, what at first seems to be a malevolent demon turns out to be a deity who grants a young woman the power to fight back against her oppressors. These themes are powerful, even (or especially?) when they’re explored in a fun way, and once they take hold in the imagination, it’s hard to keep them from spilling out into real life.

To which I say: good. Let our stories be Pandora’s box, unleashing all the things fascists fear the most.

There’s one question I keep coming back to and not knowing how to answer: Will the MAGA regime start censoring stories about witchcraft? Or feminism, social justice, climate change, or any of the other subjects that witches, real or fictional, tend to be into? (snip; a little bit more. Refill your cup, click through on the title, enjoy, then look around the magazine for more you’ll like!)