As usual, that is omitted, then people believe it when other people say Dems do nothing. Elected Dems are doing all they can. Sen. Rand Paul is also involved, as Libertarians will be in matters of war.
Amid a wave of U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean and plans for covert operations in Venezuela, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is leading a bipartisan effort to force a vote to stop President Trump from unilaterally declaring war on the South American nation.
Kaine, a longtime proponent of Congress’ powers to declare war, filed the resolution late Thursday, a move that will force the Senate to take up the legislation after a 10-day waiting period. Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., co-sponsored the plan.
Kaine said concerns about war in the Latin American region are growing.
“The pace of the announcements, the authorization of covert activities and the military planning makes me think there’s some chance this could be imminent,” Kaine told reporters.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., speaks to reporters outside the Senate chamber on Oct. 1. Kaine is hoping to prevent President Trump from unilaterally waging war on Venezuela without approval from Congress.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
This week, Trump said the U.S. had conducted another military strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean and announced that he had authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. He also said he was considering land operations in the country.
“We’ve almost totally stopped it by sea. Now we’ll stop it by land,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Wednesday about alleged drug smuggling.
Last week, Kaine and Schiff forced a Senate vote to limit Trump’s war powers in the Caribbean. While that vote failed 48-51, two Republicans, Paul and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined Democrats in support.
Paul has been a vocal critic of the new military strikes, saying they set a precedent for the U.S. to shoot first without asking questions.
“The American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote,” Paul said in a statement. “We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war.”
Kaine, Paul and Schiff are hoping more Republican members will vote in favor of the new limits. Several Republicans have voted for other war powers and use of military force resolutions led by Kaine in the past.
“I think it’s probably 10 or so [Republicans] who voted yes on at least one of them,” he said. “So we’ll start to work that.”
It remains unclear whether there are enough Republican votes for the measure to succeed.
Kaine said Congress continues to face a “black hole” of information related to action against Venezuela. Lawmakers say the administration still has not shared evidence to justify the boat strikes, which Kaine and others believe are illegal and unconstitutional.
Since September, Trump has ordered at least five U.S. military strikes on boats that the administration has claimed were smuggling illegal drugs. So far, at least 27 people have been reported killed, but their identities have yet to be shared.
I think I remember an ABC Movie of the Week back in the 70s, about something like this. I’m not rooting for bad acts, and this is a bad act. But what an entertaining story: man, oh, man!
PARIS (AP) — In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world’s most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift to the Louvre, forced a window into the Galerie d’Apollon — while tourists pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the corridors — smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said.
It was among the highest-profile museum thefts in recent memory and comes as Louvre employees have complained of worker and security understaffing.
One object was later found outside the museum, according to Culture Minister Rachida Dati. French daily Le Parisien reported it was the emerald-studded crown of Napoleon III’s wife Empress Eugénie — gold, diamonds and sculpted eagles — recovered just beyond the walls, broken.
The theft unfolded just 250 meters (270 yards) from the Mona Lisa, in what Dati described as “a four-minute operation.” No one was hurt.
Images from the scene showed confused tourists being steered out of the glass pyramid and adjoining courtyards as officers closed nearby streets along the Seine.
Also visible was a lift braced to the Seine-facing facade near a construction zone — an extraordinary vulnerability at a palace-museum.
A museum already under strain
Around 9:30 a.m., several intruders forced a window, cut panes with a disc cutter and went straight for the vitrines, officials said. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said the crew entered from outside using a basket lift.
The choice of target compounded the shock. The vaulted Galerie d’Apollon in the Denon wing, capped by a ceiling painted for Louis XIV, displays a selection of the French Crown Jewels. The thieves are believed to have approached via the riverfront facade, where construction is underway, used a freight elevator to reach the hall, took nine pieces from a 23-item collection linked to Napoleon and the Empress, and made off on motorbikes, according to Le Parisien.
Daylight robberies during public hours are rare. Pulling one off inside the Louvre — with visitors present — ranks among Europe’s most audacious since Dresden’s Green Vault museum in 2019, and the most serious in France in more than a decade.
It also collides with a deeper tension the Louvre has struggled to resolve: swelling crowds and stretched staff. The museum delayed opening during a June staff walkout over overcrowding and chronic understaffing. Unions say mass tourism leaves too few eyes on too many rooms and creates pressure points where construction zones, freight routes and visitor flows meet.
Security around marquee works remains tight — the Mona Lisa is behind bulletproof glass in a bespoke, climate-controlled case.
It’s unclear whether staffing levels played any role in Sunday’s breach.
The Louvre has a long history of thefts and attempted robberies. The most famous came in 1911, when the Mona Lisa vanished from its frame, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia and recovered two years later in Florence.
Today the former royal palace holds a roll call of civilization: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa; the armless serenity of the Venus de Milo; the Winged Victory of Samothrace, wind-lashed on the Daru staircase; the Code of Hammurabi’s carved laws; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. More than 33,000 works — from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the classical world to Europe’s masters — draw a daily tide of up to 30,000 visitors even as investigators now begin to sweep those gilded corridors for clues.
Politics at the door
The heist spilled instantly into politics. Far-right leader Jordan Bardella used it to attack President Emmanuel Macron, weakened at home and facing a fractured parliament.
“The Louvre is a global symbol of our culture,” Bardella wrote on X. “This robbery, which allowed thieves to steal jewels from the French Crown, is an unbearable humiliation for our country. How far will the decay of the state go?”
The criticism lands as Macron touts a decade-long “Louvre New Renaissance” plan — about €700 million to modernize infrastructure, ease crowding and give the Mona Lisa a dedicated gallery by 2031. For workers on the floor, the relief has felt slower than the pressure.
What we know — and don’t
Forensic teams are examining the site of the crime and adjoining access points while a full inventory is taken, authorities said. Officials have described the haul as of “inestimable” historical value.
Recovery may prove difficult. “It’s unlikely these jewels will ever be seen again,” said Tobias Kormind, managing director of 77 Diamonds. “Professional crews often break down and re-cut large, recognizable stones to evade detection, effectively erasing their provenance.”
The Louvre closed for the rest of Sunday as police sealed gates, cleared courtyards and shut nearby streets along the Seine.
Key questions still unanswered are how many people took part in the theft and whether they had inside assistance, authorities said. According to French media, there were four perpetrators: two dressed as construction workers in yellow safety vests on the lift, and two each on a scooter.
Investigators are reviewing CCTV from the Denon wing and the riverfront, inspecting the basket lift used to reach the gallery and interviewing staff who were on site when the museum opened, authorities said.
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Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
Growing up as someone who is different from the majority is difficult no matter the circumstances. For the LGBTQ+ it is horrific when just your very existence is called an abomination and you are equated with the worst being in history. Especially when your parents and your god are pushing the idea that you are a monster who can only be cured if you follow their god, their church doctrines, have their feelings about everything in your life. Hugs.
A guest essay by Sean Robinson – Spencer’s boyfriend.
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When I was around 10 years old, I remember horsing around in the grass with my oldest brother. I asked him the meaning of homosexuality, a word that I had heard from my parents and from the New Order Amish and Mennonite communities I was surrounded by growing up in upstate New York and rural Virginia.
Sean and his dad Upstate New York. Photo courtesy of Sean.
While I wasn’t certain what the word meant, I knew it was bad and I was pretty sure it was me. So when my brother responded to my question by saying that homosexuality is “demonic,” I pushed those thoughts down.
A few years later, my dad told me that once someone becomes a homosexual, they will “want more and more and more” and it will lead to a sexual desire for “children, then animals, then blood.”
Sean and his dad through the years. Photos courtesy of Sean.
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Hearing these ideas persistently and consistently made me feel like there was this horrible thing inside of me that I just hated. I had learned that it was akin to being a pedophile, and that’s how I felt about myself.
These feelings created so much shame and fear but most of all a level of embarrassment that was so intense that I vowed to myself I would take my secret to the grave.
Sean and his parents. Photo courtesy of Sean.
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But I didn’t. When I met just one gay person at Danville Community College, I felt a small but significant rumbling of hope. This encounter gave me the courage to leave. So at 17, I told my parents I was moving to New York City to pursue the performing arts.
While I was semi-interested in being on screen, I saw NYC as a symbol of a new life where I could be my authentic self. A few months after I moved, I came out to my mom over the phone, who later told me—through a puddle of tears—that I might as well have died in a car accident.
I had to dig to make a life for myself with few people in my corner. I utilized NYC social programs like SNAP benefits, free health care and low-income housing. These services gave me the bootstraps I needed to pull myself up.
The years of familial and community rejection and efforts to change me through conversion therapy took more than two decades of treatment, medication and supportive friendships to help me find a formula where today—at 40 years old—I can manage my depression, anxiety, tics (that were at one point debilitating), no-contact relationship with my parents and low self-esteem.
I am so grateful to the heroes who helped me through these years: Paul Warner, Jerry Meadors and countless others. You lifted me up, taught me the ropes, allowed me to couch surf and showered me with love.
Sean in his teens. Photo courtesy of Sean.
Fighting the demons of my past, including years of religious trauma and physical abuse disguised as “corporal punishment,” is something I’d wish on nobody. When I read Uncloseted stories that discuss how nearly 40% of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide in the last year, my heart breaks because I know that could have been me if my path had veered a degree in a different direction.
Sean with Spencer and his psychiatric service dog Carson. Photo courtesy of Sean.
Flash forward 20 years and I’m sitting next to Spencer, who’s helping shine a spotlight on the very thing I tried to suppress in the darkness of my mind. I am now a video editor at MTV, working on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the groundbreaking television show that has helped so many queer kids across America feel seen and feel safe—something every child deserves.
I’ve always been resilient and tough.
But finally, I feel calm and free.
Response from Sean’s Dad:
In a text message to Uncloseted Media, Sean’s dad, Chris Robinson, wrote that he remembers saying that “when the moral fabric of societies begin to decay it usually starts with the sin of not acknowledging Almighty God, the Giver and Sustainer of life. [If] that condition of man continues then more sin comes [including] adultery, fornication and general unfaithfulness. The next level is men allowing women and children to rule. This would have been the feminist movement of the 60’s. Next comes homosexuality then bestiality and finishing up with child and adult sacrifice and much shedding of blood. This progression is recorded in Genesis and through the Chronicles and Kings in the Bible.”
In response to Sean’s references to corporal punishment, his dad wrote that he remembers being “shocked at [Sean’s] fearless defiance to [his] authority … as being the one responsible for order in the home” and that he would punish him—after multiple verbal warnings for misbehavior—by giving him “4 or 5 good licks with the switch and [would then] give him a hug and prayer and hope he got the message.” His dad added that he and Sean had many good times too and that he “still shed[s] a tear at times in memory of [his] little Seany.”
Response from Sean’s Mom:
In a text message to Uncloseted Media, Sean’s mom, Michelle Robinson, does not remember telling Sean after he came out that he might as well have died in a car accident. “My mind is blank for anything specific,” she wrote.
In response to Sean’s reference to corporal punishment, his mom says that out of the hundred times where corporal punishment was administered correctly through biblical spanking done with love, there were “a handful of times when his father admits he acted more in anger as [an] immediate reaction because of Sean’s behavior and he realizes he should’ve done that differently [and that his dad] always immediately apologized and they always had special time together and they worked through that.”
“We believed in honoring God with our life. We were not perfect but our heart was to please God,” she wrote, adding that Sean was treated with love as a child and through adulthood.
Sean’s brother did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.
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Democrats rally at No Kings to protest Trump — but many are also unhappy with their party
Some Democratic voters at the Washington, D.C., No Kings rally voiced concerns about the Democratic Party’s opposition to the Trump administration.
Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
On October 16, 1758, Noah Webster and his wife Mercy Steel Webster welcomed a new son into their lives. They named him after his father. Noah Sr. was a farmer and weaver, and Mercy was a homemaker, and by all outward appearances, they lived a rather normal life in the West Division of Hartford — what would become West Hartford, Connecticut.
Though the elder Webster had never attended college himself, he placed great value on education, so from an early age, Mercy taught the younger Noah what she could of spelling, mathematics, music, and other subjects. At age 6, he began attending a one-room schoolhouse; later in life, he described his untrained teachers there as the “dregs of humanity.”
Regardless, Noah took to learning like a fish to water, eventually outgrowing the educational opportunities of his hometown. When he was 16, Noah Sr. mortgaged the family farm so that they could afford to send the younger Noah to Yale University to continue his studies; he graduated four years later in 1778, in the midst of the American Revolution.
After Yale, Noah wanted to study law, but his family couldn’t afford it. Remembering the deficiencies and horrors of his grade school days, he recognized that education might be a better place to make his mark. So he became a teacher.
Most of the books used in American classrooms at the time still came from England — some even included pledges to King George. There was also the matter of patriotism. There was a scarcity of American textbooks for American children, and Noah Webster decided he could help.
So in 1783, he published his own textbook, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Because it was printed with blue covers, it was known colloquially as the Blue-Backed Speller, and it became one of the most popular American books of the late 18th century, helping teach children to read, spell, and pronounce words.
But the words themselves were still anchored in Great Britain, and the lexicography coming out of England didn’t encompass the American experience. This realization set Webster on a course that would change the language. In 1801, he began collecting words and their definitions with the aim of creating an American dictionary.
His first edition, published in 1806, was called A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and it contained the spellings and brief definitions of 37,000 English words, including thousands of new words that originated on the left side of the Atlantic, words like skunk and raccoon and moccasin (entered as “Moccason or Moggason”).
Webster wasn’t the first to refer to his word hoard as a dictionary. That word had been used in English to describe a reference work at least since the early 16th century, including in the titles of Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie (1623), Thomas Blount’s Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue (1656), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and Francis Grove’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788).
The word was apparently coined by John of Garland, a 13th-century English teacher, from the Latin dictio “speech, word.” There are quite a few dict words in English from the same source, such as edict (“to speak out”), contradict (“to speak against”), and benediction (“to speak well”). The adjectival form of dictio is dictionarius, meaning “of words.” In Medieval Latin, a book containing an ordered list of words was called a dictionarium (which might be a shortening of dictionarius liber), whence the English dictionary sprang.
Compendious is an interesting word. It traces to the Latin preposition com “with, together” and pendere “to hang, to weigh.” Compendium is literally “that which is weighed together,” but in Latin it meant “a shortening, a shortcut.” A compendium is a concise summary of a larger work or, more generally, a compilation of related things. The adjective compendious, then, was chosen to indicate Webster’s attempt to be both comprehensive but also brief.
And brief is a good word to describe the entries in Webster’s Compendious Dictionary, especially when compared with all the information found in dictionary entries today. The vast majority of entries are a single line on pages arranged in two columns. And while they are technically accurate definitions, they don’t always help the reader understand how to use the word. For example:
Definite, n. a thing defined or explained
Sailing, n. the act or art of sailing
Stoic, n. a philosopher of the sect of Zeno
Webster continued to collect, define, and compile words, and in 1828, at the age of 70, he published what is considered his magnum opus: An American Dictionary of the English Language, containing definitions for about 70,000 words. That the word American replaced Compendious in the title says a lot about his motivations. He was working toward a new edition when he died in 1843.
Webster famously simplified (corrected is the word he used) the common spellings of some entries based primarily on pronunciation, creating the separation between British English and American English that exists today. For example, his dictionary dropped the u from words like colour and honour. He also favored -ize over -ise in words like crystalize and emphasize, though he wasn’t wholly consistent.
Though Webster’s dictionary was widely popular in the United States, not everything he included was universally welcomed or adopted. Some of his spelling reforms simply didn’t take: For instance, he entered the word bedclothes into his dictionary as bedcloaths, sleigh as sley, and tongue as tung. He also included words that some found objectionable. In the December 27, 1828, issue of The Saturday Evening Post can be found this bit of snark:
Webster’s Dictionary has been issued from the press of Mr. Converse, the publisher. It is contained in two large quarto volumes, and is executed in a manner highly creditable to the press of our country. He introduces into his new dictionary as legitimate, the word lengthy. We should like to know whether his reasons for so doing are breadthy and strengthy.
Regardless of the criticisms, Webster’s lexical toils set the foundation for American dictionary scholarship that extends into modern times; the dictionaries of Merriam-Webster are the direct descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language.
And that’s why October 16 — the anniversary of Noah Webster’s birth — is today celebrated by lexicographers, linguists, and logophiles as National Dictionary Day.
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!)
A white Christian Karen uses her own mistake and inability to understand to pull a Riley Gaines to make a life out of fake outrage at something she did not understand. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 