On Monday, September 8, left-wing feminist website Jezebel published an article: “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.” Two days later, on September 10, Charlie Kirk got shot through the neck in Utah and died. Does this mean that magic actually works? It depends on what you mean by the word “magic.”
Jezebel’s piece was actually rather tongue-in-cheek, and it simply called for annoying things to happen to Charlie—like wanting “his podcast microphone to malfunction every time he hits record” or desiring “his thumb to grow too big to tweet” with it—not for him to take an assassin’s bullet. Nonetheless, the piece’s author did say she wanted to do all this for what she saw as being a serious reason: namely, to begin “punishing Kirk for the years of regressive rhetoric he’s shouted at America’s youth and anyone within earshot,” pieces of “regressive rhetoric” like “I’m a Christian,” “close the borders,” “Islam is our enemy,” “I believe in marriage,” and “biological women exist,” maybe.
If you go to the relevant webpage on Jezebel now, you will find the original piece has been taken down and replaced with an apology “on the recommendation of our lawyers,” although the editors do emphasize that it “was intended as satire and made it absolutely clear that we wished no physical harm.” Although certain aspects of the apology do read almost like a joke (“we want to make clear that we prioritize an end to violence over anyone wanting to read about Etsy witches”), it does seem obvious that the piece itself was just intended as a piece of what the writer thought would have been harmless humor.
The trouble is, that’s not always how magic is supposed to work…
Hex and Violence
One witch Jezebel hired through Etsy (a website where people offer their specialist artisanal skills and products to the public—here, magical spells), who calls herself “Priestess Lilin,” later explained to British journalists how her curse against Kirk had worked:
Throughout the witchcraft community many of us believe that spells, magic and curses are very real and can bring about profound change in this world, whether it be through psychological or metaphysical means. As sisters we have dealt and seen things we cannot explain, done things that defy logic, magic is very much real to us. While we cannot claim literal responsibility for Mr Kirk’s death, we do affirm that the magic we work with is effective. When you work that in alignment with the collective energy, it can manifest in unthinkable ways. We hope that sums up our stance on this matter…Infernal Blessings, Priestess Lilin.
What did Priestess Lilin mean by this? She seems to contradict herself by saying that “While we cannot claim literal responsibility for Mr Kirk’s death, we do affirm that the magic we work with is effective.” How can magic be “effective” if it does not have any “literal” effect at all? The way to understand this idea is by realizing there are competing schools of thought about the issue. Some witches, wiccans, pagans, and others believe that magic functions in precisely the cartoon way you see it doing in the movies; that is to say, a literal supernatural force at work in the world around us.
Others, however, view magic’s effects through a more psychological lens, seeing it as a type of subtle but effective psychological manipulation—a form of advertising, essentially, intended to bend individuals and society to one’s own chosen will. In a sense, you could call it a kind of political propaganda. Twenty years ago, for example, almost nobody in their right mind literally believed that biological men could be biological women, and vice versa; now, thanks to a relentlessly manipulative media and “educational” campaign, millions of people have been deluded into accepting this very same wholly false premise, including numerous actual doctors and scientists.
In a way, actual physical reality has thus now been altered by the seductive “spells” of transgenderism like “Trans Women ARE Women!” being incanted daily from our campuses and media pulpits. Such ritual incantations are akin to spells of physical transformation or metamorphosis, via which the enchantress of old could supposedly transform herself into an animal or the false doppelganger of another human person—even one of the opposite sex.
In a way, actual physical reality has thus now been altered by the seductive “spells” of transgenderism like “Trans Women ARE Women!”Tweet ThisWhen we say that someone has “fallen under the spell” of some ideology or other, to certain practitioners of witchcraft this is not simply a figurative metaphor; they mean it literally, if by “spell” you actually mean a kind of behavior- and belief-altering brainwashing. Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, for example, is reported to have been in a relationship with a transgender roommate, and he is presumed by many commentators to have been motivated by some kind of trans ideology. It’s a simple fact that there is a growing witchcraft subculture of “queer witches” out there these days, and no wonder: transgenderism itself is a brand of “magical thinking” in more ways than one.
Very Weird Sisters
Attempts to “change the consciousness” of our entire society via acts of left-wing witchcraft are not entirely new. During the 1960s, hippie hexers saw in witchcraft a great aesthetic means to try and undermine the traditional Judeo-Christian-capitalist basis of American society. The feminist organization WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) was formed in 1968; it did not feature any genuine spell-casters and cauldron-botherers among its ranks, simply cosplaying leftists who saw in the image of the witch a propagandistically useful image of the female outsider, rejected by mainstream normative society.
Enemies of Christ, the patriarchy, and the law, witches made excellent radical icons. So their immediately recognizable comic-book outfits were made good use of by WITCH members to disrupt “enemy citadels” like bridal fairs and the New York Stock Exchange, where they pulled childish stunts like releasing white mice among attendees or waving brooms around.
Would these actions really curse stock-traders or brides-to-be so completely that they ended up going Commie, getting divorced, or turning lesbian? No, not literally, but they caught easy media attention and helped make previous radical-sounding alternatives to normal modes of “bourgeois” living seem altogether more thinkable and possible in the eyes of those who read about their pranks.
That’s why, these days, WITCH is still being promoted to impressionable young girls in the pages of the leftist-captured Teen Vogue, or youth-courting websites like Vice, as a model to be admired and emulated. And such tactics work: in 2015/16, WITCH, by then long-defunct, was revived in Chicago by groups of left-wing females who aimed to cast spells against local gentrification practices in the name of affordable housing for all. During interviews, it was noticeable how many of these sorority sorceresses used variants of the phrase “I identify as a witch.” Nowadays, simply to “identify” as something you really are not is the greatest and most effective socially sanctioned spell of all.
His Candle Snuffed
While much of this kind of thing is intended by its practitioners semi-humorously, as with the Jezebel piece, sometimes the aims of the spell-casters are distinctly darker. Once Donald Trump was elected for the first time in 2016, witches all across America came together in attempts to curse both the man himself and members of his administration.
In an article I wrote elsewhere last year, I detailed the attempts of left-wing occultist Michael M. Hughes, author of the 2018 anti-Trump book Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change, who explained how his ceremonies and rites were more psychological than paranormal, intended for “putting gas in the spiritual gas-tank” of participants and to “help change their consciousness and re-energize them” in their political crusading. Trouble is, gasoline can sometimes be explosive if not handled with the proper due care.
In 2019, Hughes wrote a temperately-titled magical essay, Fighting Nazi Scum with the #MagicResistance, aimed specifically against Trump’s immigration adviser (or anti-immigration adviser, perhaps) Stephen Miller, which featured a symbolic ritual I described thus:
This involves a racially significant small white candle, representing Miller and his ilk, and a “substantially larger” black candle representing “people of color, immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ and all those targeted by white supremacists.” You place the latter behind the former, “visually overshadowing and overpowering it,” then concentrate your will and use “your third eye” to help “all those working to save our country and our planet”—i.e., the Democrat Party, BLM, Antifa, etc., etc. Lighting the candles, you tell the black one “You are powerful. You are strong. You are courageous and protected and loved”—like George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Brianna Taylor. Then, whilst keeping the black one lit, you snuff the white one out and kill it off completely. How very symbolic. You then place the dead white candle into a sealed jar with various unpleasant noxious substances, whilst “imagining the screams and cries of Stephen Miller as his fate is sealed.” “May hatred be extinguished,” worshippers are then exhorted to chant—excepting their own hatred for white conservative people.
Literally speaking, messing about with candles like this will have absolutely zero effect whatsoever upon the well-being of Mr. Miller. But the effect upon the mental well-being of someone already clearly mentally unbalanced—like a future transgender shooter who engages in activities like this rather more than once every full moon, obsessively directing all their prejudices and psychoses onto potential targets of hatred like enemy politicians or the students of “trans-erasing” Catholic schools—might be a different matter. How might their consciousnesses be changed by such magic, whether explicitly draped over with superficial trappings of the occult, or simply of more secular mainstream identitarian shibboleths like “trans rights”?
I think we just saw the answer to that question when Charlie Kirk got shot. Looks like curses can kill after all.
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