ANTIFA Witches Are Mobilizing Under Trump

Editor's Note: This article is presented to illustrate yet another example of the absurd fantasies of the contemporary Left. Its author, Callie Beusman, has a penchant for the bizarre and depraved, which her social media presence reveals. The piece is purported to be about magic and witchcraft, but it is not. This is a manifestation of cultural-Marxist orthodoxy and its corrupting influence. Apologies in advance to genuine practisers of the arcane.

I went to a sex dungeon and watched a dominatrix dressed as Hillary Clinton flog a repentant Trump voter in a diaper https://t.co/89qxYaI8oL — Callie Beusman (@cal_beu) April 28, 2017

As Trump supporters and antifa clash throughout the country, witches are turning their magical attention towards the new administration—and their spells are not all about love and light.

In the days after Trump's inauguration, after the outspoken white supremacist Richard Spencer was punched on camera, the media became entangled in a passionate ethical debate: Is it ever OK to punch a Nazi? several news outlets pondered.

Around the same time, I was sent a Google Doc containing a poetic manifesto written by a mysterious group of anti-fascist witches called the Yerbamala Collective (YMC) that seemed to raise a similar question: Is it ever OK to curse a Nazi? The manifesto was titled, succinctly, "Our Vendetta: Witches vs. Fascists." On the first page, it read, "Fuck [Donald Trump], Fascists, Richard Spencer, Milo." On the third page, in giant font, the collective proclaimed with unpunctuated urgency, "You Will Not Win Even If You Kill U We Will Haunt You Our Ghosts Will Kill Your Dog."

An antifascist spell book created by the group (also in the form of a Google Doc) offered a more extreme alternative to the Wiccan Rede, a moral code central to Wicca and several other Neopagan and witchcraft-based belief systems. "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" is the most common form of the Rede; it simply means that those who abide by the rule are free to do whatever they wish as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. "& IT HARM FASCISTS," the Yerbamala spell book states, "DO WHAT THOU WILT."

Intrigued, I contacted the group, who informed me that an interview would be difficult to coordinate, as the members of the collective are scattered throughout the US, the UK, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, and some of them wished to remain anonymous. As a solution, one member created yet another Google Doc, which I was not allowed to access due to privacy concerns, and instructed me to email them my questions, which they answered collectively and privately. They then emailed me their responses, listing the respondents only as Witch 1 through Witch 7, and noting that none of their answers were definitive, as "this Collective is way bigger than the people who have contributed to this interview, and is not defined by what we write here, but by how we fight here/there/wherever&however we can."

I'd been expecting—or, more accurately, hoping—to talk to a group of devoted spell-casters intent on bringing Trump down beneath the light of the waning moon. At first blush, however, the YMC seemed more like a group of occult-leaning queer theorists and activists, interested in creating art that interrogates and subverts the crushing logic of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy—which, I guess, is its own kind of magic. "We want a contagious art project against fascism. Fascists use collective world-making to forge a vision of what they want the future to look like. This common vision has allowed them to gain numbers, terrorize others, and kill," one YMC member wrote. "We're witches. We knew about world-making way before these fuckers."

Though most of the group's members do practice witchcraft, some of them very seriously, the term "witch" is especially useful to them "as an inclusive identity category," they told me. "Witches are historically devalued, dehumanized, and generally, you know, destroyed. Witches are a non-consumer category... Fascism depends on denying access and human rights to people in order to eliminate them. But witches do not exist. We cannot be eliminated. This puts us in a unique position to fight."

If "witch" is the term for those who live at the margins, the people society has traditionally rejected and sought to render invisible, it has a subversive utility: It gives a name to something those in power want to keep invisible and indefinable. "Witchcraft is a name given to networks that have survived despite innumerable repressions," one YMC member said. "The history of fascism is not just the history of fascist repression. It is also the history of resistance. Witchcraft is the practice of building that resistance."

About a month after the Yerbamala Collective released its manifesto, I attended a ritual to bind Trump and his supporters from doing harm, which took place in the back room of Catland, an occult store in Bushwick. Some witches who abide strictly by the Wiccan Rede find binding spells distasteful, as they can be interpreted as harmful; when I mentioned this fact to F. Jennings, who led the ritual, he was firm in his response, noting that the magical community "includes countless immigrants, people of color, indigenous groups, and many from the LGBTQ* community," all of whom are directly endangered by Trump, his administration, and their supporters. "I am all for love and light, but the gloves come off when members of our community are the target of hatred and darkness," he said.

"This [isn't] about enlightening others—binding is restrictive work. Most practitioners would much rather lead a group ritual that helps enlighten or heal others," he added. "But that's not the time we're living in right now. This is no time to idly preach enlightenment."

The Yerbamala Collective, too, has little faith that Trump and those who support him can be reasoned with through either magical or mundane means; they see the festering beliefs that ushered Trump to power as a form of dark magic, or at least an obvious symptom of spiritual decay. "The Trump administration operates within an existing colonial-capitalist ideation of 'freedom,' as in 'Make America Great Again,'" one witch wrote. "These were dark spells that continue to be fed by white supremacy and fermented ignorances. We are pointing to this old curse. Our spells run on these circuits so that they can break these spells."