For an administration that has made clear at every turn its contempt for marginalized women and the issues that most deeply concern them, it sure does love to identify with them. Why else would a president and his minions keep referring to themselves as the misunderstood village crones?
Taking a page from the Richard Nixon playbook, the tweeter-in-chief has of late developed a deep fondness for the phrase "witch hunt." On Tuesday morning, he deployed the phrase three times in a row — possibly while standing in front of a mirror and hoping to summon something exciting from the other side of the glass. Specifically, he referenced the "rigged Russia Witch Hunt," which keeps to his theme of the "phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt" and the straightforward, no other words necessary "WITCH HUNT!"
The White House's embrace of phrase has trickled down. Rudy Giuliani has been doling it out since at least last fall, when he called the investigation into then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie a "partisan witch hunt." Earlier this month, he talked to local Washington station WJLA, and after asserting that "The president can’t be indicted" (which is debatable) he insisted, "There is a witch hunt." In April, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that the president believes that the Mueller probe is "a witch hunt," adding, "I’m not sure how we could be any more clear."
Much like the phrase "lynch mob," "witch hunt" in its modern usage seems a favorite of people who don't have a great grasp of its historical connotations there. For context, consider that both terms have also, in recent months, been applied to the #MeToo movement. Nothing like demanding accountability to incite cries of oppression.
Real witch hunts date back to ancient times and have been practiced all across the globe. The practice peaked in medieval Europe, when as many as 60,000 individuals were executed for the perceived crime. As BBC News magazine explains, accused witches were often "the convenient scapegoats for anything from a death in the village to the failure of crops. Individuals would often have been branded a witch after falling out with a neighbor…. Most would be poor and elderly." Three-quarters of them were women.
Witch hunts are still conducted in certain parts of the world today. In Gambia, former leader Yahya Jammeh reportedly regularly enforced them, targeting "poor, elderly farmers, forcing them to drink a hallucinogenic liquid before pressuring them into confessing to murders by sorcery." Over a span of seven years, suspected witches were subject to "kidnappings, beatings and forced confessions." Amnesty International confirms two deaths from the campaign, though the real number of victims is likely much higher.
Here in the United States, we associate witch hunts most closely with the infamous trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 17th century. As historian Rebecca Beatrice Brooks explains, "Many of the accused witches were outspoken women, Quakers, slaves, colonists with criminal backgrounds and/or prior witchcraft accusations or colonists who criticized the witch trials." Consider the first three women famously accused — "Tituba, a Caribbean slave; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman." In all, 20 people were executed, and four more died while awaiting trial. None of them lived in gold towers or had reality shows.
The ignorant and manipulative are never going to stop being ignorant and manipulative -- and saying the same phrase over and over and over again is effective. It absolves both the originator of the smear and the people parroting him of having to come up with any real rebuttals or arguments. Just as happened with "fake news," "witch hunt" has now become a handy rallying cry for irritable trolls both on and off your social media feed. And why not? They are the flip sides of each other. Say something that disrupts a White House account of anything, even if that account itself is full of contradictions? FAKE NEWS. Ask a question about apparent falsehoods and inconsistencies? WITCH HUNT. It doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter that you might as well be screaming MANGOES AND ORANGES. All that matters is that it's insubstantial, and easily repeated.
The insistence of this administration to recast itself in the role of persecuted victim or outcast is galling to anyone who ever read "The Crucible" in high school, but the hyperbole is exasperating if you didn't. And it feels unbelievably pointed — an appropriation of state- and church-sanctioned violence and torture directed overwhelmingly at women, in particular women at the margins of society. "Who's the real victim now?" asks one of the most powerful men, consistently butt-hurt in the world as he tries to yank away programs that help women and the poor. (Spoiler: He thinks it's him.)
At least Jordan Peterson, subject of the wildest New York Times profile in recent memory, understands how the whole witch thing actually operates. In his sound-bite rich interview earlier this month with Nellie Bowles, the Canadian academic gave the witch population a shoutout by stating, "It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah. Why?” He expanded on the theme by explaining that "You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.” Then he gave his views on "enforced monogamy."
Peterson's bizarre notions about witches may appear on the surface to be just so much glorious word salad, but they make a perfect companion ideology to the "witch hunt" rhetoric rising like stale flatulence out of the White House. It's all about power. It's about the fear of power in the hands of anyone else, about the fear of having one's long held and entirely unearned privileges taken away. It's about the terror of anyone, anywhere, doing things that small-minded, fearful don't understand and can't control.
You need only look as far as "The Wizard of Oz" to know that witches get a bad rap. Witches are, just as often as not, the heroes. The healers. The truth-tellers. The ones who've paid the price for being different. If they're having a moment in the public conversation now, it's not because powerful men feel ostracized and victimized. It's because those men are scared. Scared that there are forces in the world stronger than they are. Scared that their hypocrisy will not sustain them. When the supposed commander in chief whines that he's the subject of a witch hunt, it's ludicrous not just because that's not how governing works. It's absurd because the witches would never have him.
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