The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years.

Whatever your sphere is, however big or small, you get to make choices within it, and if you care about healing the wounds of the world I hope you become a real demon bitch about diversity and never let anyone sleep. Think radical thoughts and let yourself imagine they’re true. Then ask yourself why it’s considered radical to make art that accurately reflects reality, to build a society that takes care of its members, to demand a better world.

But at this point, when we have maybe thirty more years (if we’re lucky) before there is no more ice and many people on the right are over here calling for a RETURN TO MOTHERFUCKING COAL, and you’re still smirking at the libs for being try-hard, bleeding-heart “social justice warriors” because we want our grandchildren to experience, I don’t know, fish, then you have crossed the threshold from kicky contrarian into fully detached-from-reality genocidal psychopath.

There is no cool version of conservatism, no ethically responsible version, no rational version ready to reclaim the tiller after Trump leaves office. The word itself betrays an inherent violence: to conserve is to avoid change, to embrace stasis, to freeze frame the now because the now is treating certain people very, very well.

Irreverence is the ultimate luxury item.

If seeding nuclear war wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, Twitter wasn’t a service I wanted to endorse.

need systemic change, not whack-a-mole with one grandiose troll at a time. But change has been so slow, mystifyingly slow, even while the troll in the White House tweets threats and typos and personal attacks on individual citizens. In April 2019, Dorsey met with Trump in the Oval Office to reassure the president that Twitter was not artificially lowering his follower count. A month later, Twitter announced that it is launching—and remember, this is motherfucking May 2019—an in-house research project to START to TRY to figure out whether or not it is good to let white supremacists organize and radicalize others on their platform. “Is it the right approach to deplatform these individuals?” a Twitter executive told Vice. “Is the right approach to try and engage with these individuals? How should we be thinking about this? What actually works?” It’s farcical. It’s literally a farce. Here’s an idea: maybe instead of trying to troubleshoot the Nazi factory inside a clown’s asshole, we just let it go.