The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

If the Left’s loathing of George W. Bush energized us to fight for and ultimately elect Barack Obama, what kind of political revolution might Trump engender?

Americans are addicted to plausible deniability.

Ted Bundy was a mediocre student whom no one liked who failed at everything he ever tried to do except for exploiting women’s socialization as caregivers in order to put them into vulnerable situations so he could take away their one single precious exquisite life.

But in order to cook two full meals from scratch every day, I had to take hours out of the middle of my workday to chop, essentially, one of every vegetable, and then clean my entire kitchen three times a day.

My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer’s tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because it’s “your job” and your wife should “get up.”

The reason i picked this up

One of the subtlest and most pervasive is social ostracism: coding empathy as the fun killer, consideration for others as an embarrassing weakness, and dissenting voices as out-of-touch, bleeding-heart dweebs (at best). Coolness is a fierce disciplinarian.

Those of us who complained about online abuse were consistently told—by colleagues, armchair experts, and random internet strangers—that we were the problem. We were too soft. We, who literally inured ourselves to rape threats and death threats so that we could participate in public life, were called weak by people who felt persecuted by the existence of female Ghostbusters.