The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history.

We can’t save ourselves until we get comfortable with discomfort. The truth hurts. But the future we’re building without it will hurt more.

It is not good or healing or compulsory for marginalized people to connect with those who disagree that they should get to be full human beings under the law.

There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred, and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.

The world moves forward. Not in secret, not in ambush, but in front of our faces. Everyone has the choice to listen and absorb, or to shut down and dig in.

Artists who refuse to listen, participate, and change along with the world around them are not being silenced or punished by censorious college sophomores. They are letting obsolescence devour them, voluntarily. Political correctness is just the inexorable turn of the gear.

the Trump/Brexit era is a rich, famous, white, middle-aged man declaring the world to be in decline the moment he stops understanding it.

Conservatives adore a disgraced liberal who’s willing to pander to them because he’s too weak to grow.

It was about making women mad so you can call them crazy and justify hurting them to make yourself feel better about your broken little life and cling to your pitiful scraps of institutional power because you have no power as a person.

If we lose either way, why the fuck shouldn’t we just let our anger out?

If you train people to scoff at community and stewardship—at tending to the needs of others, yes, but also at advocating for oneself—you can do whatever you want to them and they will not complain.

The modern right loves to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a “real” activist, while deriding Black Lives Matter. They claim to support social justice in the abstract but hate “social justice warriors.” They’re all for freedom and equality, they say, but sneer at the mechanisms that might actually help get us there—affirmative action, deplatforming Nazis, reparations, voting rights for felons, prison abolition, respectful adjustments to language—as bleeding-heart pandering to the dreaded “political correctness.”

But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.

Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people’s lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.

The witches are coming, but not for your life. We’re coming for your lies. We’re coming for your legacy. We’re coming for our future