What worries me is that instead of finally being a wake-up call to do something about guns, the assassination of Charlie Kirk will be an excuse for the Republicans to clamp down on any minority group that they don’t like. Like the Nazis with the Reichstag fire, they will use it to consolidate their power.
My reaction to his death is that he died doing what he loved: sowing division and hatred — and what could be more fitting than becoming one of the people who he said were an acceptable loss because “it’s worth it to keep the second amendment”.
I had never heard of him until now, but he sounds like a horrible person (a misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-climate-science, anti-vaccine, white supremacist) so I can’t say that I am even slightly sad about his death. He was also the founder of Turning Point, an organization dedicated to promoting extreme right wing views among youth.
They say you shouldn’t say nothing about the dead unless it’s good.
He’s dead. Good.
— Moms Mabley
Mourn for the children
There are people being killed in Gaza and dying of starvation there. There was a shooting in a Denver school that doesn’t seem to have been reported on much; unless people were referring to the previous shooting; I’ve lost count, because there are so many, unlike in normal countries where we have gun control. According to Education Week:
There have been 9 school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week analysis. There have been 230 such shootings since 2018. There were 39 school shootings with injuries or deaths last year. There were 38 in 2023, 51 in 2022, 35 in 2021, 10 in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018.
None of them (or the thousands of other mass shooting victims) got a minute’s silence in Congress and neither did Melissa Hortman as far as I know (and she was the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives). Mourn for the victims of gun culture, not for its architects and cheerleaders.
The Etsy Witch
Interestingly, a writer from the magazine Jezebel paid some witches on Etsy to curse Charlie Kirk. The goal was to have him wake up every morning with an inexplicable zit and be unable to find his keys, not to end up with him being killed. Who knows if the witches consulted put limits on their curses. The Tab article about the Etsy witches has some very interesting details.
Jezebel say one [witch] said they did a “POWERFUL HEX SPELL.”
The writer claims “The witch performed the hex, but her response was unsettling: ‘just completed your spell, and it was successful. You will see the first results within 2–3 weeks. However, I did notice disturbances… negative energy not only from you, but projected at you. Likely from toxic family members, co-workers, or new acquaintances.’”
I do hope that this is not going to result in making witchcraft illegal, or persecuting witches. I remember what the Satanic Panic was like in the late 1980s (yes, there was a Satanic Panic in the UK and also in Canada, with incidents in British Columbia and Martensville, Saskatchewan).
The likelihood of this sort of thing generating a moral panic is why Wiccans are generally opposed to cursing, and very cautious about hexing and binding: because they are excuses for authoritarian governments to persecute witches. And they won’t make any distinction between different types of witches.
The Satanic Panic didn’t exactly end, it just ceased to be taken seriously by the mainstream media or politicians; but there are right wing groups like evangelical Christians and QAnon who still believe in its claims. It’s lurking beneath the surface, ready to blow up again.
The ethics of magic
I’ve written and spoken about the ethics of magic before but sometimes it is necessary to bind harmful people, as well as to work magic against harmful systems.
But this is why we should be careful about lobbing curses around — because if they succeed, or appear to have succeeded, it could result in a clampdown on witches of all kinds.
Dowsing for Divinity 