Oct. 29, 2016 "Politics, powerful women and hunting witches in a new age of superstition": Today I cut out this article by Paula Simons in the Edmonton Journal. It is about women and politics, social media, and mass hysteria:
The witch.
She haunts our cultural imagination, and not just in the Halloween season.
The consort of Satan, the powerful, dangerous woman who can make crops fail and turn men impotent. In 2016, she should be the stuff of fairy tales and ghost stories.
Instead, she still seems to be terrifying grown men.
When Australian politician Tony Abbott was leader of the opposition, he chose to stand in front of a sign that read
“Ditch the Witch” as he berated then-prime minister Julia Gillard for introducing a carbon tax.
When Christy Clark was leader of the opposition in British Columbia, an NDP cabinet minister sneered in the house, suggesting her choice of transportation was
a broom-stick.
Kathleen Wynne in Ontario and Rachel Notley put up with a steady stream of bloggers and social media commenters who call them witches — mostly metaphorically, but sometimes not.
And then, of course, there’s Alex Jones, the American broadcaster, conspiracy nut, and fervent Donald Trump supporter. Jones took to the airwaves earlier this month to insist that Hillary Clinton was quite
literally possessed by demons.
Multiple witnesses, he affirmed, had reported that Clinton and Barack Obama both stink of sulphur and brimstone. Flies land on them, when they land on no one else.
It would be easy to laugh off, if Jones were a random kook. But Trump has been a regular guest on his talk show, and a reliable parrot and amplifier of many of Jones’ more loopy theories.
Why this enduring fascination with the witch? And what exactly are people conjuring when they invoke the witch in their political discourse?
As luck would have it, Edmonton is blessed with more than its fair share of experts in the social psychology and cultural history of witch trials.
• Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian, who divides her time between her homes in New York and Edmonton. Her latest acclaimed book,
The Witches: Salem, 1692 has just been released in paperback.
• Andrew Gow is a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who specializes in medieval and Reformation religion and social culture. Together with his fellow U of A scholars, Robert Desjardins and Francois Pageau, Gow is the editor of
The Arras Witch Treatises, the first English-language translation of a witch-hunter’s manual, written by cleric Johannes Tinctor.
This month, the U of A puled together its expertise and artifacts and launched a new online museum exhibit called Imagining “Witchcraft”: A Book of Horrors, which explores the Arras witch trials as well as Tinctor’s guide to identifying witches — a guide whose resonance was felt right up until Salem.
Two books.
Two bookends.
Arras was one of the first big public witch trials, the first to be covered by the mass media of its day. Salem was one of the last big public witch trials. Together, they mark the beginning and the end of the witch craze that gripped western Europe and American colonies for a little more than 200 years.
We often think of witch trials as medieval, but the U of A’s Andrew Gow says they were really a product of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation — in other words, a response to the social disruptions of early modernity.
Witch trials were a reactions to upheavals in the social order.
So how much do Alex Jones’ descriptions of Hillary Clinton align with the traditional iconography of witches and demonic possession?
“Only entirely,” says Schiff, via email. “Those accusations hark back to the biblical witch, the kind who roamed about Salem.”
“The witch is a constant in our nightmares, political and religious structures aside. The traditional witch manages to bring together those things that unsettle the most: wild beasts and devious, scheming, unabashed women.”
Gow agrees. The language he sees in the American campaign, he says, strongly echoes the kind of language you’d find in Tinctor’s witch-hunting guide.
“There’s no question in my mind that some very old and very nasty stereotypes about women are being articulated by Trump and his allies,” says Gow.
“Alex Jones is a type of Inquisitor. He’s cast himself in that role and he’s using the same kind of magical thinking we see in Salem and Arras. He’s using that religious language to literally demonize his opponents. It’s all about belief, about supernatural belief, versus empirical proof.”
Gow notes that, in the case of Hillary Clinton, “it’s impossible to ignore the fact that she’s a woman.
“And among the alt-right — and by that, I don’t mean thoughtful principled conservatives — the thought of a female president is at least as distressing as the thought of a black president.”
But both Schiff and Gow agree there’s more going on here than straightforward misogyny, more than just using the handy old label “witch” as an all-purpose put-down for a powerful and polarizing female politician.
“What you have developing in the United States right now is a new post-factual era, where belief counts for more than evidence and facts,” says Gow.
“In the post-factual world view, you twist whatever meagre evidence you have to conform to your beliefs, not the other way around.”
Jones’ fulminations, says Gow, are just a subset of a larger group of conspiracy theories, about everything from vaccines to vote-rigging. And they are, in turn, all a part of a larger, historic trend, he argues, toward what historians have dubbed “
the paranoid style in American politics,” something that may well have its roots in Salem.
The appeal of conspiracy theories is that they offer simple, black-and-white, explanations in a complex world.
At a moment in history where distrust of central authorities and conventional information sources is rampant, at a time when the social order is going through an upheaval not unlike the Renaissance and Reformation, the appeal of conspiracy theories crosses all kinds of political and social lines, embraced — to varying degrees — by people on the left and the right, and from every social class.
No wonder worried householders see killer clowns hiding behind every pumpkin.
And the problem isn’t just that some people are making misogynist comments about strong female politicians such as Clinton or Notley.
It’s that in a fetid atmosphere of paranoia, where imagination can run wild, modern-day witch hunts become a real and present danger — as we project our fears onto those who unnerve or unsettle us, on those who are “different” or “other” or “outsiders” — whomever it is that we happen to distrust at the given cultural moment.
“I think we were headed straight in that direction, given the conspiratorial fantasies, the rabid xenophobia, the talk about alien invaders,” says Schiff.
“Fear is eminently contagious, especially at unsettled times. When you read the Salem testimony you see again and again how suggestible we are, how reluctantly we dissent, how easily we all admire the emperor’s new clothes.
Time and again someone points to an imaginary figure — ‘Look, a woman perched in the meeting-house beams!’ — and others claim they see her, too. No one cares to seem ignorant, or difficult, or to step out of line, especially when the price of doing so is a witchcraft accusation.”
“A common enemy moreover,” she adds, “bestows the gift of solidarity, as we know even from gossiping with our friends.”
Schiff sees other troubling parallels, in the world of social media and the way it can feed rumour and whip up mob righteousness.
“I began work on the book in part because of the remarkable parallels between oral and Internet cultures. Neither has any regard for truth; both effectively sow mass hysteria. Both invite pile-ons and public shaming. And both lead to indelible accusations.
“No one could entirely escape the suspicion of earlier witchcraft accusations; there’s a terrible story of a woman, acquitted of witchcraft charges, who took to drinking from puddles because no one allowed her to draw water from the public well. Salem reignited those kinds of lingering doubts; it made it possible to cart off many of the undesirables.”
True, we are hundreds of years away, in time and in world-view, from 15th century Arras or 17th century Salem. Despite the frenzy of fearmongering unleashed by Trump and his acolytes, we aren’t likely to start burning people at the stake any time soon.
And yet, if Andrew Gow is right and this is a new age of superstition, we shouldn’t forget the lessons of history — how easy it is to demonize a political opponent, to scapegoat an undesirable or an outsider, to whip up a mob.
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Paula Simons: Politics, powerful women and hunting witches in a new age of ...
By Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal
From Rachel Notley to Hillary Clinton, powerful women are targeted as viciously as so-called witches of centurie...
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Sept. 26, 2019
"Can a bot fight back against sexist online attacks on female politicians? Paritybot hopes so": Today I found this article by Kashmala Fida in the Star Metro:
EDMONTON—Twitter bots are often annoying trolls that pose as real people and spam your timeline with unnecessary tweets.
ParityBOT does not claim to be human, but it will restore your faith in humanity.
Created by Edmontonian Lana Cuthbertson, past chair of ParityYEG, an initiative created to support and inspire more women to enter politics, the bot detects abusive tweets directed at female candidates running in elections, then sends out a positive tweet on its account.
Although the tweet is not directed to a candidate — as in it does not name the candidate or appear under the offensive tweet posted due to spamming concerns and Twitter rules — Cuthbertson hopes candidates will see the tweets either by following the account or by having their followers retweet the messages.
The idea is to counterbalance the toxic energy on the platform as a whole with the mere presence of positive and uplifting tweets like “You are stronger than you know!” “Keep fighting!” or inspirational quotes from famous personalities.
