Witch-Hunt!

The POTUS says he’s the object of a Witch Hunt, but he’s playing tricks with smoke and mirrors. There is a whole lot of burning that’s going on. Cuba, NATO, the Paris Accord, Immigration, the Environment, Affordable Health Care, Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment of the Arts, and our beloved national parks.  Despite the claim of POTUS, he is not the object of a Witch-Hunt; he’s the hunter and ‘We the People’ are the hunted.

The tempestuous POTUS is flaming so hot that it’s not only social and economic issues, Constitutional law and venerable public institutions that are burning at the stake. In the cloud of blinding smoke, there is the erosion of integrity and the disintegration of respect that was once accorded to the American people and the President of the United States.

Witch-hunt? The reality is witch-hunts are really bully pulpits. The accusation of witchcraft is often an attempt to blame somebody else. It’s called scapegoating. A witch-hunt is a search for people labelled "witches" who practice witchcraft, causing disease, pestilence and moral turpitude. A witch-hunt usually involved mass hysteria and the breakdown of of moral order—when people are feeling scared and desperate, lies are made to be real and the truth is spun to be untrue.

Today’s witch hunter searches for the witches who are causing opioid addiction, the lack of American manufacturing jobs and the oppression of white men. Today’s witches are Liberals and Democrats, Obama and Clinton. They made America’s problems. All of them. Ouch! And they need to burn!

POTUS has given witches a bad name! Historically, many witch hunters were men who held that women were far more likely to come under the spell of the Devil and become witches. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, held that “some witch hunts did almost exclusively target women, in percentages as high as 95% of the victims.” Another fact worth noting is that the members of its legal system, its “judges, ministers, priests, constables, jailers, judges, doctors, prickers, torturers, jurors, executioners, were nearly 100 percent male.” *

Remember the Witch Trials in Salem Massachusetts? In the late 1600s over 150 men, women and children were accused of witchcraft, and many were executed. The Massachusetts court later annulled the verdicts and compensated families for their loss. However, it is important to remember that most of the victims were women. From the 1500s to the 1800s, over 200,000 witches were tortured, burnt or hanged in the western world. And most of them were indeed women. Burn baby Burn.

Now to be fair… the POTUS might feel like he’s a witch who’s being hunted. And he’s right, to some extent, he is being hunted because we want to see his numbers. And by numbers, we don’t want him to pull up his shirt so we can see if he has three breasts like all other women accused as witches including Anne Boleyn. ** We want to see his financial numbers. His tax returns.

The whole concept of witchcraft is that of a witch using supernatural powers to harm others. In the case of POTUS, he is using real political power to slash and burn America.  Instead of taking responsibility for our own problems and spearheading collaboration and consensus to find pragmatic and fair solutions that work, the POTUS is hateful, harmful and spewing incendiary lies to inflame the masses.  While POTUS distorts and perverts the truth, he and his cronies are getting ready for a real big witch-hunt. But the POTUS ain’t no witch. He’s Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns. The only thing burning at the stake is our own integrity and the world’s perception of America.

*(Anne L. Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts: Our Legacy of Violence Against Women (San Francisco: Pandora/Harper Collins, 1994), 142).

**Henry VIII, King of England accused his second wife of being a witch. He claimed she had three breasts, bewitched him and used trickery to get him to to divorce Catherine of Aragon and make her the Queen. #Truth: Anne Boleyn did not produce a male heir and he wanted to get rid of her so he could marry Jane Seymour.