What do a Shakespeare museum at Stratford-Upon-Avon and Arizona State University have in common? Woke and cringey propaganda about witches. And it just illustrates again that leftists are a curse on society, and live in a fantasy world of their own making.
Witches are usually — though not always — depicted as wicked in traditional European fairy tales, and even when they're not wicked, the stories usually depict them as figures isolated from or outside the rules of society, as are fairies and wizards and warlocks. This is not a commentary on "gender roles" or "systemic oppression," but simply the traditional Western idea that if magic does exist, it's not a part of ordinary human society or reality as we know it. But wokies have to take everything, even kids' bedtime stories, and turn them into Marxist commentaries on victimhood.
For the ASU seminar on "WitchTok" and how witches are supposedly brave pioneers for equality, I was not able to find that event on the ASU website, so it is not clear when or if it even occurred. But a screenshot shared on Instagram shows the original ad for the event, from Susan Nguyen, who is an English managing editor at the university. Below are a few excerpts:
Witches ... are powerful, controversial figures who show up wherever rules are being broken and stories are being rewritten.
In this Discovery Seminar, students explore witches as cultural icons — artists, rebels, memory keepers, and figures of resistance. Through fairy tales, films, TV shows, and social media, the course examines how witches have been used to challenge authority, question gender roles, and survive systems designed to silence them. We'll also look at gossip as a tool of power and protection, especially for women and marginalized communities.
Among the materials for the course are "The Little Mermaid," "Hocus Pocus," "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina," and the controversial "Agatha All Along," besides witch content on social media or "#WitchTok." I note with interest that the description does not include such traditional classics that include witchcraft, such as Macbeth, The Odyssey, or The Crucible, nor medieval fairy tales, nor even the much more modern Harry Potter series, which was still grounded in traditional Western civilization's culture and Christian imagery. Not even The Wizard of Oz, with its mix of good and bad witches, made the cut. The seminar has to borrow from kids' animation and creepy modern TV shows and movies. In other words, it has nothing to do with the history of depicting witchcraft, it's all about trying to pretend witches are misunderstood Marxist activists.
Related: Thomas Sowell Nailed the Archetypal Marxist in One Quote
As soon as I read the above seminar description, it reminded me of a display that one of the museums connected to William Shakespeare's childhood home had at Stratford-Upon-Avon in England when I visited in May 2024. Now, perhaps no classic English-language author besides Jane Austen has portrayed women so powerfully and complimentarily as Shakespeare; indeed, his plays not infrequently portray women as more clever and admirable than men. That said, Shakespeare was not, of course, a 21st century-style feminist, and to impose Marxist feminist thought on his plays is pure revisionism. Yet the Stratford museum in 2024 had a display which included the following ridiculous sign about witches:
[We] have chosen these objects to interpret their thoughts on medicine and witchcraft. They reflect on ... the housewife managing the household's health in the 1500s to the regulation of medicines we have...
The objects were a pestle and mortar, cauldron, wooden stool, drug jars, and decorative beer container. As if rebellious housewives who made medicines at home (which was not, incidentally, unusual — home remedies have been common throughout history) inspired Shakespeare's witches in Macbeth . What absolute drivel woke museums and universities produce, cheapening and obscuring the greatness of the men and women they are meant to celebrate.
