The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West

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The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West

Published: November 5th, 2019 by Hachette Books

Genre: Non-fiction, Essays, Politics, Current Events

Format: Hardcover, 260 Pages, Library

Rating: 4 stars

Summary:

In this wickedly funny cultural critique, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir and Hulu series Shrill exposes misogyny in the #MeToo era.

THIS IS A WITCH HUNT.
WE’RE WITCHES,
AND WE’RE HUNTING YOU.

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You’ve got one.

In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics-and that delivered us to this precarious, disorienting moment in history.

West writes, “We were just a hair’s breadth from electing America’s first female president to succeed America’s first black president. We weren’t done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form—like the Balrog’s whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can’—white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.”

We cannot understand how we got here-how the land of the free became Trump’s America—without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact-checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.

My Thoughts:

I enjoyed West's first book "Shrill" a lot better. I liked her personal story and her thoughts about everything. This collection is more "personal essay" rather than "personal story," which is fine but I just wanted a bit more from her.

Each essay has something fantastic to say, though. But some were more misses for me. Like I don't care about "South Park" and didn't really think the essay had a lot to contribute.

But overall I love West's down-to-earth style. She pulls no punches and gets you thinking. Where are my privileges and how can I show up to help and be an ally? How can I show up and be my own damn adult and get shit done?!

Some thought-provoking quotes:

"When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America's ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years."

"I got older, too, my conscience matured and solidified, and eventually I realized that the taste of it had changed in my mouth. "Common sense" without growth, curiosity, or perspective becomes conservatism and bitterness. I moved on."

"The truth of abortion is that people need abortions and always will. You cannot legislate abortion out of existence--you can control only who has safe abortions and who has dangerous ones, who is considered a full person in the eyes of her government and who is a state-owned incubator, who is free and who is not."

"Today, the anti-PC set frames political correctness as a sovereign entity, separate from real human beings--like an advisory board or a nutritional label or a silly after-school club that one can heed or ignore with no moral implications--as though if we simply reject political correctness we can keep, say, the Washington Redskins without harming native communities. But the reality is that there is 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."

"Of course now I know that there is no effective activism without the passion and commitment of ordinary people and it is a basic duty of the privileged to show up and fight for issues that don't affect us directly."

"We've won this war before, and we will win it again.

Tomorrow can be the first day.

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."