Thread by @HeatherEHeying

Wow, @NYTimes. You have outdone yourselves. And not in a good way.

In Sunday’s paper, the NYT throws @TulsiGabbard under the bus with innuendo, while simultaneously celebrating a “witch” who would like us to “be more thoughtful about where magical crystals come from.” 1/14

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard For reasons that are ever more unclear even to me, I get a hard copy of the NYT delivered on Sundays. Below the fold on the front page today, we find this: 2/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard They couldn’t even manage guilt-by-association. Gabbard isn’t purported to be friends with bogeymen in the article (except, as always, Assad). But the fact that People-We-Don’t-Approve-Of have words of praise for her, well, we all know what that means. 3/
nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/…

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard Because People-We-Don’t-Approve-Of praise Tulsi Gabbard, the only safe conclusion is that if you support Gabbard, you’re a Nazi.

If you like anything she says, you are tainted. You have the pox. You may be irredeemable.

Gee, I wonder if this tactic could possibly backfire. 4/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard “Her isolationist stance has made her a darling of the far right,” writes the Times. I am actually, legitimately curious when & how so many values of 1960s liberals, hippies roundly mocked by moderates & conservatives at the time, have become indicators of far right politics. 5/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard The wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. is no longer embraced by the wokest on the (pseudo) Left. We are now expected to judge each other by skin color. 6/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard And having an anti-war stance, arguing that the U.S. should not be policing the world—informed, in Gabbard’s case, by actually being in the military—that’s now an indicator of…being a secret far-right sympathizer?

What complete and utter tripe. 7/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard Don’t mind me, though. I am tainted. I have the pox. I may be irredeemable.

Probably I should stay in my lane, stop asking so many damned questions, and find role models in witches: 8/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard In the same section of the Sunday @NYTimes, we get a glowing endorsement of banal, consumption-based, ladies-who-lunch style…witchcraft. 9/
nytimes.com/2019/10/11/sty…

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard The profiled witch offers: “I do have a problem with cultural appropriation, which runs rampant in the witchcraft community.”

Does it now. Is she objecting to mere mortals such as myself having black cats, or to “witches” using symbols and rituals from actual cultures? 10/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard The witch in question is concerned that some people “are jumping on the witchcraft ‘trend’” when such people claim that “an item without intention is magical.”

Unfalsifiable garbage.

I will wave my wand, and you will buy my garbage. 11/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard Also: The “coven” is “like a witchy book club,” in which “we all bring food and wine, and we hang out and talk. And we never start on time.”

So if you call hangouts with friends a coven, you get a friendly write-up in the NYT. Got it.

Maybe Gabbard should start a coven. 12/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard Witchcraft, we are told, is a way for “women to be able to step into their power.”

It *would* seem to enable women to step into something, alright. And it comes at the expense of legitimately empowering skills like logic, rigor, and basic reality checks. 13/

@nytimes @TulsiGabbard The witch, says Grossman, is “the ultimate feminist icon.”

Terrific. The “ultimate feminist icon” is a fictional being who, when instantiated in the flesh, is delusional.

#NotMyFeministIcon

/end