#you don't have to agree with their takeaway but you are ignoring their existence outright by talking about the concept under the lens of

[naivety]

kamalaheads love to say it's "mostly virtue-signaling white people" who don't want to vote for harris due to the two party backed genocide happening in gaza and then proceed to equate doing so with not giving a shit about "queer people, Jewish people, women, the elderly, people of color, the disabled, and any other group all across the country and the planet who aren't straight white (male) Christians" while conveniently ignoring the people not included in their proposed "mostly" who happen to be incredibly prominent palestinians on this website that thousands of people followed to learn more about palestine in the first place who have been campaigning to help actual gazans survive on a daily basis for more than a year now, and the second they're like hm not super excited about promoting the party that actively sent bombs to help kill 40,000+ people, i won't do that actually, americans who are more scared of trump than their democratic president sponsored bombs because they know it won't be their houses they're dropped on have the fucking gall to reduce it to oh so you don't care about disabled americans? so you want queer americans to have no rights? well well well!!!!! i will call out all the white american voters who happen to agree with you while conveniently never meaningfully engaging with you, an actual palestinian, about this wider topic on how even the "lesser of two evils" version of american democracy affects other countries across the globe against their will in escalated ways that now and actually often include literal genocide that the average american voter won't lift a finger about as soon as election season is over, nor care to challenge the cultural and societal icebergs including so-called "american democracy" that belie this normalized trend the second it inconveniences their version of a better life as an american 👍

[headspace-hotel]

as much as i do agree with your weird memes-to-tradfem pipeline post, there is a part of it that nips at me. witchcraft- and by that i am mostly referencing that practiced in Paganism- is a genuine religion for a lot of people. for sure there are a lot of newbie people who see watered down wicca on, like, pinterest, and do baseline surface level things and call themselves witches, and then post those memes and get into weird tradfem territory, but it feels... sort of weird to imply that an entire religion that has existed for a very long time is founded on nothing but lies and pseudoscience. respecting others' religions is important- every human being should have the right to pick their own faith. what is important here is harm reduction- and that means leading vulnerable people (esp. women who are unaware of this sort of weird pipeline, and more susceptible to falling for it) away from that. the endgoal should be education and safety nets, not like... trashing a whole faith system?

i don't know. i may be misreading your post/intent, and i apologize if i am! but the amount of comments on it that have started outright invalidating and denying any and all faith is really sort of concerning, and i suppose i felt like saying something about it, at the very least.

bad witch memes can lead you down a weird internalized misogyny rabbit hole. rejecting and bashing all faith can lead you down even worse rabbit holes in regards to more marginalized religions than paganism. just be careful.

The takeaway I hoped others would have is that you HAVE to keep your brain close at hand when exploring spirituality and faith.

To me, the biggest and most obvious example of religion/spirituality being a gateway to conspiracy shit is, of course, Christianity. The reasons for this are so complex it would take hours to outline them, and many are specific to Christianity, but there are several that I think can apply to any belief system:

people think of critical thinking and faith as being opposed to each other (they're not)

people exploring new belief systems are generally looking for meaning in life and people in that state are more susceptible to conspiracy

belief systems often have a process of unlocking insight/enlightenment/truth about the world through deeper study, prayer, etc whatever, and it's very easy for cult-like environments to exploit the process of seeking spiritual understanding and use it to isolate you from outside communities and the world, rather than connect you to it

there are genuinely a few ideas that can wiggle their way into a variety of different beliefs just because their central assumptions are so culturally ingrained. A lot of stuff about "natural" food and healthy eating comes from diet culture and ableism, basically.

on the subject of that last one, I think it winds up entangled in spirituality because ultimately, diet culture and ableism have...a spiritual component to them, as weird as that sounds. The way we think about disease and food is often in terms of fault, sin, and 'purity.'

Food is 'guilt-free,' you have to restrict and ignore your hunger to eat healthily because what the body wants is bad (thanks, St. Paul), people are disabled because of something they did wrong and wouldn't be disabled in a hypothetical 'perfect' world where no one did anything wrong (Eden/the 'pre-fall' state of man), we have to return to nature and disease will disappear (again, the presumption of 'nature' as something inherently good that humans have corrupted is Eden/fall of man stuff). It's a mutation of Christian ideas.

Now, here's the most relevant thing: people who are coming from a culturally Christian background often cannot identify when an idea is, well, culturally Christian.

Almost all of the questionable memes in the 'Goddess' to 'Tradwife' pipeline are just recycled Conservative Evangelicalism. The 'sex links your soul to someone' thing, the ideas about gender, it's the exact same stuff with a different coat of paint.

Now, some (not enough) Christians use enough critical thinking to question this stuff and realize it's crap. Plenty of witches probably do too. But conservative Evangelicalism is REALLY PERVASIVE in culture, and it in particular is big on the idea that "faith" means you throw your brain away. People of all stripes are vulnerable to applying that sort of thing.

Also. I really should have led with this because I want to stress it:

'Witchcraft' is kinda trendy right now, and like all trendy things, it's infested by people who want to take your money. One of the best ways to take someone's money is to lie to them.