#blacklists

i came across one a few months ago and almost wanted to yeet my computer

Every once and a while I see a "Witchcraft Author Blacklist" either in the tags or getting passed around here on Tumblr, and never in my life have I thought it was a remotely useful thing.

Because every single time, they lack and semblance of nuance. Like yesterday I ran across one that literally equated Scott Cunningham with Stephen Flowers. Yes, Cunningham, a person who wrote some things that need to be read critically is, apparently, as bad as a literal fucking Nazi whose books help fund the AFA.

Like are there Cunningham books I wouldn't recommend? Absolutely. Should most of his works be read with a critical eye and take into account the state of the community and available information when he was writing them? Yes. But... like... there's a huge fucking difference between these two things.

Also, this list claimed because Cunningham wrote about Wicca his works were somehow homophobic. Have there been homophobic Wiccans? Of course - but Cunningham, an openly gay man, was not one of them.

Additionally, there are people who get included on these lists where I wouldn't recommend anyone read their books to learn witchcraft per se, but their works have important historical significance.

Like Gerald Gardner - should anyone learn from Gardner? Fuck no. His works are full of misinformation and outright bullshit. But it literally is where the modern witchcraft movement was birthed, so there is value in understanding where we came from.

Aleister Crowley falls into this category too - harder even. Crowley was gross as heck, but how can you understand what in the modern community is still descended from his works or propagating his gross ideas... if you're unfamiliar with his works?

Also, he's super dead, so it's not like he's benefiting from someone reading his stuff.

It's just so deeply frustrating that people make these lists to start with. Like, I have written or talked about how certain authors should be avoided -- but I always do my best to include context, reasons, and explanations why. I will specifically explain why I don't think they're valuable to read. Making a laundry list where you make unsourced or unexplained claims about a huge list of people doesn't help someone understand what might be wrong with them.

Also, my recommendations are usually about how a new witch shouldn't read their work, because it's about not having the experience to see what is and isn't bullshit in what they read yet. They don't have that baseline yet. That doesn't mean that some of these books might not be significant or worth reading at some point in their journey. Just not at the start of it.

It's just... a complete lack of nuance. Like I don't recommend Silver Ravenwolf because her books are, frankly, poorly researched and bad. I don't recommend Stephen Flowers because he's a fuckin' overt WHITE SUPREMACIST whose publications have been used to fund the AFA. These are not the same. When we pretend that they are, we are doing a massive disservice to all of us.

Sophie Hurwitz at Mother Jones:

[Update, July 9: On Wednesday, a senior ICE official testified in court that the Department of Homeland Security created a team to investigate student protesters “based on a list of 5,000 people identified on the Canary Mission website,” according to the Knight First Amendment Institute. The ICE testimony was in response to a suit brought by the institute against the Trump administration for violating the First Amendment rights of students, including at Columbia University.] On March 25, six people in masks approached Rümeysa Öztürk on a Somerville, Massachusetts, street. The group surrounded the Tufts University PhD student and claimed they were “the police.” As Öztürk began to call her sister, they escorted her away. Unable to contact her lawyer, Öztürk was shipped across several state lines. She was never charged with a crime. And it was only later that Öztürk’s lawyers learned that she had been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on suspicion of “support for Hamas.” 

The claim did not make sense. Öztürk is not a well-known activist. The only reason for her arrest—and potential deportation—her lawyers and friends could find was a single op-ed in a student newspaper written in support of Palestine. How did such a small thing get her on ICE’s radar? How did it warrant an operation that played out like a disappearance? The op-ed, which Öztürk co-wrote with three other students, had been published a year earlier. The only new element, which had appeared a month before her arrest, was a profile on a mysterious website dedicated to cataloging people who express pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist views: Canary Mission.  An anonymously run blog founded in 2014 to name and shame those publicly critical of the state of Israel, Canary Mission looks a bit like IMDb or an early internet wiki. Each profile carries a headshot, the offending individual’s institutional affiliations (most are professors or current or recent students), and a list of supposedly anti-Israel activities, all of which the website says are antisemitic.

The goal, Canary Mission says, is to “ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees” and “combat the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses.” But lawyers, activists, and critics of the site worry that the consequences could now be more serious than diminished job prospects and that foreign students like Öztürk—who have been rounded up by the Trump administration—may have been targeted for imprisonment and deportation because they were listed on an anonymous blacklisting site. (Öztürk has since been returned to Massachusetts.) “After being smeared on Canary Mission’s website, being falsely labeled as being antisemitic,” said Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer representing Öztürk, “Rümeysa was picked up by ICE and had her student status terminated in a matter of weeks.” The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond when asked whether they used Canary Mission to identify activists for deportation. Canary Mission and organizations reportedly affiliated with it did not respond to multiple requests for comment. What’s clear, however, is that Canary Mission has been repeatedly cited in federal lawsuits against student activists and in official US government communications with universities, as the Trump administration detains students with little explanation. Canary Mission’s “about us” page claims its content meets “high standards of accuracy and authenticity,” but the spin it puts on pro-Palestinian activities is hardly objective—especially given the increasingly severe consequences for the people it describes. Attending an antiwar protest, for example, becomes “participation in a pro-Hamas rally;” criticism of Israeli policies is framed as “demonizing Israel.”

Öztürk’s Canary Mission page says she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024.” What Öztürk did that month, according to her lawyers, was co-write a single op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, encouraging the school to “meaningfully engage with” a student government resolution asking the university to divest from Israel. “We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote. In February 2025—10 months after Öztürk’s op-ed—her headshot appeared on Canary Mission’s website. The page linked three times to her op-ed but provided no other examples of her supposed “anti-Israel activism”—let alone any illegal activities. When Öztürk visited a friend in early March, “she was concerned that there is this Canary Mission page,” her friend told my colleagues at Reveal. “I kept…trying to reassure her that you’re okay for now. I didn’t think it would be so immediate.” 

When Öztürk was detained, Canary Mission claimed credit, asserting that her profile was the “primary cause” of her arrest. A Department of Homeland Security memo justifying her detention reportedly used language nearly identical to that of her Canary Mission page. Like Canary Mission, DHS cited her op-ed.  In the wake of Öztürk’s arrest, Mother Jones spoke with multiple academics from other countries who have decided to stop traveling to the United States due to concerns that their own Canary Mission profiles could lead to detention or questioning. Joseph Howley, a Columbia University classics professor, doesn’t worry much about his own Canary page; he has tenure and US citizenship. But for international scholars like Öztürk and other vulnerable people, “Canary Mission is incredibly dangerous,” he said.

[...] Profiles on Canary Mission are optimized to soar to the top of Google results. It is a more professional operation than Masada2000—which was covered in low-resolution graphics and jokes about Muslims eating pork, with accompanying pig-oink audio cues. Canary Mission steered clear of that type of juvenile bigotry, adding to a veneer of legitimacy that some of its predecessors failed to achieve. By 2018, Canary Mission was reportedly being referenced in FBI interrogations and used by Israeli security personnel to question activists coming through Ben Gurion Airport.

[...] The money and manpower behind Canary Mission are mysterious. “Why is it so important who we are?” Canary Mission’s founders wrote in a 2015 blog post a week after launching their site. “Maybe you want to know so you can threaten us, discredit us or punish us. Many of our detractors just want to know who we are so they can physically harm us.” The site is not registered with the IRS as either a for-profit or nonprofit entity. In 2018, an investigation by the Forward connected Canary Mission to a registered Israeli nonprofit called Megamot Shalom, or “Peace Trends.” Donations to Canary Mission, the outlet reported, were being routed through Megamot Shalom.

The Israeli nonprofit registry shows that Megamot Shalom, still active seven years after its launch, has only 11 employees. More than 99 percent of its budget—about a million dollars in fiscal year 2023—comes via donations from abroad. The purpose of Megamot Shalom, as reported to the Israeli Justice Ministry’s Corporations Authority, is to “preserve and ensure the strength of Israel’s national image and to act in the media against boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel in the face of international challenges, using technological media tools.” [...] Megamot Shalom has few known employees. But one individual deeply connected to far-right politics reportedly sat on its board. As of 2016, Rabbi Ben Packer was listed as a board member of Megamot Shalom on Israel’s public charity registry. Born in the United States, Packer—who says he was a “rabbi on campus” at Duke University and the University of North Carolina—now runs an ultranationalist youth hostel in Jerusalem and lives in a West Bank settlement. He has boasted of his friendship with Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser behind many of the president’s most controversial immigration policies.

[...] Canary Mission may be the premier online outlet for branding protesters and academics as terrorist sympathizers, but it is far from alone. StopAntisemitism is a pro-Israel group that broadcasts the names and photos of those it deems antisemitic—ranging from avowed neo-Nazis to activists like Greta Thunberg. (It is also asking the Department of Justice to investigate popular children’s content creator Ms. Rachel for allegedly disseminating “Hamas-aligned propaganda” when she drew attention to the number of children who have been killed in Gaza.) And there is Betar, a century-old Kahanist organization with deep ties to the Israeli far right. It was recently revived in the United States and claims to keep a list of potentially deportable noncitizens. Betar representatives say they’ve given that list to the US government.   Collectively, this online ecosystem has grown into an informal database ready for use by those hoping to punish activists—what attorney Diala Shamas calls a “public-private system of surveillance.”

Blacklists are real, and not just from the studios but individual directors and casting agencies as well. A-list talent can likewise blacklist crew or other actors. Agents are usually the first to find out if a client happens to be on one, if and when they ask for feedback from people willing to be honest with them.

If the reason is based on unprofessional behavior, especially if any of that behavior is known to the public, then improving their reputation is absolutely within a publicist's responsibilities. (Less we can do for more personal grudges, like sleeping with a producer's wife...)

(note: all examples are either my own previous triggers unless stated otherwise)

Following a conversation in a discord I'm in, I wanted to make this post. This isn't mocking the concept of hyperspecific triggers, not is it saying that the concept of blacklists is inherently bad. However I think that making a long blacklist of peoples hyperspecific triggers, then insisting that people not only remember them but also either spoiler them or not mention them at all, is inaccessible and unethical.

I understand how they come about. You start with a general blacklist, of intense topics things like suicide or self harm or rape, and maybe a couple discourse topics you're sick of hearing about. Then someone asks if you can add a trigger on- a relatively common one. So you do. And then someone else asks, and someone else, and before you know it your blacklist is half a mile long and you can't mention marshmallows without a trigger warning and spoiler.

This is inaccessible.

If there's a long list, it'd likely be difficult to remember for anyone. Especially if people have memory issues- something that's very common with multiple disabilities, and ironically, many of the same disabilities or mental illnesses that cause these triggers in the first place. If you have a space full of people with disabilities or mental illnesses that cause memory issues, it's not particularly possible to expect that blacklist to be kept to. But if you do, and you warn or even ban people who don't adhere to the blacklist, you create a space that's hostile to disabled people.

Additionally, I've seen or been made aware of servers that don't seem to have any reasonable kind of limit for the blacklist. Servers that allow you to add prosthetic limbs to the blacklist. Limb differences. Mention of chronic pain. Facial differences. Servers that make disabled people trigger warn their own existence. That's not okay.

It's also unethical. Telling people that their triggers are on a list, so they'll be safe from them in that server, creates a false sense of security. Then if someone does accidentally forget that they're not meant to mention deodorant without a trigger warning? That false sense of security shatters. They thought they were safe in that server, but they aren't. They're not actually fully safe from their triggers anywhere really- it's impossible to guarantee that they won't be able to come into contact with their triggers.

I've had it happen in real life. Teachers told me they'd made everyone stop spraying deodorant in the PE changing rooms. I thought I was safe there. But people forgot and still sprayed, and it was worse than if I'd have know it was a risk. It meant my paranoia and feelings of not being safe anywhere got worse.

And yet these servers try and claim that the blacklist will keep them safe.

A blacklist that's gotten so long, it's almost impossible to remember.

A blacklist that has everything on it from photos of marshmallows to people's names (oh, and if that's your name? You have to go by an alias in that server) to F4 racing.

A blacklist that doesn't keep anyone safe.

FYI I watched the Show "From" (Yes, just From is the name) and it is a suspense / horror show with some very gory and realistic SFX. I queued a bunch of gifsets of the show, and some are pretty bloody and gory.

Want to block the entire show reblogs? Blacklist "from epix" (it airs on the Epix channel.)

Anything that was scary at all can be blacklisted with "horror tw" This will include blood and gore and ALSO just like, creepy kids and bugs and such.