Thousands of witches gathered at midnight Wednesday to cast spells on President Donald Trump as part of a summer solstice ritual.
"My thought from the beginning was that Trump's presidency was surreal and abnormal; therefore, there was a need to counter him and resist his administration beyond the normal channels like public protests, petitions, emails and calls to representatives," Michel M. Hughes, one of the originators of the spell, tells Vox.
He and a community developed the spell that's now been cast across the internet as part of the #MagicResistance.
"One very powerful element of the spell is its ability to allow participants to take back their power from the out-of-control administration," Hughes says.
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With the help of the internet, witches, neopagans and other occult-based religions gathered together to practice their magic.
Medium's Matthew Gault, also a witchcraft practitioner, describes the resistance like this:
Readers may mock magick's ability to play a part in politics, but this was the first election cycle — to the best of our knowledge — where the political right employed an army of chaos magickians to turn the tide in favor of Trump. To some in the alt-right, Pepe the cartoon frog isn't just a meme — but an avatar of Egyptian chaos god Kek.
This isn't a joke. Followers such as Richard Spencer absolutely believe they helped swing the election from Trump through elaborate ritual magick spread across viral memes on the internet. For practitioners, all those Pepe memes weren't just crass humor but elaborate sigils aimed at launching The Donald into the highest office in the land.
According to Vox:
[Gault] pointed out the prevalence of various quasi-occult images and memes among the alt-right: the performance of Kek worship, for example (in which popular alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog is venerated by some in that community, albeit with no small degree of irony, as a chaos god), or professions of belief in meme magic, the notion that internet memes (such as the "Sick Hillary" meme prevalent during the 2016 election cycle) might affect real life. (When Clinton really did get ill at a 9/11 memorial, internet denizens joked that "meme magic" was behind it all.) There too, Gault noted, a kind of grounds-up, anarchic approach to ritual and religious imagery served a political aim: countering what he called the "top-down neoliberalism" that many on the political right objected to.
Dave Kubal, president of Intercessors for America (IFA), previously issued an urgent call to prayer when the resistance launched in February.
Kubal explained about a worldwide call for witches—and those willing to attempt witchcraft for the first time—to cast a spell harming Donald Trump.
According to IFA, the ritual is to be done at the stroke of midnight on waning crescent moon ritual days until Trump leaves office. The summer solstice is considered especially important.
"Whether or not this call for spells pans out and people act on it, we feel compelled, as the body of Christ and intercessors, to come against this evil with immediate and powerful prayer," the IFA reports. 
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