Nerd & Tie Network

BS-Free Witchcraft

Bullshit-Free Witchcraft is a monthly podcast on the Modern Witchcraft movement, minus any extraneous, well, bullshit. Look, aesthetics are great, and none of us would be here if we didn’t love the mystery — but there’s a lot of misinformation floating around, and this podcast aims to dispell it.

It’s a show designed to cater to all ranges of experience — from those who have been witches for decades to those just starting out. We hope there’s something here for everyone.

New episodes come out the last Saturday of the month.

BS-Free Witchcraft
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83. An Honest Review of Thorn Mooney’s “Witches Among Us”

One year ago I put out this podcast’s first book review. It was for Annwyn Avalon’s Celtic Goddess Grimoire, and I absolutely hated it. It was everything I despise in modern witchcraft publishing, and it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

I felt like I needed to fix that.

So I decided to make it my mission to find a new witchcraft book I might actually like — to find something I could actually talk positively about to this show’s audience. And that’s when I found Thorn Mooney’s Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca (ISBN: ‎ 978-0738777375) last fall.

And it turns out I really like it.

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82. The Pagan Invasion and Propaganda

The 1991 Christian propaganda series the Pagan Invasion by Jeremiah Films was oddly formative for me. It’s a masterclass in propaganda, and a perfect example of the kind of misinformation that was spreading during the heights of the Satanic Panic. So in this episode we’re going to break down how “documentaries” like these work to push an agenda, and how to recognize these patterns in other places.

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79. The Telepathy Tapes and the Dangers of ‘Magical Autism’

One of the biggest podcasts out there right now is The Telepathy Tapes. It’s topping the podcast charts on both Apple and Spotify’s American listings, but it perpetrates an incredibly dangerous idea about people with autism. But none of this is new, and we’ve seen this kind of trend before.

So it’s about time we talked about it.

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77. Agatha All Along Review (with Bree NicGarran)

It’s been about a year since Hex Positive‘s Bree NicGarran showed up to review a piece of witchcraft media with Trae, and with how terrible the world is, why not take a break and listen to two witches reviewing the latest piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Agatha All Along! Because we all need a distraction… and it’s an amazing show.

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