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Susan Raine, Kilian LaBonte-bon |Witch Hunts and Gendered Politics
served twelve non-consecutive years as First Lady of
Arkansas and eight years as First Lady of the United
States (Zulli, 2018). Additionally, she served as a
senator for New York State from 2000 to 2009 she
was appointed Secretary of State under the Obama
Administration from 2009 to 2013 and she received
the Democratic Presidential Nomination for the 2016
election (Bordo, 2017 U.S. State Department, n.d.
Patrick, 2016 Zulli, 2018). Her public career has also
included success in publishing: Clinton has authored
and co-authored several best-selling books in a wide
range of genres, including children’s welfare, memoir,
political analysis and commentary, policy advocacy,
women’s empowerment, and fiction. She has also been
the subject of numerous books, news and magazine
articles, and scholarly works (Zulli, 2019), and both
traditional and new media have extensively covered
Clinton.
As First Lady of the United States, Clinton was
instrumental in creating legislation to reform children’s
healthcare and often championed children’s and
women’s causes (D’Antonio, 2020 Patrick, 2016).
In 1995, she traveled to Beijing for the fourth U.N.
Conference on Women, proclaiming “women’s rights
are human rights” (Clinton, 1995, p. 5 Donert, 2023,
p. 2). Clinton has made history many times, including
being the first First Lady to enter the White House
with a law degree and the first to serve in the Senate
(occupying the roles concurrently for a brief period).
Also, she is the first woman to receive a major American
political party’s presidential nomination, going on
to win the popular vote in 2016 but ultimately losing
the Electoral College to Republican candidate Donald
Trump (Bordo, 2017 D’Antonio, 2020 U.S. State
Department, n.d.).
Prior to Clinton’s independent political career, Bill
Clinton, while campaigning for the 1992 election,
remarked that by electing him to the White House,
Americans would have dual presidents (Cornwall,
1994 Kornblut &MacGillis, 2007), suggesting that
Hillary Clinton would take on a more significant role
as First Lady than her predecessors. Clinton advocated
for healthcare reform in the United States (D’Antonio,
2020 Hitt, 2007). In this regard and others, Clinton
was and remains a second-wave feminist success
story: an ambitious woman who achieved a high-
status vocation in contrast to most of the First Ladies
who served before her.7The
1
tension, however, between
what the American public had come to expect of the
First Lady and who Clinton was made her a polarizing
figure, foreshadowing subsequent and more extreme
divisions.
Clinton has been the subject of numerous conspiracy
theories, scandals, and investigations throughout her
decades-long legal and political career, dating back to
Bill Clinton’s 1977 appointment as Attorney General of
Arkansas. As the Clintons’ national visibility increased,
so too did the incidence of conspiracy theorizing about
the couple—much of it emerging from the Republican
right (D’Antonio, 2020 Gatehouse, 2022 Brisini,
2019). As Clinton became more successful within the
American political establishment, some sectors of the
public became more distrustful of her. Conversely, a
strong sector of the population admired Clinton for
her achievements and dedication (D’Antonio, 2020).
Still, the detractors were persistent. In January 1998,
reflecting on the fallout of the Monica Lewinsky and
Bill Clinton affair, Clinton remarked in a speech that a
“vast right-wing conspiracy” was plaguing the Clinton
Administration8 (Kurtz, 1998).
Hence, despite Clinton’s sixty-seven percent approval
rating and designation as America’s most admired
woman by the late 1990s, the minority who disapproved
of her would be rallied by the political right to apply
their feelings about her to the Democratic Party
generally—all at a time when the politics of hatred
and “negative political attacks” were becoming a more
popular tool (D’Antonio, 2020, p. 79). The resolve
of this small, largely Republican—and often very
conservatively religious—group to eradicate Clinton
from the American political milieu further intensified,
laying the foundation for an expansion into a larger
and more intense public fixation on Clinton a decade
later.
7 Some other first ladies were politically active. For example, Eleanor
Roosevelt (1884–1962), wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–
1945) actively pursued causes that were important to her, including civil
rights, women’s rights, and a variety of humanitarian issues. She traveled
throughout the United States to witness social issues firsthand and would
then report what she had observed to her husband. She had been engaged
with social justice and political concerns prior to, during, and after her role
as First Lady (National Archives, 2025).
8 Clinton was referencing a 332-page report compiled by political
consultant, Chris Lehane, titled, “Communication Stream of Conspiracy
Commerce.” The document outlines the way in which narratives are
circulated in ideological circles (typically right-wing), are subsequently
picked up by British tabloid media, and then are discussed in right-wing and
Republican media circles in the United States (Garofoli, 2004 Kurtz, 1998).

International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 9, Issue 2 2026 22
Clinton, however, had faced bias, discrimination, and
outright misogyny for most of her life. As a child, she
dreamed of becoming an astronaut and even wrote to
NASA, which replied saying that women could not be
astronauts. Years later, when she sat the entrance exam
for law school, young men berated her for potentially
taking a man’s position away from him. From these early
experiences through to the end of Bill Clinton’s two-
term presidency, Hillary Clinton had been scolded,
accused of crimes, lied about, publicly humiliated, and
more—and often for being a woman in politics rather
than for her political affiliation (see D’Antonio, 2020,
for a full account of the targeted campaigns against
her).
For all she had endured, however, the intensification
of conspiracy theory culture in the 2000s facilitated
an unprecedented level of vitriolic conspiratorial
narratives that took the nascent witch hunt against
Clinton to new and unimaginable levels. As Bordo
(2017) commented, “[O]f course, there was the gender
factor, which throughout Hillary’s career has made her
a living Rorschach test of people’s nightmare images of
female power. It’s no surprise that as she came closer
and closer to the most powerful position in the world,
the misogyny directed toward her became increasingly
vicious” (p. 27). The political–religious right’s fear that
feminists undermined conservative patriarchal values
meant that scapegoating and persecuting9
1
Clinton for
9 The terms scapegoat and scapegoating have a lengthy history, having
biblical foundations and subsequent theological translations. The details and
description of the process vary cross-culturally and have evolved throughout
history—and the behaviors associated with scapegoating pre-date the bible
(Douglas, 1995).
Scholarship on scapegoating is diverse and has defined and
adapted the concept according to academic field, culture of application and
time frame (Douglas, 1995 and Girard, 1986). Thus, scapegoating is no
longer confined to religious-political settings but is identified in numerous
institutional settings e.g. therapeutic, familial, and workplace (Douglas,
1995). For a comprehensive historical overview of scapegoating see Douglas
(1995) as well as Jensen (2007). This article draws both on Jensen’s use
of scapegoating within the context of witch hunts—and contemporary
psychological definitions.
Jensen uses scapegoating in his narrative whilst also addressing
that it has acquired multiple meanings and is closely connected to the
concept of persecution. One can use this latter concept (which Girard, 1986
discussed at length) in the context of the witch hunts to illustrate how victims
of ‘ritual violence’ are symbolic of others who are viewed as threats i.e. those
persecuted as witches were “symbolic of a female threat to patriarchy”
(Jensen, 2007, 53). Using the language of scapegoating witches is especially
common in research. This word connotes several processes including the
idea of ruling elites acting on their frustrations, anxieties and angers at
social conditions by purging these emotions by locating a target for them
e.g. identify women as witches and thus hold them accountable for social
problems. Scapegoating refers also to a tactic of diversion whereby the elites
engage in strategies that distract the population from other problems e.g.
identify women as witches to distract from the ideological battle between
Protestantism and Catholicism. Jensen is careful to note that scapegoating
1
all that was allegedly immoral in the United States was
not only an effective political strategy, but also it was
essential to preserving and expanding patriarchal order.
Although the witch hunt against Clinton began in the
very early days of her husband’s political aspirations,
many people with varying degrees of power colluded to
destroy her reputation and end any political ambitions
and power they feared she might have (D’Antonio,
2020).
The purpose of this article is to detail some of the
widely spread conspiracies about Clinton after she
won the Democratic nomination for the presidency
in 2016. To discuss and analyze these narratives as a
modern-day witch hunt, we first examine key themes
and characteristics of early European witch hunts.
These events form the basis for our analysis. Then we
examine the criteria for witch hunts (Wood et al., 2017)
and apply them to several Clinton conspiracy theories,
illustrating the concept’s continued efficacy.
Witch Hunts: Then and Now
Then: Politics, Religion, and Gender in the European
Witch Hunts (1300s–1700s)
The European witch hunts disproportionately
targeted women as witches because they were viewed
as spiritually weaker, more vulnerable to the devil’s
influence, sexually unbound, and, in myriad ways, lesser
than men (Goodare, 2016 Jensen, 2007 Russell, 1980).
Demonologists10 and the authorities linked to them
targeted women who were assertive, outspoken, and
defied traditional roles and religious expectations, and
therefore, the divine patriarchal order. Consequently,
monarchs, religious leaders, Christian reformers,
politicians, magistrates, and all others involved in
the machinations of the witch hunts sought to “purify
and persecution are closely connected—and that the numerous scholarly
contributions to scapegoating make conclusive and universally applicable
definitions of it, very difficult (Jensen, 2007).
Finally, scholars have produced social psychological theories
of scapegoating. Currently, the American Psychological Association defines
scapegoating as follows: “blaming: the process of directing one’s anger,
frustration, and aggression onto others and targeting them as the source
of one’s problems and misfortunes.” We find that both Jensen’s and the
APA’s approach to scapegoating are applicable, as is Jensen’s approach to
persecution.
10 Demonology is the study of witches, demons and other entities.
Beginning in the 1400s, religious figures, monarchs, academics, theologians
and others produced numerous texts and images that “debated the extent
and power of Satan, demons, and witches, about their corporeality or their
illusory nature” (Voltmer, 2020, p.20).