the CTA over a proposed transit hike, dancing and chanting. Members additionally staged a ritual in the Logan Square neighborhood in 2015 to protest housing inequalities throughout the city. Participating members at this event included Jessica Caponigro, Chiara Galimberti, and Amaranta Isyemille Ramos. In another instance, W.I.T.C.H. members protested the firing of a radical feminist professor by entering the sociology department of the University of Chicago and leaving hair and nail clippings all over the building. In February 1970, the Washington coven held a protest during a Senate hearing on population control. They interrupted Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough's testimony by chanting and throwing pills at panel members and people in the audience galleries. In 2015, the Chicago chapter was reestablished by three women. Their first action took place in November 2015. Later actions targeted the lack of affordable housing, abortion rights and the Trump administration's condonation of racism and sexism. In 2017, the group's members from the WITCH Chicago Coven group of 2015-2017 intentionally pulled themselves out of the public's eye to make space for the creation of an anonymous WITCH chapter in Chicago. They still promote the continuation of the practice of performing rituals to fight against inequality in all of its form. Understanding of witchcraft In their leaflets, WITCH adopted the witch-cult hypothesis by claiming that those persecuted as alleged witches in European history had been members of a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion which the Christian authorities then sought to suppress. In their manifesto, WITCH propagated the erroneous claim that nine million women had been burned to death during the witch trials in the early modern period. This claim had originated with the first-wave feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage. WITCH declared that any woman could become a witch by declaring herself to be one, and that moreover any group of women could form a witches' coven. In one of their leaflets, it is stated that: If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions... You are a Witch by saying aloud, "I am a Witch" three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by