Witch Hunting Returns to America

Witch Hunting Returns to America

By Bill McConnell, PhD

I just finished reading the latest book in Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing” series, Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. The most interesting part of the book is the note at the end in which the authors discuss the similarities between the Salem trials and our current situation.

The authors point out that today there is a new kind of witch hunt called Cancel Culture. The parallels between some parts of America in 1692 and 2023 are stunning and depressing. But it has only been 331 years so how much progress can you expect? O’Reilly and Dugard list the similarities between then and now:

·      Willingness to treat an accusation as a fact,

·      Absence of due process, and

·      Disregard for the concept of innocent until proven guilty.

In the 1690s in Salem almost any accuser would be easily believed. There was a lack of any fair process for determining guilt. Accused persons would have to find some other way to save themselves. Ironically, the most common approach was to turn into an accuser oneself. With luck, one might then be identified with the “other side.” Laws in the 1690s did not recognize any presumption of innocence.

Many important changes have happened in America since the 1690s, the most significant for this discussion being the adoption of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. One would think that the horrors of the witch hunt days would be long gone, but they are not.

While most people in the U.S. recognize and agree in principle with the concept of innocent until proven guilty and the right to due process, when it comes to applying these principles to everyday situations, far too many fall short. Today’s witch hunters are not the insane religious fanatics of 1690s Salem but rather partisan zealots, journalists, and the media that feed on their disinformation. Modern-era witch hunters make reckless accusations. A pandering press and social media platforms then reproduce the hate virus at the speed of light.

 You could think of this as the modern era witch trial exponentially compounded by the wonders of our new technology. This is the phenomenon that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas memorably denounced as a “high-tech lynching.”

Most of us have heard of careers and lives being ruined simply by an accusation. Once an outrageous charge has a head of steam (which takes about 5 minutes), it is too late. It is disturbing that so little has changed in the last two or three centuries. As technological progress speeds along at a scary pace, we are still stuck with many of the same social and psychological problems we had thousands of years ago. Scarier still is the thought that this disparity seems to be getting larger. A prime expression of this disparity is the early 21^st century witch hunt known as Cancel Culture. The victim is no longer burned at the stake; rather, he or she is vilified, reputation destroyed, fired, denied tenure, banned from professional publications, and speaking on campuses and other venues of politically correct society.

The new witch hunters are very busy.  They have managed to get an athletic trainer fired for using the OK hand symbolbecause someone decided that it is a racist symbol. Of course, it has also meant “OK” for a long time.

They have also targeted Jerry Seinfeld reruns for the same kind of nonsense. A Hollywood insider publication, under the headline “Out of Control Cancel Culture Targets ‘Seinfeld’ Reruns,” reports that a 2015 article in Salon declared that “one of TV’s supreme sitcoms is now too ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ to enjoy. The article sprang to life after Seinfeld admitted he’d never play a college gig because students are too easily offended.”

Not to be outdone by the worst of the worst, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris quickly jumped into the witch hunt parade to support Jussie Smollett when he first claimed he was the target of a racist and anti-gay attack. Harris publicly called his claims a “modern day lynching” before obtaining any facts. Who needs facts when Smollett’s false claim so well supported the Biden administration’s effort to brand white Americans as systemic racists?

Like Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg discussed his own thoughts on the censorship that accompanies Cancel Culture. The movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was released in 1982 and includes a scene of officers with firearms chasing young kids. In the 20^th anniversary release Spielberg took out the guns and replaced them with walkie-talkies. Spielberg now says:

“This was a mistake. I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lens we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer though. . . I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and don’t recommend anyone do that. All our movies are a kind of signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there. . . For me it is sacrosanct. It is our history, it’s our cultural heritage.”

A main reason the Cancel Culture has been so successful is because of our old frenemy, technology. It has given us the internet, cell phones, and browsing.  When a modern-day witch hunter finds something salacious to post, especially about a well-known person, the post can get millions of clicks in a few seconds, and the hysteria then goes into hyper-drive.

I’m tempted to advise readers to avoid exposing themselves to people, situations, or events where they could be targeted. But is that the world we want to live in? Scientists with reservations about the UN and Biden administration’s climate catastrophism must edit their thoughts to skirt Cancel Culture censorship. Patrick Brown, a PhD climate scientist and co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute, writes that “I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published. I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.”

Amen.

Bill McConnell can be reached at wam45@comcast.net>