Wow, really fascinating three hours on Salem witch hunt. Well worth hearing if you have Insider.
Turns out there have been a lot of books written in the past 20 years that have been sympathetic to the accusers at the expense of the victims. Vast right-wing effort to side with the religious over the female Wicca?
No, quite the opposite. The accusers were the socialist-farmer class, accusing independent-minded men and women who threatened the groupthink to the point that no one really cared if they were witches or not, they just threatened the social order.
Direct parallel to "Russian collusion" as a means by which to punish those who threaten Social Justice. (Interestingly, first guest from law enforcement made the same point about accusations against police.)
Guest stated that the leftward trend in academia has caused authors to side with the accusers because they were socialists, completely setting aside their religious purge against (mostly) women. Fascinating way the Left now views the Salem witch hunt, and why it's not inconsistent to see them, not the religious anti-witch Right, as the descendants of yesterday's witch hunters.
I like that Coast tends to the Right, and Ian plays along despite his occasional discomfort.
Perhaps, but couldn't it have been just what it looked like - a bunch of religious zealots living in and trying to make sense of a still superstitious world? That the accused were mostly women and the accusers were traditional within the community hardly proves anything - most witches were thought to be women, and independent women would be viewed as more suspicious.
These early extremely devout protestants were not more fanatical than the people they'd left behind in Europe, it was just that they had a different religion and had been persecuted themselves by the Anglicans in England and the Catholics in much of the rest of Europe. Science was still new and evolving, and these sorts of non-scientific answers were used to explain the otherwise unexplainable by most commoners. Heck, they are still accusing people of witchcraft and killing them today in various places in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Maybe politics did play into what happened in Salem more than we've been told. Regardless, why did it take two hours to finally get to the premise? I realize Ian has four hours to fill, but the case could have been made in a segment or two and it was tedious with him teasing each segment by telling us we may end up siding with the accusers, but taking two hours to get to that point.
In any event, did anyone end up sympathizing with the accusers over the accused? Or did Ian just like the idea that they were much like the Democrats of today, twisting everything Trump says or does into something sinister and evil? I don't really have any sympathy for any of that, and don't quite understand what Ian thought would be appealing about it.