As with so many things, one can hold the media partly responsible for the hysteria. In this case, one of the sources of fake news of the time was Cotton Mather’s 1689 book, Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions.8 The events described in Mather’s book charted the course for the Salem Witch Trials. Many of the shocking cases cited in that book began with children’s behavior. In 1692, much like today, a lurid fake story was destined to be passed around far more quickly than a calmly reasoned, and less sensational, factual discourse. Once the idea had been set in the public’s mind, there was no shaking it. A book by the respected clergyman, and the odd behavior of the three local children, were a match quite literally made in heaven.
As news of the arrests and of the children’s behavior spread through the town of some six hundred citizens, parents may have realized they had an opportunity to settle old scores under the guise of witchcraft accusations.
While the hysteria gathered force throughout the early spring, the numbers of those accused continued to grow. By the end of May, more than sixty people were jailed and awaiting trial. That was when the governor was finally forced to establish his Special Court of Oyer and Terminer.
On June 10, that institution hanged its first victim, Bridget Bishop—a brassy widow whose late husband had run an inn. She was apparently accused of no crime in particular other than that she was a soft target. The woman was known for playing shuffleboard and wearing red clothing, which was considered to signify sexual yearning and prowess.9
Meanwhile, Mather wasn’t done writing. His words continued to fan hysteria. After Bishop’s death, the court was temporarily suspended and a group of Boston ministers were asked for guidance. Mather, who drafted the group’s response, had an opportunity to inject some coolheadedness into the proceedings.
He didn’t. Instead, putting his agenda ahead of justice, he crafted the equivalent of fake news and contributed his own call to arms to the court, writing, “we cannot but humbly recommend unto the government, the speedy and vigorous prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God, and the wholesome Statutes of the English nation, for the detection of witchcrafts.”10
At the peak of the hysteria, few citizens, regardless of their standing, were immune from accusation. Martha Corey, a member in good standing of Salem Village’s church, came under suspicion when she bravely voiced concerns about the truth of the young girls’ accusations. At Corey’s trial, some of her accusers began mimicking her actions and claiming they were under her control. She was found guilty and hanged on September 22. Her husband, Giles, who had sought to defend her against the allegations, had been crushed to death under a pile of stones three days earlier.11
Dorothy (also Dorcas) Good was another early defendant: the testimony of the four-year-old implicated both herself and her mother (a nonchurchgoer whom Dorothy swore she had seen interacting with the Devil). Dorothy was released from prison on December 10, 1692, without being charged. Her mother, however, had been hanged five months earlier, on July 29.12
Taking a moral stance against the hysteria was dangerous. Dudley Bradstreet, nearby Andover’s justice of the peace, issued thirty warrants related to witchcraft between July 15 and September 7. After writing out eighteen on a single day, he refused to grant any more arrest warrants—and was promptly accused of killing nine people through witchcraft himself. Bradstreet took the charges so seriously he fled the region.13
Ironically but fittingly, the end of the hysteria was inadvertently brought about by Cotton Mather. In September 1692, he requested records from approximately a dozen trials of individuals condemned for witchcraft. He incorporated these into his book, Wonders of the Invisible World, which he presented to Governor William Phips. Distracted by the responsibilities of his office and wrongly trusting in those judges he had named to the court, Phips recognized the dangers the trials presented. He ordered an immediate halt to the proceedings. While the courts themselves remained convened until late April 1693, Phips’s order marked the end of any executions based off witch trials in Salem. It also, not so coincidentally, crushed for all time the power of the Puritan church in the region.14
By the time Phips intervened, nineteen blameless souls had been executed, one had died of torture, and four had perished in prison.
What of the three women whose arrest had begun the short reign of terror?
Poor Sara Osbourn died in prison. Sarah Good was found guilty and executed. As for Tituba, she recanted her testimony and for reasons unknown the court decided to be lenient. Though she was not indicted, the woman stayed in prison until the following year, when someone purchased her for the price of her bail.15
IMAGINED THREATS VERSUS REAL DANGER
At the time of the trials, the combined population of Salem and the surrounding “witch” towns was roughly two thousand.16 The number of accusers, the people who used the trials as a way to eliminate local rivals or distract the public from the refugee problem or even bring closure to unhappy love affairs, was relatively few. The perpetrators of this kind of mass hysteria are generally not members of the populace. Rather, the perpetrators manipulate the population into a state of mass hysteria to serve their own ends. Those among the populace who dare protest may be accused themselves. Or, worse, they may be led to believe their souls will be damned. Those who don’t necessarily get caught up in the hysteria are driven to silence.
It’s important to make a distinction here, one that we face today: the difference between mass hysteria and justified concern. If, for example, the public had risen up against Mather and his cohorts, that would not have been hysteria. In 2018, this is something the mainstream media do not understand. If you look back through history—history, not agenda masquerading as history, which is all you get from the media today—you would learn the following: For the last 1,400 years, Radical Islam has been at war with the world. That isn’t Islamophobia, as the mainstream media would have us believe. It is fact. It is history, and I urge you to read this without the bias I mentioned earlier in the book—indoctrination versus truth. Let’s go back only forty years for just a partial listing of the atrocities:
1979: The U.S. embassy in Iran—American soil—was taken over by Muslim males.17
1983: The Beirut barracks of the U.S. Marines was blown up by Muslim males.18
1985: TWA Flight 847 was hijacked in Athens and Robert Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver who was attempting to rescue captives, was murdered by Muslim males.19
1988: Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up by Muslim males near Lockerbie, Scotland.20
1993: The World Trade Center was bombed by Muslim males who packed explosives into a van and drove into the underground parking lot, killing six. Their goal had been to destabilize the North Tower and crash it into the South Tower.21
1996: Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel and one Saudi national died in Saudi Arabia when a housing complex was bombed by Muslim males.22
1998: The U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked by Muslim males.23
2000: Seventeen sailors died when the destroyer USS Cole was bombed in Yemen by Muslim males.24
2001: Four airliners were hijacked. Two were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. One struck the Pentagon and the other was brought down in a field in Pennsylvania. Thousands died on that day and more, later, from having selflessly served as first responders in the toxic pile created by those homicidal and suicidal Muslim males.25
2001: The United States undertook a war in Afghanistan against Muslim males.26
2002: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan. A video of his execution and subsequent beheading was released by his captives—Muslim males.27
2002: More than two hundred people died when a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, was blown up by Muslim males.28
2003: Twenty five people died when two synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey, were car bombed by Muslim males.29
2004: Helping to
rebuild Iraq, radio tower repairman Nick Berg was kidnapped and beheaded by Muslim males. A video of his grotesque execution was released, initiating a new phase of terror perpetrated by Muslim males.30
2013: Three people were killed—including a child—and 264 others were injured in the Boston Marathon bombing perpetrated by Muslim males.31
2015: Twelve employees at Charlie Hebdo, a French satire magazine, were shot and killed after the magazine published drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. The two shooters were Muslim males.32
Notice that I said history; fact, not opinion. This is not an indictment of an entire people, though anyone who harbors terrorists is complicit. It is a fact that the mainstream media has not presented any criticism of Radical Islam as bias, as hate. The goal of their knee-jerk progressivism is a relatively recent phenomenon—that of mass amnesia. Like the vile Goebbels, media executives believe that if they obscure the truth long enough and hard enough, it will be overlooked.
Why would they do that? Part of it is profits: their revenue goes up each time there is a terrorist attack and people tune in, click on, and drop what they’re doing to watch. But part of it is also this insane liberal dream of a pax humana, a human race of blended skin color in a world without borders. Of course, these blindered lunatics ignore their own cognitive dissonance. If they achieve their goal, with Radical Islam in the mix, protected by mass amnesia, there will be no gays, no Jews, no Christians, no Buddhists, no Hindus. There will be no law, other than sharia. Women will have no rights, no education. The only women’s faces you will ever see is that of your wife, in private, or one of your sex slaves.
That, too, is fact.
IT’S ALL GOING TO POT
Mass amnesia is not a myth. It is a conspiracy of sorts, a vaguely defined plan to undermine the nation. Its perpetrators know that a malleable populace is a necessary tool to achieve an agenda, and as Bernie Sanders discovered with his pie-in-the-sky promises during the 2016 presidential campaign. And if you cannot seduce them with promises of free “things” and mass hysteria about “the other guy,” you have to take another tack. You have to dull their wits but tell them that the means is okay. It’s harmless. It’s fine. Youth is especially vulnerable as they have always been susceptible to overconfidence. I was watching Turner Classic Movies the other night and I saw a silent film from 1921, Enchantment. The opening title card set the tone for the movie and defined a generation: “What is more amusing or more charming than a girl at the flapper age? That egotistical youth so gloriously confident of never being conquered… so all-wise… so tolerant of the last dull generation of grownups[.]”33
There is never a last dull generation of grown-ups because someone has to bail out the untrained, unfocused youth. The youth who have been told, against all evidence, that Muslim males would never harm you. Youth who have been fed affordable, available marijuana. Those are the two pillars of mass amnesia. As Aldous Huxley warned in his masterpiece Brave New World, a stupidly drugged population is a happy population. A happy population is one that can be easily controlled.
This was not new to Huxley or to the United States, by the way, and there is a cautionary tale there. This was how the Roman Empire began its decline. In 123 B.C., the government began controlling its citizenry with welfare in the form of heavily subsidized grain.34 After that, according to the poet Juvenal writing approximately two hundred years later, around 100 A.D., “Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce; and everyone would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King.’”35 The politician and orator Cicero commented, “The evil was… in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of games.”36 Bribed, doped, the Romans suffered short-term memory loss. They forgot their real problems, fell into complacency, and couldn’t be bothered to remove ineffective or tyrannical leaders.
When I talk about amnesia, I don’t mean the movie trope of being hit on the head, forgetting your name, and spending ninety minutes looking for clues. I am talking about the relaxation of inhibitions, morals, and basic decency. The mind control masters in the media lie and tell us that this is a good thing. They say, for example, that relaxed scrutiny of Muslim men who were entering our nation under Obama as “refugees” was an act of mercy. What that contemptuous lie did, of course, was all but guarantee some kind of horrific attack in the future to fill several news cycles… and enrich media coffers.
That’s why politicians on the left and the mainstream media are pushing the legalization of marijuana. Of course, I think it’s a waste of time to prosecute overzealously for pot—this is not Les Misérables, and I don’t want to ruin someone’s life over a crust of bread. And I know there are alkaloids in cannabis that have medicinal properties without the recreational high. But the left thinks we should let taxi drivers, airline pilots, and surgeons light up when they want a buzz. They’re wrong, and the impulse to allow people to impair themselves whenever and however they want is wrong, too.
Back in the 1920s, the flappers and jazz babies didn’t want to depend solely on the music for their fix, for their night of relaxation and forgetfulness. They drank, but when that legal high was denied by Prohibition, they were compelled to find another.
It wasn’t that marijuana and opioids were freely available in the Jazz Age. The opium dens of the nineteenth century were out of fashion, as authorities had become increasingly concerned about addiction, and in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act took the first steps toward regulating that drug, requiring that all medicines be labeled with their contents.37 So, the young people looking for a wild time turned to another, more readily available high—marijuana, which had swept up from New Orleans along with black jazz musicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As pot moved into the cities of Detroit, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere, the sons and daughters of white families increasingly had access to it, and authorities began to take notice.
The great pot party—and the arrogance of youth referred to in that quote from the movie Enchantment—ended on October 29, 1929, with the stock market crash. America needed its youth—needed all of its citizens—sober, alert, and skeptical of the demagogues who sprang up to take advantage of the country’s crippled economic state. Despite the economic free fall, the underlying strengths of the United States still made it a desirable target for subversion, whether from outside forces such as Stalin’s communists, or inside agitators such as Louisiana governor and presidential candidate Huey Long, whose proposed Share Our Wealth program would have been the closest thing to socialism this country would see until Barack Obama.38
From a legal standpoint, the U.S. war on pot gained significant momentum during the Great Depression. Desperate people have always been more susceptible to the allure of crime. Add marijuana to the mix, with its effect of numbing the pain of poverty, lowering inhibitions, and erasing ethical boundaries, and the problem became pervasive. The government couldn’t do much about the poor and homeless but individual states began to wage war against pot. In 1930, the United States created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and by the following year, twenty-nine states had outlawed marijuana completely.39
Marijuana was demonized in the media as way of trying to counterbalance the natural allure of escape. The most prominent example was the campy 1936 film Reefer Madness, about a man and woman who live together and sell pot, and the psychosexual and homicidal effects it has on others.40 There were more serious works about the psychoses caused by the narcotic, like the 1941 novella Marihuana, by Cornell Woolrich (author of Rear Window), writing under the pseudonym William Irish.41 But that didn’t solve the problem. The problem was the modern world. The Depression gave way to World War II, which gave us the nuclear age, which rolled into the Cold War and Vietnam and Watergate. For many, especially the young, the name of the game was “anesthetize.” People drank bootleg liquor until Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and then they drank legal liquor. They still smoked marijuana. In 1948, actor Robert Mitchu
m and friends were famously jailed for smoking pot in a private home.42 But the addictive nature of pot’s effects is not the only problem. Threats do not go away simply because we have numbed ourselves to them. That being the case, people just continue to smoke.
I have a doctorate in ethnobotany and I can tell you that crops have dramatically shaped civilization, whether through ensuring an adequate supply of food that allows people to settle in an area, or the cultivation of cash crops that open up commercial possibilities, or in the introduction of invasive species of plants that can destroy an ecosystem. In fact, there is evidence that past societies have used this idea as an early form of “special ops” warfare.
What marijuana has done is more insidious. This invasive crop has destroyed us, our alertness, our resolve. Take sex and sexual mores. As much as the birth control pill, marijuana had a direct impact on the launch of the sexual revolution in this country. Its role was not an accident. It was the direct result of men who sought to create youth hysteria for their own profit. During the 1930s and 1940s, marijuana-fueled jazz and bebop music spread throughout the urban centers of our country. Enter record producer Sam Phillips, who in 1952 founded Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee.43 In the 1950s, white parents didn’t want their children going crazy over black men onstage. Phillips knew this, and in 1954 he found his white boy, a slim, swivel-hipped truck driver named Elvis Presley. And with Elvis came the perfect storm that led into the sexual revolution, because now white girls were going wilder than their parents ever did for Frank Sinatra. The rock-and-roll era had dawned, and all it took was one more event to utterly shatter the relative innocence of prosperous, baby-booming, postwar 1950s white America: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Hope and a patriotic youth were destroyed in an instant, followed and replaced by the shaggy-haired Beatles, confrontational and frequently deadly civil rights actions in the South, war in Vietnam—which was brought to American homes in living color on the nightly news—and of course the use of drugs to escape these onslaughts. Marijuana was back serving the same function as before: dulling the fear of the young.
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