Comments - el gato sin lluvia
Oh yeah, actual witch trials were an ongoing problem in Europe for several centuries.
See, the church post-Reformation didn't want them - much too disruptive of society, and one hysteria with violent mobs may easily lead to another and to uprisings over real grievances, so from the fifteenhundreds (at least here) the church officials tried to find other explanations for accusations of witchery.
What isn't very widely nown due to revisionist feminist hsitory is that the ratio of executions for heresy, apostasy, and sorcery/witchcraft (if you've done witchcraft you are by definition an apostate and heretic too) was at least 5 men condemned for every woman.
Also, the normal accuser and "witness" were other women and their children. Hardly surprising since women are much more group-sensitive than men and also far more prone to hysteria and neurotic fears.
What made Covidiocy, climate change, and so on into such persistent major scares apart from the profit in purveying Pfear is modern communications technology and freedom of information/freedom of the press. See, old timey egimes would repress all information until it had passed censors. Not a good startegy, very expensive and makes you look like you fear the truth. Far better to ally with major privately owned media companies, as was done during the 1970s, and then drip-feed your agenda into their news-stream, utilising the very freedoms of the people as a tool for oppression.
But I'm digressing wildly, not unlike a moose having eating too much fermented apples...
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