From Witch Trials to Epstein Mania: The New Moral Panic

In 1628, the Chancellor of Bamberg, Johannes Junius, was charged with witchcraft. At first, he was interrogated by prosecutors without torture. He did not confess. Then he was subjected to thumb screws and leg screws. He still did not confess. Only after repeated sessions of agony did he finally admit to crimes he knew he had not committed. 

A special Witch Commission had been established in Bamberg, and it was illegal to criticise its activities on pain of whipping or banishment. Those accused were tortured until they confessed, and then tortured again until they named accomplices. Under pressure, working-class people began naming the town’s elites, which meant that Bamberg’s clerical class, officials, and public servants soon found themselves imprisoned and executed. The Bamberg trials became one of the largest witch persecutions in Europe, claiming between six hundred and a thousand lives. Victims were beheaded and sometimes burned alive.

Writing to his daughter from confinement before his execution, Junius described the logic of the system he had fallen into: “Innocent I have come to prison, innocent I have been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head.”

The witch trials of Europe have long puzzled historians. People had believed in witches throughout the premodern period, but witch trials had been isolated and rare events. Why, then, did trials erupt with such ferocity in the 17th century? Why did they claim so many victims? And why were they clustered in regions like Bamberg, Trier, and Würzburg, but not in larger cities? Explanations including misogyny, famine, and disease have been proposed but rejected by historians as insufficient. The most compelling explanation focuses on the exact places the witch trials occurred, and the social function that they served. 

The trials occurred most often in the borderlands between Catholic and Protestant regions, territories in which religious authorities had to compete for the loyalty of their flocks. In the borderlands between France and Germany, villages that were Catholic and Protestant were walking distance from one another. Religious leaders, anxious that their followers may defect to a neighbouring Church with a different confessional, persecuted witches to display their moral authority and demonstrate that their Church could protect people from Satan. In other words, witch trials served as a form of marketing during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Economists Leeson and Russ write: “Similar to how contemporary Republican and Democrat candidates focus campaign activity in political battlegrounds during elections to attract the loyalty of undecided voters, historical Catholic and Protestant officials focused witch-trial activity in confessional battlegrounds during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to attract the loyalty of undecided Christians.” In places where one faith dominated, such as Catholic Spain, witch trials didn’t happen (heretics were persecuted by the Inquisition instead). But where belief was contested in the borderlands between France and Germany, theatrical displays of moral authority became essential. The witch hunt was never really about rooting out evil, it was about signalling power and moral legitimacy.

Our conflicts today are for the most part no longer eschatological. Yet the mechanics of moral panics have not changed. They still emerge where authority is in flux, and they still serve as a means of asserting moral power and legitimacy. Today’s borderlands no longer exist between France and Germany. They exist online, in digital space. Platforms such as X, Reddit, Rumble, and YouTube function as modern zones of religious warfare, where rival moral sects compete for allegiance and loyalty. It is within these digital borderlands that contemporary panics erupt.

In the United States and across the Anglosphere, during #MeToo, the campus rape hysteria, and the 2020 panic about police brutality following the death of George Floyd, the progressive Left asserted its power and moral authority. In each case, innocent people were caught in the frenzy. But as Leeson and Russ write of 17th-century religious conflict, “the prodigiousness of Catholic suppliers’ witch-trial campaigns in religiously contested regions put pressure on neighbouring Protestant suppliers to step up their own.”

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a panic driven by the Right emerged, which also swept innocent victims into its net.

The Post-Kirk Clampdown

The current frenzy of right-wing cancel culture recalls the progressive lunacy that followed the murder of George Floyd. But the current iteration is more dangerous because it is backed by state power.

Rare are the panics that are driven by both the Left and the Right, but the Epstein story has become one.