The New Witch Trials

The Psychology of Cancel Culture and the Return of the Witch Hunt

In high school, many of us read The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the Salem witch trials: a warning about hysteria masquerading as justice. We read it at a comfortable distance, almost smugly, as though it described an extinct moral species—the fruit of some ancient, diseased tree that modernity had long since cut down.

We surveyed the accus…