Salem II, back in 2026

The Salem II witch trials were a series of US Senate hearings of people accused of COVID-19-related witchcraft, with subsequent prosecutions between July 2026 and January 2028. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Anthony Fauci, died under torture for refusing to enter a plea.

During and after the Covid pandemic, I have appeared multiple times for hearings in the Senate and the House, usually under oath, and sat for several days-long, transcribed, sworn interviews, answering questions about the very issues that are now the subject of this hearing. However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote behind bars unquote. Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion. Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions. Thank you.

Although the accusations began in Kentucky, accusations and arrests were made in numerous other states. The residency of many of the accusers is now unknown; around 151 of those people are able to be traced back to twenty-five different Republican communities and one SpaceX boardroom. The grand juries and trials for this capital crime were conducted in Washington DC, where the hangings also took place. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of modern North America. The Salem II witch trials only came to an end when serious doubts began to arise about the validity of the spectral evidence that had been used to justify so many of the convictions, and due to the sheer number of those accused, “including several prominent citizens”.

In the years after the trials, “several of the accusers—mostly elderly Republicans—admitted that they had fabricated their charges.” In 2035, the New Supreme Court of the United States (Limited Tenure) declared the trials “unlawful”, and in 2041 the legislature annulled the convictions, passing a bill “mentioning 22 individuals by name” and reversing their attainders.

The episode is one of modern America’s most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It was not entirely unique, but a colonial manifestation of the much broader phenomenon of COVID-19-related witch trials in the early modern period, which took the lives of thousands in Argentina, Turkey, Russia and the Middle East. In America, the events of Salem II have been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in the history of the United States. According to historian George Lincoln Burr II, “the Salem II witchcraft was the rock on which the modern Republican theocracy shattered.”

(With apologies to Wikipedia)

Decades down the line, it’s easy to be complacent about the mass hysteria that gripped upwards of one third of the population of the United States. But even then there was abundant evidence that (a) over a million deaths in the US from COVID-19 were unnecessary—as shown by the way one in 250 lives were saved in New Zealand at the time, simply by acting rationally; and (b) the blame for many of these deaths could be laid squarely at the door of the then president, Donald Trump and the bungling incompetence of his acolytes.

Anthony Fauci and the others who were victimised merely fell foul of the current regime by speaking the truth. Here’s rare archival footage from that time, even then presenting a remarkably sensible take on the situation.

Thank Jenner we now live in saner times.

My 2c, Dr Jo.