William Happer

Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory?

Well... Does it make sense to you?

I don't know.

Most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way.

And, you know, they had these visions of...

The person they were accused, consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of obscene things, and that was accepted as testimony.

It was called spectral evidence.

And so when finally the trials were stopped, it wasn't for the right reason, which is that there's no such thing as witches.

They were stopped because spectral evidence was shaky.

It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point, so it was getting very dangerous.

You know, but one of them was selling a book on how to detect witches, cotton matter, you know.

Malleus Maleficorum, you know, the hammer of the evildoers.

That was the first book on witches.

But either way, it took – I think that's a kinder explanation of what happened.

I'm less generous.

Yeah, that's one of the parts of Orwell's 1984 that many people forget.

But a big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate.

And so people seem to have this need for hatred.

You know, you have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or somebody.