When the Salem witch trials reached their fever in 1692, the accused were not merely condemned in court — they were denied even the chance to speak. Whenever a supposed witch opened her mouth to defend herself, the “afflicted girls” shrieked, convulsed, and fell to the floor. Their bodies became a wall of noise and spectacle. The message was clear: you must not hear what she has to say.
That is the logic of silencing, and we are watching it play out again — not in a Puritan village, but in our own supposedly enlightened age.
Say something on X that deviates from the party line, and you’re blocked or brigaded. Launch a conservative website, and hackers DDoS it into the ground. Try to give a talk at Berkeley, and a mob howls outside the hall to make sure your words never carry. And if none of that works, there’s always cancel culture: the digital stocks and pillory, designed to strip you of your job, your reputation, even your friends. It is the modern equivalent of those girls writhing on the floor in Salem — ritualized refusal to listen, a public spectacle to silence one voice by frightening all the others into stillness.
And just as “witchcraft” was the ultimate untouchable evil in Salem, today the left throws around Nazi and fascist. These words are not used with historical precision; they are cultural kill-switches. Once you are branded with Trump cooties — soiled with the ultimate evil — conversation ends. No one need hear a Nazi. No one should allow a fascist the courtesy of a word.
This habit of silencing doesn’t stop at our borders. For three and a half years, Joe Biden refused even to speak with Vladimir Putin. That refusal wasn’t strategy — it was theater. The White House was essentially convulsing on the floor, declaring the other side too unclean to acknowledge. And yet, as Donald Trump’s press secretary pointed out this week, the only path to peace runs through speech. You cannot negotiate with silence. You cannot resolve conflict without words.
It isn’t just that the left won’t listen to opponents — leftists no longer know how to listen to their own. Because lecturing has become their default mode, they’ve forgotten the craft of conversation, even with their base. That’s why Democrats keep bleeding working-class voters: they can’t hear what ordinary people are saying about inflation, safety, or schools. They deliver sermons instead of answers.
Trump, meanwhile, is making bank with the 80-20 rule — focusing on the broad, unglamorous middle, the 80% who just want stability, normalcy, and to be heard. Imagine what would happen if Democrats stopped convulsing like Salem’s accusers long enough to hear their own 80%. But lecturing drowns out listening, and without listening, persuasion dies.
We live in a Salem culture, where fits have replaced reason, labels replace arguments, and silencing is treated as virtue. But truth does not tremble before words. It doesn’t need mobs or bans or convulsions to defend itself. A society that cannot bear to hear another voice is a society on the edge of hysteria. And we know how that ended in Salem.
At the core of every shriek and every mob, the message is the same as it was in 1692: You must not hear what she has to say — because it is true. That is the terror. Truth, left to itself, will prevail. Falsehoods cannot survive on their own, so they demand mobs to shield them, rituals to shore them up, and silencing to stretch out their life a little longer. The convulsions of Salem, the cancel culture of today, the bans and the blocks — these are not signs of strength. They are the desperate scaffolding of lies, trembling at the approach of truth.
The left may shriek, convulse, and try to silence the truth, but at PJ Media, we refuse to be drowned out by the mob. We dig, we listen, and we tell the stories they want buried. Join us in breaking through the hysteria — and do it today with 60% off a PJ Media VIP membership. Use the promo code FIGHT and stand with us against the modern Salem.
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