Michael: We all think of the Salem Witch Trials as this bizarre, one-off event fueled by superstition. But what if the real story isn't about witches at all? Kevin: Oh, here we go. Don't tell me it was aliens. Michael: (Laughs) Not aliens. What if it was about property, power, and personal revenge? And what if that same playbook—demonizing an enemy to seize control—was later used to start the American Revolution? Kevin: Okay, now you have my attention. That's a bold claim. You're saying the road to independence was paved with the same stones used to build the gallows in Salem? Michael: That's the explosive argument at the heart of Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. Kevin: Right, the guys from the 'Killing' series. They're known for making history read like a thriller, which definitely fits this topic. But I've heard this book gets some mixed reviews because it's so ambitious—it connects Salem to everything from piracy to The Exorcist. Michael: Exactly. It's sprawling, and some readers find the connections a bit of a stretch. But today, we're focusing on its most powerful through-line: how the terror of the witch hunt directly shaped the fight for American freedom. And it all starts not with a cackling witch, but with a woman who was just a little too different for her time.

Michael: Let's go to Salem, 1692. The first person executed wasn't some old crone muttering curses. It was Bridget Bishop, a tavern owner who wore a flashy red dress, enjoyed a good game of shuffleboard, and wasn't afraid to speak her mind to men. In Puritan Salem, that was practically a confession. Kevin: A red dress? That was enough to get you on the radar? It sounds less like witchcraft and more like she was just... interesting. Michael: That's precisely the point. She was an outsider in a society that demanded conformity. She'd been in court before, for public brawls with her abusive husband, Thomas Oliver. A neighbor even testified to seeing Bridget’s face "at one time bloody and at other times black and blue." But instead of sympathy, her defiance earned her suspicion. Her own husband had accused her of being a bad wife, saying "the devil had come bodily to her." Kevin: Wow. So the groundwork was already laid. People already had a narrative about her, and 'witch' was just the label that made it stick. What was the actual "evidence" they used against her? Michael: It was a cascade of absurdity. A slave named Juan claimed her 'specter' spooked his horses. When workers tore down a wall in her old house, they found 'poppets'—small dolls with pins in them, which were seen as tools for dark magic. Kevin: Hold on, poppets in the wall of a house she used to live in? How could they prove those were hers? She could have had no idea they were there. Michael: They didn't have to prove it. In the climate of fear gripping Salem, accusation was as good as conviction. The real nail in her coffin was something called "spectral evidence." This was the core of the Salem legal disaster. Kevin: Okay, you have to explain that. What exactly is 'spectral evidence'? How could that possibly be used in a court of law? Michael: It's the idea that a witch could send their spirit, or specter, out of their body to torment victims. So, in court, a group of "afflicted girls," like Ann Putnam, would start screaming and contorting the moment Bridget Bishop looked at them. They'd claim her specter was pinching them or trying to make them sign the Devil's book. Kevin: That's insane. So someone could just claim they saw your ghost doing something, and that was considered proof? You can't defend against that! It's literally one person's word—or vision—against yours. Michael: Exactly. It's an unfalsifiable claim. During her hearing, the judge, John Hathorne, tried to trap her in a logic loop. He asked her, "How can you know, you are no witch, and yet not know what a witch is?" She maintained her innocence, stating clearly, "I am innocent. I know nothing of it. I have done no witchcraft." But it didn't matter. The performance of the afflicted girls in the courtroom was all the jury needed. Kevin: So it was pure theater. A public performance of hysteria. It feels like the whole system was designed to find people guilty, not to find the truth. It wasn't just superstition; it was a weapon. Michael: It was absolutely a weapon. And it wasn't a new idea. The book opens with the execution of Dame Euphame MacCalzean in Scotland in 1591. She was a wealthy woman whose lands were conveniently seized by King James VI after she was burned at the stake for witchcraft. The king was terrified of witches, but as the book dryly notes, "he has no issue with gaining control of Effie's lands, haunted as they may be." Kevin: So there's a clear motive beyond just religious purity. It's about power, property, and getting rid of inconvenient people. Bridget Bishop, the woman in the red dress who ran a tavern, was very inconvenient for the Puritan ideal. Michael: She was the perfect scapegoat. An independent woman in a world that feared female autonomy. Her execution on June 10, 1692, opened the floodgates. After her, nineteen more would be hanged, and others would die in the squalid prisons. The system worked exactly as it was designed to.

Kevin: Okay, so you have this society built on paranoia, injustice, and a legal system that's a complete sham. It's hard to imagine how you get from 'let's hang the nonconformist' to 'give me liberty or give me death.' How does that transformation happen? Michael: It's a fascinating and deeply ironic journey. The book argues that the memory of Salem, and other forms of religious persecution, became a powerful catalyst for the revolution. The colonists developed a deep-seated allergy to a certain kind of top-down, absolute authority, whether it came from a church or a king. Kevin: So they'd seen what happens when one group gets too much power and decides who's 'good' and who's 'evil'. Michael: Precisely. Fast forward about 70 years from Salem to Virginia in the 1760s. The fight isn't about witches anymore; it's about tobacco and taxes. But the underlying principle is the same. Virginia had the Anglican Church as its state religion, and every citizen, regardless of their faith, had to pay a tax to support its ministers. Kevin: A mandatory religious tax. That sounds like a recipe for conflict. Michael: It was. And a young, fiery lawyer named Patrick Henry stepped right into the middle of it. The case was called the "Parson's Cause." The King had overturned a local Virginia law that limited the parsons' salaries. Henry was hired to argue that the parsons should only be awarded one penny in damages. His argument was breathtakingly radical for the time. Kevin: What did he say? Michael: He stood up in that Virginia courthouse, with his own father presiding as the judge, and essentially put the King on trial. He argued that a king and his subjects share a solemn compact. The people offer obedience, and in return, the king must rule for their happiness. He then declared, and this is a direct quote from his closing argument, "for a sovereign to disallow such a wholesome law...is a misrepresentation of rule and breaks the compact... It may even be called tyranny." Kevin: Wow. He called the King of England a tyrant. In a public courtroom. That's the 18th-century equivalent of a mic drop. Michael: It was an earthquake. He went on to say, "This is a case concerned with freedom. Freedom for Virginia to govern itself. Freedom to choose who shall minister to our spiritual needs. Freedom from tyranny, in whatever form it may take." The jury was out for five minutes and came back with a verdict: one penny for the parsons. Henry had won. Kevin: That's incredible. So Henry is basically calling the King a tyrant for imposing a religious tax, which isn't so different from the Salem court imposing its religious will on people like Bridget Bishop. It's the same fight, just a different arena. Michael: It's the exact same fight! It's a fight against an unaccountable power imposing its will on individuals. The colonists who resisted the Stamp Act in 1765, the ones who formed the Sons of Liberty, weren't just angry about taxes. They were angry about being controlled by a distant authority that didn't represent them. Their rallying cry, "No taxation without representation," is a direct descendant of the silent plea of the accused in Salem: "No conviction without evidence." Kevin: And you see this thread in other Founding Fathers too, right? Michael: Absolutely. Look at John Adams. After the Boston Massacre, he makes the deeply unpopular decision to defend the British soldiers. Why? Because he was horrified by the idea of mob justice. He wrote that a judgment of death against those soldiers would have been "as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the Quakers or witches." He was haunted by the legacy of Salem and believed that the foundation of a free America had to be the rule of law, where even the most hated person gets a fair trial. Kevin: So the injustice of Salem created a kind of institutional PTSD. The founders were actively trying to build a system that would prevent it from ever happening again. Michael: That's the core of it. Benjamin Franklin, in London, gets publicly humiliated by the British Privy Council. They treat him like a colonial upstart, a lesser being. That personal experience of being demonized by a powerful authority turns him from a loyalist into a revolutionary. He felt the same powerlessness that Bridget Bishop must have felt. The methods were different—public shaming instead of a noose—but the dynamic of power crushing the individual was the same.

Michael: And that's the book's central, and I think most compelling, argument. The American experiment wasn't born in a pristine, philosophical vacuum. It was forged in the fire of its own worst impulses. The memory of Salem—of what happens when fear, religion, and state power merge without checks—became a ghost that haunted the Founding Fathers. Kevin: It’s like they had a perfect blueprint of what not to do. Michael: Exactly. They built a system with a separation of church and state, a Bill of Rights, and a commitment to due process precisely because they knew the alternative. They had seen it. They had lived it. The fight for liberty wasn't just an abstract ideal; it was a direct reaction to the very real horror of what their own society was capable of. Kevin: It's a chilling thought. The rights we often take for granted were built on the graves of people like Bridget Bishop and Rebecca Nurse. It makes you realize that the fight against 'witch hunts,' in whatever form they take, is never really over. It just changes its name. Michael: The book ends by drawing a parallel to modern 'cancel culture,' which is a whole other debate and part of why its reception is so polarizing. But it leaves you with a powerful question that transcends politics. Kevin: What's that? Michael: When we see a public pile-on today, whether it's online or in the media, how do we know if we're pursuing justice or just participating in a modern witch hunt? How do we tell the difference between accountability and hysteria? Kevin: A question worth thinking about. This is Aibrary, signing off.