Podcasthon 2026: The Anatomy of a Moral Panic — Salem, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic

Show Notes

What’s in This Episode

Podcasthon is a global event where thousands of podcasters use their platforms to raise money for a cause they believe in. This year, The Thing About Witch Hunts is participating to support End Witch Hunts, the only US nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about witchcraft accusation violence past and present. If this episode moves you, donate at endwitchhunts.org/donate. Every contribution goes directly to the work.

The Salem Witch Trials ended in 1693. We know what went wrong. And yet the pattern keeps showing up, different century, different accusation, same structure. This episode names that structure.

Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack step back from individual cases to look at what moral panics are actually made of: how they get built, who builds them, who gets targeted, and why the fear feels so real and so righteous from the inside. The history moves from colonial Massachusetts through the Red Scares, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, connecting to witchcraft accusation violence happening in communities around the world right now.

What You’ll Learn

Why the same panic keeps working across centuries. How institutions transform fear into prosecution. Who gets chosen as the target, and why that choice is never random. What genuine fear has to do with other agendas operating underneath it. And perhaps most importantly: what the people who actually disrupted witch hunts throughout history had in common.

The dissenters are always in the record. This episode finds them.

Why It Matters

Every person who can recognize a moral panic in progress becomes a potential dissenter. That is not a small thing. Support End Witch Hunts at endwitchhunts.org/donate.

Keywords: moral panic, witch hunts, Salem witch trials, Satanic Panic, McCarthyism, Red Scare, witchcraft accusation violence, folk devils, spectral evidence, historical exoneration, End Witch Hunts, Podcasthon 2026, Dr. Leo Igwe, Maimunat Mohammed, Thomas Brattle, Cotton Mather, Massachusetts Bill H.5154