There were great dangers in such an unregulated procedure

From American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America by Edmund S. Morgan. Page 119.

When the court proceeded to trial, he and the other judges apparently became infected with the panic that had already seized the Salem community. The devil seemed to be at large, winning more and more adherents, and the cause of God in New England, already visibly threatened in so many other ways, seemed to be at stake. The court, in the throes of this panic, began deciding cases and rendering judgments on the basis of a procedure that had long been recognized as invalid in witchcraft cases. They convicted accused persons on the ground of what was known as spectral testimony, unsupported by other evidence. Spectral testimony was testimony offered by the victim to the effect that he or she was being tormented by a specter in the shape of the accused. The assumption behind this form of evidence was that the devil could not adopt the form of an innocent person (which would thus be just about the only shape he could not take). The only human shape that the devil could take, according to this assumption, was the shape of a person who had confederated with him. If, therefore, a girl was tormented by someone who looked to her like, say, Goody Jones, then Goody Jones must have made a pact with the devil. Goody Jones, in short, must be a witch.

Now, if this sort of evidence was accepted as sufficient for conviction, it would be easy for anyone, either out of malice or because of hallucinations, to accuse and obtain the conviction of an innocent person. Even people who believed in the reality of witchcraft could see that there were great dangers in such an unregulated procedure, and it had been established for some time that spectral evidence was not to be regarded as conclusive. The Mathers and other ministers were aware of this and cautioned the members of the court privately against placing too great a reliance on this kind of evidence. For they knew it was a matter of controversy whether it should be relied on at all. There were some experts on the subject who believed that it was possible for the devil to adopt the shape of an innocent person, and if this was so, then of course spectral evidence had no validity whatever.

This mass hysteria, spilling over from the populi to the leadership is what most struck about this essay.

We don't have to go back to the Red Scare or anything as distant as that. We had exactly the same thing happen in the late 1980s and early 1990s when day care centers became the target of accusations, not just of abuse, but of Satanic rituals.

To those well-grounded in empiricism and rationality, all of this seemed incredible. Hysteria infecting academia, infecting the courts, infecting the very roots of governance. This was the period when "Believe the children" became the rallying cry in the face of all known research. When "recovered memories" became a thing, much like spectral evidence. The best and the brightest of academia, the media, and government were all bending to the hysteria.

We don't even need to go back that far. We are currently still dealing with the nonsense of the past decade where purportedly there was a rape crisis on college campuses to a degree only ever seen in war zones, if then. The evidence was not there, the data did not support, it was not a real thing. But again, media, academia, politicians jumped on the hysterical bandwagon and introduced kangaroo courts under the tragically absurd rallying cry of "Believe the women."

Just as with "Believe the children" this was another tool of hysteria to stampede into court processes which had no validity at all.

It is easy to dismiss the Dear Colleague nonsense as simply the product of politics, and clearly there were factions and advocates at play to advance otherwise unconscionable causes. But ascribing it to leadership hysteria fits the facts as well. We still have people insisting on the need for Kangaroo Courts that produce judgments which in turn lead to multi-million dollar judgments against universities for their knowing failure to observe due process.

It happens in the racial hysteria arena as well where roaming hordes of white supremacists are threatening our very way of life. Hoards unwitnessed and not evident in the data. See the sorry outcome for Oberlin College for this sort of hysteria of the Mandarin Class.

AGW hysteria of course falls into this pattern as well. Hard claims about model forecasts which evaporate when looked at rationally and empirically. It is not that the forecasts are not correct. It is that, with what we know, we cannot be confident that they are correct. And hysteria then drives governance decisions leading to hundreds of millions and billions of misallocated investments with grave social and natural consequences.

All look like they have similarities to that Salem hysteria which we mock as only religious and a product of ignorance and primitiveness. It looks like a general system failure to me.