When any of these groups become large enough to be intoxicated by their own apparent size or power and infatuated with their own righteousness, it is the rare individual who will stand up and loudly say no.

From American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America by Edmund S. Morgan. Page 120.

Such a situation is all too familiar. When any group of people become sufficiently intent on attacking a particular evil, they are likely to discard as obsolete and ineffective any ground rules that society has developed for the peaceful or fair achievement of social objectives. When those on the right become exercised by the demons of anarchism, communism, or terrorism to the point where they feel themselves threatened, they call upon the government to ignore the normal procedures designed to protect the rights of individuals, or they resort to lynch law, kangaroo courts, or torture, or they persuade their legislatures to act as courts and in effect convict their enemies in wholesale fashion. Similarly, when those on the left come to feel that the duly elected officers of government have somehow betrayed them, the left also discards ordinary, orderly procedures and moves to direct action, to force, disdaining the old procedures except as they may be useful in hampering the establishment’s efforts to defend itself. When any of these groups become large enough to be intoxicated by their own apparent size or power and infatuated with their own righteousness, it is the rare individual who will stand up and loudly say no.

In Salem it was not a party or faction but the whole local community that rose against the apparent legion of witches enlisted by the devil. God Himself, it seemed, surely approved of any methods used to stop them. Anyone who suggested otherwise was obviously a witch lover. Although procedures existed for trying witches, procedures that had been used in the past with seeming success, the situation appeared to call for extraordinary procedures against the devil’s massive onslaught. The majority of people were either egging the court on or keeping their mouths shut.

Only after twenty persons had been executed in 1692 and hundreds more accused did a group of ministers, led by Increase Mather, have the courage to get together and point out firmly and unequivocally to Governor Phips what some of them had said privately and with reservations—namely, that the court was proceeding contrary to established practice. After they had done this, the terrible business came to an end. Phips, upon receipt of the memorial from the ministers, dissolved the special commission of oyer and terminer. The remaining cases were tried under the old, regular procedures by the newly appointed superior court. Spectral evidence was not admitted as a sufficient basis for conviction. And the result was acquittal of all but three, whom the governor promptly reprieved. So far as I know, no more trials for witchcraft were ever held again in New England, though the last trial in England was in 1712 and isolated trials and executions continued on the Continent through the eighteenth century.

We know the strength and value of conviction in the Bill of Rights, human universalism, consent of the governed, equality before the law.

And with a whiff of convincing hysteria, we turn our backs on all those fundamental precepts, lured by the siren song of danger and threat.

Covid-19 has been such a siren song of not letting a good crisis go to waste. Many actors, not all, are legitimately trying to do the right thing in the face of an unknown and little understood threat and expediency becomes the watchword over freedom and rights.

And many actors are arguing precisely for the abandonment of our freedoms. See the unbelievable argument in The Atlantic, Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal: In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong. by Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School professor and Andrew Keane Woods, Professor of law at the University of Arizona. Once again media and academia conspiring to overturn regular established procedures with nearly 250 years of demonstrated success in order to achieve the old primitive model of autocratic rule.