Witch Hunts/ How to Not Get Burned

We spook ourselves with stories of witch hunts throughout history and the world. Don't get burned by satanic panic!  I sneak in a Friends joke.  Tangents include, Leonard  Nemoy, world travel, gun sales and simple math.

Fear+trigger=scapegoat

Transcript

0:01

Hey everyone, welcome to True Crime Defense, the podcast that nerds out on true crime cases, gives you tips on how to stay safe, and never blames the target of any crime. Hope you enjoy the show! Radhika, are you comfortable with me talking into your ear holes? Yes, I am. Great. Also, will you join me in the Wayback Machine? I vacuumed, gassed her up, and packed some snacks. Lovely. In honor of Halloween, we are covering witches and witch hunts. I thought this was going to be a fun pumpkin spice latte fueled romp through Halloween witches, and it turned really dark very fast. It was so sad. I know. What were you expecting? I don't know, I thought it was more like hocus pocus y or something like that and learning about like the, I don't know, the fun but spooky aspects of being witches and I was like that is not what it was at all. Yeah. Sorry about that. And then even when we talked about this episode, you were so freaked out by Indian witches. You didn't want to even want to talk about it. So I'm like, there's so scary. Are you okay? Yeah. I mean, that's not what it was. And so I was like, Oh, this is a different direction. So it's all good. Okay. Okay. So we'll try to keep it light. It was definitely a journey. I think we can use the lessons of the past, which hunts in the current atmosphere of panic inducing news that surrounds us. What most people in the U. S. think of when we hear the word witch is the Salem Witch Trials. We will touch down in Salem, but I want to go back further into history. There are a lot of warnings with this one. Rampant misogyny, slavery, colonialism, mental illness, torture, brutal killings, racism, and I'm very gently and briefly going to go into children getting caught up on this. I'm not going to give any details and I'll give warning when we get there so that you can skip anything else. No, you got it. Okay, just to note, we do our best to keep it as PG as we can, and so we do use euphemisms for some things in case little ears run across our show. And we're not making light of the seriousness of any crime. And if this is your first episode, we generally are even on the true crime and the defense content, at least for my part. This episode is way more true crime because the defense to panic is whatever you and your mental health professional have come up with, and a simple equation I'll give you in a bit. I'll just give a couple tips on how to stay safe from witch hunts and irrational thinking. Okay, we watched Why Witch Hunts Are Not Just a Dark Chapter from the Past, presented by Arts Unveiled on YouTube. And I couldn't find anything that stained their reputation, so I felt comfortable using this, but be very careful what you believe on the interwebs, especially YouTube. Just based on what I read from legitimate sources, this case seems to fall in line with what I read about German witch trials. This case shows the politics and economic pressures that created the foundation for witch trials that can be used as a lens to view other witch trials. There's some wacky stuff in it. I would say it's a documentary version of a junk drawer, and I tried really hard to organize it. We're just going to see how it goes. We start with what I imagined this little jaunt would be. Clips from The Wizard of Oz, Charmed, Hocus Pocus, the movie Witches, etc. And then the host, Karen Helmstead, tells us her ancestor was tried, convicted, and burned as a witch, and then ominously tells us witch hunts are still happening today. We're going back in time to winning in Germany, Margarita Kruber was Karen's ancestor. Walter Rummel is the local historian, and he describes Margarita as very clever, with a deep sense of responsibility, inner strength, and confidence, and that may mean she overstepped her bounds in the community. I guess men can act that way, but I don't think that was okay for women. No, they were like, oh, she's acting powerful, witch, get rid of her. I kind of see that today, occasionally. she was from a well to do family and married to a judge. At the time, she was accused of witchcraft. She was the mom of two small boys. At church, before the accusations, she suffered a bout of dysentery in front of everyone. And I have to assume that she either vomited and or visited a town. South of vomiting in front of everyone. later she was accused of witchcraft. People said Satan, had followed her into church as an explanation for the public gastrointestinal outburst. She was accused of poisoning people because they became sick after she fed them. in 1631, Margarita's mother Maria was the first person burned for witchcraft in Vine and. Yeah, that's a dark family tradition. I kind of didn't have a chance. Margarita was shaved and stripped so she could be searched for a devil's mark. She was tortured to get a confession. I didn't want to go into details at all, but it lasted days, and people under duress of torture would commonly be forced to point out others who were witches in order to have the pain stop. We now begin to investigate witch hunts in general and talk to Rita Voltimer, an expert on European witch trials. She starts with the Book of Exodus. In the Bible, it states, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And then a powerful guy named Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s warned that the world was full of witches and women were more prone to demonic possession and wanted to have. I'm going to say married hugging with the devil. I'm like, oh, oh, oh, okay. Those visuals are also pretty graphic that they were showing. It's really gross. Yeah, the Pope around that time also made sure everyone knew no form of magic would be tolerated and began making witchcraft illegal. The Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, was published in 1486, and the author described witches as making a pact with the devil, and, here's a disturbing accusation, if you want to fast forward a couple seconds, eating children. There was not that much to read comparatively back then, so the Bible and the Malleus Maleficarum I believe got all the clicks. Why this publication was believed and what gave the authors the legitimacy to say these things. I'm a little unclear on I, my guess is that there was yet to be debunking literature and people were also really afraid to speak out because they were seen as defending, which is, and they could easily get roped into, which craft accusations and worse. At this time in Europe, there were invasions, wars, syphilis made its debut, and there was an ice age. I imagine people being cold, covered in inexplicable shankers, and under threat by marauders. And so no wonder they thought the world was going to hell in a hat basket. A popular opinion was that all of this was caused by witches. It is estimated that 000 people in Europe were killed as a result of being accused of witchcraft, and about 80 percent of those were women. Half of those were killed in Germany. Now we take a hard left to blame feminists for misinterpretations of why witches were persecuted, and it was definitely not because of misogyny, according to Rita. Okay. I was stumped, but we'll just move on. There seems to be a mix of religious fanaticism and the need to blame someone for the ice age that destroyed the grapes used to make wine, and which caused the economic dip in Winningen. Can you imagine the nightmare of old Europe? I'm thinking no toilet paper specifically, and also no wine. No wonder everyone went bonkers. Like, I lived in a country for four months that did not, as matter of course, have TP in the bathrooms. I was constantly on the brink of burning a witch myself, so I couldn't imagine it. The commission on witchcraft was composed of local people hoping to better their status. Protestants, according to Walter, our expert, were relatively new to the Christianity game, and they wanted to prove that they were serious, and may have wanted to show they were tough on crimes against the church. In 1642, Margarita Kruber is executed. 250 liters of wine were brought to the execution site and Margarita's husband was handed the bill. Apparently, those involved in witch hunts made a good living with this work and the town folk would attend trials and executions for entertainment, so you can see how money would roll in from observers. Apparently, in 1782, the last execution of a witch in Europe happened. So now we're gonna zoom off to the US very briefly for the Salem Witch trials. In 1692, there were 19 executions and one man was crushed and five of the accused died in jail. And then we trade in the way back machine for the DeLorean and back to the future, and we end up in current day, belief in witchcraft is still alive and well in some parts of the world. Sorcery Accusation Related Violence, or SARV, has its own acronym because it's so common. It's still mostly women, especially single women, who are accused. Northern Ghana has its own sort of witch camp where women are housed together after being accused of witchcraft. The locals will beat and kill the accused if they don't escape. Leo Igwe, founder of Advocacy for Alleged Wishes, tells us women are targeted because they have fewer rights and can be more easily taken advantage of. And then we end with the Witches of Scotland is a group working to officially absolve those accused of witchcraft during what were called the burning times to signal those who are creating laws to punish witchcraft even today. So that's the documentary. I was surprised because in Scotland, that was the one country. Where they acknowledge and issued a formal apology for, all the women that were persecuted and burned and just under suspicion, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, I mean it was men too, but yeah, just to show that they. They see the error of their ways. Yeah. And then Radhika, you know, I always want to nerd out on history, so I brought us the witch trials up through the 1980s and to right now on the interwebs. I didn't have to define what is a witch hunt? I looked at the Salem Witch Museum website and they put forth a Formula for creating witch hunt, which is fear plus trigger equals scapegoat. And a scapegoat is a person who is unfairly and irrationally the object of blame. And then once you have a scapegoat, presumably laws and social pressure are used to incarcerate or eradicate the scapegoat. And that constitutes a witch hunt. So my research really highlighted how old I am and maybe the fact that I went to public school. But when I looked into Western history, it's like an empty, clean slate in my brain. I did not know a thing., I did a quick timeline because everybody knows I love chronology and then we'll just fill in the details. So i'm starting with the bible and the passage about thou shalt not suffer a witch to live According to my the message bible at home The origin of the translation was written between 1360 and 1280 bc or bce depending on your beliefs by Moses. Witches must have been a concern before biblical times, or I'm assuming it wouldn't be mentioned is my guess. Then we're fast forwarding to Thomas Aquinas talking smack about witches in the 1200s, Malleus Maleficarum in 1486. In 1517, Martin Luther splits off from the Catholic Church and forms Protestantism. King James Bible has its book party and release in 1611. According to the History Channel, before this, the Bible was mostly the realm of the church and KJV brought the Bible to the people. witch trials across Europe were all the rage, especially 1560s to 1630s, but they did occur before then and then after as well. In 1620, the pilgrims came from Europe and touched down at Plymouth Rock for financial reasons to have their own colony and to force the indigenous people into their form of Christianity or else. European visitors and settlers were in other places in North America, and these settlers began to infect the landscape, I would imagine, like syphilis, from the perspective of the local people. Oof. There were witchcraft accusations, trials, and executions in the U. S. prior to the Salem Witch Trials, which were from 1692 to 1693, but they were smaller and less famous outbreaks. And then I'm thinking concentration camps of Japanese Americans during World War II can be considered witch trials, all of Nazi Germany, I've seen McCarthyism of the 1950s labeled as a witch hunt, and then there's the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s. And now I found some evidence of witches at nativelanguages. org, among a few different indigenous groups. Some of them are pretty scary, so I suppose it's possible that there were witch hunts in the U. S. long before Europeans got here. I found one case, potential case, of a witch trial about the Zuni witch trials in Pueblo in the late 1800s in New Mexico. There's very little detail, from what I can tell is from the perspective of a white researcher. So it's... And there's just not a lot of details. I don't really have a clear understanding of what's real and what's not, but could have had a long, proud tradition, I suppose, before Europe even got here. Yeah. So let's talk about the hammer of witches, aka the Malleus Maleficarum. I assume those words are Latin, and you can pretty much pronounce Latin however you want. It is a dead language, so I'm going to pronounce it the hammer to use against anyone you want to oppress. According to berkeleylaw. edu, the book was written in 1486 by a guy, or maybe a couple of guys, with very long, difficult name or names in Germany. It was written to prove witchcraft existed, that women were witches more often than men, and to educate magistrates how to find them out and convict them. I'm not sure if this is a fever dream or what made this guy knowledgeable on this topic. They say these things happen more commonly in Germany, Scotland, and the Alpine lands, which just for a second I was like, that's refreshing, that sounds magical. These were small, weak states that had secular courts, and apparently that means that a guy called the magistrate was a judge, investigator, prosecutor, and defense counsel, if he chose to defend, and the law back then allowed for secret interrogation of the accused and they were allowed to use torture, and they could punish witches by death by burning. I mean, Radhika, say what you will about the faults of the current court system, but it's an improvement from that, I hope. I know. YouTube is filled with so much crazy stuff, and I got caught in the vortex, and I was compelled to watch Ancient Mysteries with Leonard Nimoy. The episode is Dark History of Witches. Do you know who Leonard Nimoy is? only through Big Bang Theory, but I don't actually know who that is. I'm such an old fart, so, Leonard Nimoy has that really creepy voice. He was from, um, what's that show? The Enterprise? What was it? Star Trek. Oh, got it. That's my childhood, just watching, like, reruns of Star Trek, and then he hosted this show, Ancient Mysteries. Uh huh. And I think that's probably why I love, like, the weird and the occult and the crime. Yeah, that show was very spooky. I'm sure it planted the seed for my need to investigate mysteries. And then based on the puffy 80s hairstyles, it was made as a reaction to the Satanic Panic, in the documentary, they say torture means there's an ever widening circle of people accused as witches. Many who were tortured gave the names of others to get the pain to stop. Between 1625 and 1631 in Würzburg, Germany, over 600 people, including priests, and then another warning to fast forward, also children got caught up in this. Now, one of our experts says there were towns in Germany where all of the women were killed. Yeah. According to nationalarchives. gov. uk, accusations of witchcraft appear to increase during times of war and famine. It could be used as a tool to oust a person from the community or a position of power or to seek revenge on a neighbor. The church taught that women were weaker and more easily influenced by the devil because Eve was seduced by the snake in the Garden of Eden. In an article from the History Channel, it's called Beyond Salem, Six Lesser Known Witch Trials. They say witch hunts are sometimes used to personally target unwanted people, sometimes used for change in political power and to show commitment to a particular religious sect, i. e. Protestantism. Other Christians that they're just as cruel and legitimate as the other guys. I mean, just like Jesus wanted. One trial on the list that I scoffed at was in Sweden. When another guy with a very long name, I'm going to translate to minister Larry of Jeter Lana. I guess, was instructed to weed out witches in his church, and for some reason he asked two young boys to identify witches who had an invisible witch's mark, and then when one of the boys identified the witch's mark on Larry's wife, he shut the whole thing down. That's what happened in Salem too, as soon as the mayors, Or governor's wife got accused. He's like, no, no, no, now we're going to just stop all these witch trials. Hilarious. Or it would be hilarious if it wasn't so terrifying. Yeah. Now we get to Salem, Massachusetts. Woot woot! The practice of trying people for witchcraft was out of fashion in Europe, but settlers went old school on witches and brought back vintage injustice. In 1692, 200 people were condemned and 19 people were killed. Radhika, did you know that Salem comes from Jerusalem? No. I didn't know that either. Jerusalem. I guess Salem means peace. Salem, I had no idea. The pilgrims came to the New World to escape the influence of the outside world and to persecute others for not being religious to their liking, and the so called New World, because it was new to Europeans. There were indigenous people none too happy to see the interlopers taking their resources, and so there were attacks and wars. There were all kinds of political and personal arguments. To the people at the time, the devil was a clear and present danger, and witches were his associates and can be blamed for everything. The accusation of witchcraft began during a harsh winter in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris. His daughter Elizabeth and niece Abigail played a game with the household slave Tichuba. They broke a raw egg into a glass of water to see the future. One of them claimed to see an eggy coffin, and then both girls went into so called convulsions, and then nine other girls around town started having the same symptoms. Reverend Paris insisted the girls name the witches that had bewitched them, and they named Tituba, Sarah Good, a beggar, and Sarah Bourne, a widow who was rumored to have had an affair with a house servant. I've seen her described as a quarrelsome woman who rarely attended church. Busted! All of them were outsiders. The girls may have done this purposefully to get out of trouble for fortune telling or to gain attention or because they were forced to testify by adults in their lives or a combo platter of all three. This was serious business and a tribunal was convened. Parents and relatives of the girls may have used the accusations to gain political power. Most of the accusers were from inside Salem and the accused were from outside the town. Tichiba admitted to being a witch and threw the other ladies under the bus by saying the other women flew through the air on poles. The frenzy also bled out into nearby towns. Some theorize that the trials ended when the governor's wife was accused of witchcraft and the people in charge pulled the plug. Just like you were saying. Between 150 and 200 people were arrested and 14 women and five men were executed. A side note is that Tichybo was not killed. And then I didn't write it in but there was a lot of talk about, and one of the books that I read was that, even children were left behind, farms were left unattended, these people's lives were ruined and we'll see in future cases, you know, even when the accusations, the people are seen as, innocent in the end, it still can ruin people's lives. Two years after the trials, the tribunals abolished witchcraft as a crime. In 1697, one judge and all the jurors begged forgiveness and blamed the devil for misleading them. I read the book Devil on Trial that accusations were often used to collect a neighbor's property because the custom was to seize all assets of those accused of witchcraft. In other countries that is something that even today is currently done. Yeah. And are left alone, their husbands, or they have built a business on their own, or if a widow. Has, property or assets. Yeah. Then the community will use witchcraft in order to take the yeah, I read more on that as well. The cues were often stripped and shaved so they could be searched for a sign of the double, which was. Where the witch apparently let her associates drink blood from her. So if you had any skin imperfections, you were in big trouble as it would be seen as evidence. Spectral evidence was accepted and this was when anyone claimed they saw the so called witch's disembodied spirit and they would often link it to harm done. I'm going to talk about infant loss, so fast forward if you can't handle that. One piece of evidence was that a baby died and the father claimed he saw the accused person's specter hovering over the baby's crib. One of the accused, Rebecca Nurse, was exonerated by the jury, but then the magistrate insisted they reconvene after the girls who accused her and testified against her went into fits, which I guess is just loud and funky carrying on that couldn't be tolerated by the judge. In some places, the girls were described as folding their bodies into unnatural pretzel shapes. And then sure enough, the jury came back with a guilty verdict once the girls put on this display. Those who stood against the court were often accused as witches, too. One man said the girls could be cured of their weird behavior if they were disciplined, and he ended up being executed after being accused of witchcraft. Yikes! Witches were believed to be unable to pray, and when a former minister prayed the Lord's Prayer before his hanging, the townspeople started trying to stop the execution, but Increase Mather, a well known minister and... Insane racist at the time said the devil could transform himself into an angel of light and the hanging went ahead So like there's really no way out if the no those in power have it out They're just gonna make excuses until they get what they want Did you book claim she signed the devil's book and rode through the air with a witch? I don't think it was honestly even legal to have an enslaved person testify in court and Socially, it's very hard to imagine her or the girls being believed in any other case, but yet their word was believed. One woman's four year old was hesitant in the opinion of interrogators and they took this to mean her mother was obviously a witch. I skipped McCarthyism and the Japanese internment camps and all of Nazi nonsense because I didn't want to do a 56 hour episode with you, so I just skipped right into Satanic Panic. I'm going to talk about false abuse allegations coming up, so if you need to duck out, I'm so glad you stayed with us for this long. I did read a New York Times article called It's Time to Revisit the Satanic Panic, and just as a reminder to everybody, this is all fake. It's false. There's nothing true to any of this. In 1980, as far as like the allegations in 1980, Michelle remembers mm-hmm. with a bestselling book wherein a psychiatric patient recounts her experiences with a murderous Canadian Satanist cult to her psychiatrist. Her psychiatrist was Dr. Paster, and he claims that she was richly abused for years. The article talks about the economic need and personal choice and freedom of women to enter the workforce. And there was a recession happening at the time. Children were being put into daycare at higher rates in North America than previously. And many people had guilt about this. And we have fear plus trigger equals scapegoat. people in power and the townsfolk suddenly felt like there was a hidden occult conspiracy when the safety of Children was threatened in the place where they should be the safest. This book took the world by storm and was later debunked, but while it was having its heyday, many people were accused of outlandish, horrible, satanic ritual abuse, and many victims were convinced they had been ritually abused. In the article, a law enforcement officer asked Dr. Pazder why he was the one answering for Michelle. And the reply was that Michelle didn't have any conscious memory of the abuse, but through his therapy she had recalled it, but then most of it left her memory. Huh. Also, Rodica, Dr. Pazder and Michelle divorced their respective spouses and married each other. Okay. Yeah, so the scruples on this guy. Gross. Passenger's ex wife started speaking out when she learned that people were caught up in the court system and incarcerated based on accusations of satanic ritual abuse brought on by repressed memories, therapists and mental health workers extracted from their patients. But this sort of became a textbook and a training manual for law enforcement, social workers, mental health providers at the time, even though it was almost immediately debunked as being false. But, you know, the hysteria remained in the culture. I know, I feel like it's crazy how just like New literature and an unknown subject just becomes the law for everybody. It's wild. And here I had to put my hands on my head and sit back in my chair because this is why legitimate targets of assaults and abuse are not believed. But that is for another episode. I'm going to talk about abuse of children and as an important spoiler, again, this was all not true. In 1983, the parents of children at the McMartin Preschool received a letter from the Manhattan Beach Police Department saying a child had been abused and that the parents should question their kids, which is an excellent way to contaminate a witness statement. In 1986, seven employees at the school were charged with child abuse. The children claimed that they saw a goat man. That a horse was sacrificed at a church nearby, an employee could fly, and claims of violence that had absolutely no physical traces. In 1990, McMartin employees were acquitted on some counts and jury deadlocked on others, and then a second prosecution ended in mistrial. And this was after 15 million was spent on the trial, which I think at the time was the most ever in U. S. history. And it went on people were in jail, and accused, and I'm assuming just ruined their lives, even though they were acquitted. I couldn't thoroughly investigate. Have you heard of the West Memphis Three? No. Okay. So this one is about kids, both accused and the victims, and that just makes me queasy, which is why we don't cover those cases on this. This podcast, it is a well known case of innocent people being incarcerated for decades. But from what I skimmed, Arkansas teenagers were freed in 2011, nearly 20 years after they were convicted of murders in a portrayed satanic ritual. I listened to an interview with one of the accused., he was one of the three that was accused of being able to fly at trial. And he said, if I could fly, why wouldn't I have just flown away from Arkansas? Escaped the whole thing. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So that's our proud history of witch trials in the West. this morning I did have a moment of panic on Instagram about an imminent land war because we're being infiltrated by the Chinese army. And then I used math. Fear plus trigger equals scapegoat. And then fear is our current state of being exposed chronically to social media. That's definitely causing fear for me. News plus this person actually wanted to sell me a firearm. So it's a literal trigger. And then that equals scapegoat. I did some investigation. I'm feeling better about it now. And then I also looked into how to fight false allegations. If you're the 1 being accused and legal websites, obviously say to hire a lawyer, which is sound advice. If you have the resources, there's also free or low cost legal advocacy agencies. You can contact. SDSU's School of Journalism has an article about the best PR for false accusations is to have a code of ethics. So hopefully you were falsely accused and not actually accused. correct the record and educate about media literacy. And that's assuming you're accused online. And then I got curious about media literacy. And the commonsensemedia. org, which really dumbs everything down, which is exactly what I needed this morning at 6 a. m., their overall stance is to be clear on who's putting out the information, what do they stand to gain from it, and does this information make sense. So that's the end of my part. What do you got? Well, I got really spooked because I was like, I thought, honestly, witch trials were something that happened in the past. And after watching, the episode. I realized, no, it's not. It happens still all over the world. I really enjoy traveling and going all over, After my research, I realized I'm probably not going to be one of the accused people because they kind of stick to the people that they know. but I still wanted to just be aware of where are these hot spots? according to National Geographic, there are 4 major witch hunt spots to this day, and that is India. Papua New Guinea, Amazonia, and Sub Saharan Africa. And most of these, hunts actually happen in, villages that aren't really well educated. Not to say that it doesn't happen in,, developed areas, but it's mostly in the uneducated, undeveloped areas. And it's because... They associate it with the power of nature, such as medicinal and poisonous plants or rains and floods. They believe that these witches can control natural events like storms and droughts. And I'm like, so you think this person has that much power? And they haven't wiped you out. That's pretty crazy. What happens in these areas? And I think the most, the most sad area was, Ghana, which you had mentioned, and they have these camps where. They are elderly, they are widowed,, or they're single women, it's mostly because their neighbors or family members want their land and property. So the more I read about it, the more I realized that they just want control. One lady's grandson got bit by a snake and he died. And so they claimed that she was a witch who made that happen. Pushed her out and in very brutal ways too, and they pushed her out and the only place that she could go is that they have six little campsites, away from the community and then the rest of her family members just took what was left of hers in that area. And now she's left. With nothing, and what's scary is in some of these countries and areas, the leaders truly believe in it, so they support the witch hunts. I was just shocked. And for a lot of other people in the world, these are actually terrifying things. To be called a witch, and I feel like it's hard because in a lot of these countries that are still developing, they use a lot of natural medicine because they don't have access to, health care. And so a lot of their remedies are these quote unquote potions that they're creating and making and just because someone doesn't get better, they get labeled as the witch of purposefully not making them better. It just freaked me out how much it still prevails to this day, but... I guess if I'm not, I love touristy things, I love touristy places, I will only go where things are easy for me to explore, for people who like to go backpacking and Visiting rural areas and villages and meeting other people of other cultures. Just be very wary when you do go out there, at least in these hot spots. That's one of the things that I found. Yeah, that made me think of like to Chuba. I read, you know, she was a slave and I think she wasn't killed because of her financial value. Right. Also, as a tourist when you go somewhere, probably not going to get, right up in that because. You bring monetary value to the situation. Yeah, this one is a rough one as a Christian, not all of us are bad. Come on, guys. They always make it seem that way though, Shelly. When you backtrack it, they always blame the religion as the spark of these theories. And It is. Yeah, it sucks. I think it's like such a mix, cause, in the eighties it was women having more freedom was like such a freaky, scary thing. same thing with, back in the witch hunts, they were so terrified that women would get control. Yeah. Had to be tamped down, we got to stop it somehow. Yeah. And then Christians being labeled as these, we want to kill in order to get what we want. And I'm like, every Christian, I will not every Christian our whole thing is love, forgive and just be kind. And so to see your religion just being the cause of so much pain and anguish, it's horrifying. Yeah. Oh gosh. Well, I'm of glad that one's over. Me too. It wasn't, it wasn't like as serial killer y, but I feel like it's so much scarier so thank you. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you. Bye everybody. Bye. Oh, you see, that's why you are truly a glittering ray of sunshine. You're amazing. Thank you. All right, what's up, witches? What's up? Yeah