The article I am quoting from is about “mass hysteria” which, the author argues, “has been a feature of American life since at least the time of the infamous witch trials in Salem.” He doesn’t think it’s quite the right word for what he has in mind, but you be the judge. But it’s not quite America, I think, but the American left, the kinds of people who reliably vote Democrat, who are typically the crazies he describes. This story is one of the most grotesque tales I know about social insanity. I remember it well since my wife was working in childcare at the time. It is a story worth remembering whenever you hear about Democrats, or the American left in general, running off on some incomprehensible tangent that could happen in no other country on earth.

Anxiety about wayward adolescents is eternal. But widespread anxiety about toddlers was, at the time, a relatively new phenomenon, the tykes of Generation X having been the first generation of Americans to have been entrusted to professional daycare services in such large numbers.

Music had Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest, and daycares had the Little Rascals case and a few others like it. The criminal cases brought against those accused of carrying out theatrical episodes of ritualized sexual abuse within the walls of American daycares look absolutely unbelievable in retrospect [!!!!!].

The phenomenon of “recovered memories” that drove many of these cases is pseudoscientific poppycock, and the details of the abuse suffered by the children in these cases is obviously [!!!] the result of adult anxiety filtered through the juvenile mind: Little girls insisted, for example, that they had been sexually violated with butchers’ knives, while others told of being buried alive, being flushed down toilets, etc.

There was no physical evidence that any of this happened, of course — and even in the happy era before toilet capacity became a federal obsession, flushing an entire child down the commode was a physical impossibility — but that did not seem to matter very much. The nation was convinced — not in its mind, but in its always-unreliable heart — that there were monsters afoot, that somebody, somewhere, was doing terrible things to our teenagers and children. . . .

My Hillsdale students [to whom he was relating this story] were by turns horrified and amused by the lurid and not coincidentally cinematic tales of improbably theatrical abuse in the Little Rascals case — children claimed, among other things, to have been thrown into tanks of sharks and to have been spirited away via hot-air balloon, but there were (and this detail seems to matter more than a little) no sharks or balloons to be found. My students laughed at how odd and unlikely it all sounded, because they are too young to know what the outcome of that case was.

Everybody was convicted.

Robert Kelly Jr., the principal defendant in the Little Rascals case, was convicted on 99 out of 100 charges of abusing children, and received twelve consecutive life sentences. There were 143 witnesses at his trial, including a number of little children, whom the jury found quite convincing.

Dawn Wilson, who rejected a plea bargain, was sentenced to life in prison. Betsy Kelly, after being imprisoned for two years awaiting trial, entered a no-contest plea and accepted an additional seven-year sentence.

Eventually, the courts threw all that out, but not before a half dozen people had spent years in prison, some of them without ever having had a day in court. Such was the moral panic inspired by the case that bonds were set as high as $1.5 million, which used to be real money. So all but one defendant remained incarcerated until the criminal-justice system — hampered though it was by the dishonorable actions of prosecutors in the case — finally got around to exonerating the accused. [My bolding]

I cannot believe how he plays this down as a form of social madness. This was by no means the only instance and these people spent years in jail and have never been compensated even though they have been released. He almost makes it seem that the story is one that Americans can be proud of:

Even when American justice miscarries, as it did in the daycare cases, the appeals process generally provides an opportunity for evidence to be properly examined, for all accounts to be heard and evaluated, and for the rights of the accused to be considered.

I suppose if you are prone to believe anything, no matter how farfetched, you can end up believing in socialism or vote for Obama. He specifically describes this approach to politics as a Democrat strategy.

There are the usual grotesque opportunists who attempt to profit from these things: Tipper Gore began her activism in earnest just after the 1984 presidential election in which Ronald Reagan won a 49-state landslide; the Gores calculated, not incorrectly, that a Democrat who could maintain the loyalty of traditional left-wing constituencies while not bleeding to death among more conservative middle-class whites would have a pretty good chance against what looked, at the time, like a pretty solid Republican coalition.

But this is merely a cautionary tale. What practical lessons you can draw are hard to know.