Rachel Kincaid writes for Autostraddle on the twisted power dynamics inherent in witch trials, both in history and fiction, in the past and in the present day:

But what rings most dangerously prophetic about Salem is the ideology that suggests imagining the most helpless and vulnerable in our communities as the most powerful, in a kind of 1984-esque doublethink that provides a rationale for causing as much harm as one wishes to that group.