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The first life lesson I had in how a witch hunt works was when I was an elementary student at Center School in Natick, Massachusetts, 41 miles and less than an hour’s drive from Salem. But in my case it wasn’t 1693 but 1963.

Our fifth-grade teacher, Miss Masterson, stepped out of the classroom for a few minutes and we were instructed to remain at our desks. When she returned a pile of books had been pushed off a table at the front of the room onto the floor. Miss Masterson asked the class who did it. The entire class pointed at me, sitting at my desk near the back of the classroom.

I was sent to the office of Principal Paul Wadleigh. For close to an hour Mr. Wadleigh grilled me to get me to confess that I had gone to the front of the classroom and pushed the books onto the floor. I denied it, but with an entire class as witnesses against me, why should he believe me?

Why should the class accuse me if it wasn’t true? I didn’t know.

I didn’t know about anti-Semitism from a classroom full of Protestants and Catholics when I was the only Jewish student in the class, the only student not reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of class.

I knew I was frequently bullied and beat up after school but didn’t know it was because I displayed a vocabulary in class beyond any of the other students. (Two years later the entire Natick K-12 student body was tested for reading level and I had the highest score in the entire system.)

So I was grilled. “Confess!” and I could go back to class and nothing more would be said about it — no punishment.

Witchcraft at Salem Village

I would not admit to doing something I had not done and stubbornly pled innocent despite the principal’s plea-bargain offer.

Finally, Principal Wadleigh relented and sent me back to class.

A family member who’s a supporter of Hillary Clinton suggested to me that the reason I defend Donald Trump against his detractors is that I have a soft spot for the underdog. I don’t deny it because the underdogs I defend are the victims of mass hysteria driven by mass media.

I wrote an entire book — The Frame of the Century? — defending one such underdog, O.J. Simpson, who the entire mass madia attacked as a murderer, despite the only evidence and testimony against him in court indicating that he might have been at the crime scene. Could Nicole have called him there with the murderer’s knife at her throat — the murderer intending to use O.J. as his alibi — and Simpson arrived to walk into Nicole’s blood with Nicole already dying or dead? Could Ronald Goldman have seen O.J. standing over Nicole’s body, attacked him, and O.J. picked up the murder knife, stabbing at Ronald Goldman in self-defense?

It could explain all the blood evidence. But what I just wrote is a fictional construct as much as Marcia Clark’s prosecution theory, and just as open to interpretation and skepticism.

I have never seen a shred of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that O.J. Simpson had a motive to kill his ex-wife. What I just wrote is not even one of the half-dozen equally-valid alternate scenarios I put in my book that explain the evidence presented against O.J. Simpson in both a criminal and civil trial.

Even before the Simpson trial we have had other media-frenzy cases which turned out to be bogus. Among the most infamous are the McMartin pre-school trial prosecuted by Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. There were other such trials in Florida and Massachusetts. They all used testimony from children led into making up stories — the same prosecution methods used on adults to generate witness testimony for the actual Salem witch trials.

After the Simpson trials we have the Duke lacross case where student athletes were accused of rape and convicted in the mass media — only to have it come out that the accuser was a serial liar. This is the only such case I can think of where the prosecutor, himself, ended up fired, disbarred, and even going to jail — for one day.

President Bill Clinton was brought up on charges of impeachment — and cleared in a Senate trial — for perjury he committed while denying various sex acts — and his accusers have even accused Clinton of rape — a charge on which he has never been arraigned or tried.

Anita Hill was brought in by opponents of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas to accuse now Justice Thomas of serial sexual harrassment. Today whether you believe Hill or Thomas depends entirely not on indisputable facts but on political leanings.

So we get to 2016 Republican candidate Donald J. Trump, bragging to Billy Bush of being sexually aggressive (in Trump’s own words ending not in a sexual conquest but in furniture shopping), and now what the Clintonistas referred to as a “bimbo eruption” is bringing forth accusers, many years later, accusing the current Republican candidate of unwanted sexual assaults.

As I write this there are 27 days until the populist presidential balloting. The actual presidential electors selected on November 8, 2016, vote on December 12, 2016 and are legally unbound to vote for a candidate; they can elect whom they wish.

For either election there is no time to investigate these brand-new charges against candidate Donald Trump and find out whether there are any truth to these women’s allegations or alternatively their fantastic political constructs.

What we do know is that major media made up almost entirely of liberals, progressives, and radical leftists who find Donald J. Trump poisonous to their agendas will obsess on these charges to the exclusion of any discussion of policy debates and charges against their own preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, defender of Bill Clinton.

I can only hope that — unlike all the other times — the witch hunt is exposed and foiled before it’s too late to matter.

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