In The American Conservative, Dalrymple draws on Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft to argue that the mechanisms of the witch-craze—forced confessions, denunciations, the punishment of skeptics—are far from extinct.
Reading this, who will not think that this is the explanation of the vast increase in gender dysphoria and transsexualism in the last few years, and indeed of the spread of psychopathology in general?