Not only on the back burner, but as some kind of weird, separate thing. No one is connecting the dots to the puritans.

History is taught like the news is reported, disconnected incidents. I am reminded of the children in Mad Max reciting how they crashed on their airplane.

>Not only on the back burner, but as some kind of weird, separate thing. No one is connecting the dots to the puritans.

True. It's why they repeated the very same prosecution complex trap during McCarthyism. Same finger-pointing scenario, it was just a different boogeyman to be afraid of - so it wasn't "the same".

Hate to break it to you, but witch hunts were a European thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt#Early_Modern_Europe

The Salem affair is notable as "that one time we did the thing"; also, we hung our witches, we didn't burn them.

Sure these folks were Europeans, perhaps selected for nastiness.