Neoconservative-turned-#Resistance hero David Frum blasted Trump for defending Stein and Gabbard, noting sarcastically, “He was supposed to pretend they were not all on the same team.” Ana Navarro on CNN said, “When both the Russians and Trump support someone, be wary.” An MSNBC panel noted, in apparent seriousness, that Gabbard “never denied being a Russian asset.” CNN media critic Brian Stelter tried to suggest Hillary only seemed wacko thanks to a trick of the red enemy, saying, “It feels like a disinformation situation where the Russians want this kind of disinformation.”

(The “Russians caused us to say that crazy thing about Russians” meme has been a recurring theme. When Luke Harding of The Guardian was criticized for a thinly-sourced report that Julian Assange had met with Trump aide Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian embassy, an anonymous CIA official penned an editorial in Politico suggesting that if the story was fake, “the most logical explanation” was a Russian disinformation effort to discredit journalists.)

This sufficiently shows that the new beliefs had completely conquered the old. The question had passed beyond the range of reason and argument, and everywhere throughout Europe the Witches' Sabbat was accepted as an established fact, which it was dangerous to dispute. Jurists and canonists might amuse themselves with debating it theoretically; practically it had become the veriest commonplace of the courts, both secular and ecclesiastical.

That the details of the Sabbat varied but little throughout Europe is doubtless to be ascribed to the leading questions habitually put by judges, and to the desire of the tortured culprits to satisfy their examiners, yet this consentaneity at the time was an irrefragable proof of truth.

¶ 11:35 PM