Though contemporary scholars disagree as to the degree that conspiracist thinking still poses a serious threat, for most of them, demonization of women or “bad mothers” has historically played only a minor role in manifestations of collective or political paranoia. Daniel Pipes, an expert in Middle Eastern history whose major contribution to the subject is the word “conspiracism,” narrates the history of Western conspiracist movements from the Knights Templar through the Freemasons and the Illuminati without mentioning the European witchhunts. Oddly, considering his focus on anti-Semitism, he also has little to say about the Spanish Inquisition. Robins and Post’s Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred devotes seven pages to the Salem witch trials. Of these “body count” analyses,1 one may argue that the persecution of women gets minimized or trivialized, but the body count approach does compel the observation that paranoia is very closely associated with power, and positions of power or perceived power historically have been occupied, for the most part, by men.