IF you are brave, or foolish, enough to dip your toes into the fetid pools of online American conspiracy theories, you soon find yourself in a whole world of crazy.

Conspiracy theories have always been with us, a prime example being the witch craze of 16th and 17th-century Europe which saw thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, being tortured and executed after being subjected to baseless accusations that they had cast spells to make their neighbours' cows stop giving milk. Scotland is by no means immune to these episodes, which with the benefit of hindsight can be clearly seen to be nothing more than baseless hysteria which often feeds upon prejudice and ignorance.

READ MORE: Why a campaign to pardon Scots women killed as witches is starkly relevant today

In North Berwick in 1590, more than 100 alleged witches were arrested and several confessed under torture to meeting with Satan in the churchyard of North Berwick kirk. They were accused of using black magic to raise the storms which had threatened to sink a fleet of ships carrying King James VI and his bride Anne of Denmark back to Scotland.

After suffering terrible torture, Agnes Sampson confessed to sinking a dead cat – to which human body parts and stones had been tied – in the Firth of Forth as a spell to raise a storm which would have sent the king and his bride to the bottom of the sea. In 1591, she was garrotted then her body was burned at the stake in Edinburgh. John Fian was strangled then his body was burned, and Euphame MacCalzean suffered the appalling fate of being burned alive.

In the 1980s there was another outbreak of mass hysteria when so-called “satanic panic” swept the globe. Using the now discredited practice of recovered memory therapy, lurid allegations were made of child murder and sexual abuse in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. In 1991, police and social workers removed five children on South Ronaldsay from their families, all English “incomers” into the tightly knit island community, after allegations were made of ritualistic satanic child abuse. The allegations were unfounded and the social workers involved in the case were sharply criticised by the senior judge Lord Clyde, who led an investigation into the events.

The great irony is that while moral hysteria was being whipped up by right-wing Christian fundamentalists about baseless allegations of satanic child abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was indeed an epidemic of very real child abuse. The real one was being perpetrated by ministers, pastors, priests and nuns and it was being hushed up by church authorities who were far more concerned with protecting the reputation of their churches than protecting the vulnerable children in their care.

In the 2020s, with the assistance of the internet and social media, modern moral panics can spread very quickly.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect."

This quote was written by Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels) in 1710, but has never been more true.

The latest paroxysm of moral panic which has been circulating in the USA for some months has now arrived in Scotland.

This is the claim put about by right-wing figures in America – including the conspiracy theorising Q-Anon-supporting Republican congresswoman Margorie Taylor-Greene and others in her party – that schools are providing litter boxes in bathrooms for pupils who “identify as cats”.

READ MORE: How America's 'litter box conspiracy' spread to one Scottish school

This week there have been claims that a school in Aberdeenshire is being pressured to provide litter boxes in pupils' bathrooms. There is no basis whatsoever to this claim, but it is being propagated by right-wing politicians and commentators in order to belittle and ridicule transgender people who seek to use a bathroom which is in line with their gender identity.

In the exact same way in the 1980s and 1990s, Conservative opponents of equal marriage asserted – without presenting any evidence – that allowing two men to marry would result in an epidemic of people wanting to marry dogs or horses.

What all episodes of moral panic have in common is a demonisation of a minority or marginalised group which is deemed to present a threat to social order and established power structures. The American sociologist and criminologist Stanley Cohen, who was the first to identify and study the phenomenon of moral panic, noted that at its root was the exaggeration or distortion of who did or said what, which is then followed by increasingly dire predictions of widespread calamity if the “deviant” behaviour is not controlled or stamped out.

Moral panics originate in real fears and uncertainties, but then become increasingly overblown and ridiculous until they eventually burn themselves out. Unfortunately too many innocent people are harmed in the process.