What's surprising about that? Not much, perhaps, but I would say that one thing that is important about it is that it shows that huge, glaring errors of judgement are not restricted to Far Mode.

To the extent that I use that nomenclature I would have called this judgement to be a far mode one. It is the throwing about of far mode political abstractions to achieve perceived near mode goals. Those near mode goals have very little to do with the guilt or innocence of the victim (Amanda) and a lot to do with how your political utterance ("She's a witch! Burn her!") will be perceived by your peers.