Communal Violence in Early America Through the Present

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00:09

Welcome. Today, I have a special treat for you.

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We have a guest who has done a lot of study on what you might call ritual violence or cultural justice.

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I don't know. We'll see what she says about it. But I don't know if you've heard. I'm sure you have, because I've heard for years that right wingers, conservatives, especially

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Southerners, are uniquely violent and they're uniquely evil people because of this, because they have something called gun culture and because they used to have dueling.

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There's a vigilante almost justice that they have. It's very decentralized where, as in more progressive regions of the country, people handle things in a civilized manner.

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I want to explore and perhaps challenge this narrative today. I think it will be a perspective you're not likely to hear anywhere else.

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Well, maybe somewhere, but not anywhere that's prominent. With that, we have

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Nicole Williams with us. Thank you for joining us, Nicole. We really appreciate it. Thank you for asking me.

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You have a degree from the University of Strathclyde, which is over in jolly old

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Great Britain. If people want to follow you, they can go to Nicole W.

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100, which is at Twitter. The name of your dissertation is

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The Rights of Violence, Rough Music, Protest, Atrocity and Power, A Comparative Examination, Ulster and the

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Carolinas, 1760 to 1840. Just to give a little background,

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I think I know you from social media from Facebook and X. We have mutual friends who are like some people that have gone to Abbeville Institute and people who are interested in things like Southern history.

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I've been going through Albion's seed by David Hackett Fisher. I was surprised.

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Some of the things that I knew about didn't surprise me, but there were things like the rough music. I actually didn't know a lot about that.

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Of course, it sounds like what you're doing is something very similar to him, except you're getting into more detail. You're comparing these traditions that existed in Ulster, and correct me if I'm wrong, with what came to the

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United States, especially in the South. You're showing this cultural connection and how there actually was somewhat of a cultural order.

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There were circumstances in which people relied on these mechanisms to restore justice and prevent evil and these kinds of things.

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I want to give a new category to the listening audience. Maybe consider all of this from a perspective they haven't.

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Tell us a little bit about yourself. Why did you choose to study this? What compelled you? I'm assuming studying it in Great Britain, they must have looked at you kind of odd.

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Why are you—they hate guns, right? They hate American—I don't know.

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I'm stereotyping here, but they must have given you the side eye. I usually try to give everyone a little bit of a side eye.

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No, seriously, the Scots were great. Never had a problem. Very friendly people.

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Very communal. They do like to drink a little much. I originally came to this.

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I was always interested in history. Our recent attacks on Southern culture and what you would call old

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American heritage culture really kind of spurred me on to want to study, to delve deeper into this and be able to speak more honestly as to who, especially common people, were.

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A lot of times what people miss is the way ordinary common people lived two or three, 400 years ago.

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To that end, I started looking at cultural history and came across ritual violence and rough music.

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To break it down, Americans will be very familiar, at least if they've never really thought about it, with the term running someone out of town on a rail.

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That's essentially what this comes from, is if someone offends the social and moral fabric of a community, they will literally put you on a rail and send you out of town.

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You also see this in, if you've ever seen the HBO miniseries, John Adams, you'll see it in the tarring and feathering of a merchant, a tea merchant, who was stripped of his clothes, had tar poured on him, put on a rail and taken out of Boston Harbor.

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The South was not immune to this. As a matter of fact, there was a distinct form of Southern ritual violence, which was different in many ways than Northern ritual violence.

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But again, to back up a little bit, a lot of this ritual violence came out of England, Scotland, and to some extent

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Northern Ireland and Wales. People in the medieval and early modern period had to have a way to moral police their communities.

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And these were not stodgy, pious people, as we might think. They drank, they danced, they gambled.

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But one thing they did not tolerate was sexual immorality or breaking or violating the bonds of marriage.

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So a lot of times people, if somebody was not adhering to gender roles, or somebody was engaging in affairs, or doing something that they ought not to be doing, more often than not, in the

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UK or Great Britain at the time, people would go to the person and say, you need to stop this, or there's gonna be consequences.

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There was no police force that was going to enforce this, and the church necessarily wasn't always going to enforce it. And if warnings, one or two warnings were ignored, a lot of times they would come to the door, take the person out, possibly tie them up, put them up on top of a pole, parade them out of town, throw mud, rotten food at them, perhaps sing or chant a primitive, kind of what they would call a nominee, to humiliate them.

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They're basically saying, you're not wanted here, you're causing a problem. This, and it was also a signal to other people, is if you violate our moral norms, this is what's going to happen to you.

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And on top of that, there were also protests during that same period of people, especially with food.

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Food was a big issue with people, and as capitalism started to really take off, people began to adulterate food with otherwise poisonous materials.

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And when people found out that they were being poisoned for goods that they paid for, a lot of times the gristmills, the gristmill operators who sold flour would find their gristmills destroyed by a mob.

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And that this, again, was repeated again and again. And one of the interesting things about that is a lot of times the women were the ones who galvanized a lot of these mobs.

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I guess E .P. Thompson, who is an English historian, said women were responsible for feeding the children, so if their children were harmed, they were the first to become aggravated.

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And if they were aggravated, their husbands were aggravated. So this type of behavior was, of course, culturally transmitted to colonial

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America, but it was adopted for use especially on the frontier. Painting a picture, while you had these incidents of, you had

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British or English -style ritual violence in the north, in the south, the south outside of Charleston and maybe some settlements in Virginia was much more sparsely populated.

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And there was a lot more crime, especially in, for example,

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South Carolina. South Carolina had, especially after the Cherokee War in 1760, had an outbreak of rapes, robberies, and murders.

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And there was no colonial authority outside of who were prepared to deal with this. So the people were terrified, and several of the poor but more aspirational individuals who wanted to bring order to the situation took it upon themselves to galvanize into a vigilante force.

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And more often than not, the tool by which they dispensed justice was the whip. They tied people up and whipped them to try to terrify and run off, not just lawbreakers, but after a while they started to run off people who were, they beat prostitutes, they beat men who were beating their wives, anything to try to bring moral order to an otherwise anarchical situation because there was no, there was no authority, the authorities in Charleston were not interested in bringing order to this situation.

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And that was, that was only but one example. I mean, it was completely, there was a different movement in North Carolina around the same period.

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It was more of a protest movement against what, and both of these movements, by the way, took on the name regulators, but they were, they had a completely separate genesis.

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But in North Carolina, people were being fleeced by county agents for small fees because you had to pay fees to have marriages recorded or have a marriage license issued for burials or even just for general taxes.

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People were paying upwards, I think it was like 12 pounds for sometimes for a license and 12 pounds in 1760, even in North Carolina, proclamation money was a rather large amount of money.

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So a lot of times you had tax collectors who were beaten, you had tax collectors who were put on horses and run backwards, you had houses literally pulled down.

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In one of the more infamous cases, there was a riot in the Orange County Courthouse in 1770, and in that incident, the regulators came to the courtroom, hit one of the crown attorneys, grabbed one of their targeted individuals who was named

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Edmund Fanning, drug him out of the courthouse, beat him mercilessly, didn't kill him. The judge got up to oppose them.

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They told the judge to sit down and shut up, and they said to carry about your business. The judge later that night absconded from the town.

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They pulled Fanning's house down after looting his liquor, and then they threw a, someone who had already been executed by the court, they threw a corpse into the courtroom and left excrement in the judge's seat.

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This was a means of signifying anger, but the difference being is it was restrained.

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Typically, no one was, they did not ever intend to kill anybody.

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It was a way to intimidate, drive off, and say we're bringing order to something that's either hurting us or where there is no order.

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Now, okay, so it's probably important for me to mention, we're not justifying any of this.

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We're not saying that. No, no, no. I have always been clear, looking at it from the historical context, these things can be used for good or ill.

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Right. But the fact of the matter is they do happen, and they've even happened in contemporary times when people have felt rightly or wrongly if there's injustice.

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I've seen videos of it out of Ukraine. Well, so it's not the ideal, obviously, but one of the things that I think we came close to considering a few years ago especially is, okay, what happens when the entire system is completely corrupt?

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You can't trust the mechanism of elections anymore to give you virtuous leaders, and this happens on every level.

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What recourse do you have left? I think these are the conditions that we are talking about as people who don't think they have any recourse left and what they did.

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It developed into various different—actually,

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I really like the way that you said that there was some restraint in this because there were different traditions even in the

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United States maybe we can talk about. I've always thought even the whole matter of dueling, which

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I went to Liberty University, and there's a place not far, right on the other side of Lynchburg.

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That's the point of honor, they call it, where everyone would go to duel. It didn't happen very often, but when it did happen, there's all these rules.

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That's the thing that I think struck me is Southern gun culture, they're just shooting everyone and murdering.

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They point to dueling, and I'm like, dueling had some really serious rules that you had to abide by.

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If you didn't abide by them, you're going to have a problem with the rest of society. There really was an honor code that was kind of ingrained.

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Maybe talk about that a little bit, North -South, I don't know, Scotch -Irish lowland cavaliers.

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What did ritual violence look like in some of these different regions? How do we do we see whispers of this today?

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I would say, first off, when you think about things like dueling, that was more of a province at the time during the colonial period of the coastal

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Anglo elite. I originally went to University of Georgia, and there's an aerial north campus where there are two debate societies.

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I think it was in the early 1800s, they actually came to a pistol debate with one another. I think somebody was killed.

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There was a sense of you can't defame someone's honor with impunity and get away with it.

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If memory serves, even John Randolph of Roanoke, who was one of my favorite senators in American history, famously challenged

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Henry Clay to a duel. He had no intention of shooting Henry Clay, but he took it all the way to the brink.

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I think Henry Clay shot him through the coat. John Randolph said, I can't believe you actually tried to shoot me.

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Is my example bad? Is this outside the scope of ritual violence? No, it's related.

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I would say it's not entirely, but that has more to do with the question of honor, which is certainly an issue.

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Ritual violence, I think, was more the purview of the common person. Let's get back to that then.

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The rough music and the more communal would be the word. You can use communal.

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Community threats, handling community threats and not just personal abridgments of honor and so forth.

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Maybe talk about that then. How did this look different, and do we see whispers of that today?

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One of the things I included in my PhD dissertation, which I'm surprised wasn't more controversial with some of my examiners, is if you look at the raw footage of January 6, 2021, there's a lot of echoes in that incident.

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People try to characterize that incident as an insurrection, which is funny because that word is used repeatedly throughout

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American history on ritual violence, when the reality is that they were protesting, rightly or wrongly,

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I'm not passing judgment, on what they felt were the norms of a free and fair election not being conducted.

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So you saw chanting, you saw people singing, you saw property damage, you saw attempts at humiliation and intimidation.

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You also saw this, I would argue, a year later there were protests in Dublin against crime committed by migrants,

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Dublin, Ireland. I would say you probably even saw it in the English riots of last summer. Again, these are things that rise up when people feel like there's no other mechanism of the state that's willing to deal with their complaints.

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So people get to the point that they don't feel like they have another choice, but again, it's still restraint.

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People aren't walking around the street. To your lay person, they feel like this looks horrible, this looks terrible, this looks like society's falling apart, but you notice no one's getting killed, at least not on purpose.

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So you don't have people running around the streets literally trying to end someone else's life.

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And again, you saw this in different bits in the colonial period as well as you saw in the antebellum period,

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North and South. It was just manifest in different ways. Most often, property violence was a very easy way.

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People would burn someone's property down, not with them in it, nine times out of ten, but it was a way of saying you can't live here anymore because your house is gone, your farm is gone, you have to leave.

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You knew this was coming. Or like I said, it could just be just, there are several incidents where clergy in the colonial period and in the early antebellum period were driven off or attempted to be driven off through threats of violence, property destruction, there was a famous published journal written by Charles Wood Mason, who

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I recommend everyone read if you want to have a very good idea of the way the old Southern backcountry was in the years before the revolution, called the

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Carolina Backcountry, the writings of itinerant Anglican Charles Wood Mason. And Wood Mason went about his business and he comes off as a huge snob, but you do start to feel for him as he develops a relationship with these people.

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But he and the Presbyterians were at each other's throats, although the irony being is the

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Presbyterians and Anglicans both seem to hate the Baptists. Still do, no

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I'm just kidding. But a lot of times the Presbyterians would get people intoxicated to try to disrupt

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Wood Mason's sermons, or they would send people to hoot and holler during some of the sermons to try to disrupt his ability from carrying out what he saw as his duty.

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He was even assaulted a couple of times, he had his books and his horse stolen. These were things that he felt, but the people back there, a lot of them were

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Scots -Irish Presbyterians, were saying we don't want Anglicans back here. We don't want to turn our people into Anglicans.

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The difference being, and this proved quite controversial with some other members of faculty, is during the

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Revolutionary War there was a lot more violence that we would call unrestrained, and I'm talking about off the battlefield violence, things that were almost nauseating to read, and this was not like the

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British did, the British bad Americans, everybody engaged in this to some degree or another, and it became more retributive.

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In other words, people were repeating patterns of violence simply out of revenge if something especially had happened, not only to themselves but to members of their family, which somebody would think, well, that sounds like Hatfields and McCoys, but in reality it's something that's human.

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If somebody did something to someone in your family, obviously your first inclination is not necessarily going to go out and do something about it, but if you don't feel like someone else is going to do something about it, you as a husband and father are going to feel compelled to do something about it.

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It's just a basic human emotion. It's just that in a lot of ways the

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South and North weren't that different, it's just that there was a sense of, there was so much violence that took place off the battlefield, and people felt compelled to do what was necessary to eliminate that threat, and to probably gain some perverse pleasure in doing it.

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Again, this is when civil disorder breaks down, you know there's no one who's going to come and help you, there's not going to be a sense of justice in this.

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You can't say I was wrong by somebody and the state's going to come by and arrest that person and charge them with something. You can see, again, you see these patterns repeated again and again and again, and when there's the more civil disorder breaks down, the more deadly the violence becomes, but when civil disorder goes away and order is restored, you start seeing a lessening of the violence over time.

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So I guess I'm thinking of like Fisher when he talks about the Northeast being more communal in the way they handled justice, and the

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South being I guess a bit more decentralized, and I think rough music was one of the things he used.

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Was rough music more of a regional thing? Because he paints that like that's a cavalier thing.

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There were variations all over the UK, which were specific to various places.

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There were different names, I mean there's rough music, Skimmington was very common, you can even read colonial documents from the colonial period, they'll call it

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Skimmington. The difference being is when he talks about communal justice, a lot of times when

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I was talking about tarring and feathering and riding someone out of town on a rail, you would have a great big show out of abusing somebody and humiliating them.

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That's what the Northerners did because they lived in more close -knit settlements where you could get a large population over a period of time.

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Southerners, again, were so dispersed from one another where you couldn't create a huge show out of it, so you had to use tools like the whip.

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I mean you could carry someone on a pole, but if there's five people there, what have you really accomplished?

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Have you really intimidated someone with a crowd of five people? Probably not. Right, right.

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Well, people are hearing us use these terms and many probably don't know. So the rough music, I mean this is a fascinating thing.

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Paint a picture for us on what that looked like, whether it's someone who's influential, commits adultery or whatever.

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What would happen if they did such a thing? A lot of times it was just very kind of a typical offense was either adultery or what they call cuckolding.

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In other words, where a husband was more submissive to his wife or the perception was, and the people in the town would come and grab the person, usually at night, at an unknown hour, and they would bind the person, possibly usually put them up on a rail or sometimes on a cart.

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Drawing someone on the back of a cart was also humiliating. Again, throw rocks or food at them, not with the intention of killing them, but it was supposed to terrify them.

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It was also sending a message to the rest of the community that certain types of moral turpitude were not going to be allowed in the community, period.

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And a lot of times this especially had to do, again, with relationships, relationships that either transgressed marriage or things that people deemed improper.

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It typically wasn't used for drunkenness, unless someone became a real problem, or dancing or something like that.

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But it really had to do with we cannot let this type of behavior flourish in this community.

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It was widespread throughout England, Scotland, especially, even in Wales.

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And that same behavior came to America, but in the

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South, due to the fact that there was not as much population density. You had people for a long time after they settled, especially the old back country where you had more poor people.

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There wasn't as much of a sense of order. So a lot of times you found people engaging. I think Woodmason said there were all kinds of children born out of wedlock who weren't being educated.

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And this, again, was in the 1760s. And you had men like those regulators and Woodmason who encouraged the regulators to say, we're not, this is not going to be allowed.

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We can't build a society out of this. And so they used different tools, which said more often the

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South was whipping. I think normally the normal punishment was 39 lashes under most circumstances to try to bring order to people.

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I mean, there was a case where a man by the name of Samuel Boykin, who was later an

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American patriot in the American Revolution. There was a man named Dozier and Dozier's wife came to him and said that he was not working.

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He wasn't providing for the family and he was mistreating her. Boykin came there one night, grabbed

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Dozier, tied him to a tree, whipped him 39 times. And according to the manuscript that I had read to get this information, they said

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Dozier was a perfect citizen from that day forward. No one ever had a complaint about Dozier again.

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This is interesting because this, I think, lasted a long time up into the 20th century.

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There's examples of this kind of thing. So I know someone, not like super close, but I met someone

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I should say at a conference. And anyway, he said that his, I hope

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I'm not going to get in trouble for it. I don't think I will for sharing. It's just a story. But he said that his grandfather was in the

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Klan. And it's funny, that's a whole nother story, I suppose. I don't know if we'll get to that.

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But the Klan existed in various different forms in different time periods. And this would have been like the civil rights era

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Klan, I guess, you know, 1960s or whatever. And this was down south.

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So in the Klan, the area that I'm in now, the Klan was actually very active, but it took on a different form and it was against different immigrant groups.

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Anyways, this tangent. But he said, in the case of his grandfather, he goes, the violence they did was mostly against white people.

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And it was for things like marital infidelity. So he said that there was this guy,

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I guess his grandfather must have told him this story. He wasn't providing for his wife and his family, basically.

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He was kind of a deadbeat, wouldn't get a job, that kind of thing. And so in this case, and I'm not justifying this, but the

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Klan showed up at his house and wrapped him in barbed wire and rolled him around.

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And from that day forward, he got a job, he provided for his wife. So the point of me even sharing that is just to say that it sounds like there were forms in which, and in that case,

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I mean, it could have just been the men of the community in somewhat of an organized fashion. It doesn't have to be the

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Klan or anything. It's just, there were mechanisms that used to exist,

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I think more so that upheld social standards, even if they did it inappropriately or wrongly, or it was worst case scenario, or the guys doing it were nefarious.

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I mean, all of these things can be true, but I suppose one of the big debates now is that I see in the church, at least in the more evangelical church is like, can you have

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Christian culture? Can you have Christian civilization? And behind that, there is, I think, an assumption about the nature of politics and whether or not culture is downstream from politics or whether politics is downstream from culture.

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And can you use force to try to, we hear all the time, actually, like you can't do this, but can you use force to enforce a moral standard upon people?

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And it sounds like for most of our history, it was very common for people to use coercion and force to uphold social mores, including things like against infidelity and against the example

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I just gave, dead beats and so forth. So I don't know if you could talk about that a little bit, but I don't know where we got off track, if you want to call it off track, but where we developed the assumption that like, oh, you can't use force to compel people to be moral because that's got to come from within them somehow.

29:46

It sounds like your whole dissertation is about using force to compel moral behavior, and it kind of worked.

29:55

As an aside, your little story just reminded me of something. I had someone tell me some years ago that they were in Monroe, Georgia in the 60s, and there was some man, he was a white man from Detroit, who was down there trying to be a political agitator.

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And they told this man, I'll give you $100 if you go up there and find out what that guy wants.

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And apparently this guy was some sort of organizer slash hippie. Anyway, the guy, when he heard that, he took his car keys and threw him way off in a field.

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And then one of these old men who was like in his 80s, came up off of a stoop and shoved a snub -nosed revolver in his throat and said, if you don't get out of here,

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I'm going to blow your head off. Now, nothing happened from that. But that was, again, that was people saying, whatever you're doing here, you could do it somewhere else.

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Because the perception was for right or wrong, this guy was causing a problem. So, all right.

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So you said there's whispers of this or there's shadows of this that you think are still around as far as people taking, when the other mechanisms fail, using intimidation tactics to enforce these moral standards and so forth.

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Are there other examples other than January 6th where you see this? Yes. Funny thing is, well, the funny thing is not, of course,

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I was in Scotland, but my PhD supervisor and I talked about, there was one morning

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I woke up and there was a drug house in Ayr, Scotland, A -Y -R,

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Scotland. And the police refused to really deal with the issue. And then the house apparently mysteriously was set on fire.

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And the people in the town said, we don't know anything about it. When it was pretty much obvious that the people living around there knew exactly who did it, but they didn't do it themselves.

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But the police weren't going to deal with it. So they were going to deal with it. And I'm sure that there's so many of these incidents that go unreported.

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Anytime people feel like they're spiraling out of control, but they haven't reached total chaos, desperate people will take desperate measures to bring order to an disorderly situation.

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How does this fit in with the American decentralized tradition? Because during our Revolutionary War, of course, we had committees of correspondents that functioned as a shadow government.

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And there's always been, I think, a sense of like, we handle things on the local level in our communities, a fierce kind of defense of those communities, and not a wanting to meddle in other people's affairs, but just to kind of be about your own business.

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But you saw how the royal governors were treated in the Revolutionary War era, and how these shadow governments form.

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How do you see this in relation to America's decentralized tradition?

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And do you think that these can constitute an actual legitimate government at times, where if you have the prominent people of the town, and they're being led by an authority figure, and they have more of the social capital and trust than the actual official leaders appointed by the king or supposedly elected.

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I mean, it would seem to me that you actually have like another government, you have a competing government. It's not just vigilantes in a chaotic sense that are undermining the law, like maybe the guys sometimes who are trying to enforce the law against corrupt officials, they are actually the law.

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So maybe talk about that a little bit. Well, I think that that was a huge impetus in especially the

33:58

South Carolina regulators, is that the law there, they felt like the regulators were a law unto themselves.

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They were, in other words, appropriating government action. And that was the reason that they felt like they had to shut them down.

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These people weren't necessarily at the time revolutionaries, they weren't preparing for the American Revolution, but they were appropriating the role of the government in lieu of the government, which made them a threat to the government.

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A lot of these early forms of ritual violence, states whipped people as punishment.

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There wasn't a lot of prison time handed out by the states. A lot of times people were branded or maimed, but more common people were whipped if they weren't executed or they were just pardoned.

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The governments weren't about to build prisons and keep people in prisons for years because that costs money.

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So a lot of times you would find in these ritual punishments, people would start using the same punishments that the government was using to bring order.

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In the more modern sense, I think what you were saying has been true up until the last couple of decades, people handling their business locally.

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But unfortunately, the long nose of the central government has stuck. People are fearful of being caught, even if they're dealing with a problem.

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You saw the Daniel Penney thing up in New York. This also plays into something you were talking about a couple of days ago about being deracinated.

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People are stripped down now to think they don't know anything that happened before last week.

35:45

So their world is, I'm going to sit here, I'm going to watch TV, I'm going to be angry because I've worked in local government before.

35:53

People can't even bother to show up to city council meetings. They just won't. If you can't show up to city council -

36:00

Men are just citizens. Citizens. You can't muster anybody. People will complain incessantly about a problem, but they won't actually show up to do anything about it.

36:10

So if you can't show up to do something about it at a council meeting, you're probably far less likely to go grab some guy out of bed and walk him out of town on a rail.

36:18

These things still happen. There was, again, not passing judgment.

36:24

There was video during the BLM riots in Bethel, Ohio, you may have seen it, where some people were marching through what was described as a redneck town.

36:33

I think it's in Southeast Ohio. And the citizens came out and drug them out of town.

36:41

And some of these marchers came and went to the sheriff and said, you need to do something about this. And the sheriff said, I don't know what you're talking about.

36:48

That's more reminiscent of how Americans, even North and South, handled their issues.

36:57

And I think someone at one of the protests said, if we can't do this here, where can we do it? The whole town pointed and said,

37:03

Cincinnati. I think because people are very enraptured by their position and materialism.

37:21

They don't have a sense now of who their neighbors are. If you don't know who your neighbors are, why in the world would you stand up for them?

37:29

Right. Yeah. So only in fit communities or functional communities

37:35

I know it maybe sounds like an oxymoron, but you're going to have these mechanisms manifest themselves,

37:41

I suppose. No, I will say it was South Carolina historian,

37:47

David Ramsey, claimed as much that some of the worst habits of the common people were tempered after the

37:55

Second Great Awakening, when people started going to church. And people could, you know, if you're a

38:01

Baptist, you go to Baptist Church Presbyterian, you go to Presbyterian. If you want to go to Episcopal Church, Episcopal Church. But there was a sense at that point that when churches became, they weren't mandatory.

38:14

You didn't have to tithe to a church, but people, if everyone in town went to one or two churches and you committed a transgression, you better be repentant for it.

38:24

Otherwise you'll be kicked out of the church. They didn't have to run you out of town on a rail because you would just be de facto ostracized.

38:32

Right. When you're ostracized from the local church, you were essentially ostracizing yourself in the community.

38:38

Yeah. So there's these mechanisms. So shaming, shunning, there's, you know,

38:44

I guess, excommunication, church discipline, all of that. And these are all social.

38:51

And then there's the rough music, the vigilante justice. I don't know if vigilante is even the word

38:57

I want to use, but there's the, what did you call it? Cause I don't want to use the word vigilante, but just.

39:06

Well, you can certainly use the word vigilante, but communal justice. Yeah. Cause vigilante carries this sort of like,

39:13

I guess, I guess it is outside the law. So I guess we can't say vigilante. So I've used the term extra judicial, extra legal.

39:20

Yeah. It's very flexible. There's many words that you can use to kind of describe some of these actions.

39:27

But the. Vigilante is such a negative connotation. So that's why I'm trying. But the point, yeah, it does.

39:34

Well, especially a lot of what people think of if they think at all about this, they think of vigilantes or posse's out

39:41

West. These things existed in the East, but they existed out West because again, there was no law.

39:48

There was a sense of you deal with your own justice. There was the term that became popular in the antebellum period throughout much of the

39:57

United States was lynch law. And lynch law doesn't necessarily mean lynching as in hanging somebody.

40:03

Lynch law could mean essentially just a form of ritual violence, which may have been a more

40:09

American form of rough music. Historian E .P. Thompson said that rough music lent something to American lynch law.

40:19

And then it was Richard Maxwell Brown, who wrote one of the best, if not the only text on the

40:24

South Carolina regulators, that the American Revolution was an early form of lynch law, especially in the back country.

40:33

Because again, there was people are going to police themselves. They're not. Most people will not sit by and allow anarchy in their community.

40:43

You'll even see this. If you go into inner city communities, if a gang runs a community, that's their community.

40:50

They're not going to allow behavior within that area.

40:56

Even if it's a, what you think of as a bad area, they still have a code. They're not going to allow other transgressions that they did not authorize within that community.

41:07

Order wants to assert itself. Now, what kind of order that is, that people want order.

41:16

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you were in the United States during COVID and that whole thing, or if you were,

41:22

I was, I was here for 2020, but we were in lockdown in Scotland in 2021. So, okay. Yeah.

41:27

I'm sure I've heard it was worse over there in some ways. It was pretty bad. Yeah. But I noticed here, you know, there was very, even regionally, there was different approaches to this.

41:38

So in in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I was living at the time that we had next to us,

41:44

I forget which County it was, but they were a sanctuary County. They, they, I think that's the term they used, which is hysterical because the left likes to use the term sanctuary city for the migrant issue.

41:54

But they were like, we're a COVID sanctuary County. And the, even the local police were supportive of the militia groups and those who basically said, we're not going to go along with the governor's order here.

42:10

We are going to make sure, I think it was Camden County, but we're going to make sure Camden County, you know, businesses we're going to defend businesses who remain open.

42:19

We're not going to do the mask thing. We're not going to enforce lockdowns. So maybe there's some anti -commandeering going on there.

42:25

They're just saying, we're not going to enforce what you're imposing on us. Uh, but, uh, I know as I traveled, you know, from North to South, from South to North during that time, which

42:35

I did a few times, you know, the, it got more restrictive and more insane. The farther North I got where, you know, everyone's just kind of like locked into place.

42:43

And like, uh, that's where you see all these people with masks on driving in the car or jogging, uh, if they're even dare to go outside.

42:50

I mean, it was kind of insane, but in these more sort of like freedom loving areas, uh, there, there was a lot of pushback and resistance to that on the local level.

43:00

Um, and then, and that spirit, I still remember that spirit being like almost, um, like no one likes that time period, but there was this like sense of camaraderie and community that has then now dissipated, uh, somewhat because they had a common threat and you had to get involved with your neighbors and you, people were concerned, um, in Virginia, at least this is also coming off the heels of the governor wanting to confiscate firearms.

43:28

So there was, there were these threats that created these, uh, pockets of solidarity.

43:34

And, um, and that's something that, I don't know, I, I just, I think that it parallels what you're talking about, like the communities that want to defend themselves and their ways of life.

43:45

And oftentimes this paralleled a Christian virtue system of some kind, you know, we're punishing marital infidelity.

43:51

I mean, that's who would think to do that today. But, um, now I do think that like, there's something we've lost and it's, it doesn't mean that everything that you're writing about is good, but like, in other words, they should have done exactly what they did and so forth, but there, there is this like sense of like,

44:10

I love my community and I'm going to protect it. Even if the people who that's their job won't, or even if, you know, there's no one around who has that position,

44:19

I'll take that position. I'll, I'll do something, uh, here to, to ensure that we have law and order.

44:26

Uh, and we kind of need more of that spirit. I don't know exactly how to give it back. I'm, I'm more presenting the problem, but you know, it's, uh, it is in our

44:34

DNA though. So is there a way to like reach back and kind of reclaim this? That's a question I'm interested in. I don't know that there is.

44:42

It's funny. We were, I was at my church last night and I was talking a little bit about this. Um, people find meaning and purpose in hardship.

44:53

So anytime that we have hardship, you're going to find people who are going to pull, pull naturally closer together.

45:01

COVID was an example of that. Um, I think if we have an economic downturn or we have a repeat of some of the political instability of 2020, you'll see it again.

45:13

Uh, but people tend to become very navel gazing when they've, uh, got all their goodies nearby.

45:20

Uh, but, but people will, I mean, one thing that I've, and I, I'm from Georgia, but I've lived in Louisiana.

45:29

I've lived, I lived in Virginia and I've lived in the UK. And one thing that has struck me is the places that I think people are the happiest.

45:38

They aren't necessarily the wealthiest, but what they have are strong communities. People know their neighbors, people, not even so much just for the violence, people will watch out for each other.

45:49

People will, will go next door or, you know, are you okay? Or do you need anything? People know that they reach out to each other.

45:56

They have each other's back. Uh, again, my father grew up in Southern Appalachia. He said, all you had to do was blow a horn and somebody would come down the mountain.

46:04

What do you need? Today, a lot of people, you know, in the

46:09

Atlantic area don't want to talk to their neighbors. They don't want to know you. They've got their own thing going on. They don't want to, they don't want to have anything to do with you.

46:16

And it's, it's a little depressing. And that's where we've lost, not just order, but we've lost our country.

46:23

I think it was de Tocqueville who talked about one of America's early strengths was association. We don't have a lot of association in this country, at least not the way we used to.

46:34

And these things could be formal or informal. But again, you know, when it comes to especially things like moral culture and whatnot,

46:44

I mean, in my dissertation, there were two incidents in North Carolina. One was in Lexington, North Carolina, 1830s, where I think men were involved in extramarital relationships.

46:56

And in both instances, the men were carted out of town at midnight by the townspeople and thrown literally out of town.

47:07

And it wasn't that, you know, if you engage in these things, people worry that if you let one person do it, the whole town, essentially the young people will find to do it.

47:17

And then it becomes, it becomes a contagion. If you let things, you know, one thing becomes acceptable, becomes acceptable.

47:26

I mean, our society is so depraved at this point, what more is there to, what more is there to rebel against?

47:35

I think it was Marion Smith, who used to run the Common Sense Society said, paleoconservatives are the new conservative or new rebels.

47:44

Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's no doubt. Yeah. And I feel like that on every level, to be honest with you.

47:50

I mean, not to get too off track here, but like, there's,

47:55

I don't, I don't really know what to call it. But the sort of, they don't have any institutional power, but the sort of like neo -fascist

48:04

LARPer types online. Yes. They share memes. They're not really, I don't know that they're accomplishing much in a tangible way.

48:11

They're not. They're not. But I, I do have a heart for a lot of these guys. And a lot of them, I don't think they realize even that that's what they're doing.

48:18

Like there's, there's just a lot of, you listen to a few podcasts, you think, you know, about the world.

48:24

And, and I, I realize I'm, I, you know, I'm going to be interpreted as being condescending here, but, but there, there,

48:31

I have seen a lot of immaturity and I think it's, I don't know how else to point that out. But what

48:37

I was going to say is like, they, you know, they, they sort of like perceive of themselves as like, they're the real, true far right.

48:45

They're, they're the ones who, who, who hold the mantle of conservatism or something. And, and, or, or, or they'll say conservatism is bad, you know, where, where like the true alternatives to the left.

48:57

Um, I have an article hopefully coming out today where I talk about like, we were kind of left with one pole in our politics.

49:03

Like it's, it's that egalitarian utopian vision and anything that deviates from that, like that's considered good, but we don't have like a solid positive vision anymore where the guys you're talking about did as far as like, they, they had expectations for what their, their order would look like in their communities.

49:19

And it wasn't just tethered to, you know, like a cartoon blow up that, uh, was meant to compete with the left.

49:26

It was, it was a solid rooted, generationally, uh, distilled

49:31

Christian kind of understanding of how they were supposed to live. Anyway, all that to say all the reason

49:37

I brought those guys up and stuff is like, you know, I I've noticed myself and other more paleo con types who try to even enter the fray on uncertain matters and promote really what is a much more rooted, truly

49:52

American, Anglo -American conservative conception. They're shot out from both, both the liberal ideologues, certainly the woke guys and, and sort of this new, new undercurrent.

50:04

Um, they're, they really are like the rebels of everything. Like, like, or we are, we really are the ones who are like, you know, out of, out of step with the ideologies of the day.

50:15

And, and I, and I don't really know, um, I, again, I'm, are you presenting problems without like maybe holistic solutions for all of this?

50:23

But the, the thing that I've thought the most is like, we have to somehow reconnect ourselves to our past.

50:29

And maybe I haven't emphasized that enough, but we have to see how Christianity played out in various contexts in the

50:37

Anglo -American sphere. We, we have been perhaps robbed of some of these things or, or prevented from taking, uh, conferring identity to ourselves through these things, but we, we can restore that.

50:50

We can, we can be the pioneers who go back in the historical record, who try to recover, uh, the, whatever we have of our family's history and our region's history.

51:01

And, uh, and then create, um, this, you know, not from thin air, but from in, in informed experience, create a positive vision for our particular contexts.

51:13

That's hard work though. You know, that's that, that means getting off Netflix, perhaps that means not scrolling on your phone.

51:20

Perhaps it does mean you're going to have to pick up some books. It does mean you may have to visit some historical sites.

51:26

Um, but I think you're someone who's contributed to this in some way. You're recovering something that's been forgotten that, you know, for all the negative ways that this mechanism can be used, there are positive ways.

51:40

Uh, this mechanism of, uh, you know, ritual violence, if you want to call it that, but like this restoration of order on a local level, uh, lesser magistrate stuff.

51:52

I mean, if you want to call it that, like, like taking charge of your community, understanding what moral standards are and enforcing those things when others won't, um, it, it takes a thick community.

52:06

We just, we have to find our way back to this somehow. Maybe it's going to take, as you say, hardship. Maybe that's what, what, what we have to, you know, the funny thing is, but I think about what you, what you were talking about in some of this kind of what you said, neo -fascist,

52:19

I think Americans suffer from what I like to call World War II brain. Nothing happened before World War II.

52:26

So their entire worldview begins with World War II. And that was one of my goals, but looking,

52:33

Americans have no conception, generally speaking, of what happened during really the

52:40

American revolution. And this is something I really would like to do as much work as I can on before America's 250th next year, because I think it was even, it was presented to us, they white knighted

52:52

Washington and Jefferson a little too much. And now we're, we're flipped over and now we're, we're trying to make these people villains.

52:59

Whereas the reality is people are complex. And if you allow those complexities to show forth, history becomes more real.

53:06

You, I, I've saw in, in different things, I had sympathies for in the American revolution for the

53:12

Tories and the Whigs. It was all about perception. You could see someone do something heroic and two hours later do something horrific.

53:21

You saw these dualities in people. People today have lost their identity.

53:27

They want community, but they don't know how to go about and get it. I think you see this in some of the, a lot more discussion about people going to different churches, people now wanting to live in these more walkable neighborhoods.

53:44

It's not the walkable neighborhood so much that they want, they want to talk to their neighbor. People want comfort.

53:52

We all live these very isolated consumerist lives and somehow we've replaced everything that made life worth living with a bunch of electronic gizmos.

54:05

It's profound. It's profound. It takes work to, to do these things, to, to get to know your neighbors, especially if you're in an area like, like I am, it's kind of hard in here in New York.

54:17

You know, I've, maybe I shouldn't get into details if you, maybe my neighbors will watch this, but it could be, it could be rough, but it is worth it.

54:27

And it is, it is something that I think is necessary for us to continue as a people.

54:32

We're not going to be a people anymore. And like the enemy's one, if you know more about the

54:37

Marvel universe than your own history, the enemy is one. If you, if your starting point is

54:44

World War II, and I don't care if you think that the

54:49

Nazis were right, which apparently is now becoming sort of a thing online, you're still kind of buying into a post -war consensus.

54:58

You're just on the flip side of it where the heroes are the villains, the villains are the heroes. We need a understanding of who we are as a people and our own traditions, our own history.

55:09

And it's hard for some of the blank slate biblicists, I think also to see this because, you know,

55:15

I, and I understand it. I actually really, I really respect some of these guys who will say like, look, the

55:21

Bible is sufficient. So like you, you don't really need history. You don't really need anything else. Like you just, if you're going to interact in society, all you need is scripture.

55:30

The problem I see, the main problem is scripture itself doesn't assume this. There's, there's a lot of natural assumptions that scripture brings to the table.

55:39

Like it expects you to know what a man is and how a man acts. There's, there's cultural things that even

55:45

Paul has to navigate concerning gender relationships that are very particular to the times in which he lived.

55:51

And they have to be then applied to particular times in which we live. We do live in particular contexts with development that's taken place.

55:58

And we're so blessed in our Anglo -American sphere, even despite all the liberalism that's happened.

56:05

We have a Christian heritage that was in place for centuries, and we've been passed down things we take for granted that are the distillations of biblical principles in our own communities.

56:18

And we need to strengthen those things. We need church bells. We need invocations of Christian prayers.

56:25

We need, in God we trust and Christmas celebrations in the public sphere and, and so many other things that I think we just kind of are used to.

56:36

Well, I would say, I think that's why a lot of people, especially a lot of young men, a lot of people now are going for more traditional liturgical worship.

56:46

Because again, it goes back to that need for order. There's people need order because they see so much chaos around them.

56:55

Their days are constantly filled with chaos. You turn on social media, what do you see?

57:01

Chaos. Everything's chaotic. People want to know that there's certain things that are dependable.

57:06

God is dependable. Usually most families are dependable. If you have a strong community, your strong community is dependable.

57:14

But relying on the stock market, as someone pointed out to me yesterday, the stock market four years ago, it was like 18 ,000.

57:21

Now it's over 40 and people flip out about the stock market. Because I just thought it's supposed to go up.

57:29

My entire life is a stock market. You need to find a new perception of identity and order in your life.

57:37

When you look at how people lived, somebody maligned me online the other day because I said something about Americans worship the almighty dollar.

57:51

I said, there's being alive and then there's living a meaningful life. You need to strive for living a meaningful life and not just actually just breathing air and taking up space.

58:04

Yeah. Living for the weekend, living for vacations in Aruba or wherever. You make a lot of money so you can afford these things.

58:12

It's a sad existence. It's lonely. Well, I did that for... I worked in corporate IT for 15 years.

58:18

I feel like I'm missing a decade of my life. Because all you do is grind. You're just grinding. You've missed something.

58:25

But some people can live that way all the way up through retirement. I had neighbors one time who they had a corporate job.

58:35

I said, do you like your job? No. I said, why do you do it? They said, because I want to retire at 55. I said, what are you going to do then?

58:42

They said, absolutely nothing. I thought, what are you going to do for 55?

58:48

There has to be something intangible. We're missing identity.

58:54

People who have a shared identity, it doesn't have to be an ethnic or racial identity. The most logical thing is it's going to be tied locally.

59:02

It's going to be tied to the people you know. People will step up and defend and help the people that they know.

59:10

I'm glad you bring that up. Even about the ethnic racial thing. It's cartoon.

59:16

It's a very ideologically, it's an abstraction of even white people.

59:26

Without much rootedness, that's going to be the glue that binds us together, at least in the minds of some.

59:33

First of all, the history of Europe and all these white people shooting each other all the time.

59:40

Really, my thought is if you the shared experience thing is so big, you can actually overcome a lot of other barriers with shared experience.

59:52

We are very complex, holistic people with a lot of needs.

59:59

Yes, I think that there is this strand that has been attacked incessantly by the left.

01:00:05

You're supposed to hate yourself if you're of European descent. You can't use that as any identity marker.

01:00:13

You produce that. That's obviously evil. You should. I take pride in the fact that I'm someone of Scottish and English descent.

01:00:26

I know my people accomplished great things. Maybe did some other things that weren't so great. This is who

01:00:31

I am. It fulfills me. There's a place connected to this.

01:00:37

There are places. There are heroes. There's legends. There's lore. There's interactions with other groups.

01:00:45

Growing up in an area, even where you have people that are different in some ways with shared experience, shared threats, going through similar situations, relying on each other, these are the things that create the arrangements that make stability.

01:01:00

If that's missing, if it's just this cartoon of white or anything else,

01:01:06

I don't really care what it is. In the liberal order, it's consumer, as we've been pointing out. We have a shared affinity for consumerism.

01:01:15

These things can't bind us together. They're not fulfilling. The world now, at least this country, has lost its enchantment.

01:01:26

It's very two -dimensional. It feels very plastic, very fake, very temporary. In my mind, this was by design.

01:01:33

The other thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that we all have a finite time on this earth.

01:01:42

I tend to look at history as a long story, like a long play or opera.

01:01:49

We are so lucky that in all of the period of human history, the spotlight is over us right now. The question is, what are we going to do with that time?

01:01:59

Are we just going to remain asleep and keep looking at our plastic gizmos that we can't possibly take into the next life?

01:02:06

Are we going to actually make a difference? That doesn't necessarily mean you have to go engage in ritual violence.

01:02:13

It may be that you can go make a difference in a neighbor's life, just help somebody out.

01:02:19

Everything that you do matters. It matters because other people need that connection.

01:02:29

It's so fulfilling to know that there are people out there who at least partially understand and partially care about you.

01:02:36

God loves you, but God also wants you to love your neighbor, literally your neighbor. We've deviated from the conversation here, but you brought it back, which

01:02:47

I appreciate. If we're going to even get back to a time where there are these sick communities that can defend themselves against tyranny and so forth, then we're going to need to start off small and get to know the people around us.

01:03:01

Good word, Nicole. I really enjoyed this. I should have asked this, but they can't purchase your book or can they?

01:03:10

I don't know if that's even something you're promoting. No, I haven't published it. I have somebody who is a friend of mine who's interested in thinking about publishing it.

01:03:20

I think for something that's academic work, it is remarkably easy reading. As much as I hate to say it, but there's something about reading about people getting what they come into them.

01:03:31

It's entertainment, yeah. Do a mini -series on it or something. I've written for Law and Liberty, the

01:03:40

Abbeville Institute, previously. People can look me up there. My ultimate goal really is just to try to give people something to hold onto in the past that inspires them in their day -to -day life.

01:03:58

I know that's great. Well, I appreciate it. Let me know when and if that is published.

01:04:05

Like I said, people can follow Nicole's work at NicoleW100 on X. God bless.