The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1201: The Whiskey Rebellion and Local Governance w/ The OGC's Clossington

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

65 MinutesPG-13Clossington is a member of the Old Glroy Club.Clossington came on the show to talk about his recent article/book for the Old Glory Club Substack, "Death and Taxes."Death and TaxesPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two, even three a day. And yeah, can't do it without you. So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingiano show. For the first time, my OGC brother, Closington, how are you doing? I'm doing fantastic.

A lot of the times when I'm just hanging out with the OGC guys in my local chapters, I'm always asked, like, if I've ever been on to Pete Q's show before, because that's how a lot of guys are finding OGC, you know, I'm almost embarrassed to say no, but I guess we can rectify that today. Well, you pretty much had to write a book. that that helps so um yeah good yeah it's i have a nasty habit of um you know maybe once every you know six months to year i just crank out like a small book for the ogc substack and uh this one

you know ended up being a little bit longer than most with being you know 30 000 words long takes like three hours to listen to, if narrated, you know, two hours to read. It's kind of a behemoth. And I think it's something of a greatest hits of maybe six or seven decent books on early colonial history and Pennsylvania history in particular. And I don't know. I started out just looking around my current city, Pittsburgh, for where are the historical markers.

And when I started noticing, hey, this island here is named after so-and-so, that brand is named after what's his name, and no one actually knows about it, people don't really have a good idea of what actually happened in the Whiskey Rebellion, what happened in the early confederation and early constitutional period. Most people kind of line eyes, the first presidency of George Washington, but no one can actually tell you exactly what he did or what his administration was like. And people, you know, they don't, particularly in Pennsylvania, they don't really have a good

grasp of what their own state history was like. And so I ended up writing, you know, over two weekends, this sort of treatise on, you know, early Pennsylvania colonial and Republican American history, history of, I guess, alcohol production in the early American Republic. I wrote a sort of polemic, sort of strong manning the pro-whisky tax and anti-whisky tax positions. by laying out the necessity of having a stable currency from the perspective of the federal administration, but also the justification for resisting the whiskey excise tax. Going into the fine numbers of how profitable, how the profits of the whiskey trade was essentially the only lifeline

that the Appalachian economy had to hard currency, and they couldn't survive without it. And I ended up just going on this sort of long, I guess interlaced narrative weaving in different characters from the pro and anti-whiskey tax sides. And I've had a very good reception from it, just writing a book. It's certainly a It's a feather in OGC's cap that they They will both publish your small books And I think our OGC audience is

How would you say? We're sophisticated enough to have a good reception for that kind of thing So I'm all around blessed to have OGC platform for me. Well, considering how many books we're apt to reading, I mean, this was really more of a novella kind of thing, a more of a kind of booklet, a classic kind of booklet. And, you know, it interests me because I have a lot of family who are still live in Western Pennsylvania and are buried in Western Pennsylvania. So the history there is of great interest to me. So, all right, let's just jump right in. This is a theme that we've heard before about, I think libertarians have a tendency to talk about

the Whiskey Rebellion a lot as an example of state overreach right from the beginning or even like a oligarchy right from the beginning or a corporatocracy right from the beginning. So, you know, when it comes to taxes and state overreach, you know, how does that play out in everyday life? Well, part of the reason why I picked this particular subject was Patrick Newman's book, Cronism, Liberty versus Power in America, published by the Mises Institute. And I had something of a, I don't know, something of a visceral reaction against it. well, I had a reaction against it because in a lot of ways, sort of libertarians underplay the amount of violence that actually went on in the back country and underscore the necessity of actually having a federal income to actually pay off war debts. I mean, I do go into the numbers where 70% of the federal budget was just paying on. interest on the war debts accrued from the American Revolution and 20% was, you know,

fighting Indian wars. And then 5% was just, you know, federal salaries and paying off Barbary pirate ransoms. But I also, I do have a sort of soft spot for the resistors of the taxes because, you know, as I go into my article, tax collectors on the frontier are particularly corrupt and particularly hated. And America has a long history of regulation, of communities self-regulating corrupt tax collectors

and land agents and, you know, vigilanteism. But a lot of people of the particular back country persuasion have a very they don't like tax collectors. And there

was a certain amount of truth to the fact that, yes, there was a very plutocratic banking elite being established in early America. And as I kind of lay out, there was a necessity to having both income from taxes, but at the same time, I name a few of the different plutocratic institutions, one being the Essex Junto, but there are quite a few of them across New England and the middle colonies and they did actually fleece the little guy for all that he was worth to pay off their essentially their

bonds that they paid for so I want to add a little bit of nuance and a less ideological I guess have a little bit of a less ideological take on what would actually happen in the early administration so I'm not necessarily

pro-taxation, anti-taxation in one way or the other. I just want to present the narrative from both the federalist and anti-federalist sides, respectively, in a very humanizing way. Is that how you're able to, because you mentioned the reference to the American Revolution's tax disputes and everything, is that where you draw your inspiration from? Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28, to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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event, I did a substantial amount of research on why did people starve at Valley Forge. You know, this place, Pennsylvania, as I talk about, my article, it was like a linen and

like the linen and flax manufacturing colony. You know, they made clothes and they were kind of, the county was also something of a bread basket. And how come these soldiers starved at Valley Forge?

A lot of it was, yeah, if you really want to get into it, it is graft. And there were contractors that did fleece Congress for all that they were worth. But at the same time, the continental dollars were worthless. And why were they worthless?

I mean, they weren't backed by anything. America has kind of started out as this sort of startup company. You know, they took, they didn't have any creditors. They just printed money and no one accepted the money. And, you know, there weren't any taxes. So this is a problem. This is a genuine problem. Guys in the field can't, you know, they can't buy shoes.

And as I lay out later on like later in my article, you know, the one institution that was actually set up by these putocrats to actually finance the revolution, the first national bank or the first national, the first national, the first bank of North America. I forget it's something like that. But it's essentially this shipping magnates, you know, personal bank backed by, you know, hey, he promises to pay out gold if you, if you want to sell your stock in the bank. But you had these, if America was something of a startup company and the early investors wanted their pound of flesh out of it. and they were essentially the only people that, you know, kept Congress afloat for all that was worth. And Robert Morris, you know, this shipping magnate, he personally, you know, annied up and paid for the supplies for the final siege at Yorktown. And after Yorktown, you know, Washington's army was, basically they put New York City under siege, like besieging the last remaining British.

Army located in New York City and Congress, they couldn't pay their soldiers and the odds were that they weren't going to pay any of the veteran officers' pensions that they were promised. So the officers were going to

mutiny and they might have you know, cooed the second, they would have cooed the Confederation Congress. And it's a very dire situation that the American Republic was in, not having, not being able to pay their own soldiers,

and their soldiers, you know, that they actually did, like, someone, like Washington was able to, you know, appeal to his officer's sense of duty and posterity to talk them down from mutinging. But that didn't stop, you know, a few garrisons of Pennsylvania soldiers from, you know, mutinying and forcing Congress to evacuate Philadelphia.

So paying your army and paying your debts is a very valid concern, especially for the early republic. So I can't be totally anti-tax after witnessing and hearing about and reading about Valley Forge and reading Washington's very personal Newburgh address where he talks his army from out of mutineying. So it's a tough thing to just come at, you know, tax, tax collectors evil as an ideological position. Although I do end up going into the regulators and how they fought back against corrupt, like more corrupt tax collection practices. Well, centralization is, you know, something you talk about in the article.

when you look at like the articles of confederation and you compare it to the Constitution, what would you say would have been the better way of going about the state going forward at that point? Or the confederation or the state union? Well, frankly, I think the confederation just was not going to work. and I'm personally a huge fan of, you know, James Madison's political career in his writings in the Federalist papers. And I did think that he, Madison, you know, as sort of the Constitutional Convention's organizer and, you know, early Federalist later, you know, Democratic Republican, I think he, he meted out just about the the correct middle ground for how America should have

approached centralization. I do get into nullification and how localized communities could nullify state or national law. This has had very strong precedence

in American history and even in colonial history which I do get into. Well, you mentioned state and federal nullification, and it seems like federal nullification was given to us in the Constitution, but nullification on the state level would have to be written into the state constitution, or you're basically doing it where it's more of a, what could turn out to be termed as a revolt if it's not, if it's not written in.

You know, the, I can't remember the, so the Virginia Resolution and the Kentucky Resolution, those were, those were national nullification discussions and issues. But as far as, as far as I know, when it comes to state nullification, nullifying, you know, a location nullifying in your own state, if that's not written into your state constitution, which I don't think it's written into any of the 50 state constitutions, then that could be something that would be looked upon as extrajudicial? Yes. Like when I talk about regulators and communities self-regulating,

a lot of the time these are just county-level acts of nullification where this is not something in a particular state, Constitution, it's more of a sort of Appalachian backcountry cultural staple that was somewhat born out of necessity. But in terms of actually organizing anything beyond the county level and even regional level, the regulators were very careful in how they worded their speeches at their conferences. If you're going to nullify a law, you know, what you do is you get all of the most prestigious guys and, you know, affluent, you know, the most affluent citizens and prestigious politicians together in a conference and you work out exactly what you're going to propose.

And reading some of the transcripts from these regulator conferences, they were very, very careful as to not be seditious, or at least be as, as, as, implies little sedition as possible. Because people who, people would get, you know, their territory removed, they, they would get their property seized and they would have been hanged as traders if, you know, they were seditious. and the early republic, you know, we didn't really have, like, you know, as I talked towards the later end of my article, there really wasn't much of a consensus as to what was treason against the federal government in the early republic. And they really kind of shrugged off defining it because it was such a difficult thing to,

different thing difficult thing to actually define I guess but perhaps maybe I should just talk about how I guess these early vigilante possees

carved out their own little their own little statelets that nullify national law one of the more esoteric things they came across was the fact that throughout the American backcountry, they're about, depending on how you count them, somewhere between a dozen and maybe 20 independent states that were never recognized as full

states, but kind of independently operated by themselves outside of the federal government and even outside of the Confederation government. A lot of them were squatters who refused to accept speculator claims to land ownership and just declared themselves an independent association or even applied for statehood, but we only ended up with 13 states. I guess Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky eventually became their own independent states anyways. so it's not something of a moot point. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you.

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Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Farage. But in the late colonial era and early Republican period, the Appalachian Mountains were something of a dividing line between what were royal colonies in what was kind of Indian land and kind of settler territory, it's somewhat murky. After the French and Indian War, there's a proclamation

line of 1763 where essentially settlers were forbidden from crossing the Appalachians and selling into Indian territory. However, settler, you know, settlers, you know, free land is free land and they settled it. And a posse of, you know, a couple thousand regulators from North Carolina, they launched an unsuccessful vigilante revolt against the corrupt

governor of North Carolina. And the North Carolina tax collect. they'd take the taxes of backcountry farmers and they just pocket it and then say that the farmers, you know, they didn't pay their taxes. Or land agents would collect, you know, collect money from farmers to purchase land, but they'll never actually file it. And this one man named, this one surveyor named Herman Husband came across, you know, 200 instances of one single tax collector. taking phony taxes off of farmers. And 2000 militiamen essentially tried to fight off the corrupt governor and they lost their revolt. And in losing, they fled to Mardi, Tennessee, where they created the Wataga Association and had their own independent republic. So when the colonial governments

refuse to acknowledge that there was systemic and widespread corruption, they tried to self-regulate. They burned down the house of a very nasty tax collector. And when they lost, they just created their own country, completely independent of the colony of North Carolina. And you look up the state of Franklin but they tried to create their own state afterwards too or um the state of vermont was

basically a bunch of squatters who organized under the green mountain men and uh they created their own independent little republic um like daniel boone is very famous but uh he tried to he created he tried to create the transylvanian colony which you know very wealthy speculators by like a large chunk of land off the Cherokee and they tried to create their own little state but didn't work out too well. Let's see. There was also like the pine tree, but pine tree boys in northeastern Pennsylvania, they declared themselves, or they tried to declare themselves their own independent republic.

They didn't go out too well during the revolution. but, you know, sometimes, you know, when you're just in the wilderness, you can just do things. You can just kind of, you know, string up corrupt tax collectors or declare yourself independent. But, yeah, when it comes to actual sedition, like the regulators for a Shays rebellion, you know, like I said earlier, you know, Essex Junto, they did, they, they, you know, try, to create a very nasty system where the accrued state debt that Massachusetts accrued during the American Revolution was essentially contracted out to the public speculation market where very wealthy merchants could essentially buy chunks of the Massachusetts state debt and created a sort of speculative bubble because there were interest payments

to pay off the debt and you know certain percent of return on income was very good but to pay for interest on these debts the state of Massachusetts you know increased property taxes increased poll taxes in the early republic there are tariffs between individual states so like if you wanted to do business for Massachusetts to Connecticut you'd have to pay a tariff. And this this was just, it was nasty, it was regressive.

A lot of veterans went into debt fighting the American Revolution and they weren't being paid their pensions. So Western, so farmers in Western Massachusetts, you know, they saw the corruption and

sediciously seized an armory and burned down locations that had the records of, you know, these farmers' debts. So the backcountry was wild. Nullification, it could happen at a very local level, assuming no one notices, but even back then, sedition was pretty quickly stamped out. And, you know, Kentucky was a particular,

wild and lawless territory, especially in the beginning. So it's, it's complicated in terms of precedence. Why don't we talk about what led up to the Whiskey Rebellion itself? Give us a little background on that and what you wrote about in your article. So I wanted to give something of a history of, you know, a history of colonial. Pennsylvania, which is something that it's sort of a niche local topic. But I wanted to explain

how odious these taxes were. So the national debt, right? It was funded by first by a tariff. It was essentially like a 5% tariff on all imported goods.

which it wasn't too much, but we weren't really importing much anyways because immediately after the American Revolution, we didn't exactly have any trade treaties with any other countries. We were locked out of the British economy because they were so heavily protectionist. We didn't have any treaties with France or Spain,

so we couldn't actually ship any goods out through New Orleans, the entire economy was being rejiggered to be its own its own collective market. But, Pennsylvania,

the way that it was settled was that I use a source from on the frontier with Colonel Anties that basically describes how, Pennsylvania was settled where you had, you know, a small sort of Quaker elite established in the seat of Philadelphia. And in the immediate suburbs outside of Philadelphia, you had essentially these large estates owned by Quakers, but you also had large estates owned by Dutch traders who brought over German. like starving Germans who they sold into indentured servitude.

And then outside of the Dutch and German ring, you have the Scots-Irish who have a long history, who have a long and fun history if you actually care to read about colonial Appalachia. One of the problems on the frontier is that you have to organize things in a very ad hoc fashion. because there isn't exactly any, there aren't any roads,

there aren't any, there's no government infrastructure, there aren't any banks, you know, very little hard currency comes out to the back country. But what you do have are a very clanish people

who fought off, bands of Indians who some of them were Christianized, and a lot of them were kind of just roaming bands of hunters. Like, one of the big Indian tribes, of course, is the Iroquois Confederacy, but a lot of them were more permanently stationed in upstate New York, while they had sort of these roving bands of, you know, like Mingo Iroquois, who you might sign a trade.

Or you might sign a property agreement agreeing to, you know, buy a certain amount of acres off of one Indian band, but the other won't actually accept it. And there will be all sorts of Indian wars on the frontier. And in response to these Indian raids, what these sort of Scots-Irish communities did was they formed local militia, where every man of fighting age from 18. to 46 had to go to these either like monthly or quarterly militia musters where you'd go out, you know, learn how to how to conduct drills and march in line, you'd practice shooting, and then afterwards, you know, you'd have nice barbecue with your neighbors. And this created a very strong sense of camaraderie and organic social fabric. You train to fend off and fend off Indians and defend your homes with your neighbors,

and everyone kind of knows each other. And inevitably, they form sort of social network associations. And in the very far west of Pennsylvania, on the west of the Appalachian frontier around Pittsburgh, there were five counties, the biggest being Washington County, then Allegheny, Westmoreland, Fayette, and Bedford. And what happened was the only way that these people, so land speculation, right?

So the frontier of Pennsylvania was, was sort of de facto owned by the Penn family who had their original charter. Now, the pens, in order to actually make money, they sold land to other large corporations of land speculators who, you know, they'd buy like 10,000 acres off of the Penn family for, you know, five cents an acre.

And then they'd parcel out the chunks of land at a profit. or even better, they loan money to farmers, like the poor people that will ship them out west, to sell the land, but they'll give these farmers loans to settle their speculated territory at 8 to 10% interest rates,

which is pretty good. But the problem is that, in order to pay off these loans, you have to have hard currency to pay off them. So how do you actually make money on the frontier? So the one product that was actually very easily grown on the frontier were grains. So corn, barley, and rye. And you could easily distill. I think the figure was something like 1,200 pounds of grains into 160 fluid pounds of whiskey.

And if you could get on the frontier, you know, a gallon of whiskey costs like between a quarter and 35 cents. But if you could get it to, if you could get Philadelphia, you could sell it for about a dollar. And if you could ship it down to New Orleans, you could sell it for a little bit over a dollar. And it costs almost nothing to float whiskey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. That cost nothing. But we didn't actually have a trade treaty with Spain ironed out yet. So we couldn't actually sell anything there. And it costs a whole lot of money to.

ship whiskey 300 miles and over a mountain range from Pittsburgh to Philly. So, you know, the profit margins are very thin, but it is, you know, it is a way of actually making money. However, the tariffs that the Washington administration first came up with to pay off the national debt. This was not sufficient to actually, there was still a large gap between what the federal budget was and how much they needed to pay. Hamilton proposed a property tax, you know, a flat tax per acre and per house and per slave, but everybody hated this. So he suggested something a little bit more targeting a luxury good whiskey.

which at the time, you know, people drank the equivalent of, or people took, consumed like the equivalent of like three or four shots of alcohol per day. You know, John Adams, you know, every morning he'd drink a tankard of hard cider. Like Tidewater, Virginians, you know, every night they'd have, you know, a bowl of punch. And this is partly out of necessity, because we didn't have sanitary water and a little bit of whiskey in your drink

sterilizes it but people still drank in absurd excess and it was it was this excess that you know

concerned physicians who are a little bit more genteel and urbanite who backed a certain tax on whiskey. It would, in theory, it would raise, I think the breakdown of the federal budget was something like

we had an expenditure of about $5 million per year in the Washington administration, and we spent about, and we had a budget of about $3.5 million per tariffs. and the whiskey excise tax, which Hamilton proposed, Alexander Hamilton proposed, was calculated to bring in about $800,000 a year. So it does a good bit to close the gap in the federal deficit. It doesn't fully close the gap, but it does a good bit to actually close it.

So Hamilton's whiskey tax is a nine cent per gallon tax on all distilled liquors. We used to have, before the American Revolution, a thriving rum industry where we had rum distillers in New England. But after the revolution, we no longer had access to Jamaican sugar plantations. so we had to pivot to a different, so consumers had to pivot to a different, a different source of alcohol. And that's where whiskey came in. And what Hamilton did was he essentially made whiskey unprofitable

for West Pennsylvania farmers. And worse yet, if you didn't pay the whiskey tax, you'd be fined $20. And you'd have to actually pay it, you'd have to be served your, serve the fine in Philadelphia, which, you know, 300 miles in a mountain range away from Pittsburgh. And most people only made like between $20 and $100 a year in hard currency. So it's, you know, you have to pay your entire life saving, your entire year's like salary upfront in hard currency

for not being able to have a profitable whiskey stillery. So Hamilton's whiskey tax is it just wasn't going to work in the back country. And the back country didn't really support the creation of a national government

anyways. So what happened was the five counties of Western Pennsylvania developed various conferences where at first we put together all of our grievances and sent them to Philadelphia, but when no one actually did anything about the tax, instead, what happened were spontaneous sort of militias developed in each of the counties to resist paying the excise tax. So it was sort of like a county level,

like per county level, a nullification of the tax. We just weren't going to pay it. And this strategy was adopted throughout Appalachia. Kentucky, they didn't pay their whiskey tax. West Pennsylvania, we didn't pay our whiskey tax. North Carolina or like Tennessee, they didn't pay their whiskey tax.

but Pennsylvania was the only West Pennsylvania was the only region that actually erupted into armed violence against the federal government and that's why it gets you know, why it gets a little bit more of the the limelight.

So that's why I ended up writing this in a very long-winded kind of way. That's why these farm farmers resisted to excise tax. It was, it completely invalidated their entire local economy's business model. So, of course, they fought it. Well, I guess one of the things that we could look at is how that would be used today. Because, you know, the, when we talk about the

Old Glory Club, you know, we, we talk a lot about what we have is we have people who are gathering in, you know, creating groups in certain areas. And how do we make that actionable today? Because I think that's what, you know, we can talk about history all we want. And I love to talk about history. Obviously, anyone who listens to my podcast knows I love to talk about history. But I also want to apply what's been learned in the past to today. You know, I can think of one city on the East Coast where, I'm not going to say where it is, but a bunch of our people have migrated to. And how do we begin to have that same kind of spirit, especially when, I mean, we know that the federal government, as big as it is, it doesn't have the manpower or even the will at this point to, to target certain areas that have decided, well, we're just not going to do it that way anymore.

So I guess the more applicable angle that you could take from my article is the OGC Pittsburgh chapter named ourselves the Mingo Creek Society after the sort of working man's resistance against the whiskey tax. And in my article, I highlight two different groups that organized against the whiskey tax. And emulating their model is, I mean, it's somewhat anachronistic, but it is, it is exemplary of how in the past people locally organized resistance against federal tyranny. So the two different tiers of organization, right? There was the local farmer, you know, the local militia where every month or every quarter of a year, guys would get together, they'd train at the local muster point. They'd break bread and then they'd scheme of how to properly.

how to properly regulate their own communities. This is the sort of, it's civil society in action. It's actual democracy as it was designed to have functioned, where these local societies, these local malicious societies would essentially, what the Mingo Creek Society ended up doing was, They null, but they both nullified the federal, uh, federal excise, whiskey excise tax.

But they also, you know, they, they drew up, you know, their, their, um, their local county or local township, uh, school board curriculums. They, they developed their own, you know, process for electing, uh, Pennsylvania state assemblymen. They, you know, this, this, this, this, this, club, that club was the sort of model society for the working man back in 1790s. But there was also the higher tier of the democratic societies that were the sort of of socialite, more socialite societies where the more affluent members of Western Pennsylvania A society would, you know, they'd host all sorts of speakers and make all sorts of toasts to more high-minded ideological, ideological, is what they wanted to see America become.

They were these democratic societies. They emulated the democratic societies that spawned the French Revolution. but you know, don't get that, don't let that put you off. It's, um, what they did was they sort of, they sort of, uh, what's the right term for, sort of, uh, they, they branded the, the sort of lower level Mingo Creek society, um, action into something palatable for the elites of their time in place. And this, this sort of ideological, laundering

like went from your localized the localized guys would do what they need to do on the ground and then the more higher members of society wind and dined the elites

and put into practice and distribution what the guys on the ground were up to. Now it's difficult to recommend this because of the actions of the actual Minka Creek Society

or Mika Creek Association, as they were called, because what they were doing were scaring off tax collectors and Tarring and feathering people for most of the time. But it's it was exhilarating to actually read about how these guys organized way back then.

And I think bringing back the old sort of democratic model that we, that this country was actually founded on is, I guess it's a breadth of fresh air because these societies, you know, when Tocqueville talks about how we have the social fabric of interlocking fraternal and societal organizations, he really, he really underplays the level of communal societal obligations that there were. Organization on a local level is one hell of a drug, and it was exhilaring to actually read about. But, you know, I do, I do have these two models that we could discuss. Yeah, well, let's do that, because one thing that's been, really drilled into us, you know, especially since the War of Northern Aggression, is that we're a federal society. And national politics is the only thing that can cause change. So,

and we know that that's not true. We know that that's never been true. So, why don't you talk about your models? Well, I sort of already went over the two different, the two different tiers that were organized during the Whiskey Rebellion. But, There's the, I want to say that before, you know, like you said, you know, Civil Wars, society was a lot more democratic and it was still a whole lot more democratic after the Civil War than what we have now. There's something that was lost in the sort of mass media age, in the, the, it's sort of impersonalizing, like, it's impersonalization of politics.

I have a book called For the Common Good by Kaufman that goes over, I guess, fraternal networking at the turn of the century, late 1800s, early 1900s. And even back then, you know, there's a chapter called competitive militants where, you know, your local guys would compete to get into the most exclusive rifle club or rifling militia. it's exhilaring to actually read about and it's a shame that all this was sort of killed and the well the problem is like the boomer generation never actually took up these fraternal um these for these old boomer the pre-boomer fraternal organizations that their forefathers actually had and there was a whole lot there wasn't as much of a need to have militias, you know, in place when there weren't massive unions that the militias were used to actually put down. And also, there was the whole professionalization of the American military. That really kind of was a death nail for that sort of Mingo Creek Association, social networking order.

I guess I guess I'm sort of, I guess my article is somewhat anachronistic in terms of the era that I actually describe. But there are sort of through points that still exist today where having a local gun club that is actually prestigious and brings all of like the local, you know, movers and shakers into one room. it still has a whole lot of potential. It's one thing that I could say. I guess I didn't really, I guess I really didn't address your point of elaborating on the two different models. Maybe that's, and maybe that's a good thing.

Let's keep some things close to the best. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But what you're talking about gun clubs and everything is, basically what you're talking about is you're talking about what are known as natural elites. People in the people in an area who, you know, if something happens, they're the kind of person, what they use, commonly pillars of the community. And I don't think that a lot of people realize just exactly how much power people like that have. I've been mentioning lately, I mentioned it on my

my live stream yesterday, I think I mentioned on my substack this morning, that in the small town that I live in, we had a couple people, transplants, move in and try the woke stuff. And there was just one guy. There is one guy in the community who pushed back against it. And we never heard from these people again. So basically all it takes is will. All it takes is someone who's going to stand up and go, yeah, this, that's, that's, That's not the way we do things here.

You're not going to say that there are consequences to come along with thinking like this, but that's not the way we do things here, and we are going to defy you. And that's exactly what happened. They were openly defied and things reversed, and those people weren't heard from again. And if you have people who are willing to do that, you have power. Right. It takes a very, like a remarkably little, like a very small number of actual confrontations like this to actually put a full stop to any sort of local activism. some. Like, I guess in terms of scale, really there were only like maybe like 20 guys in all of like

in all of like Western Pennsylvania that that actually went out and, you know, knocked heads to make sure that the whiskey tax wasn't actually paid. that, you know, across several counties, like that's all that it really took to completely nullify the federal government's, you know, the federal government's presence in western Pennsylvania. Like, it's a little bit different now

in a much more digital age, but I think the type of people that you're talking about are even more afraid of confrontation than anyone, you know, 200 years ago, like all it takes is one guy and one incident to actually get a certain point across. Like, you don't want this type, I can only imagine what kind of nonsense the person was bringing, but it doesn't take much, is what I'm just trying to say, to have a very, very large rolling impact.

Well, and also, if this was happening in Atlanta, that person could call upon reinforcements, could call upon NGOs with money, could fight it. They could get law enforcement to force. But when you're in a smaller, when you're in a smaller polity, you know law enforcement. You go to church with law enforcement. you know where law enforcement lives you know where the sheriff lives your friends you go to the gun range you're at the gun range at the same time that kind of stuff doesn't fly i mean when you know when i'm when i talk about i guess this uh this very localized activism that went on back in the day um everyone knew everyone knew their neighbors like uh everyone everyone in order to

to, you know, in order to convert your grains into whiskey, you have to, like, only like, one in five or one in ten guys actually owned a whiskey still. You had to, you relied on your neighbors to actually convert your grains into money. You spent, you know, once a month, you know, training with your fellow guys. You, you know, there isn't exactly TV or smartphones to entertain you. So, you actually had to be somewhat sociable and in it was a much more a much more

I guess low tech age where the mechanisms of actual communication and socialization were a lot more straightforward

but well these guys went to church together they practiced you know practice drills together. They knew each other very intimately. And when the feds came knocking, they closed ranks in a very organic kind of way. And that's a certain, there's a certain virtue to that that you can encourage all of your,

all of your listeners to actually participate in because it makes one hell of a difference when, you know, you're coming on, you're coming on to hard times and you actually have a vast social network to actually fall back on. You know, whether it's your church or it's, you know, gun club, or even your little local OTC chapter, you know, when, you know, social contagions enter your social network, you can actually socially deal with it internally. And these things work themselves out very naturally.

where like you said, the natural leaders kind of arise out of chaos to actually fight off social contagions. And that's something that all of the more anti-social woke types don't actually,

they can't actually, like whenever they actually do show up by R.L, they can't really fight off the hard-edged reactionary. In a much more sort of this rule, turn of phrase. Well, these are people who are not used to hearing one word, no. And people have been basically conditioned to not want to say no.

And when you tell somebody no and you tell it to them firmly, they don't, first they don't know what to do, then it sort of instills a little bit of fear in them. and I guess that's the I guess that might be one of the stages that we're at right now. I mean, I won't be so incendiary as to as to advocate for physical intimidation. What I'm suggesting is that having a strong social network

pays dividends in the long run. And it's not, it's almost never immediately clear how when you first get started, but it does end up actually making a difference in ways that sort of spontaneously arise. And that's part of

the lesson from the that's part of the that's a lesson from the history lesson you've given us. Yep. Well, thank you. Thanks Pete for for letting me pontificate a little bit.

And it There's a I don't know Coming Doing this This project was I guess it was both I guess

Humanizing Where you know You literally Where I literally read the Personal Correspondences of all these actors who participated in the Whiskey Rebellion But it was also It was also interesting to see the social

dynamics actually work themselves out because nominally, you know, a lot of the people on the frontier weren't particularly eloquent people, but they did have very complicated, you know, business models and social networks. And it's, you know, the past is a foreign country. And it's, it was very interesting to see the rise and fall of, you know, the original Mingue Creek Society. And How, what not to do is what I'd say, because they, you know, their sedition eventually did bite them in the rear end. But in terms of finding a good vigilante story, I don't think you could go much farther than that, the original MCS. All right, Closington. Let's close us out here, and I will link to the long article slash book on the OGC substack.

Everybody go to the OGC substack, and please subscribe. We do keep some stuff hidden behind a paywall, and that stuff is always reviewed well by those who are supporting the OGC. So do that and watch for anything in the future of Clusington puts out. He has a tendency to do long form. So he's not going to, you're not writing something long form every week. But like you said, you know, as a couple months go by, you're like, yeah, time to write another book. Well, I mean, I only really come out to discuss like either a, whatever, whatever book I

public small book of an article that I publish or respond immediately to um like infrastructure collapses or explosions or anything like that just as a professional uh engineer uh that's no there there's my hobby of writing novellas and then there is my um professional gig of trying to tamper down more incendiary discussion around around infrastructure collapses. So it's a very wild tone shift is what I'm trying to get across. Yeah, you come. You grace us with your presence on the OGC live streams when a bunch of Pagit's run

into the key bridge and knock it down. Well, they're still here, unfortunately. I think I mentioned that they had the goal of actually applying for, you know, work visas while they're, while they're still here, even though they're like, foreign citizens. That's like a that's a whole other tangent though. All right, man. I look forward to seeing you in just over a month at the event and, you know, keep it open that you can come back on soon or whenever. Anytime. Just reach out. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Pete.