more like “son buddy johnny “large ears” mcmaster, my main man, my most promising recruit [agressive back pat] what’s here gonna happen is that if me your favourite mentor get the newspaper boy to get me more happy news about our beloved senator, then I can pretty much guarantee that big boss “honey pot” oreilly is gonna hear about your mom’s flower shop”

One thing I’m looking into lately is lynching and vigilante law. Got the standard background picture of lynching as a specifically racial Dixie thing but realizing that much of the country, between the Civil War and the 1920s, was developing traditions of extralegal killing.

I talked here about the Unwritten Law, that a man was entitled to (=routinely acquitted of) stalk and kill those who put hands on his women. Meanwhile the “true man” and “American mind” doctrines set into law something like modern Stand Your Ground laws. In popular conception the list of things a true man was not expected to tolerate rather than deploy righteous violence was longer, in practical application it turned on the testimony of survivor-defendants.

Not just individuals committed individual acts but communities came together, enacted deadly purges, and then published triumphant histories about it, as Regulators, Moderators, Committees of Vigilance.

(cf. the Vehmic courts of medieval Germany, particularly the resemblance of the Gilded Age to feudalism insofar as the state secures magnates’ holdings and leaves the people to themselves)