It Doesn't Matter If You Want to Be Left Alone

Flock Cameras and Local Leadership

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[AUDIO] It Doesn't Matter If You Want to Be Left Alone

Flock Cameras are covering the country (100,000 of them surveil 6000 communities), and so a wildly disparate collection of leftist anarchists, libertarians, and right-wing dissidents are going berserk about this obvious threat to liberty. Who can live free, after all, if one’s every move is watched by a vast panopticon created and funded by one’s tax dollars under the supposed guise of building infrastructure to catch fugitive criminals? No one, particularly in the land of Three Felonies a Day.

That said, the response has also been as incoherent and fragmented as could be expected from so disparate a collection of mutually hostile interest groups. Should the cameras be cut down, as has long happened with ULEZ carbon-tracking cameras in London? Should a national law banning them be passed? Should control of the most boring version of the Ring of Power—the vast surveillance network built to spy on ordinary Americans—be appropriated to instead catch “changing consumer habits” (Pitbull Americans) committing crimes en masse?

Nobody knows. Even fewer people care, really. The point is not the solution, nor even what Flock cameras are really being used for, or even if they are actually being used for anything malicious. People want to be left alone, and the surveillance dragnet that AI has finally enabled is making people realize that they are not, in fact, being left alone. Perhaps we’ll soon get whatever the modern equivalents of torches and pitchforks are in response to this obvious tyranny.

The problem is that such a response, whatever the level of response actually is—from Luigi Mangione-style “direct action” to posting a black square on Instagram in #solidarity with some stupid cause or another—is almost always futile and self-destructive. As I spoke about in my recent podcast on the Virginia Gentry with J. Burden, going postal rarely achieves anything productive. Peasant rebellions always fail, even if they sometimes produce dashing figures like Florian Geyer and Nathaniel Bacon. Perhaps today’s anti-Flock rebellion can come up with a phrase as exciting as “Nulla Crux, Nulla Corona”¹ before they too get obliterated. Regardless, rebellion alone means the cameras will rise and stay, in the end.

That’s depressing, of course, particularly given that the national political scene is largely too full of comically inept lemmings at best and comically evil spiteful mutants at worst to ever deal with the “omnipresent, AI-enabled surveillance infrastructure” issue. It’s unlikely one in four Congressmen could even tell you what the Fourth Amendment provides, much less how it is applicable to the Flock issue. Regardless, Congress doesn’t legislate anymore—malicious, anti-liberty goblins called bureaucrats do—so it’s mostly a moot point.

The national political scene can still be pushed in a direction that is useful on some overarching issues, like taxes, general regulations, and whether cannibalistic race communists imported from Gambia have the right to eat my liver in the name of cultural sensitivity. It is less useful for handling similarly pressing but much more mundane or specific issues, such as whether the town of Somaliland, Michigan gets Flock cameras that will be used to ticket (white) residents for going 5 mph over the speed limit while doing nothing to stop the Somalis from stealing trillions of tax dollars. Such is the state of our anarchotyranny regime.

The simple truth is that no one in that scene cares about that issue. Congressmen, after all, don’t care about what outraged voters care about; even large popular movements have effectively no ability to shape Congressional policy in the absence of elite support.² Members of Congress care about what their donors care about, and the donors don’t care about this, nor anything like it. They might be dragged to caring about some issues like immigration after the immigrants start targeting the wealthy (this is why the 1920 bombing of JP Morgan led to the exceedingly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act), but a few rabble-rousers and serially disaffected types using hacksaws to cut down camera poles won’t do the trick.

That doesn’t mean the problem is hopeless, nor is this a new problem: it is, after all, why our ancestors came to America.

Virginia became the land of the Cavaliers because its settlers wanted to make money in a way that would have been made generally impossible by the hidebound stagnation of Britain, and because they wanted to be sovereign in a way that never would have been possible for them—whether younger sons, tradesmen, or indentured servants—in that settled society. For them, sovereignty meant a union of church, state, and property into a governing gentry that rising new men entered as they became capable of doing so. For the Puritans to the North of those Cavaliers, self-sovereignty meant being able to be religious dissidents and avoid suffering the rigors of state persecution for their Dissenter stance. For the Scots-Irish frontiersmen, it meant being generally free of any landed elite telling them what to do…though Andrew Jackson came to represent the sort of Scots-Irish gentry that developed in America.

In every case, there was the idea that a given locality ought generally be left alone to be in charge of those decisions that impacted it the most, and that such localized sovereignty meant different men would live differently. Hence the differences and similarities between the Tidewater, the frontier, and New England, amongst other regions. Further, there was a sense that those men of good quality who composed the community—generally white men of good character who possessed at least some property—should have a say in that community’s decisions and would be led by the best men of the community in putting those preferences into practice. The degree to which this was the case varied, but on the whole it was more community involvement than in England.

This combination of democracy and aristocracy reached its flowering peak in Revolutionary Virginia, as Charles Sydnor notes in American Revolutionaries in the Making:

Eighteenth-century Virginia did not regard democracy and aristocracy as contradictory kinds of government. It employed both of these qualities in its political system, and it was the interplay of these two forces, democratic and aristocratic, that gave to the government of colonial Virginia much of that distinctive quality which made for the selection of those men who ruled Virginia during the era of the American Revolution.

Notably, the aristocratic tendencies of the state’s political system ensured exceedingly high-quality men were involved,³ and the democratic tendencies ensured that men who actually cared about the community and putting its general interests into practice in the most effective way possible were the ones elected.⁴

That wasn’t all. There was also an understanding that the liberty to participate in deciding the state of exception in one’s community meant one also had the obligation to remain informed about the issues confronting one’s community, the various candidates involved, and to participate to the best of one’s ability. No propertied man of good character missed election day: it was his duty to show up, and so he did so. This sense of duty compelling one to be politically involved was true at the voter level, and was also true at the level of the politically leading gentry. As Carl Bridenbaugh notes in his Myths and Realities, noblesse oblige was cultivated to ensure that the highly competent remained rooted to and interested in that which was best for their people as well.⁵ As Chitwood puts it in Richard Henry Lee, Statesman of the Revolution:

The wealthy planters of colonial Virginia, especially those of the eighteenth century, seemed to feel that their position carried with it the duty to take the lead in securing for their fellow countrymen a wise and just political system. And few of the Virginia patriciate of that day were influenced more by a sense of noblesse oblige than was Richard Henry Lee.

This duty to provide good governance, for example, was why the Cavaliers chased the Quakers out of Virginia⁶: they saw them as dangers to public order (which indeed they were).⁷

Such remains exceedingly relevant, particularly in regard to the Flock issue and others like it. Though many state powers regarding Freedom of Association have been abrogated by Civil Rights Law, there is still an immense amount of room for localities to make their own rules, and even more leeway in the enforcement of rules.

The decision to put these cameras up is not one being made nationally. The legislature doesn’t care one way or another, the NSA can track us all already, and no will exists to muster the “put a camera along every five miles of road” bill that would be necessary to make it happen. No, the decision is being made locally. In nearly every case, it isn’t even the preserve of state legislators or officials, but local office holders…who largely are just as goblin-like and anti-liberty as their national-level bureaucratic peers, if not more so.

Such is an excellent opportunity for productive action that is neither impotent raging about “fighting tyranny” with those unused AR-15s nor impractical demands that Nancy Mace and Cory Booker unite to pass a bill banning the Des Moines police department from putting up license plate cameras. If you want to stop the Flock cameras or change anything of that sort, recovering the old sort of attitude regarding state and local politics, and building infrastructure to wield it for the long term, is the path forward.

The cameras are a great example of this. If you live in a small to moderately sized town, the sort of place where personal politics can still occur and a dedicated group can make a difference, having a group of friends mobilized to run candidates for local positions and get them elected—the sort of thing the colonial Virginia cursus honorum was great at—much of this can be avoided.

You can be the ones who decide not to erect the cameras, and to instead just arrest troublemakers like thieves and vagrants who generally provide the justification for such surveillance infrastructure. That is legal. That is possible. It likely requires a mere few hundred votes and relatively small annual expenditure of campaign funds. Moving to a given place with friends and pressing forward such an agenda would make it even more possible and plausible, and is far easier than sailing across an ocean and building a new civilization out of the primordial forest, as our ancestors did when they sought to build sovereignty for themselves.

That’s not to say it’d be easy, but it is nevertheless possible. It’s also the only real path to any durable gains on this front, or others like it. Whining about zoning, about the HOA, about Flock cameras, and all the rest is not likely to be productive. Nor is chopping down what ones exist; you’ll get arrested, new ones will be raised, and taxes will be raised to pay for those new ones. Resistance is not futile, but sputtering is.

No one cares that you (or I) want to be left alone. That’s not how our political system works, or has ever really worked at the national level.

But we can still shape things at our local level, if we get involved in them at every level of the process, as our ancestors did.

The joke is that the state legislator is different from the national legislator in that he’s owned by a car dealer’s donations rather than Raytheon’s donations. That’s largely true. It’s also an opportunity, for it is much easier to be of commensurate wealth as a car dealer than to build a company as large as Raytheon. It’s also an opportunity to be better than both, and start living out the lifestyles of duty-informed competent governance that built our nation.

The sort of gentry that ruled Virginia in its Golden Age would never have tolerated this nonsense. For one, they had no inclination to do so, being raised to see ordered liberty as the highest good. But also they were personally accountable to those who elected them, and would have been tarred and feathered had they pushed such tyranny.

Such was the union of interests and power between the commons and the gentry that built the state that built the early Republic, and indeed became the model for the early Republic as a whole.

Much of their world is gone, lost to the sands of time and ravages of bureaucratic rule. But flickers of it remain—namely the vast power of localities to make our lives better or worse to an exceedingly appreciable degree—and acting as our ancestors acted to seize that power and use it to make our lives better is the necessary first big step to national renewal. It’s also the way to get those damned cameras off the road.

Here’s how we can rebuild the counter-elite we need to make this possible:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Geyer#German_Peasants’_War

2. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/do-protests-and-social-movements-sway-voters-not-really-except-for-one

3. Sydnor notes:

Such vestiges of aristocracy in eighteenth-century Virginia as property qualifications for voting, oral voting, the power of the gentry in elections, and the arrogation of virtually all offices, local and state-wide, by the gentry, are contrary to twentieth-century principles and ideals of democracy. It is nevertheless certain that the high quality of Virginia's political leadership in the years when the United States was being established was due in large measure to these very things which are now detested. Washington and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, Mason, Marshall, and Peyton Randolph were products of the system which sought out and raised to high office men of superior family and social status, of good education, of personal force, of experience in management; they were placed in power by a semi-aristocratic political system.

4. Sydnor notes:

Men who were customarily haughty, aloof, and ultra-conversative might win the support of a few powerful gentlemen and thus gain seats in the county court; but in burgess elections the friendship and goodwill of the generality of men were needed. The House of Burgesses was made up of gentlemen, but only of gentlemen who were acceptable to ordinary men.

5. Bridenbaugh notes:

“Noblesse oblige was as much a part of the creed of the Chesapeake gentry as it was of the old regime in France. The inferior and middling sort of people generally found the owner of the big estate courteous, kind, and a fair and understanding judge on the quorum, ready to extend a helping hand before his aid was sought. A gentleman knew his neighbors of every rank and called them by name. Above all, the leading planters were imbued with the belief that they constituted a class whose obligations to serve and to govern well must be fulfilled in return for the privileges which were their birthright. This was a part of their code; this duty of service to the state was to be given without charge, as George Washington made clear to the Continental Congress when he accepted command of its army. There is no denying that aristocrats ruled in the interests of their class, but they brought to the political office a sound practical knowledge of the needs of their agricultural community, an understanding of how to deal with human beings learned on their estates, a habit of command that made them good leaders whether in politics or war, and a strong sense of justice. It was a responsible aristocracy.” (Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths & Realities)

6. Fischer notes in Albion’s Seed:

When Quakers began to appear the authorities moved quickly against them. A law in 1658 ordered all Quakers to be banished.

Shipmasters who brought them were required to remove them in close confinement. One defiant female Friend was ordered to be whipped twenty strokes upon her bare back, and (more painful to a Quaker conscience) she was also required to confess her error upon bended knee. The whipping was remitted when she promised to conform. Quakers were also fined for failing to attend Anglican services and for refusing to pay tithes. In 1661 other laws punished Anglicans who were merely “loving to Quakers.”

This persecution worked. Puritan congregations were virtually eliminated from Virginia, and Quakers were reduced to a few small meetings. By the end of the seventeenth century, religious belief was remarkably uniform in the colony...

7. Philip Alexander Bruce, in his Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, notes:

all the non-conformists found in Virginia during the Seventeenth century the most important, from the point of view of numbers, were the Quakers. The spirit animating the members of this remarkable sect, as well as the authorities who sought to repress them, was clearly illustrated in a few words passed in a trial occurring in the General Court in 1661; a small company of Quakers had been arraigned before that Court as recusants and in defending themselves, one of them boldly exclaimed: "Quaker consciences must obey the law of God, however they suffer"; to which one of the judges returned the stern but significant reply: "There is no toleration for wicked consciences."


But it was not simply a keen repugnance to supposed heresy which lay at the root of the determined opposition to this sect. There were certain features characteristic of Quakerism which were regarded, not unnaturally, as directly inimical to the welfare of the community as a whole. First, the members of this religious body aroused suspicion and distrust because their meetings were so often held in the profoundest secrecy; it was not unreasonably concluded that, having undergone such persistent persecution they would, when they came together in this dark and furtive manner, be strongly inclined to devise schemes of reprisal and revenge. Secondly, the necessity of paying tithes for the support of the religious establishment always bore very heavily on the resources of the persons assessed for the parish taxes; if the secession of a large number of the members of each congregation was to be permitted because they claimed to be Quakers, and these schismatics were to be exempted from the levy for the minister's maintenance on the plea that they were required to provide for their own clergyman, then it can be seen that the burden of supporting the Established Church, already so onerous, would have become unendurable. Thirdly, one of the most important of all the duties imposed on each citizen was the defense of the community in the hour of internal commotion or invasion from without; and this duty seemed to be peculiarly imperative in Virginia because there the plantations were so often exposed to the atrocities of Indian incursions; when, therefore, a sect arose which demanded freedom from military service, on the ground that its members were opposed to all forms of war, the authorities quite properly saw in this principle one that would certainly diminish the fighting force of the Colony (a matter involving the safety of every man, woman, and child in it), and the security of every interest of its different communities.¹ Fourthly, disloyalty to the Church of England was thought to be at bottom disloyalty to its head, the King himself; dissent was a form of revolt and rebellion against all established order, and unless checked with sternness and determination might lead to universal disaffection and its attendant horrors, anarchy and blood-shed.

One of the most remarkable rules of the sect was, in ordinary intercourse, to show no formal respect to persons in authority; it can be easily seen how quickly, in the suspicious state of the official mind, this singularity would be seized on, and its significance exaggerated into a deep seated hostility to the Government itself.

In the light of all these powerful reasons for opposing the sect, the only ground for surprise is that the persecution was not pushed to a greater extreme.