Dream Votes: America, The Cult

So we all know about like the Salem witch trials, which were a little bit later.

Yes, about 60 years later.

But at the time when they first got here, what were the mechanisms by which they controlled people? Like I'm picturing – what are those things called? Oh, sure.

The

stocks and the pillory and various instruments of torture that you attached around one limb or another.

Sometimes they just had you standing on a box in the middle of the town and people could like – Stone you.

Tuck shit and throw food and trash at you.

You had to wear – Your crimes pinned to you.

People got branded A for adultery.

Yeah.

Scarlet letter, but branded.

People got their tongues clipped, their ears clipped, sometimes reattached, not always.

One of my favorite stories is this guy got kicked out of And they tossed him on a ship because that's how they banished people at the time back to England.

And there was like a – the only thing I can describe it as is a spank tunnel.

There were guys waiting in a line on either side with their muskets.

And as he walked past, each one had to thump him on the breech with the butt of his musket.

Why? No people pay for

that.

No people pay for all this shit.

Truly.

And it's just another example of how deeply this is still inside all of us.

Okay, so that's Boston.

Like, does it spread? Like, how does it start to become kind of the norm?

The Puritan settlements were extremely successful.

They did eventually blend in with larger New England society, but at that point it was all culturally pretty much the same, in my opinion.