I’m going to guess that most of the readers here have a vague recollection of who Tony Spell is. I’ll refresh that recollection by noting that Spell was the Pentecostal pastor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who got himself in trouble for refusing to close his church despite having been ordered to by Louisiana’s tyrannical Democrat governor, John Bel Edwards, during the latter’s COVID lockdowns.
Spell ultimately won that fight, as he should have. He’s back in the news over another fight that he won this week.
Specifically…
Louisiana pastor beats up a man who allegedly threatened to r*pe and kill his wife and grandchildren.
Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church says he was working on a church bus when the neighbor’s son started shouting at him.
Spell said that it is his job as the natural… pic.twitter.com/v2ThlOEo3t
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 24, 2026
Depending on how you’ve had this filtered to you by the mainstream media, you could well be outraged beyond measure that a man of the cloth would engage in fistic encounters with the neighbors of his church.
And it is certainly an unconventional bit of ministry. That can’t be denied. You don’t have to feel guilty for being uncomfortable with the idea of ministers throwing hands on a public right-of-way.
But this was Spell’s side of the story…
Well, if nothing else, we can say he got his answer.
There has been a problem with the family across the street from Spell’s Life Tabernacle Church for years. Here’s just a taste of that…
Scott Sherwin wasn’t the man involved in Tuesday’s fisticuffs with the pastor — he’s the father of the 20-year-old who found himself madeth to lie down on the green pasture of the right-of-way. It’s fair to say that Sherwin created the situation, though — his own long-standing behavior toward Spell and his church metastasized into his son’s screaming threats and vulgarities.
Which Sherwin denies. And some 1,000 members of Spell’s congregation seem pretty adamant about supporting the pastor’s allegations. It was reported several years ago that Sherwin installed cameras all along his property to surveil the church, possibly in concert with the FBI, as insane as that sounds, after Spell refused to close his church or limit attendance during the COVID lockdowns.
Assumedly, it was one of those surveillance cameras that shot the video of the confrontation, which has surfaced all over the internet.
But the question is, if the younger Sherwin didn’t provoke Spell, if Spell is lying about the threats and provocations, then why would he so urgently cross the road?
Tony Spell isn’t a stupid man. He’s spent a good amount of time in the public eye and has generally acquitted himself well. For him to have thrown himself into this current situation, there had to be something that created that conflict.
And on the video of the fight, there’s a good telltale sign, which was that the son was holding up his phone and filming Spell. You generally don’t do something like that unless you have good reason to believe you’re going to capture something interesting — like the reaction to a provocation.
I don’t relate all of this as a call for Spell to escape prosecution, though, from the local reaction since his arrest, I’m going to predict that no serious charges are going to be brought against him, or if any are, the prosecutors are going to have a very tough time getting a conviction. And that’s despite the fact that the last few seconds of that video come off as… regrettable. Particularly with respect to the kick the pastor delivered to his opponent’s skull. It’s not outlandish to say that the excessive force at the end could be problematic for the preacher.
What I find more interesting than the litigation of this incident is the pattern it fits into.
Because Tony Spell whaling away at a radical atheist — I’m given to understand that’s the box the Sherwins fit into — isn’t happening in a vacuum.
It should be understood in a wider context. Belfast, for one example. And not just Belfast. (RELATED: On Belfast)
The Irish have started finding the locations of illegal migrant HMOs and are forcing them out of their houses and out of Ireland. pic.twitter.com/ykkiQCTlHg
— Knights Templar International (@KnightsTempOrg) June 25, 2026
The two recent incidents in New Jersey, where anti-ICE protesters blocking roadways have found themselves moved out of those roadways by drivers of cars, are another.
There are multiplying incidents caught on viral video where shoplifters, muggers, and others are jumped by store employees or intended victims. You’d see them here and there; now there’s a flood of these videos.
It almost seems like civilization is manufacturing antibodies.
This week, a low-budget, highly viral movie called Citizen Vigilante came out. Written and directed by Uwe Boll and starring Armie Hammer, it’s about an American landlord in Europe who decides he’s had enough of migrant rapists and street criminals in whatever city he’s in, and he leverages his military training and don’t-care-anymore Death Wish mentality to become a one-man wrecking crew against Muslims and other undesirables. It’s not quite V for Vendetta or Death Wish — it won’t measure up on that scale — but after the German government banned the film, Boll dumped it out on X, where it was immediately shared by Elon Musk on his own account, and now everybody’s watching it.
It almost seems like civilization is manufacturing antibodies.
Another way to see the Spell incident is that it’s an example of what it can look like when an honor culture is confronted by a victim culture.
The 20-year-old provoked Spell and recorded his reaction. Spell wasn’t interested in the perception his actions would create — he crossed that road to confront the verbal aggressor, and quite justifiably so if his statement is accurate that the 20-year-old was threatening to rape and kill members of his family.
Victim culture confronts honor culture and insults its honor so that it can either score points as the victim when provoking the correct reaction or humiliate the honor culture by noting its failure to respond to the provocation. This is now a very old game.
But what happened on that right-of-way, whether it’s punished or not by the legal system, was what you get when the honor culture understands the game and breaks the rules anyway — because if you threaten to rape a man’s wife and grandchildren, an honorable man will punish you regardless of the consequences.
We have a lot of people in this country and elsewhere in the world who don’t understand those basic precepts of civilization. There are signs that’s about to change.
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