Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

December 15, 2008

Were they alive today, the men who drafted the Bill of Rights might be considered clinically paranoid.

Harvard history Bernard Bailyn has documented that the colonial patriots who won our independence and enacted the Constitution acted on the belief that they were battling a conspiracy ? what a ?deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and America."

The Constitution and Bill of Rights cannot be properly understood unless we understand the conspiracy-centered analysis used by the Framers. In the decades prior to independence, that conspiratorial view of government permeated colonial America by way of widely distributed newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets.

Today, conspiratorial perspective on government of widely varying reliability are available online in the blogosphere. This has led some, such as mental health advocate Angus MacDonald of the University of Minnesota, to suggest that propagation of conspiracy theories should be treated as a public health issue.

King George III would have found that approach very useful in putting down the move to American independence.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.