On this episode of NUTS World, I want to put our current challenges.

The current difficulties we're having in defining freedom.

The current threats to our freedom in context.

I want to remind people that there's been a long struggle in the English-speaking world

to define our ability to be free from tyranny and at the same time to have responsible

citizenship based on the votes and the voices of the people.

And the person I want to use to start this conversation is John Wilkes, an Englishman

who became one of the great advocates of free speech, one of the great advocates of freedom

of the press, and one of the great advocates that it is the people, not the politicians,

who get to pick who serves in the parliament or in our case in the Congress.

I think it's particularly important at the present time because we're faced with the

spectacle this week of politicians in Washington deciding that they have the power to say to

74 or 75 million Americans that the politicians in Washington will define for them who they

are allowed to send to be president or in the other job.

It's an extraordinarily dangerous precedent.

It's something we've never seen before in America and it carries us right back to the world

of John Wilkes and to the great dangers of his generation when the team still thought

of themselves as divine right and they thought of opposition as treason and the fight to

have the right to print something, the right to say something, the right to be elected by

voters without the politicians approving or disapproving, all of these things were in flux

and they were in flux in a period about 10 to 15 years before the Declaration of Independence

and then say another 10 years before the Constitutional Convention.

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