July 5, 2013: Ben takes a good hard look at the “Founding Fathers” and the coup d’état that installed “constitutional government” upon the people of America.
Click here for a direct link to the MP3 file for this episode.
In response to a comment on this episode's page asking about his sources and research methods, Ben elaborated as follows:
Whenever I look at history I try to use a method, more than a source. I start by rejecting the basic stuff that governments and their puppet historians always try to push. (great man theory, government is by the consent of the governed, government is good, democracy is good, humans are bad unless restricted, etc) I try to find moments when people changed their minds about something and I try to figure out why they did that and what actions they took as a result. In this case, I remembered a while back when I was reading the letters of Thomas Jefferson (at loc.gov, the Library of Congress web site) and I remembered how his letters to Washington changed over the years. I wanted to figure out when and why Washington changed his mind about supporting a strong federal government. So I began by going back to loc.gov and looking at Washington’s letters. I could see that Hamilton was likely the strongest influence on Washington and that reminded me of a book by Tom DiLorenzo called Hamilton’s Curse. So I read that again and started looking through his references to get to his sources. That’s how I found out about John Taylor of Caroline and his book Tyranny Unmasked. Then I remembered talking to Kenneth Royce about his book Hologram of Liberty and how he called the signers of the Constitution “Founding Lawyers”, so I decided to find out who these guys were and why they were invited to Hamilton’s convention.
So I guess you could say my sources are Jefferson’s letters, Washington’s letters, Hamilton’s Curse, Hologram of Liberty, and Tyranny Unmasked, plus I constantly pop back and forth in Rothbard’s book Conceived In Liberty and I use Wikipedia to look up names and dates and things like that. I often have 6 or 8 Wikipedia pages open at the same time as I read letters at loc.gov, so I can bounce back and forth and figure out what the authors are talking about.
