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I never realized before this journey that the Constitution is like this beautiful, powerful pair of arms, wrapping around me and my children, literally protecting us from beatings by a state agent, protecting us from being thrown in prison and left without due process, protecting us to say what we want and think what we want and feel how we feel,
and express it. So, that’s what Americans are losing now, and so yeah, absolutely, Give Me Liberty is the only program for doing things that are necessary in order to get that back and keep it forever and make sure that our kids have it. It’s so important that...
Kall: I’ve got to tell you, when I read, I underline for quotations – I’m a quotation junkie. Your book is rich with them. I just realized, listening to you, you’re a Constitutional poet.
Wolf: Oh, thank you! That’s a beautiful thing to say. Thank you.
Kall: So... you’ve got a wish list.
Wolf: I do.
Kall: Want to talk a little about it?
Wolf: Sure. There are many things, I realize, that need to be changed. The cool thing about going through the process of the Give Me Liberty journey is that it really... it tends to make people see things in a different way. For instance, I just read in the news today that Bloomberg denied an emergency request by the Board of Elections to get more poll workers at the polls, so there’s going to be chaos, or insufficiency on election day.
Before I went on this journey, I might have thought, “Ugh, God, they’re so incompetent,” or “Well, there they go again,” or whatever. But now I’ve got this burning rage and I’m like, “OK, who do we sue?” “How do I sue Bloomberg?” Can I do a civil suit, can I do... where’s my lawyer, where’s the National Lawyer’s Guild? I’m so ready with my army of citizens that I now know how to mobilize, to say, “Hold on. That is a tyrant’s move. That is a bid for power that the founders would not tolerate and I’m not going to let you get away with it.”
And, so, there’s so many steps, so many things, that I’m not even... like the Bailout Bill. I haven’t seen the Bailout Bill. I go in audiences... I’m sure somewhere, it’s got to be somewhere, but theoretically, ideally, it would be at least substantially excerpted in every major newspaper in America. We’ve just given away $700B of our money. We don’t know what the fine print says. We don’t even know what the big print says!
So now, having gone through this journey, and understanding that there are vested interests trying to keep these processes opaque, I’m furious and I’m like, “Where’s the bailout bill,” and hunting it down. I think what people experience when they read Give Me Liberty is that they see all the ways in which they’re being excluded and they’ve got this kind of founder’s fire in them now. They’re thinking, “What can I do in my life to push back at this, what are my resources?”
The question I want citizens to always ask themselves at this point is not just what’s in front of you keeping you from action but what are my resources to change things? ‘Cause we are so powerful when we take action together. So, you know, there are so many things
that needs to be changed. I called for a Deliberation Day, which is actually Bruce Ackerman’s idea. He’s a professor at Yale, but he’s had great results.
Instead of letting the pundits debate everything before an election... instead of leaving it to them, we should be assembling, and there’s an organization that can help us do this, in groups, big groups, city-wide, town-wide, village-wide, and it’s a structured deliberation process for two whole days. It has to be two days so that emergency workers, you know, are taking care of vital services and they get their chance. But the citizens debate the issues and can put follow-up questions to representatives of the candidates together and what he found is that leaders emerged, solutions emerged, people vote smarter, they take ownership of issues. That’s one example. I want mandatory voting. You know there’s mandatory tax-paying, for Lord’s sake. You know, everyone should vote. I want us to change the Constitution, which the Founders allowed us to do, so that we have a national referendum. There are twenty-four states that have referenda, meaning the people write the laws and people pass the laws. Europe has that...
Kall: Is that the Article 5 convention you’re talking about?
Wolf: Yes, I think it is. Yes.
