The Citizen Scholar

“The Citizen Scholar”

Do you love your country? And even more so, do you love the principles of liberty upon which your country is founded? Do you believe the power to govern originates in the individual alone? Do you believe this country is built upon principles of natural law that all men can come to know and understand? That you do not need government, lawyers, clergy, the educated elite, and politicians but by your own endeavors, and by the grace of Providence you can understand these principles?

If you answered yes to the aforementioned questions, YOU ARE “THE CITIZEN SCHOLAR.”

About Natural Law, Cicero wrote, “We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it.” In other words, senate or people (government) cannot alter natural law and we can understand it within our own reason, we do not need others to tell us the laws of nature. To clarify, Natural Law is simply the way things are. It is the way the Creator set things in motion. It is the naturel consequence to an action, good of bad. There are natural laws of science, mathematics, physics, government, human happiness, etc.

All great enlightenment periods have occurred when the people, break free from the “elite” and rediscover natural law principles on their own. These are periods of restoration—restoring fundamental principles. It was not the ruling elite that pulled Europe out of the dark ages, it was common people, or “the citizen scholar,” discovering natural law truths. And many of these “citizen scholars” sacrificed their lives to bring enlightened principles back from obscurity. “Enlighten the people,” said Thomas Jefferson, “and tyranny and oppression of mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” What a beautiful picture of what the enlightenment of the common people will paint.

The American Revolution was a period of restoration, restoring the people’s law principles of their ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons. In an article written in 1818, John Adams wrote:

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. …when they saw those powers…bent upon the destruction of all the securities of their lives, liberties, and properties, they thought it their duty to pray for the Continental Congress and all the thirteen state congresses, etc. …when protection was withdrawn, they thought allegiance was dissolved.

“Another alteration was common to all. The people of America had been educated in a habitual affection for England as their mother country;…But when they found her a cruel beldam, willing…to ‘dash their brains out,’ it is no wonder if their filial affections ceased and were changed into indignation and horror.

This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.”

If we are to restore our nation back to its constitutional purity, the people must become enlightened. Thomas Jefferson said that the only true corrective to Constitutional abuses is education. We must become enlightened in the natural law principles of liberty. We will need to do it independent of the establishment government, lawyers, clergy, the educated elite, and politicians. Persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, governments may trample, but truth will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, if we have the faith and the courage to persevere—if we become “The Citizen Scholar.”

Where Does the Name “The Citizen Scholar” Come From?

The setting—Harvard Law School, September 2011; Ralph asked “What is your background Bill? Are you a lawyer, law professor…?” “No” I interrupted. “Oh, that’s great!” Ralph exclaimed, “you stick it to them. I love that you are not one of them. They think they are the only ones who know…” I cut him off. “No, no Ralph, it is much better than that. I am not even educated. I am a high school drop out construction worker.” In victorious excitement he responded “OH…THAT IS FANTASTIC! I LOVE IT!”

But I begin too soon, let me take you back a bit.

It may not be a profound story, but it is one about a common man who bypassed the establishment to become a citizen scholar. It is a story about me, Bill Norton, not born into privilege, but to loving parents. Parents who eventually shattered a positive upbringing with the hammer of divorce, like many other millions of baby boomer parents in America. Left to our own, my five brothers and sisters and I were left to fend for ourselves. A father gone to selfishness and a single mother gone to work. We had to discover life as children without a guide. Sadly, this is a common tale in modern America—children left to a state of nature to discover right and wrong on their own rather than getting a head start under the guidance of those who have discovered before them.

I was a relatively bright and creative child. I started on the right path but soon found myself drawn to the diversions of an unrestrained teenage life. Not all of life’s events in that time were bad. At thirteen, adventures in gold mining and wilderness survival camps challenged and developed my young mind.

I dropped out of high school at sixteen and thought I could embark on an adult life a little early. Untill a person came along who knew me little enough to not spare my feeling, but great enough to know failures. He called it how he saw it, he told me I was a loser. Oh sure, I could smooth talk adults to think I was bright and mature, but he knew it was all talk. “You don’t go to school. you don’t have a job. You take no responsibilities at all. You might be bright, but your actions show, you are a loser.” He was right. His harsh, but truthful rebuke hit me, and hit me hard. In one short scolding he taught me the most basic principles of natural law—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I realized I was all “talk”. I decided right then that I would now be all “do.”

Within two days of that rebuke I had secured two jobs. Two days later I declined those jobs and hopped on a plane to Phoenix, Arizona. My brother had just started The Sharper Edge, a custom concrete company, and I decided to go work for him. After a couple of months my brother, Alan had decided we would be equal partners—Fifty fifty. He nineteen and I sixteen, we had no clue, but we had heard that in America you can do anything. We started our company with a pickup truck, a wheel barrow, two shovels, a rake, and a couple of concrete trowels. Boy, did we go hungry.

I soon set out to correct my errors and entered the Phoenix Institute of Technology (yes I know that stands for P.I.T., and it was a pit). I received my G.E.D. and graduated from P.I.T. in design and production art in 1990, the same year my class graduated from high school. With a 4.0 and perfect attendance I was now “doing.”

At eighteen I began to contemplate my life. I discovered that I was focused on myself, my growth, my learning, my hard work. Like most kids it was all about me, I was selfish. I decided to make some additional adjustments to my lifestyle and embarked on a two-year ecclesiastical mission. I put all focus of myself on the shelf and dedicated myself to the service of others. Fantastic experiences, good friends, and great leaders and mentors gave me a clearer understanding of right and wrong, or natural law. Once the mission was over I returned back to the shelf I left myself on and found a new person. I discovered the profound truth, that confidence, self-esteem, and a true understanding does not come by focusing on yourself, but true happiness comes in the service of your fellow-man.

As a parting gift from my mission, Russ Donley, former Speaker of the House in Wyoming, gave me a copy of The Making of America, a text-book published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies. Upon returning to Phoenix to resume my partnership in The Sharper Edge and I began reading the book. I was hooked. At the age of 21 I decided to dedicate my spare time to learning the Constitution. I wanted to understand the document as well as the Founders understood it. I began devouring as much information as I could get my hands on.

I quickly realized it would get me nowhere to study contemporary works on the Constitution. Modern authors were plagued with 200 years of a bias, partisan view of the Constitution. I then reasoned that to understand the Constitution like the Founders understood it I should not read the interpretations of historians or law professors. Nor should I even start with the Founder’s works themselves. But to get into the minds of the Founders I must read what they read. Thus my journey began. Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Polybius, Cicero, Coke, Adam Smith and more. Wow! This was great. Natural law, mixed governments, property, rights, revealed law. I then started to mix in the works of the Founders, The Federalist, Madison’s Notes on the Convention, Notes on Virginia, Defense of the Constitutions of the United States, the Constitution, the Declaration, and the letters, the amazing personal letters they wrote back and forth to each other.

Nineteen years later I have a beautiful picture of liberty in my mind and heart. I also have a clear understanding that I have not yet scratched the surface in what there is to know, especially what Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, and others knew. But I know this much, through a lifetime of tireless sacrifice on their part, they are right. They gathered the greatest, proven, natural law principles from the fields of history and prepared a feast the world had never known. And we have been nourished by that feast for over 200 years.

I most certainly cannot fail to mention my greatest joy along this journey. At twenty-five I married my beautiful wife, Ingra. A gifted teacher, a loyal friend, a loving wife, and an angelic mother. She is truly a blessed daughter of God. She anchors me and in her service I find what it truly means to rise up and be a real man. It may not be politically correct, but it is a solemn truth that a man and a woman who understand their selfless roles within the bonds of marriage, and who fulfill the roles with complete fidelity, together they are more likely to succeed in the world and will find true happiness at a level not found by any other means. The only way to improve upon this happiness is to add our four precious children. I cannot say more about my beautiful family, whose relationship I hold sacred, lest I cast pearls before swine.

At twenty-nine I, along with my dear friend Barbara Stowell, co-founded Constitution Week USA, what has become the largest celebration on the Constitution in the country. In ten years we have taught and entertained thousands of Arizona families about the Constitution. During my community efforts, twenty-four years after our start, I continue to own and operate The Sharper Edge with my brother Alan, though he does far more of the “operate” than I.

Efforts with Constitution Week led me full circle back to the publishers of that first book that hooked me to the subject, The Making of America from the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS). We began working on some projects to distribute constitutional materials to every school in the country. I also volunteered to begin redesigning many of the covers on books published by NCCS. In 2008 I found myself traveling with Earl Taylor, president of NCCS, as he taught The Making of America Seminar to groups throughout the nation. Seminar demand began to increase significantly and I soon found myself teaching the seminars as well.

In mid 2008 the U.S. economy began to fail and by the end of the year the bottom dropped. President George W. Bush decided to, as he said, “abandon free-market principles to save the free market,” spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out failing businesses. This move kindled a movement that was soon to sweep the nation. In January of 2009 President Barack Obama took office. Though the white house had changed parties, the game remained the same and the President committed hundreds of billions more to shore up failure. The kindling ignited and government policies continued to fuel the fire into a raging torrent of destruction. One of the largest genuine grassroots movements in history was here. The Tea Party, The Second American Revolution.

By December of 2010 I crossed paths with Patty Meckler, wife of Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots (TPP), the original grassroots organization of the Tea Party movement. Patty recruited me to speak at a Tea Party Patriots’ summit to be held in Phoenix in February of 2011. After Speaking, providing displays, providing entertainment, and performing myself at the event I became acquainted with Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, the other co-founder of TPP. Within a few short months I was hired by Tea Party Patriots as the National Constitutional Education Coordinator.

In September of 2011 Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University and Mark Meckler of Tea Party Patriots co-hosted a Conference on the Constitutional Convention.

Article five of the Constitution provides a mechanism in which the states can call a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution independent of Congress, the President, or the Courts.

Photo taken by Ralph Benko

The purpose of the Convention was to bring people together from the right and the left, pro convention and con, to discuss the merits of an Article five convention. I was asked to speak at the conference as a representative of Tea Party Patriots. My remarks at the event were about education and going back to the natural law principles discovered by the Founders. Out of more than forty people who spoke at the event, including Laurence Tribe who is considered the leading authority on the Constitution,  about the principles of natural law and returning to those proven laws to fix our nation. See my remarks in the following clip.

After my remarks I was bombarded by inquiring minds. I had just declared that the people need to be more educated to fix our problems, not politicians or lawyers, but the people. This was not often heard, especially from the secular pulpit of Harvard University, and the people loved it. One gentleman, Ralph Benko, a columnist for Forbes magazine and a new acquaintance of mine, stood by to listen in. When the crowed subsided and Ralph and I walked to dinner, he asked “What is your background Bill? Are you a lawyer, law professor…?” “No” I interrupted. “Oh, that’s great!” Ralph exclaimed, “you stick it to them. I love that you are not one of them. They think they are the only ones who know…” I cut him off. “No, no Ralph, it is much better than that. I am not even educated. I am a high school drop out construction worker.” In victorious excitement he responded “OH…THAT IS FANTASTIC! I LOVE IT!”

Shortly after the conference Ralph Benko wrote a column for Forbes about the event. It was titled Time for a Constitutional Convention. In the fifth paragraph of the column he writes:

“Mark Meckler’s biography is more laconic than Lessig’s:  ‘originally from southern California graduating from McGeorge Law School… credits his father with having passed to him a patriotic foundation and ‘cowboy ethics.’’  But his role, as co-founder and one of the national coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots, the largest and most authentic of the Tea Party groups, is all the credential he needs to stand in equal dignity with Lessig.   Similar to Meckler’s is the dignity of the Tea Party Patriots’ resident constitutional expert, Bill Norton, who also spoke at Harvard — as a CITIZEN SCHOLAR (emphasis added).”

I know this has been a long story to get to what might appear to be an uneventful conclusion. But the premise of this portion of Ralph’s article is that Mark and I came from humble backgrounds, yet were prominent figures in a national discussion among some of the nations “elite.” Though he was able to show some credentials for Mark, the only credential he could list for this high school drop out construction worker was that I am a “citizen scholar.” The point is that it is an uneventful conclusion. America is not great because one or two individuals have accomplished earth shattering things. America is great because common people have been freed from tyranny and common people have become great. This seemingly uneventful conclusion is truly the greatest event in history—America is great because in protecting the rights of common people, common people have become great.

I think this is a wonderful commentary of what America is all about. A nation where you do not have to be born into privilege in order to become privileged. Sadly, we are seeing that nation disappear quickly. We must all become a “citizen scholar” if we are to restore our country to its place upon a hill as a beacon of freedom, peace, and prosperity to all mankind.

Now, go forth and “proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Leviticus 25:10 and cast into the Liberty Bell

Bill Norton