Jesse Wegman
speaker
281 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Jesse Wegman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Several years later, they end up only slightly altered in the Declaration of Independence.
And so when I see these words coming, you know, eight years before the Declaration of Independence comes out, I think, who is this guy?
You know, how did I miss him?
Did I skip some class?
Because, you know, Wilson seems to be at the center of everything from almost the moment he arrives in America.
James Wilson was like a few of the framers of the Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton, I think, being the one people are most aware of, he was an immigrant.
And he was born into a poor farming family in the lowlands of Scotland outside of Edinburgh.
And so he has this pretty standard Scottish upbringing for a young farm boy of the, you
He grows up in the Presbyterian church, which is far more democratic in its governance than, say, the Anglican church or the Catholic church.
The parishioners vote for the elders.
There's much more involvement by the regular people in the church than in these other churches where it's much more of a top-down hierarchy.
So Wilson is – he's imbued with this –
democratic notion of governance early in his life.
He's also educated in schools in Scotland that are explicitly there to educate all Scottish children.
Everybody is expected to get an education.
Everyone is expected to learn to read and write.
So Wilson, you know, by the time he's a teenager, he is already sort of filled with these just very natural ideas of democracy,
democratic rule, the equality of all people, and the sense that everybody, no matter what their station in life, where they come from, has equal access to the truth and has an equal right to govern themselves.
And that's what he brings over to America.
Showing 21–40 of 281 · page 2 of 15
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