The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Remember Will Grigg, a champion of liberty
William Norman Grigg is the most significant political writer of the 21st century you probably don’t know. Will, as he was to friends like me, had H.L. Mencken’s rapier-like journalistic insight and G.K. Chesterton’s empathy and sense of humor.
He was the cooler, Christian version of Mencken, always good for the mot juste, whether with the written word, with his voice in person or on a radio broadcast.
Do-nothing bureaucrats to Will were “chair-moisteners” and a corrupt, morbidly obese cop was a “semi-ambulatory donut furnace.” He summarized the theme of a Southern Poverty Law Center op-ed diatribe against independent thinkers in the Los Angeles Times as “the conspiracy theorists are plotting against us.”
His Christianity-informed worldview was also rooted in a fundamental distrust of government, based upon the bloody history of the many governments he had assiduously studied. “Never forget,” he quipped of the modern government view of the First and Second Amendments, “A ‘conspiracy theorist’ is someone who notices things without official permission and a ‘terrorist’ is anybody who challenges the government’s monopoly on violence.”
Sometimes history-makers die in relative obscurity, not knowing that the impact of their words would echo louder through the decades and centuries. Libertarian writer William Norman Grigg will be numbered among those giant historical figures who are scarcely known at their death.
By the time I met him in the offices of The New American magazine in 1993, someone else on staff had already labeled him “Thesaurus Rex” for the voluminous vocabulary he wielded. Will Grigg, as his friends knew him, was not one to use big words to prove he was smart. He used the best word for the occasion. He was truly without guile or ego, and probably unaware of his own greatness in his ability to craft the English language.
The New American hired him as senior editor, essentially a full-time writer position, in which he served until 2006. It turned out to be the both the most prolific time of his career, and the only time he would
earn a full-time living with his writings. Scott Horton formed the Libertarian Institute in 2015 for the sole task of funding Will with a full-time salary in order to allow him to focus upon his writing rather than what had become a perpetual struggle to make ends meet for himself, his wife and his six young children. The Libertarian Institute had been on the cusp of attaining that goal at the time of Will’s 2017 death.
His pastor noted Will had a strong “allergy to injustice,” a heavy predilection to which I can attest in our friendship. He wrote about all kinds of injustice, from the macro level of the American empire’s wars around the world to the micro level of individual abuse by local government officials. Police abuses often fell under the cudgel of his prose. Will labeled police “the country’s most dangerous street gang” and noted that “contempt of cop” was the crime for which the most death penalties are meted out by the government in America, typically without trial. Will was well aware of the fact that on average police
kill 1,000 or more Americans annually, 20-50 times the per capita ratio of other advanced countries. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any street gang, whether the Crips or the Latin Kings, ever killing anywhere close to those numbers.
In his final years, Will railed against the Idaho Falls Police and a state prosecutor for gaining a guilty plea from Christopher Tapp for the brutal 1997 rape/murder of a 19-year-old Idaho woman. Tapp is innocent, Will told me repeatedly in the years before his 2017 death, a case he featured on his Pro Libertate blog (now archived on the Libertarian Institute website).
I couldn’t understand why Will was highlighting this case; Tapp had pled guilty to murder. Who would ever plead guilty to a murder he didn’t commit? It didn’t make any sense, I thought.
Will was insistent, even strident on the issue. He stressed Tapp had been entrapped into the plea with a threat of the death penalty by the corrupt prosecutor who had coerced a confession
(which Tapp later recanted).
In late 2017, just months after Will’s death from a heart attack, the state of Idaho released Tapp for time served. Tapp had served nearly 20 years of a murder sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. In 2019, police dropped all charges against Tapp and arrested the real murderer, Brian Leigh Dripps, who was convicted of the murder in 2021 with DNA evidence. Idaho Falls settled a civil lawsuit filed by Tapp in 2022 for $11.7 million, and the mayor apologized to Tapp.
The rest of the world found out much later in the Tapp case what Will Grigg had known years earlier because of his genius intellect and diligent research. I’m still catching up with Will Grigg’s level of understanding. And when the world does the same and catches up with Will Grigg, it will be a much freer and more prosperous world.