Thomas Paine

In the midst of this ferment of American opinion, a bold and eloquent pamphleteer broke in upon the hesitating public with a program for absolute independence, without fears and without apologies.

In the early days of 1776, Thomas Paine issued the first of his famous tracts, Common Sense, a passionate attack upon the British monarchy and an equally passionate plea for American liberty.

Casting aside the language of petition, with which Americans had hitherto addressed George III, Paine went to the other extreme and assailed him with many a violent epithet.

He condemned monarchy itself as a system which had laid the world in blood and ashes.

They pray for the American army.

End quote.

Thomas Paine never let his pen rest.

He had been with the forces of Washington when they retreated from Fort Lee and were harried from New Jersey into Pennsylvania.

He wasn't able to attend college, pretty typical for people of his era, but he did enjoy books, and he learned a lot from his own studies.

He was raised a Baptist, but in his early 20s he began to read the writings of Thomas Paine and Voltaire and Ethan Allen.

and he became a deist.

He believed in God, but he didn't believe that God intervened directly in the lives of human beings.

And we wanted to tell the entire story of Dickinson in just a couple of verses.

So you'll hear about the Townshend Act, and you'll hear about his encounter with Benjamin Rush, who encourage Thomas Paine to use the title Common Sense, and we have a jaunty new tune.

I had not heard the original one before writing it, but they're surprisingly similar because the lyrics, as you'll hear, invite the kind of drinking song feeling.

So here is Dickinson and Liberty, the world premiere.

You know, you can't ascribe innocence to those who know better and are leading people so terribly astray.

You know, I think about the No Kings protest with Chuck Schumer leading that charge and Thomas Paine, an author from the era of the American founding, he wrote this great little pamphlet called Common Sense.

You know, one thing people don't understand, like when you start to read these things, you think, oh, this is going to be hard and it's going to be history and it's going to be a drag.

These guys were so funny.

They were really sarcastic and they had really dry wit.

Thomas Paine is hysterical.

But you read this pamphlet, Common Sense, and he says, what's so great about America is in America, the law is the king.

So now if you go out and you hear these no kings protesters, all of a sudden you realize they have been deliberately moved in a direction to hate the rule of law.

Ben is an assistant professor of public sociology at George Mason University.

People may know American Crisis, apparently one of the things that Thomas Paine during the American Revolution wrote about.

So, Ben, what's the point of this particular report? What motivated you to put it out?

Well, as with pain 250 years ago, these are also times that try our souls.

I think that it's a habit, much like monarchy used to be a habit.

And when Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense during the time of our own revolution, he said, monarchy is a habit.

Humans have to get over it.

There's nothing divine about the right of kings.

The motion is not agreed to.

Thomas Paine plainly wrote in Common Sense that representatives should return and mix again with the general body of the electors.

While George Mason said the very palladium of civil liberty required that great officers at fixed periods return to that mass from which they were at first taken, so they could experience the same laws they imposed on everyone else, instead of living out their final days in a geriatric country club, leeching off the taxpayer, completely oblivious to the lives of those they claimed to represent.

People, you're getting applause for term limits, but how reasonable is that? I mean, how realistic is it that the Senate and Congress are going to vote themselves out? Also, states are rewarded by keeping a senator in longer, by keeping a congressman in longer.

And, you know, kudos, as we said, to Substack for stepping in with its Defender program and enabling you to, well, carry on looking where you are.

I think it's attributed to Thomas Paine, the famous American revolutionary who said, the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots.

and this is what we have long done in the press, and many journalists have suffered.

It's a personal decision for you what to do.