Lots of Little Thomas Paines (But No General Washington)

Guest Post by A.J. Smuskiewicz

About a year-and-a-half ago, a man named Vincent commented on one of my YouTube political music videos by posting, “You wrote a GREAT letter of resignation to that ridiculous, feckless university. You’re another Thomas Paine. I salute you, sir!”

The video, titled “Take Your Mask and Your Vax (and Shove ‘em Where the Sun Don’t Shine),” was part of an essay that I wrote describing how a university client of mine had fired me from my work-at-home job because of my refusal to get the Biden-mandated COVID vaccine. My essay contained a letter of “resignation” that the university required me to write (to justify their firing of me, from their Orwellian perspective). I worded that letter as a protest statement, which the YouTube commentator seems to have liked, prompting his Paine analogy.

Needless to say, I am no Thomas Paine! But I was flattered and amused by the man’s nice comment.

Where are the protests supporting Trump?

I thought of that YouTube comment again the other day, when I was exchanging text messages with a political acquaintance of mine—a lady who hosts a podcast on which I appeared as a guest in October 2021 to discuss my mandate-prompted firing. I started the text exchange by complaining about the lack of a strong protest reaction among conservatives to the outrageous politically motivated arraignment of Donald Trump. Where the hell are the massive and forceful protests out in the street? If Obama was being prosecuted, you know for damn sure that BLM, Antifa, and the other usual Left-wing activists would be out in massive numbers protesting, burning, rioting, and destroying. Those groups know that protests and violence can be effective. After all, their riots did lead to positive results for them—from their perspective—such as police defunding actions in many cities.

People of the Left protest and riot, and they always win. People of the Right complain a lot—if they even have the guts to do that—but they can hardly manage to stage a decent, lively protest now and then (other than the January 6, 2021 so-called “insurrection” in D.C., from which they have now backtracked in fear, as a result of the government’s fascist prosecutions). The only “protests” I’ve seen regarding the Stalinist Trump prosecution have been the few hundred (?) Trump supporters outside the courthouse in New York—outnumbered by the Trump haters and mobs of journalists (same thing)—and the string of Trumpsters lining the streets in Mar-a-Lago. But there have been no large groups of justifiably angry citizens protesting and marching in the streets throughout the country to demonstrate their support for Trump, as he has called for. Nor have there been any widespread demonstrations from the Right against any of the other massive loads of bullshit that have been forced upon the public over the past few years.

This is absolutely pitiful and shameful! And it is the main reason that the country has been lost. Good citizens sat around like stupid, senseless sheep while the evil elitist bastards blatantly and boldly destroyed the country for all to see.

So, I was complaining about all of this shit to that acquaintance of mine. And she responded by basically asking me, “Well, you’ve got a big mouth, but why aren’t YOU out on the street trying to do something about it?” (That’s my wording of what she texted me. Her own wording was much more polite, but I knew what she meant.)

Well, she posed a valid question. When I was in my 20s, back in the 1980s, I was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I used to march in protests with them and their Left-wing partner organizations. I protested against nuclear weapons, against Reagan’s meddlings in Central America, and other fashionable Leftist causes of the day. Today, I remember two main things about those protests. One time, my baseball cap blew off in the wind in downtown Chicago and I had to embarrassingly run after it in the middle of the event. Another time, my mother yelled at me for going to the protest because it was Mother’s Day. That made me feel very bad.

I am definitely not a street protestor or a street fighting man—especially now that I’m in my 60s. (The only fight I was ever in was back in the ‘80s, when me and another guy were brawling in a White Castle’s parking lot over a girl. We were both drunk and the fight ended in a draw. Then both of us went out drinking together with the chick.) Furthermore, I’m not a group person of any kind. I detest group participation in any form, because I’m too much of an independent-minded individualist, and I always find myself at odds with certain ideas of any group. Those are reasons why I’m not out in the street raising hell about Trump or the other societal insanity today.

My most useful strengths are in writing, and I’ve written numerous political essays over the past few years with my honest and blunt perspectives on domestic and international events. At least I have enough guts to express my opinions—apparently unlike the vast majority of other people. An honest, bold, and critical expression of beliefs is the foundation on which political protest and change can be built. Although I am no Thomas Paine, I am a writer, like him, and not a street fighter. Paine didn’t fight in military battles during the American Revolution, but he helped inspire the American colonists to fight those battles.

Although I don’t have a personality or the talents for street fighting or protesting, other people do. Not all of these people are on the Left, are they? And the election system, justice system, and other established systems have all proven to be corrupted and useless for conservatives, libertarians, and freedom lovers. So, to paraphrase Jagger and Richards, what else can a poor boy do?

So, I still ask: Where are the massive, forceful protests by “conservatives” and others who are pissed off about the persecution of Trump and all the other insanity that is happening in this country today? Is everybody on the Right too satiated with their Internet, cell phones, virtual reality, Amazon, apps, and other technological addictions to care? Or are they too turn-the-other-cheek holy-rolly to fight? Are they too afraid? The Left obviously cares enough to fight. Like I said, imagine the Left’s response out on the street if this crap was happening to Obama.

That’s why the Left always wins, and the Right always loses.

Who was Thomas Paine?

Thinking about all of these things prompted me to investigate the life of Thomas Paine, whom I always knew about, of course, but never took the time to study. The free-thinking Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson has always been my favorite “Founding Father,” but I’ve now come to admire Paine quite a bit also.

Paine is best remembered for writing Common Sense in 1775–1776, a pamphlet that presented moral and political arguments for the American Colonies to break away from Great Britain, and The American Crisis from 1776 to 1783, a series of pamphlets that served to clarify the reasons for American independence, as well as to inspire Americans and boost their morale during the war. In these writings, Paine strongly defended the right of people to overthrow their government.

He was born in England in 1737 and didn’t emigrate to America until 1774, when he was 37 years old. He moved to Philadelphia, at the urging of Benjamin Franklin. There, he became the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine. One of the articles that he published in the magazine was an anonymous anti-slavery essay, which he probably wrote himself.

When Common Sense was published in early ’76, it was also signed anonymously. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the pamphlet were circulated throughout the colonies, educating people about the reasons for waging war against the British king, inspiring them to fight against tyranny, and encouraging them to sign up to the Continental Army. He used his rhetorical skills to make his arguments attractive to, and easy-to-understand by, regular people. The text drove the king-supporting Loyalists totally crazy, and it even irritated some leaders of the Revolution. The latter group objected to certain ideas of Paine, such as voting rights for men who didn’t own property.

I am particularly struck by the very first lines of Common Sense, which seem just as relevant to us today as they were some 250 years ago—pointing as they do to the popular dominance of mindless fashionable ideas over rational thinking and reason: “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

Those observations of Paine show that human nature, despite all of our political, social, and technological changes through the centuries, has remained essentially the same. The masses of people don’t get what’s going on around them until enough time goes by and it finally sinks in. (That’s too much time to wait for an impatient person like me.)

In mid-’76, Paine may have worked with Jefferson on drafts of the Declaration of Independence. In late-‘76, he published the first of his The American Crisis pamphlets, which General George Washington read to his troops to inspire them. This was the text with the famous lines, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” He continued to publish pamphlets in the Crisis series throughout the rest of the war.

In the 1780s, after the American victory in the Revolution, Paine returned to England, where his writings urged peaceful relations between the increasingly antagonistic governments of Britain and France (which would soon be at war). By the early 1790s, Paine had fled to France after the British government, angered by his anti-monarchy ideas and demands to address widespread poverty in Rights of Man and Rights of Man, Part the Second, issued a writ for his arrest on an indictment for seditious libel.

His writings played an important role in the French Revolution. But he pissed off certain elements of the Revolution too (the very radical Montagnards), so he was arrested in 1793 and spent about a year languishing in a Paris prison, seemingly forgotten. He finally regained his freedom thanks to the intervention of the U.S. ambassador to France (and future U.S. president) James Monroe. During this difficult period of his life, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, in which he condemned organized religion and the Bible and advocated for the wisdom obtained from empirical reason, personal observation, and the natural world. My hero! Paine returned to the United States in 1802, after President Jefferson invited him back to the country that he had helped to create.

During his prison experience, Paine had developed an intense dislike of Washington, whom he believed did not do enough, as president, to free him from his incarceration. In 1796, three years before Washington died, Paine wrote the popularly revered president a nasty letter in which he basically called him a narcissistic treacherous hypocrite phony asshole.

Upon his return to America, Paine found that he was widely hated because of his attacks on Washington and organized religion and his association with the French Revolution. Such was his scorned life in America until his death in New York in 1809 at the age of 72. After his death, a lot of negative things were said about the anti-establishment Paine, such as (in the New York Evening Post), “He had lived long, done some good, and much harm.” People who held unpopular views tend to not get glowing obituaries.

Little virtual Thomas Paines

Is there a Thomas Paine in America today—a prominent person who tells truth to power, pissing off lots of establishment people and potentially inspiring the population to act? Maybe Tucker Carlson? That’s about the closest that I notice. But I really don’t think there is any single big Thomas Paine today. Rather, there are a lot of little virtual Thomas Paines, writing their essays, blogs, or comments online, uploading their podcasts, videos, or memes. Anyone who takes a strong stand for individual liberty and freedom in America today (which is highly unfashionable) is a little Thomas Paine. I’m a little Thomas Paine. Perhaps you’re a little Thomas Paine, too.

One of the essays that I’ve written and am most proud of is my rewriting of the Declaration of Independence for modern-day American times (which I wrote under the pseudonym of Thomas Jefferson, Jr.). I would hope that both Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of that effort and find it appropriate for these times.

The Internet—a publishing platform that Paine never dreamed of—has been a good, useful tool in that sense, helping freedom lovers spread their messages. But I believe that such messaging would not even be necessary if the Internet did not also make it possible for bullshit to spread so widely and rapidly. The online Thomas Paines are only needed to counter all the monumental online BS. Had it not been for the Internet, the lies and mass hysterias of Trump Derangement Syndrome, COVID, Ukraine, climate change, “systemic racism,” gender pathologies, and other modern mass illusions would never have swarmed over society so rapidly, effectively, and thoroughly. It is no coincidence that society really started to accelerate its descent into Orwellian Hell during the 1990s, just as the Internet became widely available. So, on the balance, I believe that the Internet has been much more harmful than beneficial to society, logic, and freedom. I wonder what Paine—if he miraculously came back to life today—would think of it.

I know that Paine would be terribly disappointed by the modern-day complaisant, compliant, sheep-like, zombie-like American population. He would observe the vast majority of Americans sitting around and watching while the extremely rare champion of liberty and common sense—Trump—is politically assassinated. He would see Americans lying around in states of semiconsciousness—addicted to their drugs, credit cards, and technology devices—while the once greatest country ever is twisted and corrupted beyond any recognition. He would conclude that here is no will, courage, or intelligence left among the weakened, frightened, and/or clueless population to fight for the freedom that he had championed during his life.

Paine might notice all the little virtual Paines—like you and me—posting our online ideas and arguments, unfortunately read by relatively few people (compared with consumers of corporate media) and probably having little to no effect on the course of human events in the increasingly decadent society. He would see that almost no one really cares about individual freedom anymore, as long as they are connected to the online group “grid.” Moreover, he would no doubt conclude that even if Americans did care about freedom and wanted to do something about its loss, there is clearly no modern-day General Washington to lead the population’s fight against the tyrannical system. All the generals today have gone “woke.” WTF? Yeah, as much as Paine hated that old asshole Washington, he would have to admit that the USA would have never won its freedom against British tyranny without him, and he would be sad to see that American warriors of Washington’s caliber and integrity do not exist to fight against the domestic tyranny of the 21st century.

In other words, there seems to be no will to fight and no means to fight.

The freedom for which Paine advocated and for which Washington fought is now lost in America. Common Sense would likely lead Paine to conclude that the Age of Reason has given way to the Age of Fear and Complaisance, and that the Rights of Man have been sacrificed to a government-corporate tyrannical authoritarianism, plunging us into an American Crisis with no apparent way out.

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