Jimmy Kimmel as Tom Paine? Absolutely! Raskin’s comparison of Jimmy Kimmel to Thomas Paine shows just how little today’s leaders understand about America’s founding—and how dangerously they govern because of it. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/20/jimmy-kimmel-as-tom-paine-absolutely/
he other day, after Disney/ABC decided to suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, rather than allow him to do his show and further attack President Trump and his supporters, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin appeared on MSNBC and compared Kimmel and other talk show hosts to one of this nation’s best-known revolutionary figures. “They’re like modern Tom Paines,” the congressman intoned.
While some on the Right were upset by the comment, believing that Raskin had plied Kimmel and his ilk with undue praise, the comparison is, in many ways, quite apt. While it is true that none of the late-night hosts is smart enough or brave enough to inspire a nation to war with his writing—as Paine is said to have done with “Common Sense”—they are very much like him in other ways. You see, in addition to being an inspiring pamphlet writer, Thomas Paine was…how do I put this in a family-friendly publication? …an enormous jackass.
It’s important to note that Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774, which is to say after the Boston Tea Party and after the proverbial die had already been cast and a conflict of some sort seemed inevitable. In other words, unlike most of the Founders, Paine came to America to be a part of the revolution. He didn’t live here and experience colonial rule, eventually concluding that his rights as an Englishman were being violated. He came specifically to agitate, to be revolutionary. His fundamental loyalty was not to the new American polity but to himself and his belief in the need to sweep away the old and start the world anew.
After the American Revolution, Paine eschewed the duties of a statesman to build the new nation and craft its new government, instead moving on, almost immediately, to his next adventure. In the subsequent years, Paine became an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, managed to win election as a representative to the French Revolutionary National Convention, was imprisoned for two years by Maximillien Robespierre, refused to learn that ironic lesson, plotted with Napoleon to invade Britain, returned to the United States only to be denied citizenship and the franchise by Gouverneur Morris (who actually wrote the Preamble to the Constitution), was refused burial by the local Quaker cemetery, and had his bones dug up by a fan who died with them in his house, from whence they were lost to posterity. Paine lived ignominiously and deservedly died ignominiously. Of all the American revolutionaries, he is the least deserving of the title “Founding Father” and the most deserving of being compared to a hack like Jimmy Kimmel.
Unfortunately, this is not what Congressman Raskin meant to do when he made the comparison. He meant to lionize Kimmel and convince people that the former host of “The Man Show” is a noble creature and a venerable patriot. In so doing, Raskin inadvertently revealed something annoying and potentially troubling about himself and those in his social circle (including his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, a highly respected law professor at Duke University and a former member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors): they don’t know a damn thing about this nation, its founding, or the purpose of the government its Founders established. If your go-to compliment for someone you respect and admire is to compare them to Thomas Paine, then that’s only because you don’t know anything about Thomas Paine. And that, in turn, suggests that you don’t know much at all about the founding of this great nation.
We learned something similar two weeks ago, of course, when Virginia Senator Tim Kaine prattled on ignorantly about how rights are granted not by our Creator but by our government. Still, it’s useful to be reminded consistently that our ruling class is comprised largely of know-nothings, if for no other reason than because they govern like know-nothings and thereby imperil our rights and our liberties constantly.
Perhaps the most common mistake made by our less-than-well-educated leaders is the presumption that the American Revolution and its subsequent Constitution were products of the Enlightenment and, as such, are somehow akin to the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As any schoolboy should know—but as Raskin, Kaine, and the rest clearly do not—the American and French Revolutions had nothing in common whatsoever, save for the fact that they occurred within a decade and a half of one another. The American “revolution” was less a revolution than an assertion of existing rights, properly termed a “War of Independence,” waged by Englishmen against Englishmen and made necessary only by the geographical peculiarities of “Empire.” Edmund Burke’s rather placid view of the Americans’ demands and his belief that the Crown and Parliament fomented insurrection by treating the colonists unfairly stand in stark contrast to his blistering indictment of the French Revolution and those who supported it, intellectually and politically. Russell Kirk, in his review of Friedrich von Gentz’s cumbersomely titled The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution: Compared With the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, spelled out the differences as follows:
The American Revolution, he contends, was – as Burke had said of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – “a revolution not made, but prevented.” The American colonists stood up for their prescriptive rights; their claims and expectations were moderate, and founded upon a true apprehension of human nature and natural rights; their constitutions were conservative. But the French revolutionaries, hoping to make human nature and society afresh, broke with the past, defied history, embraced theoretic dogma, and so fell under the cruel domination of Giant Ideology. Prudence and prescription guided the steps of the Americans, who simply preserved and continued the English tradition of representative government and private rights; fanaticism and vain expectations led the French to their own destruction. Burke, at the beginning of the American Revolution, had declared that the colonists were trying to conserve, not to destroy; they sought to keep liberties gained through historical experience, not to claim fanciful liberties conjured up by closet-philosophers; they were “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object.”
The French Revolution has inspired a nearly infinite number of revolutionary ideas and movements since. The family tree of the Enlightenment-fashioned revolutionary Left moves fairly linearly from Rousseau, through the French Revolution, to Robespierre, to Hegel, and to Marx, but then begins branching to include the likes of Nietzsche, Mill, Croly, Wilson, Lenin, Mussolini, Gramsci, Lukacs, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, and so forth.
Meanwhile, the American Revolution inspired… well… no one. Largely because it was misunderstood by almost everyone outside of America. As Kirk continued, “The dominant liberal school of nineteenth-century historians embraced the view that the French Revolution had been a noble and irrevocable stride forward toward a universal domination of peace and enlightenment and brotherhood, and they confounded the American and French revolutions as virtually identical manifestations of the same progressive movement.”
This view is wildly inaccurate, and yet it remains dominant, even among Americans who should know better.
The truth of the matter is that the American Revolution may have taken place during the Enlightenment Era, but it was, nevertheless, a pre-Enlightenment movement based on pre-Enlightenment notions that rights and liberties must be balanced by duties and obligations, observed voluntarily. Even Jefferson, likely the most Enlightenment-animated of the nation’s Founders (not counting Paine, natch), changed John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in a nod to the millennia-old belief that the purpose of man’s existence is to seek the good life (eudaimonia) through the practice of virtue.
I know some will disagree and will insist that the Revolution and its aftermath constituted an “American Enlightenment” of sorts, but that’s an argument for another day. Today, the point, simply, is that our leaders—particularly those currently in the political opposition—don’t have any idea what they’re doing or why they do it. They radically misunderstand the nation and its founding and, by extension, their own roles in preserving the ideals advanced by the founding.
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