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.
