Jonathan Turley

And ultimately, he was saved literally by a swinging door because he was in with a group of Belgians and he was dying.

He was very sick.

And they convinced the jailer to open the door.

Well, when they opened the door, you couldn't see a mark of four on the door.

That was a marked place that all four of them were to be executed that night.

So he was saved literally by a swinging door.

Otherwise, he would have joined his other friends who were guillotined in the French Revolution.

No, he's not.

And what's also interesting about Paine is that he was the ultimate contrarian and he was also incredibly principled.

You know, he was so unpopular.

He has the distinction of being tried and convicted in three countries and actually being accused of sedition in three countries.

When he came to the United States, taxi drivers wouldn't even pick him up because he was despised so much.

Benjamin Franklin's daughter, as I talk about in the book, was one of his friends.

And she said it would have been better if he died after he wrote Common Sense.

That was one of his friends.

So it's an amazing story about this guy who always had a sense of his North Star, but he also had a sense of when he was wrong.

And that's different from a lot of people.

But Paine was never someone they wanted to embrace.

They liked Thomas Jefferson.

You know, he's tall, handsome, erudite, you know, slave owner.