Jonathan Turley

Paine was against slavery.

They didn't like Paine.

who was a hard drinking guy, penniless, who just started fights in every pub he went into.

By the way, one of the reasons he was penniless is that he insisted that his works, he had the first bestseller.

That's what common sense was.

It was the first world bestseller.

And he insisted that not only should some of that money go to people fighting for the revolution, but that the price should be kept low so everyone could afford it.

No, it's so true.

And I drove my kids crazy for years because I did nothing but research Thomas Paine.

But he is so darned interesting.

He was a corset maker like his father and hated it.

But corset making may have saved the American Revolution because he hated it so much he was going to become a privateer.

and which is basically a lawful pirate.

It was his father through the secret network of corset makers that found out and found him on the ship and took him off the ship.

That ship went out and was absolutely destroyed by a French privateer.

He would have died on that ship, but he ultimately joined another ship and actually became effectively a pirate.

And the only reason that's important, as I mentioned in the book, is it gave him something he had never had before, money.

When he finished that voyage, he was able to return and study the Enlightenment and go to university classes.

So in some ways, we were not only saved by corset making and a swinging door, but strangely enough, piracy.

Well, partially it is true.