Turley: “These Are Revolutionary Times, But We Remain Truly Revolutionary People”
Law professor Jonathan Turley looks at what it means to be an American and discusses his book ‘Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution’ on FNC’s “Life, Liberty & Levin.”
MARK LEVIN: When you hear the Hakeem Jeffries of the world and others talk about, well, we’re going to pack the Supreme Court, it’s almost a matter of fact. We’re going to change the Senate and add four Democrats. We’re going to have open borders. Whoever comes in, comes in. And we want to get as many of them as possible in these different programs. We’re going to change the Electoral College. All these things that were so painstakingly put in place in Philadelphia and then debated in the states and so forth and so on. Your point is, I believe, they’re now up for grabs. They’re under attack. And if we lose these guardrails, we effectively have the French Revolution. Is that your point? JONATHAN TURLEY: Yes. The fact is, we have to answer that question. What then is this America? Not just who we were then. Who are we now at this moment? And you have many that want to change who we are. That’s one of the reasons Thomas Paine was so interesting for me in the book. Thomas Paine came to this country just two years before the Revolution. Two years before he wrote Common Sense. He wrote it anonymously. The man who sent him here came upon him when he had failed at everything. He had been fired from every job he held. He had gone bankrupt in every business he created. His marriages were disasters. And he found himself in front of a man as a smoking heap of human wreckage. And that man saw something. That was Benjamin Franklin in London and paid for Paine to come to this country. And told him to write. And within two years, he would be called the penman of the Revolution. And he wrote Common Sense anonymously. Maybe genius is required to recognize genius. Because when John Adams was asked by his wife, people say she wrote him. You wrote Common Sense. And John Adams, who was no fan of Thomas Paine, said, I couldn’t have written that book. But I think I know who did. I met a man named Thomas Paine. And he had genius in his eyes. That was the type of person that created this republic. Those are the voices that defined who we were. The question is, can we answer that question itself today? And I think that we can. These are revolutionary times. But we remain truly a revolutionary people.
