Spurious quotation paints founding father as ‘anti-statist prophet’
State Rep. Ed Comeau (R-Brookfield), last seen on the House floor defending a store owner’s right to sell synthetic drugs, recently posted a meme on Facebook featuring a quotation attributed to Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer. “The duty of a true Patriot is to protect his country from its government,” the meme read.
Comeau, who moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project, is not the first to put those words in Paine’s mouth. Tea Partiers have blasted it around the Internet as an article of faith. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and presumptive GOP presidential candidate, made the same claim during a February campaign fundraiser.
Neither Comeau nor Perry cited the source of the quote. The editors at Politifact sifted through the evidence to determine if those are actually the words of the political theorist and revolutionary who authored “Common Sense” and “Age of Reason.”
They checked with Gary Berton, secretary of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association and a staffer with the Institute of Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. “I’ve read every word of Paine’s several times,” replied Berton. “It’s definitely not Paine.”
Harvey Kaye, author of “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America” agrees. Many conservatives describe Paine as an “anti-statist prophet,” noted Kaye, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. “But Paine was a radical, small-d democratic patriot who opposed monarchical & aristocratic government and called for independence and the making of democratic republic (Common Sense, 1776), proposed a social security system (Rights of Man, 1792), and argued for taxing the propertied because God intended the earth for all to share and the concentration of power and wealth produced poverty for working people (see Agrarian Justice, 1797),” Kaye explained in an email to Politifact.
So whose words are they? The closest quote Berton can find is: “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” Ironically, that was written by radical environmental and anarchist Edward Abbey.