Silence Dogood: Brendan Carr, Meet Ben Franklin
A 16-year-old showed America how to outwit theocrats. We need his lesson now.
These are historic times—and not in a good way. America again finds itself in a dark passage. But the fact that there is an American history is reason enough to never give up on it.
Over three centuries ago, a sixteen-year-old boy wrote this:
“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.“
—Benjamin Franklin as Mrs. Silence Dogood in the New-England Courant, 1722
Born in 1706, Ben Franklin was the fifteenth child of a candle and soap maker in Puritan colonial Boston. He had almost no formal education and was working in his father’s shop by the age of ten. At the age of twelve, Ben was apprenticed to his brother as a printer.
Despite these humble beginnings, Ben Franklin was a voracious reader and autodidact who described himself “almost wholly self-taught.”
He did have one stroke of luck—and he seized it. His brother James was the printer of a newspaper which challenged Puritan control of freedom of the press—the literal printing press. All newspapers legally required a government license and prior approval by the colonial Secretary.
Despite this, the New-England Courant, launched in 1721, was the only one out of a handful of papers in Boston that had political edge and irreverent humor. It also, in a chilling echo of today’s anti-science battles, became a critic of those Puritans in the colony who resisted smallpox inoculation. In 1722, the Courant was banned after publishing satirical articles on officials and clergy.
Enter Mrs. Silence Dogood
Ben Franklin, then sixteen, saw an opportunity and slipped a series of 14 letters under the door of his brother James’s print shop—and didn’t tell him. Ben adopted the persona of a middle-aged widow who offered witty commentary on politics, religion, manners, and education (especially for women)—and frequently ridiculed clergymen and politicians for hypocrisy.
In Letter 8, “outspoken widow” Mrs. Silence Dogood gave one of the clearest early American defenses of freedom of speech and freedom of thought:
“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.”
Famously, she signed it.
At 16, Ben Franklin learned the power of free thought, free speech, and a free press. That pattern never left him. However, he was also a realist; he knew the United States of America was only a “republic if you can keep it.”
In 1789, as the U.S. Constitution was being ratified, at 83, he said:
“Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
—Ben Franklin, Letter to Jean-Baptiste LeRoy, November 13, 1789
The founders all understood, as young Ben did, that knowledge is freedom.
"Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."
—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Richard Price, 1789
Franklin’s teenage defiance became a lifelong principle, and the freedoms he helped win are under direct assault again.
Return of the Puritans
America is being led by a government that wants a return to a form of neo-Puritan rule. In the latest example, the new “colonial Secretary”—FCC Chair Brendan Carr—requires approval of what comes out of the press, or he will take away their license from the government.
A few hours before Jimmy Kimmel was thrown off the air for a mild comment about MAGA’s response to Charlie Kirk, Carr said to Russian intelligence subcontractor Benny Johnson:
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
ABC chose the “easy way” and suspended Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely. When asked about ABC and other broadcast networks, President Donald Trump said this:
"They give me only bad press. They're getting a license. I think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr. I think Brendan Carr is outstanding. He's a patriot. He loves our country, and he's a tough guy. So we'll see.".
At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has instituted a similar new rule. Reporters are no longer allowed to roam the halls of the newly-named Department of War without a badge, and no stories are allowed to be published without the DoW’s approval.
Going forward, journalists must sign a pledge not to gather any information, including unclassified reports, that hasn't been authorized for release.
As a portent of things to come if we do not arrest this slide into autocracy, the Oklahoma legislature introduced a bill that requires that:
“In his honor and to perpetuate his legacy as a martyr for truth, faith, and the First Amendment, each institution within The Oklahoma State System of Higher Education shall establish on its campus a dedicated square or plaza … the Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza.”
Of course, creating legislation to honor a martyr is precisely what the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
Everything the current American regime is engaged in is antithetical to the spirit, meaning, and the plain text of the Constitution—for a reason.
Epistemological Totalitarianism Is Hard
Three centuries ago, a teenage boy and his brother helped to crack open the theocratic rule of an American colony, and set it on a course to help found a new nation that, despite its numerous flaws and its legacy of slavery, successfully sought to create a more perfect union.
Reversing those 300 years of progress in providing freedom of thought is the ultimate goal of the Trump regime. It wants a return to 17th century Puritan rule, where a small group of white male elites determined the rules for society—and enforced them by hanging witches in the public square, or, in America’s case, by disappearing them to camps.
The only way to maintain the kind of control our captors ultimately want is to capture the means of knowledge, e.g. epistemic control; to make it impossible to reality-test; and to ensure that the clergy alone will tell you what’s true and what isn’t.
I do not think it can work. At least not well enough to prevent another Ben Franklin from coming up with an idea that will break the system of control. I do not believe you can put the Enlightenment back in a bottle and go back to a feudalist system of paupers and royals who share no common reality—not at this stage of scientific, technological and cultural advancement.
My theory is simple: if an uneducated teenager raised in a theocracy could change the world, so can you.
Despite the best efforts of Brendan Carr, Donald Trump, and the MAGA mob that suddenly wants to censor everyone they don’t like, the truth exists—and as long as there are people willing to know it, share it, and refuse to ignore it, in the end we will survive.
Franklin knew where censorship leads. As Silence Dogood said in 1722:
“Guilt only dreads Liberty of Speech, which drags it out of its lurking Holes, and exposes its Deformity and Horrour to Daylight.”
Long live a free America. Glory to Ukraine.
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A wonderful essay Jim. You're right about the freedom of speech. I'm afraid little hands grifter Donnie hasn't got the message with force enough to make him understand. As is common with rich folk they can tell lies about everything and never see a day in court. If you say something that not true you can sue for slander. Anything else you say you have a right to say. I wish 79 year olds were as smart as a kid of 16 but if wishes were horses......
Great article. Thank you. Puritans were also known to hang quakers and even hang or exile members who deviated from their approved orthodoxy (e.g. Anne Hutchinson & followers exiled). They had learned from the best how to do this because their own Protestant leaders rejecting the state Church of England or the Catholic Church of Europe had been persecuted, jailed, burned, slaughtered, etc. before they evacuated to the colonies. As you say, eventually, they came to the conclusion that the best mitigant to avoiding recurrent political violence typical of changes in leadership by fickle royal personalities, was to establish a nation governed by laws, vs. personalities and to avoid the establishment of a state religion, having already assembled a population of various religious backgrounds and having witnessed the violence that they had dished out themselves for a time and witnessed against their own English and European compatriots (e.g., Huguenots like Paul Revere’s father). They started with a model of rule (kratos) by the people (demos) first attempted in Athens about 500 BC (500 years before the birth of Christ).
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/democracy-ancient-greece/