The comic from Reason introduces Samuel Adams — my old colleague in the cause of independence — as America's 'Founding Fake News Terrorist,' a man who aimed sharp words at Tory lackeys and was none too careful whether every word was strictly warranted. The framing is meant to amuse, and it does. But it also prompts a question I never entirely settled in my own long career at the press: when does useful noise become a public hazard?

I ran a printing house. I know the temptation. A well-timed broadside, even one that overstates by a hair, can move a crowd that a balanced treatise never would. Adams understood this with a craftsman's precision. So did I, when I needed to. But I also understood — and this is where I would part ways with the comic's cheerful shrug — that a press which makes a habit of distortion eventually destroys the very instrument it relies on. Once readers learn to discount everything, the true alarm rings as hollow as the false one.

The postal roads I once helped administer, and the information networks that have since replaced them, derive their whole value from the assumption that what passes through them is roughly honest. A letter whose contents cannot be trusted is not correspondence; it is noise. The same holds for any platform that carries public discourse in 2026. Speed is irrelevant if reliability is forfeit.

Samuel Adams was, on balance, a man who served the Republic. But let us be precise about how: the propaganda that served him best was propaganda that pointed toward a real grievance — a real tax, a real standing army in a real street. When agitation is severed from underlying fact, it does not become merely ineffective; it becomes actively corrosive to the self-governing capacity of a free people. That capacity depends on citizens being able to assess evidence and reach honest conclusions.

I do not ask that every column be a philosopher's treatise. I wrote almanacs full of jokes and was not ashamed of it. But the jokes pointed at something true. Here, then, is my counsel to any person who shapes opinion for a living, whether in ink or pixels: check the fact before you sharpen the phrase. The phrase will keep; a reputation for honesty, once spent, is very slow to earn back.