The Real Scandals Involving Pre-War Intelligence

Polipundit ^ | Nov. 22, 2005 | lorie Byrd

[conservativecorner]

For all the media attention the Wilson/Plame story has gotten as a scandal, there are two huge scandals that that have gone completely uncovered by the mainstream media – at least they have gone uncovered as scandals.

One is the Democrats’ lie that Bush lied and misled the country into war. That false accusation is asinine because if Bush did lie about WMD then he knew none would be found after the invasion and that he would face dire political consequences. Not only is it asinine, though, but it is also scandalous. Top congressional Democrats and other highly visible leaders on the Left accused a sitting President, in a time of war, of lying about the reason for that war, and worse. I won’t list all the specifics, but it is difficult to imagine the Republicans in World War II doing to President Roosevelt any of the things the Democrats today are doing to undermine the war effort in their attempt to bring down the sitting President. To go abroad and speak against the President of your country when that country is engaged in a war was just not done by patriotic Americans in the past. Today we are being told that such dissent is the ultimate in patriotism.

The second scandal is that the American media not only allowed the Democrats’ lie about the President to go unchallenged, when literally thousands of pieces of information were in the public record which showed it to be a lie, but they joined into the lie by creating “news” stories that regurgitated the Democrats’ talking points as fact, while ignoring all the evidence in contradiction to what they were saying. All those quotes from Democrats about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and WMD were not only easily available to the media, but they should have been fresh in their minds considering many of the statements were from 2002, and even later, and because there were so many of them. It is not like it took any advanced investigative skills to unearth them.

Over the past two years, I have often urged the President to fight back against the Democrats’ big lie and to remind the public of the consensus that existed about WMD and the threat posed by Saddam prior to the war. I know why he didn’t do it sooner, though. First, it is just not in his nature, or practice, to answer his critics – especially when their accusations are completely outrageous and unfounded. Second, he and his advisors were surely aware of how his defense against the despicable allegations made against him would be portrayed by the media. This morning on Good Morning America I heard what I have heard from the MSM since the “pushback” began. A segment including a very short clip from the Vice President’s speech yesterday was introduced with a statement from the “news” anchor saying the White House continued to attack the critics that disagreed with them about pre-war intelligence. The administration is not defending itself against a two-year barrage of vicious attacks that should have been shown by the media to be provably false. Nope. They are attacking those who disagree with them. You know the script – those Republicans are just so mean, especially Dick Cheney. The American mainstream media will never allow a tiny detail like facts to interfere with their script.

It really is scandalous.

[Keli Kilohana]

I think it would be interesting to see how many of those who are griping about not having sufficient intelligence actually availed themselves of what was available.

[gunnedah]

The American media and the Liberal Democrats are nothing less than terrorist and in my opinion, if the foreign terrorist attack our country again I will certainly consider them,the press and liberals an arm of the terrorist organizations.

[Former Dodger]

I think it would be interesting to see how many of those who are griping about not having sufficient intelligence....

Did you ever think you'd see the day when a Dim would admit this?

Seriously, one moment W is "the chimp", the next, he's this "evil genius", the left have become blatantly psychotic in their opinions of the President, and are becoming more ridiculous by the day. They are skewing polls, and spinning stories strictly designed to embarass and trivialize the president.

As the article said, if the story weas false they were doomed to be caught, if they went through all the trouble of planning this lie why didn't they carry it further and "find" WMDs they could have easily planted?

Think about it, the whole world was expecting it and probably would not have looked too closely at what was found...

[digger48]

It has been said (by a Senator) that only 6 of them had actually read information available to them.

They also can ask the Intelligence Committee members to delve into any area they question, including the analysts themselves.

[SeeSalt]

"The American media and the Liberal Democrats are nothing less than terrorist and in my opinion, if the foreign terrorist attack our country again I will certainly consider them,the press and liberals an arm of the terrorist organizations."

The fifth column.

[lrb111]

ping

[chgomac]

"It has been said (by a Senator) that only 6 of them had actually read information available to them."

This was mentioned on the Sunday Morning Talk Show Thread too....how do you know if it is true?

[Just A Nobody]

if the foreign terrorist attack our country again
I will certainly consider them,the press and liberals an arm of the terrorist organizations.

I believe in the Bush Doctrine.
I preemptively consider them terrorist organizations.

[humint]

The American media and the Liberal Democrats are nothing less than terrorist and in my opinion, if the foreign terrorist attack our country again I will certainly consider them, the press and liberals an arm of the terrorist organizations.

The difference between these things, [freedom of expression | free-flow of information | state controlled media | privately owned media] is clear. These institutions are essential but we are looking at a problem much bigger than can be addressed casually. But let’s give it a shot anyway. When it comes to information there is no process to guarantee quality. There is a clear reason for this… Scenerios are a good way to analyze so let’s get started.

You implicitly suggest the media is engaging in criminal enterprise. Say we were to send a reporter to jail for one month for reporting a lie. The lie probably didn’t originate with that reporter so their editor is also to blame. OK, send the reporter and the editor to jail for one month. The source for the story originated the lie so the journalist must be compelled to turn over the name of the source so that they too can serve a month in jail. Because so many journalist copy and paste more than any FREEPER I know, all of those within the media industry who propagated the lie would also face a one-month prison term. You might be thinking, sounds good so far…

At the other end of this scenario, who is reporting the news? Let’s guess that 50% of what we read as fact is not and that 1% of that is an outright lie. That estimate says 50% of what we read is true. If 50% of all journalists are doing time in prison for propagating a lie, then that’s 50% less news for me to read! If 50% of new production is off, we’re all only going to be getting 25% truth from the information remaining.

The point is, a free press is the best media in the world and in it there will be garbage. Restriction on the press leads to things much worse than you are witnessing here. We are the only BULL S#1T detectors that matter and it is incumbent on US, the consumer to weed out truth from lies. It is incumbent on US, the consumer, to find the true source of information. When and if we do, we tend to share the truth by writing about it, posting it here on FR and discussing it with our friends and family. The media is under no obligation to tell the truth but as an American Citizen, you are obligated to call it like you see it! You did here but I think you went overboard. Our enemies restrict freedom of the press, not us.

[princess leah]

Americans seem to lack the intelligence to think and search out information on their own, thus they believe all the media and democrat lies that bombard us day to day.

[humint]

Americans seem to lack the intelligence to think and search out information on their own, thus they believe all the media and democrat lies that bombard us day to day.

Intelligence is not always the problem although in some cases it is. I'd say most of us are too busy to seek the truth in all things. So we must prioritize, time manage and seek the truth to save us, our families, our country and our world from the most dangerous of lies. What the [Democrats | Liberals | Terrorists]) are doing is distorting our ability to determine the truth among the priorities our President has laid out for our country. But there is a big difference between Terrorists and those who have a separate vision for our future. In this case I believe the Democrats are just flat wrong and they are using an amoral tactic to take authority from our President. They are hurting all of us in the process but they are not terrorists.

Terrorists would have our entire vision of life, [Liberal Democracy] destroyed... And that is why the President's priority should be our priority. I wish that this was his priority before September 11 but it was not. But that’s the past and we must now focus on the future. To the best of our ability we should know about and be comfortable with the Global War on Terror. Winning this war will be a great moment in history for everyone, not just Americans. People of all faiths and nations will look back on this war and know that free minds and their confidence made our world stronger.

[robowombat]

'it is difficult to imagine the Republicans in World War II doing to President Roosevelt any of the things the Democrats today are doing to undermine the war effort in their attempt to bring down the sitting President.'

This is true. However, the specific tactics and techniques of the Roosevelt administration in the months before Pearl Harbor did not escape critical commentary .I think the first to write at length on the revisionist 'Japan duped into war' thesis was John T Flynn. In 1944 he published a long and tightly reasoned pamphlet which contained in summary about all the revisionist arguments writers such as Neuman and the historians Beard, Barnes, and Tansill would subsequently array against FDR. The Repubs, or at least the Taft wing of the party displayed considerable interest in these arguments, which if my parents were any index, were already circulating among the the 'America First-isolationist' end of the party. Subsequently during and after the extended congressional investigation of the events surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack (which I have to say was a lot more exhaustive than the 9-11 inquiry) the degree of culpability of Roosevelt and the administration inner circle for any lapses leading to Pearl Harbor started to get a good bit of traction.

The emergence of a full blooded revisionist argument opposing the generally accepted version of how war came led to a veritable battle of the books (or at least articles) between partisans of the Beard-Barnes thesis and defensers of the interventionist foreign policy.

In any case, as the article printed below shows, Flynn was a lot braver and more informed than are the Dems and their media hit persons circling Geo. Bush lack a pack of jackels.



The Ideological Odyssey of John T. Flynn

John E. Moser
Assistant Professor of History
Ashland University

[Note: This is a brief overview of the life and career of the American journalist John T. Flynn. I am currently working on a full-scale biography of Flynn.]

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, John T. Flynn made a name for himself as a liberal—perhaps even radical—expert on economics. The author of such books as Investment Trusts Gone Wrong! and Graft in Business, Flynn wrote weekly columns for both the New Republic and the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. He also served at various times as associate editor of the liberal journal Common Sense, a member of New York City’s Board of Higher Education, advisor to the Pecora committee investigation of the New York Stock Exchange, counsel to the Nye Committee investigating the profits of arms manufacturers in World War I, and chairman of the New York City chapter of the America First Committee. Yet although he would refer to himself throughout his career as a liberal, he would gradually disassociate himself with the political ideas put forward by individuals such as Franklin Roosevelt and journals such as the New Republic. By the late 1940s he was closely identified with forces on the fringes of American conservatism, and indeed by the late 1950s he had come to embrace an agenda that included abolition of the income tax and complete withdrawal from the United Nations.

A native of Maryland, Flynn was a graduate of Georgetown University’s law school, although he would never formally practice law. He preferred journalism, and worked for a series of publications in different cities before settling in New York City, where he took a job on the news desk of the Globe. It was not until the late 1920s that he became known on a national level, thanks to his articles in Collier’s, which was edited by one of his colleagues at the Globe. By the end of the decade, however, his byline was commonly appearing in a number of national publications such as Forum and Harper’s.

Through these early writings he won a reputation as a perceptive observer of the “New Economy,” particularly the growing domination of major corporations. While he did not necessarily object to this phenomenon, he did think that it required a new approach to business ethics. The unethical practices of the past—he cited the example of the butcher placing his thumb on the scale—only affected a small number of consumers, but in the modern economy fraud at the corporate level would hurt thousands, if not millions, of investors and customers. In particular he saw abuses in the banking system and the New York Stock Exchange, and as early as February 1929 he was predicting that the value of corporate securities was about to plummet.[1]

Flynn’s dissent from the unbridled optimism of the late 1920s—and his seeming prediction of the Stock Market Crash of October 1929—brought him to the attention of the editors of the New Republic, which was at the time in the vanguard of the American noncommunist Left. He began contributing to the magazine in 1930, and from March 1933 until November 1940 he had a weekly column, “Other People’s Money,” after the book of the same name by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. His articles in the early 1930s were openly critical of industrialists, bankers, and stockbrokers, whom he blamed for the country’s economic woes. He also took aim at President Herbert Hoover, whose efforts to bring an end to the Great Depression seemed in Flynn’s eyes calculated to help only big business.[2]

Flynn welcomed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and referred to his New Deal as a “promising experiment,” but quickly found fault with the new president. A large number of his cabinet members and advisors, Flynn observed, came from banking and big business. Moreover, while he praised certain Roosevelt projects, such as Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Committee, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, he claimed that the president had done nothing to solve the fundamental problems that underlay the American economy—the wide gap between rich and poor and gross corporate mismanagement, especially in the banks and the stock exchange.[3]

Even more disturbing for Flynn was that the president seemed to be moving the country toward involvement in another war. He had long been concerned about Roosevelt’s fascination with the navy, and feared that he might resort to massive military spending in an effort to revitalize the economy. Not only would this help to reduce unemployment, Flynn noted, but it could also win the president handsome political benefits, since even conservatives would be willing to get behind arms spending. To fight this trend Flynn founded along with socialist Norman Thomas the Keep America Out of War Committee (KAOWC), whose membership came to include many prominent left-wing intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders.[4]

Little did Flynn realize, however, that his hostility to Roosevelt and his agenda was destroying his reputation as a liberal journalist. In July 1939, in response to an article in the Yale Review, Roosevelt wrote a confidential letter to the editor in which he called Flynn “a destructive rather than a constructive force,” and suggested that in the future the journal refuse to print articles by him. It is unknown whether Roosevelt sent such letters to other editors, but in any case it is clear that by late 1940 fewer and fewer of Flynn’s manuscripts were finding their way into print. That November the editors of the New Republic announced that “Other People’s Money” would no longer run, because “[l]acking sufficient material for a weekly column on the original subject, Mr. Flynn has ranged far afield….” Although some wrote to protest the decision, Flynn would never write for the journal again.[5]

In the short term, however, the cancellation of Flynn’s column would have little effect on his livelihood, since at the end of 1940 he accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed New York City chapter of the anti-interventionist America First Committee. The Chicago-based organization quickly became a serious thorn in the side of President Roosevelt. Its speakers, who included several United States Senators, a number of prominent authors, and the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, appeared at huge rallies across the nation, protesting administration measures that they claimed were designed to draw the country into the European war. And while most of the organization’s membership lived within a 200-mile radius of Chicago, Flynn’s New York City chapter was by far the largest outside the Midwest. By early August Flynn’s chapter was claiming a membership of at least 135,000.[6]

Flynn’s experience with America First only served to deepen his disenchantment with the Left. He believed that issues such as Lend-Lease and the use of American warships in British convoys were legitimate subjects for debate. However, he sensed a growing campaign to “smear” the organization by accusing its members of being Nazi sympathizers. And although Flynn was extremely sensitive to the need to keep pro-fascist and anti-Semitic elements out of his chapter, the enemies of America First engaged in on ongoing campaign to connect its membership with extremist groups such as the German-American Bund and the National Union for Social Justice.[7]

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the formal involvement of the United States in the war led to a quick disbandment of the America First Committee, and Flynn found himself out of a job. In an effort to rebuild his career, Flynn quickly returned to writing and public speaking, but for the first time he was without an audience. The general public believed that Flynn and the rest of the anti-interventionists had been on the wrong side of a very important issue. And, of course, his criticism of Roosevelt had cut him off from his former associates on the respectable Left.

Nevertheless, by the end of the war John Flynn had revived his career as a journalist and public intellectual; by this time, however, his primary audience was on the Right. It was, in a sense, the culmination of a trend that had been going on since 1940. His critique of the president, although generally coming from a liberal perspective, nonetheless delighted many conservatives by portraying Roosevelt as a dimwitted dilettante. Flynn’s involvement with the America First Committee put him in close contact with a number of prominent antiwar conservatives. His attacks on Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies continued after Pearl Harbor, but increasingly they came from a conservative rather than a liberal perspective. For example, in November 1943 Flynn called the New Deal “a degenerate form of socialism and a debased form of capitalism,” based on deficit spending and the government’s crowding out of private business. Considering so much of his criticism of FDR in the mid-1930s centered on the president’s alleged eagerness to cater to big business, the change in emphasis is striking.[8]

But of course criticism of the New Deal was hardly new territory for Flynn, even if his attacks were increasingly couched in terms that would resonate among conservative audiences. During the war years, however, he launched two further projects, both of which would cement his place not just on the Right, but on its extreme fringe. The first was an investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack, of which Flynn was convinced Roosevelt had prior knowledge. The second was an effort to get back at those who had sought to discredit prewar anti-interventionists, by claiming that they had been part of a communist-inspired conspiracy to draw the country into a war to defend the Soviet Union.

After the war many of Flynn’s writings would suggest complicity between New Deal agencies and Soviet communism. These accusations reflect his deeply held belief that Roosevelt and his supporters had betrayed liberalism itself, and that they had shut Flynn out of the mainstream journals when he had tried to alert his readers to this fact. Although he continued to claim the mantle of liberalism, his work now appeared in such right-wing publications as the American Mercury and Plain Talk. Indeed, in the early 1950s he emerged as a strong supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against alleged communist subversion in the U.S. government. By the end of the decade his message was identical to that of the fledgling John Birch Society, calling for the abolition of the income tax and withdrawal from the United Nations.

Although Flynn consistently referred to himself as a liberal, his definition of the term seems to have changed markedly over the course of his career. In an article that appeared in Forum in 1932, he defined liberalism as “not so much a collection of beliefs as a character of the mind.” Its most important feature was “a willingness to examine the ideas of other men and to reexamine his own.” A liberal valued the “right to free development” of the individual, and championed democracy because the people “have a right to rule themselves.” However, the goal of the modern liberal, he claimed, was to find a place for the individual within modern industrial society—“to shape conditions under which the physical, spiritual, intellectual, political, social, and economic well-being and happiness and freedom of the individual can be best developed.” Above all, this meant understanding that “the doctrine of laissez-faire is now the gospel of the reactionary.” Liberals had to accept the necessity of large-scale government involvement in the economy as a check on the power of corporations and other powerful entities.[9]

Sixteen years later Flynn had a different outlook. In 1948 he published an article in the American Mercury entitled “What Liberalism Means to Me,” in which all of his earlier concerns about unfettered capitalism seemed to have vanished. Liberalism, he claimed, once had as its primary purpose the reduction of the power of the state, but in present times, he lamented, the word had been “captured by certain aggressor philosophers, carried off as so much loot and offered for acceptance to a wholly different clientele.” He praised capitalism for producing “beyond a doubt the greatest freedom in the world and the greatest abundance.” The “planned economy,” he concluded, apparently forgetting that he had embraced economic planning in the 1930s, “has produced before our eyes the most appalling consequences.”[10]

Flynn did not abandon all of his earlier views. To the end of his life he would retain an innate hostility toward defense spending and overseas military action, even when the communists were the enemy. The communist threat to America, he believed, was primarily moral and intellectual; the war was to be fought in print and in the schools, not in Europe and Asia. This attitude would keep his work from appearing in National Review, the new conservative magazine that began publication in 1955. William F. Buckley, the magazine’s editor, claimed that Flynn’s opposition to “militarism” was “difficult to defend in the absence of any discussion whatever of the objective threat of the Soviet Union.” Notwithstanding his views on foreign policy, Flynn had clearly made a significant ideological migration. Yet he never seems to have recognized that such a shift had occurred; he preferred to see himself, in the words of one biographer, as “a liberal without a party.”[11]


Notes

[1] Flynn, “Taming the Great Bull,” Forum 81 (February 1929): 88-94; Flynn, “Whatever Goes Up,” Collier’s 84 (14 September 1929): 10; Flynn, “Dishonest Business,” Forum 82 (December 1929): 351-55.

[2] Flynn, “Inside the R.F.C.,” Harper’s 166 (January 1933): 161-69; Flynn, “Did the R.F.C. Save Banks?” New Republic 74 (29 March 1933): 184-85.

[3] Michele Flynn Stenehjem, An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), p. 29; Flynn, “OPM: Let’s Look at the Record,” New Republic 97 (November 30, 1938): 99.

[4] Flynn, “OPM,” New Republic 88 (September 16, 1936): 155-56; Flynn, “OPM: Armament and the Borrowing Program,” New Republic 97 (December 14, 1938): 172; Flynn, “OPM: Hurray for War Profits!” New Republic 100 (November 1, 1939): 367-68; Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), pp. 211-212.

[5] Franklin D. Roosevelt to Wilbur L. Cross, July 7, 1939, photocopy in Wayne S. Cole Papers, Drawer 1, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA; “Other People’s Money,” New Republic 103 (November 18, 1940): 677; “Correspondence,” New Republic 103 (December 9, 1940): 792-94.

[6] “Minutes of the Meeting of the Women’s Division of America First,” August 5, 1941, Robert E. Wood Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA.

[7] Stenehjem, An American First, pp. 121-141.

[8] New York Times, November 26, 1943, 40:1.

[9] Flynn, “Why a Liberal Party?” Forum 87 (March 1932): 158-63.

[10] Flynn, “What Liberalism Means to Me,” American Mercury 67 (August 1948): 169-76.

[11] William F. Buckley to Flynn, October 22, 1956, John T. Flynn Papers, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; Stenehjem, An American First, pp. 28-29.


Sources on Flynn

Frey, Richard Clark, Jr. “John T. Flynn and the United States in Crisis, 1928-1950.” Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1970.

Horowitz, David A. Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Radosh, Ronald. Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.

Stenehjem, Michele Flynn. An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976.

[gunnedah]

The problem is that the MSM only tell the story one way and there are a lot of citizens out there who take the medias word like it is absolute. If you think not listen to C-Span sometime. I am an older citizen and it would absolutely amaze you at what people believe and buy and never even try to look into it. I dropped my membership in AARP simply because of all this crap they put out and elderly people buy it as though it is the gospel. Go into poor neighborhoods and your local schools.Look at what is coming out of your bastions of higher education you even have professors advocating military troops fragging their officers. Freedom of speech is wonderful but it is destroying the soul and fiber of the American public. When the MSM retracts something it is hidden away in the back of the paper and I do not believe CBS ever really retracted the Mapes story. I just think the MSM is as corrupt as our Congress and everything the media in this country puts out is opinion more than truth and it is directed by those in DC or New York City of which both are liberal. Your scenario is good up to a point but America is in dire straights and our younger loved ones are going to pay for us allowing it to get out of hand.

[sauropod]

mark

[pawdoggie]

This is true. However, the specific tactics and techniques of the Roosevelt administration in the months before Pearl Harbor did not escape critical commentary .

Interesting, but it doesn't alter the fact that Franklin Roosevelt got a free ride from the Republicans after Pearl Harbor, in stark contrast to what we're seeing from today's "loyal opposition" vis a vis President Bush. In fact, in his 1944 reelection campaign FDR said that the Republicans had been reduced to hyping gossip about the dispatch of a destroyer to pick up his Scots Terrier.

The thing that reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt relative to the situation in Iraq and the War on Terrorism is the fact that pre-Pearl Harbor Roosevelt made a conscious decision to deceive the isolationist American public and the US Congress by assisting Britain in every way he could. You see, Mr. Gallup's opinion polls said the American voting public was dead set against doing the right thing where Hitler was concerned. Any good Roosevelt biographer, or Doris Kearns Goodwin, will tell you that if the American people had learned of the things that FDR was doing to draw us into WWII prior to Pearl Harbor, he would have been impeached, and probably removed from office. FDR lied to the American people, and thank God he did.

[robowombat]

Paragraph 2 is pretty much the Thomas A. Bailey version of the run up to Pearl Harbor. Take a look at 'The Man in the Street' published in 1948,, I think. Here Bailey at length says why the citizen needs to have access to accurate and timely news to enable him to make informed decisions. Then Bailey shows how Roosevelt engaged in a his hidden hand campaign supporting the British just short of war. Curiously Bailey supports both approaches.

[humint]

...Go into poor neighborhoods and your local schools. Look at what is coming out of your bastions of higher education you even have professors advocating military troops fragging their officers. Freedom of speech is wonderful but it is destroying the soul and fiber of the American public...

I am under no illusion as to the scale of the problem. It's huge, but the fiber and soul of the American public IS freedom. Freedom of speech is paramount to our identity. I believe that just as natural corrections occur in a "free market economy" so too will there be natural corrections in "free market of information". To say that it will occur naturally is not to suggest individuals like you and I should sit back and wait… I am suggesting that hard work, faith in, and support for our American ideology will empower us to deliver a truth capable of supplanting the true American scourge, irresponsibility!

The truth and our commitment to it has been the engine that has thrust the United States into our current role as the world’s most capable nation. Any person who forsakes the truth in favor of lies deserves to be assaulted with the truth, hence an ensuing war of ideas. Our founding fathers knew that on any ideological battlefield, with free speech, Americans would always have the high ground. You and I sir, have the high ground… what should we do with it?