The founders, consigned to their historical moment as much as we are to ours, couldn’t have imagined today’s media—a beast whose tentacles stretch so far, whose influence is so pervasive in our lives and in our habits of thought, that we can hardly separate ourselves from it. (We can no more disown them than we can our own family.) Still, we can surmise that the men who valued above almost all else a down-and-dirty, full-throated debate—who believed that informed, open-minded, and passionate discourse was both the source and the gift of their hard-won freedom—would be fairly shocked at the current state of affairs. Wright’s only weapons, after all, are words and ideas, and these are only as powerful as we allow them to be. You have to wonder: what are we so afraid of?