Freedom itself.

Twenty-five years ago on September 11, 2001, as I was arriving at the offices and studios of KTBB to go to work, Garth Maier, then KTBB’s News & Program Director, was vigorously – almost frantically – waving at me to come into the control room to see what he was seeing on the TV monitor.

What soon became clear was that we, and indeed the entire world, were seeing in a terrible instant that freedom has enemies.

Barely four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – when it wasn’t clear that it was safe for him to return to the White House – President George W. Bush stood at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and said:

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.”

We did defend freedom.

Thousands of Americans went to war. Many of them – too many – didn’t come home. Trillions of dollars were spent. Administrations of both parties fought a conflict that changed forms, changed battlefields and ultimately outlasted much of the country’s attention span.

Yet President Bush’s words of September 11, 2001 are true today even as the battlefield upon which freedom must be defended has changed.

The conflicts in Ukraine and Iran notwithstanding, for most Americans today the fight over freedom isn’t being waged with guns, airplanes and artillery. It’s being waged with words, rhetoric and raw emotion. And the battlefields aren’t distant deserts and mountain passes. They’re college classrooms and city council chambers, social media feeds and family dinner tables.

That’s because ideas that Americans once believed were settled – ideas that were eloquently set forth in the document whose 250^th anniversary we celebrated just a few weeks ago – are now very much in dispute.

An entire generation has come of age with no memory of September 11. An even larger share of Americans has no memory of the Soviet Union or of the Berlin Wall. They didn’t see the imprisonment of much of Eastern Europe. They didn’t see the boundless joy on the faces of German citizens as the wall that separated them from their own countrymen at last came down. They didn’t witness what happens when government acquires ultimate authority over the lives, property and choices of ordinary people.

And so, we’re having the argument again.

Socialism—an idea that spent much of my lifetime being discredited by the evidence of its own dismal failures—is enjoying renewed respectability in the United States. Its promises are seductive: greater fairness, greater security, greater equality.

But every such promise comes with a price. Because every decision transferred from the individual to the government necessarily transfers some measure of freedom with it. And as we have said previously, and as millions learned at the price of their very lives, as those transfers occur, the day approaches when there’s nothing left to transfer.

This younger generation inherited freedom. What it didn’t inherit is the understanding of what freedom costs.

So, again, freedom itself is under attack. And freedom must be defended.