As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have every reason to be grateful. Two and a half centuries after fifty-six men pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of liberty, the United States remains the most successful experiment in self-government in human history.

The Fourth of July is more than a holiday. It is an opportunity to remember what made America exceptional in the first place. The Founders understood that freedom was not self-sustaining. Liberty required virtue. Self-government required self-restraint. Constitutional government required citizens who valued truth over passion and principle over personality.

As a retired FBI Special Agent who spent years working counterintelligence matters, I learned that America's adversaries understand something many Americans do not: our greatest vulnerability is not military weakness. It is division. Russia, China, Iran, and other hostile actors do not need to defeat the United States on a battlefield. They simply need Americans to lose confidence in one another and in the institutions that make self-government possible.

The Soviet Union called these efforts "active measures." Today, they are conducted at digital speed through social media, alternative media ecosystems, bot networks, and influence operations designed to amplify existing grievances. The objective is not persuasion. It is polarization. Some Americans have become willing participants.

Over the last several years, a growing segment of what was the online Right has embraced a worldview that portrays nearly every American institution as irredeemably corrupt. Courts are dismissed as compromised. Law enforcement agencies are portrayed as enemies of the people. Public........

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