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Here is a truth worth celebrating before we say anything else. A free people were built to see the whole board.The Founders did not trust kings to tell citizens what was true. They trusted citizens to find out for themselves. That is the whole reason a free press sits in the First Amendment, right next to the freedom to speak and to worship.This meme gets something deeply right. Propaganda is not only the lie that gets printed. It is also the truth that gets buried, and the one story shoved into the spotlight so you stop looking at the other one.We watched it for years with the Russia collusion narrative. It ran on every screen, day and night. Then Special Counsel John Durham reviewed the whole thing and found the FBI opened its probe on raw, uncorroborated intelligence, and that investigators never actually had evidence of collusion to begin with. The story that gripped a nation was built on material nobody could verify.And look at this week. While families stare at grocery receipts and gas prices, the loudest voices in Washington poured their energy into how to tax the country's first trillionaire. Pick the shiny object. Aim the cameras. Hope you forget the rest.Thomas Jefferson once said that if forced to choose between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he would take the newspapers. He understood that a watching, reading, questioning people is the engine of liberty.So here is the happy warrior's answer, and it is a hopeful one. The cure for a managed narrative is a curious citizen. Read widely. Ask what is not on the front page. Notice which story they want you staring at, and gently turn your head.You were not made to be managed. You were made to be free, and free people look for themselves.