Butler Shaffer asks perhaps the most penetrating question of the day: are Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange quickly becoming our Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst? They have been declared dangerous enemies of the state, contemptible traitors who threatened the security of the nation because they dared speak the truth at great personal cost to their very lives and liberties. Will they suffer the same ultimate consequences for their heroic actions as did the Scholls and Probst? Please watch this award-winning film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, and afterwards read and reflect upon Jacob G. Hornberger’s powerful essay, “Why Germans Supported Hitler.” While the specific malevolent persons he is describing may be dead, their loathsome ideological descendants are still with us. We see them in our churches and our workplaces, our malls and our playgrounds with their children. But especially we see them every night on television, slithering out of their congressional sewers and poisonous think tank lairs, rearing their vicious heads, calling for the blood of Snowden, Manning, and Assange, or whomever is next on their kill list.

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