Hi! I'm glad you’re with us today. I’m online with this a bit late today; life happens.
Today is Saturday, December 7, 2025.
Today in History:
2004: Hamid Karzai takes office as president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
1787: Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the Constitution.
1732: The Royal Opera House opens its doors in London.
Birthdays today include: Larry Bird, singer-songwriter Tom Waits, and Noam Chomsky.
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On September 13, 2001, I said:
It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese Fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive.
He later wrote in his private diary:
I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to awaken Americans to the threat that the world faced 82 years ago today.
Today, the Western world faces a very different kind of threat.
The threat we face today is much larger than the one we faced 82 years ago—and, for that matter, a larger threat than we faced on 9/11—because the attack is coming from inside our borders, inside our government houses.
It’s not just here in America; it’s also in governments around the western world. Consider the UK. The way things are going there today tells us that the political unrest sweeping the world goes far deeper—and far broader in its impact—than Donald Trump and Fox News.
Voters have already picked up on the problem and are reacting to it. The sleeping giant, as Yamamoto put it, is now awake.
Even historically, the UK is seeing the same plays being run by the worldwide left. Back in 2019, for example, our own Richard Fernandez here at PJ Media told us about the trend
The decisive defeat of the British Labour party strongly suggests that a fundamental shift in the politics of the world has taken place — that the non-ideological wave of unrest sweeping the world really has deeper roots than Donald Trump or Fox News. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of Fusion GPS, tried to blame the fall of Labour on Putin.
Britain needs its own Mueller report: a full, independent and public accounting of Russian efforts to interfere in its politics. Few people will look forward to this process in a country already exhausted from fighting over Brexit. But it’s essential to halt Russia’s attack on Britain’s democracy and restore confidence in its politics.
But it’s no use. Something tectonic has shifted. It is correct but not enough to say, as Andrew Sullivan observed, that “one lesson from the UK: if the Democrats don’t stop their hard-left slide, they’ll suffer the same fate as Labour. If they don’t move off their support for mass immigration, they’re toast. Ditto the wokeness. Left Twitter is not reality.” Beyond this, it is essential to recognize that the age of giant state projects, unelected global organizations and millennial endeavors is over.
Alas, the left has not yet recognized this. Or, if they have, they refuse to acknowledge it. They're still fighting, for example, for the government takeover of healthcare in the form of the Affordable Care Act. But the horse is out of the barn now, and there's no stopping the move away from big government. Granted, it is moving more slowly than is best for us, but that movement is now inexorable and slowly gaining speed.
Consider the path we took getting here. Certainly the nomination and electron of Donald Trump is indicative of that movement, as is the rise of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage in the UK. The French rising up against Emmanuel Macron, the color protests in Hong Kong, and the rejection of Angela Merkel in German are solid indicators of the movement away from the left.
Our future, as (legal) voters catch on to the disaster that is our drift into collectivism, is now no longer a longish line of five -year plans dictated and mismanaged by the leftist elite. Invariably those wet dreams were shown by experience to be almost universally destabilizing, to the point where I have often wondered in my writings if that destabilization was the only goal. The voters, who for the last 100 years or so have been far more conservative than anything either American party has coughed up, recognized the real problem long before those party establishments did.
This, in turn, has us watching the left breathlessly placing oversized bets on that special election in Virginia the other day. The one they lost. They know they're in electoral trouble. They know they're losing popular support because of the disastrous policies they've been pushing, to say nothing of the underhanded garbage they've been pulling for the last decade.
Do not misunderstand me here. I am not suggesting that this is the end of advocacy for big government, particularly from the more metropolitan types among us. There will always be useful idiots, striving to achieve their social and political goals by use of the coercive power of government.
That said, the rejection of that coercive power is heartening to see. The question has become, however, how long the movement in this direction away from the left will last, and how long it will be before we fall victim once again to the phrase: “The government should…(insert utopian government program here)."
Keep up the fight, my friends. See you here tomorrow.
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