80 years ago, yesterday, on Sunday December 7th, 1941 at 7:48 AM Hawaiian time, 353 Japanese Zeros appeared over the horizon on the Pacific Ocean, and attacked the United States military base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 American soldiers, injuring another 1,178. The next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood before Congress, before the country, before the world, and stated that December 7th, would be “a day that would live in infamy.” It was an attack on our country, an attack on our democracy, an attack on our Constitution. Everything that we held dear as a country, as American citizens was under assault, and we as a nation rallied together to defend it. The attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into World War II. It “awakened a sleeping giant.” For the next three and a half years, over 400,000 Americans laid down their lives defending America, and defeating Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
Looking at what is happening in our country today, the past 10 months, it’s fair to ask, what did our soldiers really fight for? These great Americans risked and sacrificed everything to preserve an America that our leaders are willfully, selfishly, blindly giving away. Our democracy is under assault, not from a foreign adversary, but from within, from American citizens. Everything that Imperial Japanese tried to do to us 80 years ago, everything that they wanted to destroy about America with those planes and bombs, our national sovereignty, our democracy, our constitution, our civil rights, is being upended by our political leaders.
It has been commonly accepted that we cannot lose this country from a hostile foreign enemy from without. The only way we can lose this country is by an attack from within. And today, our leaders are doing to America what Hirohito and Hitler only hoped to do. They are tearing down every institution that has made America great, our secure borders, our secure elections, our secure money supply, our secure civil rights, our Constitution.
We have seen the enemy, and he is us. It is our greed, our fear, our ingratitude, our selfishness. We, as a nation, possess none of the character traits that our World War II soldiers put out there in France, in Germany, in the Pacific, to preserve our country, and defeat totalitarianism. And we are going to wake up one day, and the America that those soldiers laid down their lives defending with be too far gone because we have been too weak, too comfortable, too scared to defend it ourselves.
In 2020, governors and judges in battleground states unilaterally and unconstitutionally changed our election laws implementing universal mail-in ballots, un-monitored drop boxes, no voter-ID, no signature match on ballots, all of which, to an honest observer, are highly susceptible to election fraud. We witnessed, in real time, the integrity of our elections completely compromised. We turned the hallmark of American democracy, our election system, into something that you would find the nations like the ones we defeated in World War II where the citizens vote but the election has already been decided.
In the first week in office, our current President opened our borders to the world, and in the past 10 months, 1.7 million foreign nationals from 84 different countries have walked across our southern border, untested, unvetted. Record numbers of drug dealers, gang members, human traffickers have entered our country illegally, committing crimes, and very little is being done about it. A record amount of drugs; opioids and fentanyl, have crossed the border, and have killed over 100,000 Americans this year, destroying American families, hollowing out our communities, rending the very fabric of our country. This is a direct assault on the mainland United States, and our leaders are not only allowing it to happen, they are promoting it.
Since January 2020, our Constitution, the foundation of our country, our freedom, our civil rights has been attacked daily. Joe Biden has handed down federal vaccine mandates through executive fiat, forcing American citizens to take medication they do not want or need. Political speech is no longer protected or free in America. On a regular basis, Big Tech oligarchs at the behest of our current administration is censoring speech it doesn’t like or agree with, deeming it misinformation, and canceling the offenders from social discourse. The Biden Administration has weaponized the intelligence agencies to target their political opponents, labelling them white supremacists or domestic terrorists, for espousing opinions they do not like. For fifteen years, the NSA has been tracking the communication of every American citizen, compiling and storing our metadata to monitor us, and potentially use it against us in the future.
We, as a nation, are bending over backwards to appease communist China, a country that represents everything Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany stood for – totalitarianism, oppression, concentration camps, political suppression. Our political leaders, big business, Hollywood, professional sports have been kowtowing to China for years, taking their orders directly from President Xi to enhance their bottom line. We have traded our national sovereignty, in exchange for financial benefits. We are selling our principles for cheap labor and cheap consumer goods.
It’s the height of selfishness. An entire generation sacrificed everything to pass along to future generations the greatest country the world has ever seen, and we are bartering their extreme sacrifice away for selfish and ignoble reasons. They fought for and defended a country that doesn’t exist anymore. We used to have a citizenry that would risk their lives defending America, and American ideals. Today, we have generations of people who believe it is fashionable to attack America, and our ideals, to call the Constitution and the Bill of Rights racist and white supremacy. We’ve spent too long picking and choosing what about our American principles to defend based on personal expediency to the point that none of the principles remain intact anymore. And all that is left is a shell of a country that used to represent what is great about humanity.
Looking back at what our WWII soldiers sacrificed, and what they sacrificed it for, we get a glimpse of what real courage is, what real sacrifice is, what real virtue is. It is risking your life storming the beaches at Normandy to defeat a totalitarian dictatorship, it is not storming the platforms on social media from your mother’s basement to defeat someone who used the wrong pronoun. And what we as a country see as courage, sacrifice and virtue will determine what about our country will remain, and what it will become.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.