The GOP’s Fox News Convention
The rhetoric on display Monday night showcased a party of Sean Hannity, not Mitt Romney
“Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization.”
That simple assertion, offered up by Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk at the start of the evening, was the fundamental theme of the Republican National Convention on Monday night.
Viewers were presented with two and a half hours that would register as familiar to anyone who has watched Fox News’ primetime lineup, with rhetoric far more reminiscent of Sean Hannity than Sen. Mitt Romney. It was a convention where cancel culture was a bigger threat than the coronavirus and socialist revolutionaries were knocking at the gates. It was Trump and Trump alone who could fix these problems.
The convention provided a window into a universe where the key issue confronting the country was the culture war, not the pandemic or the recession that it has caused. A refugee from Fidel Castro’s Cuba compared protests and looting in American cities to the Communist revolution against the Batista regime. “When I watch the news in Seattle and Chicago and Portland, when I see history being rewritten, when I hear the promises — I hear echoes of a former life I never wanted to hear again,” Maximo Alvarez said. “I see shadows I thought I had…
