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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 outrun.” The Democratic Party was, in his words, one of “socialism, communism, and totalitarianism.”
It was a convention where cancel culture was a bigger threat than the coronavirus.
This warning was echoed by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, who claimed “Joe Biden and the radical left are also now coming for our freedom of speech,” and by his girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, who went even farther, arguing Democrats want to control “what you see and think and believe, so they can control how you live.” While Democrats were the party of socialism and totalitarianism, they also represented disorder too — what Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio described as “crime, violence, and mob rule.”
Nowhere was this sentiment better crystallized than in a segment featuring Mark and Patty McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who infamously…
