Democracy and despotism in a digital age.
RNC NIGHT 4
Something smells like victory.
This is part four of Peachy Keenan’s nightly RNC coverage. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.—Eds.
Bang Zoom to the Moon!
You can’t always get what you want, America. But sometimes you get what you need, like Night 4 of the RNC convention. Trump, stuck at home due to coronavirus restrictions, had no choice but to deliver his banger of an acceptance speech at the White House.
As I write this, my mother is recovering from cancer surgery (her prognosis is excellent, thank you). A few hours before the convention, she was in her hospital recovery room, groggy and uncomfortable, but she asked the nurses to switch her TV to the RNC so she wouldn’t miss a second. The woman loves Trump. She loathes Great-Uncle Joe and Wine Aunt Kamala. And she’s not even a white supremacist!
Trump’s speech was over an hour long, which was just enough time to make sure anyone still watching it on the fake news channels couldn’t stay up long enough to witness the panelists panicking. Luckily, I stayed up late to watch it for you! It was nice to take a break from burning our LeBron jerseys.
Just kidding, we don’t own any NBA products made by Chinese slave labor.
It’s starting to feel like 2016 again, am I right? I’m getting that little shiver in my spine. You can feel it coming in the air tonight, can’t you? You can smell it too—even above the tear gas and the pepper spray.
Some of that tear gas deployed against peaceful BLM protesters mobbing and attacking senators in the streets of D.C. last night must have wafted into the CNN studios, because there was not a dry eye in the house. In order to understand how good the speech and the entire night was, all you had to do is watch the reaction from the folx on cable news.
For at least an hour, these expert political analysts were left to mutter things like “it was long. Longer than Biden’s speech.” “We’ve never seen a speech like this.” “Not a lot of social distancing going on.” “It was, as some of my fellow panelists mentioned, long.”
It reminded me of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and hanging in the air blinking before he looks down and sees nothing but air.
As the spectacle ended in a triumphant fireworks show over the mall, Wolf Blitzer was left to explain away the awesomeness to his low-information audience. “Joe Biden, of course, was not able to have a fireworks show this good, because he is not the president.”
I admit I was worried the RNC would put on a show this week that was as awkward and lame as the DNC’s was. But I guess we owe the DNC our thanks, since they clearly depleted the nation’s strategic cringe reserves. For four straight days, Trump and his team outclassed the Biden Zoombies with persuasive speakers and gripping content that struck terror in the hearts of the Left.
Hard Blexit
The RNC shared the stories of many former Democrats, many of whom are black, who now support Trump. They smartly realized that they didn’t leave liberalism—liberalism left them. Many such cases!
And how about Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes! I started looking at houses for sale in Utah as he spoke. “President Trump is a fierce warrior against human trafficking,” he said. Since Biden has been totally silent on human sex trafficking, you know what that means: silence is complicity!
Then came a nonstop barrage of people whose lives were literally ruined by Democrats. Alice Johnson got life in prison for a nonviolent first offense thanks to Biden’s harsh 1994 crime bill. The Mueller family’s daughter was raped, tortured, and killed by ISIS as the Obama-Biden admin twiddled its thumbs, terrified of offending ISIS with any actions that could be perceived as Islamophobic. Ann Dorn, widow of retired police captain David Dorn, lost her husband when he was shot in cold blood by mostly peaceful BLM looters.
It was NYC Police Benevolent Society head Patrick Lynch who was able to clearly articulate how Democrats are in fact responsible for the violence. “We are staring down the barrel of a public safety disaster. Why is this happening? Because the Democrats have walked away from us. Democratic politicians have surrendered our streets and our institutions. In city after city they have slashed budgets and defunded the criminal justice system. The violence is actually the goal. The message is, you can resist arrest.”
America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani doubled down. “Democrat mayors have prevented arrests, and then progressive prosecutors release the rioters right back into the streets.” At the exact moment he said “police are handcuffed by progressive Democrat mayors,” rioters were literally massing at the White House with the full backing and support of The Swamp’s Mayor Muriel Bowser. Peaceful rioters screamed “burn this F—er down!” in front of St. John’s church.
Democrats’ only hope for survival now is to pin all of the rioting on Trump, but Lynch and Giuliani provided the key points to rebut this. Hope you were taking notes, Republicans! “All five of the top cities for crime are governed by progressive Democrats,” Rudy reminded us. Fact check: True!
Then CNN cut away from a brutal video about Hunter Biden using his dad to embezzle millions from Chinese shell companies.
Busting the Big Biden Lies
The grand finale was Trump’s speech, where first he took aim at all the low-hanging Biden fruit, then picked his branches clean, felled the tree, and for good measure crammed each rotten branch into the woodchipper. You may not like it, but that was what peak convention performance looked like.
Biden’s speech only lasted 24 minutes. Trump went on for 70. Ladies, I ask you: Which man would you say had more stamina? CNN said it was “too long.” Well, what do you expect? The poor man had to cover 47 years of abject Biden failure. He probably could have gone another few hours.
My favorite part was when he skewered Biden’s fake bio as a blue-collar hero: “For 47 years Joe Biden took the donations of blue collar workers and gave them hugs and even kisses”—there was a huge laugh at this line—“and told them he felt their pain, and then voted to move their jobs to China. He spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams.”
It was one rhetorical nuke after another. Here are some other great quotes—and I decided to actually fact check each one, since that’s what they only pretend to do on CNN and MSNBC.
“Democrats see a wicked nation that must be punished by its sins. Redemption for you can only be gotten by voting for them. But we don’t look to government to restore our souls, we put our faith in almighty God.”
Fact check: True.
“Biden has spent his entire career on the wrong side of history. He supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Biden’s calamities lost us one in four manufacturing jobs. Those workers didn’t want to hear Biden’s hollow words of empathy. They wanted their jobs back.”
Fact check: True.
“Joe Biden’s plan is not a solution to the virus but a surrender to the virus.”
Fact check: True. Anyone excited about another year under a Biden total economic lockdown?
“At their convention you barely heard a word about their agenda. Not because they don’t have one, but because it is the furthest-left agenda ever.”
Fact check: True. Bernie Sanders, AOC, BLM, the trans lobby, and climate change activists authored the DNC platform.
“He says he is the candidate of the light, but he wants to keep us completely in the dark.”
Fact check: True.
“Joe Biden’s agenda is made in China. My agenda is made in the USA.”
Fact check: True.
“He vowed to oppose school choice and close all charter schools. In my second term, I will provide school choice to every family in America.”
Fact check: True. And: this is yuuuuge! School choice as federal policy will help deflect the teachers unions’ ceaseless attacks against him and against parents.
“They have no problem with stopping a baby’s beating heart in the ninth month of pregnancy. They refuse to protect innocent life and lecture us about morality and saving America’s soul.”
Fact check: True.
“We have to give law enforcement back their power. They are afraid to act, they are afraid to lose their jobs. And by being afraid they are not able to do their jobs. And those who suffer most are the people they want to protect.”
Fact check: True.
“Joe Biden’s campaign did not condemn [the rioting]. Instead, they donated to it. Biden’s staffers helped bail out vandals, arsonists, and looters from jail.”
Fact check: True.
“The Republican party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep the country safe and salute the American flag.”
Fact check: True. Sorry comrades, but you are either with Trump, or you are with the rioters. It really is that simple.
Two Months to Victory
“Revolution!” the Antifa crust punks and BLM rioters scream in our faces every night. What the revolutionary Left doesn’t understand is that the real groundswell of energy is now on the Right. They are in for a very hard fall, and soon.
The President is right. We have to “turn the page forever on this failed political class.” As Obama Svengali David Plouffe tweeted in 2016 about Trump, it is not enough to defeat the insurrectionist Left. They must be destroyed thoroughly so their kind does not rise again.
As Kayla Mueller’s mother said, “As long as we refuse to break, we will be great.”
In her daughter’s memory, we must refuse to break, refuse to bend, and refuse to lose to the soulless Left. As Trump said, this November we need to “send them a thundering message they will never forget.”
Onward!
Final Advice for the GOP
Two important jobs left for the campaign:
- Show the world the truth about the Biden rioters. Make ads, today, that show what they did to Rand Paul and others. Make it very clear what side Biden and Kamala are on.
- Shred Biden’s lame denial that he wants to defund police. This is going to be their main line of attack for the next two months. Make it totally impossible for anyone to try and claim that Trump is responsible for the violence in our streets. Biden’s team must answer these questions:
- Should there be more cops or fewer cops in high-crime areas?
- Should city police budgets be cut?
- Should jails be closed and cash bail ended?
- How do you feel about violent criminals being released from jail?
If the Trump campaign can successfully pin defund the police on Biden and not let Biden try to pin the riots on Trump, 2020 is going to be a lot like 2016, only with extra winning.
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In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of "the ruling class" back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a "cold civil war." Now he applies the "logic of revolution" to our current political scene.
Claremont Institute Senior Fellow John Marini is one of the few experts on American Government who understood the rise of Trump from the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. Now he looks to the fundamental question that Trump's presidency raises: is the legitimacy of our political system based on the authority of the American people and the American nation-state, or the authority of experts and their technical knowledge in the service of "progress"?