And so we come upon the Republican National Convention of 2020.
The fear-mongering was cartoon politicking at its most shameless. As a country, as a people capable of reasonable discourse, we shouldn’t have been willing to engage such contrived melodrama to drum up votes. How could people buy into this stuff? Kimberly Guilfoyle was autocrat window dressing of the lowest order. Her rabble-rousing speech was surreal, with her banshee screeching and her self-congratulatory Latina immigrant experience. She and her RNC handlers apparently forgot Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and thus all Puerto Ricans are natural born American citizens, so her mother’s epic saga in migrating to this country was somewhat anticlimactic. Her outlandish condemnations of Democrats having orchestrated a ruined, crime-ridden Californian wasteland ruled by feudal leftist overlords and littered in heroin needles, riots, and blackouts. I thought I was watching a tyrant empress in a Hunger Games sequel and I half expected Katniss Everdeen to come busting in at any moment.
I knew why every speaker had their gaslighting furnace cranked to max as they fanned the fear flames of Biden and his pending socialist regime. I had no interest in partisan generalizations. I couldn’t have given less of a fuck about how the right demonized the left, or vice versa. It was all cartoon hash as far as I was concerned.
I took more issue with people, and I still do, not knowing what those flashy, Insta-ready terms actually meant. I suppose it’s the linguist in me. Rarely do I see the use of Commie-Socialist-Marxist slags being used from persons who are truly versed in those philosophies, and when queried, they mostly fail to back up their rhetoric with a minimum of context to show they understand what those ideas really entail. I’d like to have thought they used the terms because they remembered the Reagan era, or came of age in the waning days of the Cold War, when Communists were easily identifiable villains and the prospect of Communism rolling over the earth unchecked by the freedom of capitalism was anathema to Americans. But I suspect it was more probable the hot button words were used as an in vogue, social media trend. They were short, snappy, easily recalled pejoratives to berate lefties. Their actual meanings and practices were seemingly irrelevant, all that mattered is that they sounded good as pop-politico nomenclature.
What average Americans may not realize is, we already operate under a poorly disguised blanket of socialist materialism.
I’ll explain, nutshell style.