Media personality figure and former prosecutor, Kimberly Guilfoyle, perhaps gave the most crazed speech at the Republican National Convention. In a shrill tone, she repeatedly claimed that Joe Biden and the Democrats are socialists. This is how far down the rabbit hole the American political landscape has fallen. If they are socialists, they are the worst ones in living memory.
After all, Wall Street heaved a sigh of relief when Biden was nominated, and again when he picked Kamala Harris. And Biden has vowed to veto Medicare for All and Green New Deal policies. While those things aren’t necessarily socialist, they are far more left than Biden or Harris’ politics. In truth, any socialist would laugh at the notion of these candidates being one of their own.
But this doesn’t matter in American politics. It never has. And this is all part of the delusion. Both ruling parties are plutocratic in nature. Both are capitalist. And both support American militarism and imperialism, with varying degrees of minute difference.
Guilfoyle, like Nick Sandmann, the smirking MAGA hat wearing kid who mocked a Native American elder in Washington DC, also brought up “cancel culture.” It has become a hot topic for these types, which is rich given the fact that they are giving speeches before millions of people carried by every corporate, national news outlet.
But what struck me most about Guilfoyle’s speech was the pitch. It was unhinged to a degree I have seldom seen in American politics. And I have seen a lot. Of course, she was a television personality, which has its own theatrical melodrama. But before that, she was a prosecutor. An astonishing fact that should make any sane person shudder. And she is now the partner of one of Trump’s sons. So the stark nepotism is remarkable in and of itself. But it was the fanatical look on her face which took me aback the most. It was the look one sees in the faces of cult followers. And all of it has been normalized to such an extent that too many Americans simply shrug things like this off.
To date, over 180,000 American have died from Covid-19. This is the most for any nation. A quarter of the entire world’s deaths, and the US only represents 4.25% of the planet’s population. It is facing an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, millions may lose their homes due to an inability to pay rent or mortgages, and millions have lost health insurance because the nation has tied healthcare to employment. It is a time where uprisings against systemic racism and police brutality are being met with more police brutality and murderous rightwing militias. And like the rest of the world, it is facing enormous ecological catastrophes on the horizon from climate change. In fact, thousands are reeling from fires in the west and the aftermath of a hurricane in the south. But to people like Guilfoyle, Donald Trump has done the best job ever, and is the only hope Americans have against all of its enemies, foreign and domestic.
Guilfoyle ended her bizarre speech by yelling “the best is yet to come” before an empty theatre. And perhaps this is what best sums up the madness of this historical moment. The political class is playing to an empty theatre because most Americans cannot afford to attend the play, or are too sick, or too over-worked, or are not white enough to be admitted. But this class has never really paid much attention to the audience to begin with, so for them, little to nothing has changed.
