The Hawk Tuah Convention

It's Not a Political Spectacle, It's the End of America as We Know It

I’m not saying that the Republican National Convention is a concrete sign of the collapse of our civilization. That would probably be an overstatement. It is probably just a sign of the collapse of American society.

Peter Navarro woke up in federal penitentiary.  He spent part of Wednesday night enjoying a rapturous reception from a “law and order” party that is headed a convicted felon and rapist. Matt Gaetz, who also addressed the crowd on Wednesday is under investigation by his fellow members of Congress for sex with a minor…and frankly that is probably not the sleaziest thing about him.

Amber Rose spoke on Monday. She’s a former stripper who once called Trump a “sexual predator” who has gone on the record as an active defender of both Satanism and, now, the MAGA movement. I’ve got nothing against her career or life choices. It’s her hypocrisy that’s gotten her on this list. Ronnie Jackson, a member of Congress and former Trump doctor is on the agenda despite the fact he was demoted by the Navy for having run a pill mill out of the White House.

Strikingly, all of these individuals, like everyone at the event were there to praise Donald Trump a man who has become the leader of the GOP because he apparently embodies all of the vices and defects of its members. Like Navarro, he’s a convicted criminal. Like Gaetz, he has been accused of pedophilia.  Trump has been convicted in part because he lied about and then tried to cover up a relationship with a porn star. Jackson’s pill mill operated under Trump’s watch and many Trump observers suspect he was a beneficiary of Jackson’s pharmacological largesse.

Many people feel that Wednesday nights star speaker, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance, was chosen because he was willing to say anything to get ahead, that he had absolutely no deeply held beliefs except a desire to advance his own self-interests. Despicable? Certainly. And in that respect just like Trump.

Perhaps even worse than the parade of ne’er do wells at the convention—oh look, isn’t that famed defamer Rudy Giuliani taking a header into the seats—was the even longer procession of individuals who once claimed to be public servants who were now doing the public the extraordinary disservice of bending the knee to the felon-rapist-fraudster-pathological liar-in-chief.  Many of them, from Ron DeSantis to Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio to Nikki Haley to Vance himself, had in the past taken the brave stand of telling it like it actually is about Trump and condemning him for being, well, as Vance put it, “America’s Hitler.” But now, in a desperate grab for power at all costs they swallowed their words and buried deep any principles they once may have aspired to and lathered up any way they could the most odious and repulsive man to ever serve in high office in the U.S.

The Selfie of a Lifetime

Hour after hour. Day after day. The MAGApalooza has celebrated not only the bloated and corrupt monster who leads the party and has promised to be “a dictator on day one” but it has featured others of similarly low character and has demanded of all present that they sell their souls, deny the values and ideals on which this country was founded, and embrace the worst of men for the worst of reasons. (It has turned the gravely serious tragedy of a shooting on Saturday into a fairly cheesy, divisive meme only days later. The Chinese see the shallowness of it all. In their media, they have been referring to the picture taken of Trump right after the shots rang out as “the selfie of a lifetime.”)

You might say well, look, sure, what we are seeing in Milwaukee is reprehensible, but how does that translate into the decline of our nation? And I respond…you mean beside the fact that this horrid display worthy of a fascist newsreel from the 1930s with all the same amounts of bluster and hate, racism and contempt for the rule of law is coming from one of just two major political parties in the U.S.? Well, ok, what about the tens of millions of people who are signing on to this mass rejection of basic human decency, common sense and the future interests of the United States and the world? Essentially half of the American electorate seems not only to be okay with this, they are actually enthralled by it. They are so energized by this degrading spectacle that many believe Trump and MAGA will win big in the fall as a result of it. Corruption and hatred can be so exciting. Fuck you Ma and Pastor Jones and Ms. McGillicuddy in the Fifth Grade. I don’t need your damn rules. I can be an asshole and a menace to society and never read a book and burn it all down and there are millions of people who will embrace me for it and wear the same kind of red hat as me.

It's sad really, isn’t it? How desperate so many Americans are for just a little fellowship that they are willing to say or do anything for it?

What is horrifying is not that the folks on the stage at this convention or those in the convention hall are so despicable. What is horrifying is that they really do represent a huge cross-section of American society that is just as depraved.

This is the summer, in case you have missed it, of the Hawk Tuah girl. You know her, Hailey Welch, the one who became an Internet meme when she told some Instagram influencers that the way she would drive a man crazy in bed was with a big old hawk tuah, in other words, spitting on the private parts of her boyfriends before, well, I don’t have to draw you a picture.

For some reason, the Internet, which has the emotional maturity of an eight year old, thought this was a witticism for the ages. Hailey Welch who said, “you gotta spit on that thang” was our Oscar Wilde. And she went viral. And made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling merch in a matter of weeks.

And all that was sad. And yes, it’s hard to deny our society is circling the drain.

Say What Now?

So how does this connect to the GOP convention—except in the fact that it was crude and appealed only to the basest instincts of a bunch of ignorant losers? Well, according to a recent recent piece at Slate, right wing groups started claiming Hawk Tuah girl as their own and saying that she “fundamentally expressed conservative values.” Now, you may find that confusing but then again the law and order party is headed by a criminal, the party that once claimed it stood for national security is now headed by a traitor and the party of family values, well, it has embraced Jeffrey Epstein’s wingman.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging Hailey Welch. What she wants to do on her own time is no business of mine. But I do think the way her story was spun into Internet gold and somehow embraced by the GOP does illustrate how low we have sunk. As Atlantic writer Tom Nichols put it today on our Deep State Radio podcast—and I’m paraphrasing--Americans lead pretty soft lives by and large, they are not fighting the kind of existential fights past generations grappled with and so they have decided to value above all things that which entertains or engages them, which gives them the momentary sensation, as you might get spinning through your Tik Tok feed, of being something roughly akin to being alive. Or at least being awake.

That is how you end up with a party lining up behind a man who is very possibly the worst person to seek high office in America. His supporters just don’t care. What they like about him is that he offers them, as Nichols rightly put it, “bread and circuses.” And because he has a special flair for it—a flair that comes from a lifetime of using celebrity to move ahead despite his complete lack of competence at virtually anything he tried—well, the sheep in the party who realize his power comes from his virality have decided that they would line up to give him whatever he wanted because maybe some of it would, well, rub off on them.

That is how you end up with the hawk tuah convention during the hawk tuah summer. Of people going one after another up to a mic and metaphorically spitting on that thang to please the man who can take them places, if not to a better future then to the kind of momentary, messy entertainment that will distract them from the rest of their lives.