Last night the Democrats kicked off their convention, and on a basic level it was a success.

On a basic level, I’m saying.

By “success,” I mean that the throngs of pro-Hamas protesters, reportedly numbering some 100,000 people, didn’t get into the United Center to tear the place up. They did manage to interrupt a few speeches by unfurling banners and heckling here and there, before being shouted down by the delegates and carted away by the event security staff. But compared to what could have happened, the effect those protesters had on the convention was pretty tame.

What wasn’t tame was the theme of the convention on its first night. Essentially, the Democrats want you to know that they’re a ruthless, power-mad death cult who will do and say anything in order that they might hold sway over their fellow man.

There were two basic tracks to this theme. The first is a recitation of the woke neo-paganism which has taken hold of the Democrat Party; by this I mean that they believe that with enough power and influence they can change the basic realities of life. You saw that over and over in the speeches given by their luminaries – from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Jamie Raskin to Raphael Warnock to Joe Biden, it was clear that these people aren’t interested in truth but rather in narrative.

AOC told you, for example, that Kamala Harris comes from the middle class. That has never been true; her father was an economics professor and the Harrises lived in college towns as, essentially, minor academic nobility. And no sooner did she ascend to adulthood but she made herself a “B-girl” to the most powerful local politician she could find; from that point on Kamala Harris was a member of California’s political elite, first by extension and later by position.

Hillary Clinton, determined to make America remember why Donald Trump won the presidency in the first place, made sure to attack Trump as “selfish.” This from the woman who did government business as Secretary of State on an unsecured private email server for the specific purpose of hiding her self-dealing activities from public scrutiny while on the job, trading influence for dollars with her Clinton Foundation as a vehicle to carry the swag. Trump needed no political influence or policy peddling to make his fortune and has lost money on net since running for office, getting besmirched, impeached, prosecuted and shot for his trouble, and he’s “selfish.”

And of course there was Biden, who dredged up as many old, disproven lies as he could fit into a speech that came in at just under an hour but seemed much longer than that. He repeated the “very fine people” lie about the Charlottesville riots that even the left-wing propaganda site Snopes has debunked. He repeated the “suckers and losers” lie about Normandy. He claimed border crossings are now below what they were when Trump left office. He claimed to have built a half-million electric-vehicle charging stations, when in fact the real number is eight.

And on, and on.

But the real theme of the Democrats’ first day, beside the clear necessity of putting Biden out to pasture – and it was obvious that’s what they were doing; Biden didn’t make it to the stage until after 10:30 local time, pushing his political farewell out of prime time and offering the equivalent of trapping the old man in the basement – was toxic femininity.

This was a chilling show.

For all of the attention paid to the pro-Hamas demonstrators outside the hall, perhaps the most breathtaking spectacle at the DNC was that Planned Parenthood pulled up a truck next to the United Center and offered free vasectomies and abortions to anyone who so inclined. They did so with the full blessing of the Party; that’s hardly a surprise, given that Planned Parenthood owns the Democrats lock, stock and barrel. But what was happening outside the United Center was being echoed inside the building, as speaker after speaker Monday night kept extolling the virtues of killing babies.

For example, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, a lisping beta male taking the stage at a national political convention sans a necktie in an apparent attempt to make himself “relatable,” droned on about empathy and compassion, which the baby-killing Democrats apparently have and the pro-life Republicans seeking to stop abortions don’t. His speech was mild by comparison to the others glorifying abortions, something the Democrats spent almost two hours on with one speaker after another glorifying abortion and decrying Republican attempts to limit it.

But it wasn’t just abortion which showed off the toxic femininity of the Democrats.

The largest ovations of the night were for AOC, who for all her bluster and bombast gave a speech almost wholly in line with the Democrats’ establishment. She refrained from trashing Biden as she’s repeatedly done in the past, praising him for trying to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza and stopping short of accusing Israel of “genocide.” Instead, Ocasio-Cortez attacked Trump as a “two-bit union-buster,” which is a fact-free allegation flying in the face of Trump holding more appeal for trade union members than any Republican in modern times. She also claimed that “Donald Trump would sell this country for $1 if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

Which Wall Street friends are those? Wall Street is mostly a Democrat constituency now.

The speech riled up what had been a quiet and mostly bored convention with its denunciations of Trump, and there was a certain bitchy nastiness palpable in its tenor. AOC’s rhetoric is grossly emotionalist; last night’s speech was an expression of feelings more than a recitation of facts. She whined that Republicans commonly tell her to go back to bartending, but that “there’s nothing wrong with working for a living.” This from someone who tended bar because she chose not to get a real job until she was plucked essentially out of an audition to run for Congress.

Then there was Clinton, who claimed she broke the “glass ceiling” and paved the way for Harris. This is wholly untrue, as Clinton didn’t break anything. She ascended in politics in the slipstream of her husband, was given a New York Senate seat by her party, lost her first truly competitive race against Barack Obama in 2008, won the 2016 Democrat nomination thanks to the party rigging the primaries to deny Bernie Sanders the victory and then proceeded to lose to Trump. And now she’s claiming to have pioneered politics for females? When Harris is now the Democrats’ nominee having won not a single delegate through a normal primary process?

This was all about chasing a feeling. None of it is factual. It’s emotionalist politics which fits perfectly with a Democrat Party no longer interested in policy and offering none; the party’s platform opens with a “land acknowledgement” offering a meaningless apology to Native American tribes white people supposedly stole North America from, when those tribes warred over the land for centuries before anything like an America existed. That’s emotion, not rationality, and certainly not meaningful policy.

And the emotion, at the end of a long evening, was fake. The “We Love Joe” signs distributed to the delegates which waved as Biden spewed angry fantasies about Trump were not some outpouring of real sentiment; if they loved Biden they wouldn’t have forced him out. And they certainly wouldn’t have relegated him to the midnight hour for his past-you-prime-time swansong speech.

Nancy Pelosi, acknowledged as the heaviest of the coup heavies, was spotted insincerely mumbling “we love Joe” along with the crowd toward the end of Biden’s farewell. It was a classic case of the insincere, conniving moral vacancy which perfectly describes what Democrats have become.