On June 28, Mark and Patricia McCloskey say they were enjoying a quiet dinner outside of their St. Louis mansion when all of a sudden the gate to their private housing community was smashed and a crowd of 300-500 Black Lives Matter protestors forced their way onto the posted private property. For fear of what the mob might do, the husband and wife retreated into their house and re-emerged brandishing firearms of which they were in legal possession. The protestors accuse them of having aimed their weapons at the crowd. The police, who had been called, did not appear in order to disperse the trespassing mob, but to arrest the McCloskeys and remove all firearms from their home.

The McCloskey family have made it clear, time and again, that they are avid supporters of #BLM. In fact, Mark McCloskey is on record as having said that there was no problem at all until white people in the crowd began to get aggressive. Obviously, the issue at hand is whether or not this was an instance in which displaying a firearm was a legally defensible act. It will be up to the courts to decide if this pair of attorneys will face jail time, fines, or apologies. No one in the mob of protestors has been charged with any crime.

There is another component to the story that has to be understood, however. The #BLM project, along with its sibling movements, spawned by a generation reared on critical theory, is a deeply religious movement. Because the soul/identity is at the center of the battle, the religious structure is unavoidable. 

In 2017, John McWhorter, responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ winsome call for reparations said, “Antiracism parallels religion also in a proselytizing impulse. Key to being an Antiracist is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen “out there,” as it is often put about the whites who were so widely feared as possibly keeping Barack Obama from being elected (twice). One is blessed with, as it were, the Good News in being someone who “gets it,” complete with the Acknowledging.”

But that is not all. The #BLM movement is not simply religious; it is fundamentalist. That is why it is iconoclastic. And the story of the McCloskeys is a story about images that are being torn down. There is a house within which these protest movements live; the house is called Meta-modernism. Meta-modernism attempts to draw from and critique both of its parents, Modernism and Post-modernism. The problem, of course, is that it has no standard by which to determine what is salvageable and what should be composted. The only supra-cultural and eternal standard is the Word of God. The tragic result is a kind of epistemological bride of Frankenstein: a horrific conglomerate of religious fundamentalism and certainty combined with unilateral and arbitrary deconstruction. 

A perfect example would be the tearing down of the statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco this past June. The protestors spray-painted ACAB (All Cops are Bastards) on the base of the statue, proving the point that if the general of the Union army is said to be a racist, a cop, or a bastard, by the new religious reformers, there is nothing anyone can do about it except to say Amen. To disagree would be heresy and heretics in this new Salem are burned at the stake. All the world torn down and renamed. Nomen Catholics.

Any opposition to this anti-intellectual fervor is either silenced or re-named as intolerance, criminal speech, or racism. St. Louis Prosecutor, Kim Gardner, said, concerning the McCloskey event, “Make no mistake, we will not tolerate the use of force against those exercising their First Amendment rights, and will use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable.” 

What is going on?

The McCloskeys, despite their willingness to recite the necessary catechisms of the intolerazis, have the unfortunate pleasure of belonging to a certain era of icons. The image of a man on the marble steps of his mansion, holding a weapon in legal defense of his property has been decried as an image of injustice, not justice. 

A Marxist critique teaches the readers to notice symbols of power in order to identify antagonists. The presence of a gun is a sign that this person takes with artificial power that which would not naturally be his . . . or so the story goes. There is no need for explanation as to why he has the gun. There are key elements that tell the only story that needs to be told. McCloskey had a gun. The end. McCloskey was white. The end. McCloskey was angry and male. The end. McCloskey was defending property and wealth which he described as being his. The end. If the McCloskeys are exonerated, will Kim Gardner offer an apology for not committing the city of St. Louis to a zero tolerance policy over force being used against those exercising their Second Amendment rights? Will she use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable? Let’s hope so. 

Perhaps it will come out that the McCloskeys are horrible people who did horrible and illegal things to the peaceful protestors who were trespassing and threatening them. Even if it’s as bad as all that, it won’t change the unpardonable sin the McCloskeys are guilty of committing: looking too much like an America that has been condemned by the Ministry of Truth.