Screenshot/Republican National Convention
Patricia and Mark McCloskey during their appearance on night two of the RNC
You probably rolled your eyes when you read that Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at BLM protesters in front of their house, spoke at the RNC. Well, think again and watch the video.
It is darkly brilliant, obviously scripted by professionals. Here you see a nice white couple, describing their fear and outrage as a “mob” descended on their home. Of course they had a right to defend it, wouldn’t you?
And leading the radical mob was a woman with a bullhorn yelling, “You can’t stop the revolution!” That would be Cori Bush.
“That Marxist revolutionary,” Mark McCloskey said, is going to be the next representative of Missouri’s First District in Congress. And so she is.
Joe Biden’s Democrats, he added, no longer see “the government’s job as protecting honest citizens from criminals, but rather protecting criminals from honest citizens.”
“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” Patricia McCloskey added.
She accused Democrats and Joe Biden of wanting to “abolish the suburbs” by ending single-family zoning, bringing “crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments into now-thriving suburban neighborhoods.”
This is all poll and focus group tested, and you have to admire the propagandistic genius of the narrative. Peaceful protesters are criminals. Efforts to overcome decades of exclusionary housing will destroy the safe, white suburbs. Only Trump stands between you and this anarchy.
Will it work? It certainly will for the hard core who live in their own, alternative Trumpian universe. Polls suggest that it works less and less with key swing voters—suburban moderates, older people who defected to Trump in 2016, and even with segments of the white working class, especially when measured against the collapsed economy and the pandemic.
But don’t underestimate Trump. His campaign marries the Republican professional media messaging that goes back to Nixon with the dog whistle racism of Lee Atwater and company, and Trump’s own demonic talent as a demagogue.
Forty percent of Americans are enthralled with a cultish freak. The rest of us need to work overtime.
