Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the white residents of St. Louis who infamously confronted a crowd of demonstrators with (recklessly handled) guns, have now pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal charges stemming from the incident and have been required to forfeit their weapons to authorities. In the original June 2020 incident, the McCloskeys were not threatened, as Buzzfeed News noted based on remarks from local officials, no matter the fact that the couple has propagated delusional and bizarre claims about what happened. In short, the McCloskeys sound like Fox News aficionados who’ve been indoctrinated into absolutely melting down at even a slight inconvenience.
Patricia claimed during a Fox News appearance that protesters said “they were going to kill us… going to burn down the house, that they were going to be living in our house after I was dead.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewed a video feed that apparently captured the bulk of the encounter between the McCloskeys and the protesters, and the paper mentions no evidence that what Patricia claims actually took place, although the feed does capture shouts of “Eat the Rich!” — which is basically a joke, and a long-running one at that. There’s even a song by the hard rock band Aerosmith — who aren’t exactly unknowns — called “Eat The Rich.” There’s a 1987 song by the also very well-known hard rock/ heavy metal group Motörhead with the same title.
That video feed also captures someone from the crowd shouting that “kids” were in the group, but the McCloskeys kept waving their guns. Someone from the crowd also shouted out that “nobody wants to hurt you,” but that assertion didn’t stop the McCloskeys from concocting some wacko version of events anyway. Mark pleaded guilty to assault in the fourth degree, while Patricia pleaded guilty to harassment in the second degree. Special prosecutor Richard Callahan, who handled the case, observed that the protesters who ended up outside of the McCloskeys’ residence on that fateful day “made a wrong turn on their way to protest in front of the mayor’s house,” adding that there “was no evidence that any of them had a weapon and no one I interviewed realized they had ventured into a private enclave.”
Mark — who is running for U.S. Senate, because of course he is — said in noted contrast that he explicitly hoped to “put other people in imminent fear of physical harm” with the brandishing of those weapons. The crowd included women and children, Callahan noted — so Mark McCloskey is bragging about threatening to gun down women and children because of apparently imaginary threats. These people are dangerously deranged.
