The Left hates the right to self-defense.  They want you disarmed so that you cannot fight back when they come for you.

The McCloskeys were armed and did defend themselves, successfully, without firing a shot.  For that, they must be punished.

Miguel already covered how the extremely partisan, politically motivated Circuit Attorney confiscated their weapons.

Now the St. Louis media is out to drag them and poison the jury pool if the McCloskeys are ever arrested and prosecuted criminally.

Portland Place couple who confronted protesters have a long history of not backing down

When Black Lives Matter protesters marched up Kingshighway on June 28 and turned through an iron gate into the magnificent private street of Portland Place, they encountered a couple who have for years, nearly constantly, sued other people and ordered people off their property.

Broke down the iron gate.  The protesters ripped the gate out of the stone arch in the fence around the gated community.  Start with that fact.

Personal-injury attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey became instant national figures when they intercepted protesters marching past their marble-faced palazzo at One Portland Place, aimed guns at them and demanded they get out.

Americans saw the story they wanted to see. Some saw respected professionals fearing for their safety, reasonably exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend their home from violent trespassers. Others saw an overwrought, older affluent couple, recklessly pointing their weapons and asserting their white privilege.

I cannot wait for a well-off black family to come out with AR-15’s to face down some Klansmen burning a cross on their yard.  I hope the media accuses the armed black family of having white privilege because clearly that’s what they believe the right to self-defense is.

But public records and interviews reveal a fuller picture than emerged two weeks ago. They show the McCloskeys are almost always in conflict with others, typically over control of private property, what people can do on that property, and whose job it is to make sure they do it.

Holy shit.  Property owners having a right to control their own property.  What a fucking concept.  What else can we expect from the media who clearly sides with the Marxists in BLM but a hatred of the idea of private property?

After this intro, the article goes on to list all the dick moves that the McCloskeys have done that makes them litigious assholes.

At the McCloskeys’ property in Franklin County, they have sued neighbors for making changes to a gravel road and twice in just over two years evicted tenants from a modular home on their property.

Doesn’t matter.

The McCloskeys have filed at least two “quiet title” suits asserting squatter’s rights on land they’ve occupied openly and hostilely — their terms — and claimed as their own.

Doesn’t matter.

They sued a man who sold them a Maserati they claimed was supposed to come with a box of hard-to-find parts.

If the parts were part of the contract and no delivered, the lawsuit was valid.  Also, doesn’t matter.

In one trip to the courthouse in November 1996, Mark McCloskey filed two lawsuits, one against a dog breeder whom he said sold him a German shepherd without papers and the other against the Central West End Association for using a photo of their house in a brochure for a house tour after the McCloskeys had told them not to.

I’d sue if someone published a picture of my house in their ad after I explicitly told them not to.  Also, doesn’t matter.

In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees. The congregation had planned to harvest the honey and pick apples from trees on its property for Rosh Hashanah.

So he’s a fucking asshole.  Destroying beehives that are not on his property is criminal, but not enough to make him a prohibited person.  Also, since I’m a man of principle, it doesn’t matter.

They filed a lawsuit in St. Louis circuit court to try to force the trustees to enforce the neighborhood rules as written.  One of the rules prohibited unmarried people from living together. Several neighbors said it was because the McCloskeys didn’t want gay couples living on the block. The trustees voted to impeach Patricia McCloskey as a trustee in 1992 when she fought an effort to change the trust indenture, accusing her of being anti-gay.

Mark McCloskey clarified in a deposition much later that the trust agreement barred unmarried people living together, regardless of their sexuality.

I’ve been the victim of rules like that as a straight person.  I thought it was moralizing against unmarried people living in sin, but when I became a landlord my property manager explained to me it’s often the case of preventing problems with roommates breaking leases.  Even if Patricia McCloskey did have an anti-gay bias in wanting to keep that rule in place, it doesn’t matter.

By filing so many lawsuits, the McCloskeys opened a large window onto their values and ambitions. Their lawsuits center on obtaining land, keeping people off of it, and forcing people to follow rules or make good on agreements.

Holy fucking shit, what a concept.  Maybe they are litigious dicks but obtaining land, keeping strangers off your land, and forcing other people to follow the rules and make good on agreements are sort of the foundational principles of our economic system.  If we don’t force people to follow rules or make good on agreements we end up in Mogadishu.

The rest of the article from here is just a muckraking through the sewer of the McCloskey’s personal life.

All of it is irrelevant.  All of it.

These people were legal gun owners.  They felt threatened on their land by a mob, in a city that had suffered millions of dollars in damage and lost several lives in mob violence in the days prior, and the police were nowhere to be seen.  They had every right to bear arms to defend themselves.

Being an asshole does not preclude you from your right to self-defense.

Being a contemptible dick who likes to sue people does not preclude you from your right to self-defense.

There is nothing in this article that explains why the McCloskey’s didn’t have a legitimate fear of the mob threatening them after breaking down a gate to enter their private property.

The purpose of this article is simple:

To embarrass the McCloskeys and ruin their reputation.

To poison a jury so that they are convicted, not because of the facts in the case, but because they are greedy assholes who like to sue people over petty bullshit.

Lastly, it is a warning to everyone else who might stand up to the mob that if they do, the media will dig through their entire lives and splash every sordid detail across the internet to shame them.

Let the mob kill you or the media will ruin your life.

Welcome to the woke mafia.