St. Louis personal-injury attorney Mark McCloskey, who along with his wife, Patricia, gained national fame last year when video surfaced of him brandishing a firearm in defense of his home against an angry Black Lives Matter crowd in the summer of 2020, has announced he is running for the Missouri Senate seat of Republican Roy Blunt.
McCloskey formally announced that he is a candidate for the 2022 race on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“When the angry mob came to destroy my house and kill my family, I took a stand against them. Now I’m asking for the privilege to take that stand for all of us,” McCloskey said in a campaign video.
“When the fascist mob came to my door, it woke me up. I saw what the future of America will be if we don’t all stand up, right now and defend our rights,” McCloskey said.
“I will defend the people of Missouri, you have my word,” McCloskey said, before delivering the tagline for his campaign, “I will never back down.”
Although it was widely reported that McCloskey was a Democrat during the fracas surrounding the events of last June, McCloskey put that allegation to rest on Carlson’s show.
“I’ll have to correct one thing. I have never been a Democrat. That was the worst fake news slur that has been hurled at me over the last ten months,” McCloskey joked. “I’ve always been a Republican but I’ve never been a politician. But, you know, God came knocking at my door last summer disguised as an angry mob and it really did wake me up.
McCloskey and his wife are still facing felony charges for evidence tampering and unlawful use of weapon, a Class E felony in Missouri which carries a possible four-year prison sentence along with a $10,000 fine. In October, the couple pleaded innocent to those charges.
But the fears that the McCloskeys might be convicted have dissipated since Missouri Republican Governor Mike Parson announced in October of 2020 that he would pardon the McCloskeys if convicted.
Then, in December of 2020, the politically motivated leftist circuit attorney Kimberly Gardner, who initially pursued the charges, was disqualified from her role in prosecuting the couple. At the time, St. Louis judge Thomas Clark ruled that Gardner’s use of the McCloskey’s names in fundraising emails was prohibited from both case law and the Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys.
Clark ruled that the fundraising emails featuring the McCloskeys raised “the appearance of impropriety and jeopardized(d) the defendant’s right to a fair trial.”
On April 6, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch effort by Garder to prosecute the case
Throughout his experience with the BLM mob, attack-attorney Gardner and biased media representations of he and his wife as “gun toters,” McCloskey appears to have learned that capitulation is never a good strategy when dealing the angry left-wing mob.
“What I’ve learned is that the people out there in this country are just sick and tired of cancel culture and the poison of critical race theory and the big lie of systemic racism, all backed up by the threat of mob violence,” McCloskey said.
McCloskey leveled a charge at the federal government with which a lot of people probably agree.
“All we hear is talk, and nothing ever changes.”
The race to fill Blunt’s seat in Missouri is already attracting a crowd. The seat, which is now in Republican hands, is one that could currently go either way.
Despite allegations of sexual and campaign misconduct that forced him to resign from the governor’s office in 2018, former Missouri governor Eric Greitens has already thrown his hat into the ring. Greiten has also snagged former Donald Trump aide Kimberly Guifoyle to serve as the national chair for his Senate bid. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is also running as a Republican.
For the Democrats, state Senator Scott Sitton and former Marine Lucas Kunce have already announced they will run. And former Senator Claire McCaskill and 2016 runner-up Jason Kander have said they will not seek the seat.
But the long odds don’t seem to bother McCloskey.
“People have to stand up. Each and everyone of us needs to stand up now and say, we’re not sheep, we’re a free people, we’re going to pull the power back to the people.”
