When the Mob Comes Knocking at Your Door with Mark McCloskey
Charlie is joined by Mark McCloskey, made famous by no choice of his own, when a mob of armed BLM Inc. rioters smashed down his gate and stormed his private property. As viral video spread across the country of Mark and his wife, Patricia, holding guns and demanding the trespassers leave, Mark was enveloped in one of the most charged racial conflicts in America's history as the couple simply tried to defend themselves and their home. After being senselessly charged with a firearms violation, Mark decided that he would devote his life to fighting for the America he grew up in and still loves by running for an open Senate seat in Missouri. Hear his harrowing story and why he's decided to start fighting to take back the country from the radical ideologues. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Honored to have with us today a brave man and a courageous man running for the Senate in Missouri, Mark McCloskey.
Mark, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks for having me on.
So Mark, I don't know if you ever planned to get into politics.
I don't know if you ever planned to run for office, but something happened to you and your wife last summer.
The Mob Arrives at the Porch00:04:25
I have a lot of questions about this.
And it was probably the number one news story in the country for probably a week and a half, where an angry BLM Incorporated mob stormed your house, at least your yard.
They tore down a gate, and then you came out with your firearm, never discharged the firearm, and then faced criminal charges because of that.
I know that saga is still unfolding.
Walk us through what happened that day from your perspective.
Okay, and it takes a little background too, because particularly since yesterday was the anniversary of George Floyd's death in St. Louis on the evening and morning of June the 1st and 2nd of last year, the folks that have the high ground, the moral superiority over us, decided that the best way to show their love and compassion was to burn down downtown St. Louis.
And they set fire to lots of buildings that did millions of dollars worth of damage.
They shot four police officers and killed retired police captain David Doran, who about a half a mile from where I'm sitting right here in his secondary employment.
And the most impressive thing that Patty, my wife, and I were we were watching from a live helicopter feed while the 7-Eleven in downtown St. Louis, two blocks from the police headquarters, from the first time a rock comes through and breaks out the window, looters come in, looted empty, throw fire in the building becomes fully and go through the flames.
10, 20, 30, 40 minutes we watched this.
How many police showed up?
Zero.
How many firemen showed up?
Zero.
We looked at each other and said, you know, when the foot hits the sham, you're out there in your wildlands.
All right.
And then in the ensuing nearly a month, more and more businesses in our neighborhood got boarded up.
A little pharmacy around the street for me.
I went over there and the roll-up steel doors have been torn off.
The windows are all boarded up.
So I asked the owner, what happened?
He said, when the alarms went off, I said, did you come down to see what's going on?
I didn't want to get killed.
Make a long story short, the guys were in there for six hours stealing everything that could be stolen, breaking everything that could be broken.
And the cop showed up 10 hours after the alarm round.
So once again, self-reliance is your only resort at that time.
So now it's June 28th.
It's a Sunday afternoon.
Our daughter, who's 31, was coming in from Chicago to have dinner with us.
We were setting up on the porch.
I put a pork loin on barbecue, and my daughter shows up.
All of a sudden, we start hearing noise coming down Kings Highway.
Now, we know that there was going to be an event that day because in the city of St. Louis, where there's no police enforcement, where the police have been told to stand down, there's no prosecution, you get to advertise your riots.
And so this organization called Expect Us St. Louis put out a fire, saying they're going to have a riot when and where.
So we put fire extinguishers and weapons around the house.
And then this mob comes down Kings Highway.
Now we're right on Kings Highway at the end of a private neighborhood, gated private neighborhood.
Everything inside the gates private property.
There's no streets, the sidewalks, the streetlights, everything owned by the members.
All right.
All of a sudden, Kings Highway, six lanes wide, fills with people as far as you can see, screaming, shouting, beating on drums, hammering the street with sticks.
The police have closed down Kings Highway to let the mob use it, but then abandoned the street.
No police anywhere to be seen.
We're looking over at the gate and we say, God, I hope they don't come in here.
Right then, the gate bursts open and the one half opens like a batwing door.
The other half is staked to the ground and does not open.
They just folded it to the ground and started coming in, falling over each other like lemmings getting in.
I stood up on the porch and I said the two most racist white supremacist words known in the English language.
I said, private property.
And as soon as I said private property, since they're communists, that inflamed them and they started pouring in every much more so.
Well, Patty and my daughter went in to call 911.
I reached in, I grabbed my AR-15 and went back out in the porch.
Started saying some really unpleasant things to them, like, get out, private property.
And I actually probably swore at him once.
I said, get the hell out of my neighborhood.
You would think they might do that, right?
You know, seeing kind of a grumpy looking 64-year-old man carrying a semi-automatic rifle, barefoot, and rumble.
Private Property and Navy SEALs00:03:56
But no, they just kept pouring in, screaming death threats at us.
You're going to rape your wife, burn down your house.
You got a business.
Your business is gone.
We're going to kill you.
That's where I'm going to take my bath.
That's where I'm going to go to bed.
That's where I'm going to have my breakfast after we kill you and take over the house.
And the best part was a couple of these peaceful protesters were standing right in front of me on the porch.
And one of the guys had ammo pockets in his body army.
He pulled out two loaded magazines, pointed them at me so I could see they're loaded with shelves, clicks them together and says, You are next.
Guy standing next to him is wearing light-colored body armor, wearing a sidearm.
He turns around so I can see on the back it says human shield.
And then he comes, he turns around back towards us and starts inching closer and closer and closer.
And if you've seen that one still from that day where I'm leaning over and talking to Patty and I've got the AR in my hand, what I'm saying to her is, if that guy comes any closer, I'm going to have to kill him.
And because he's very threatening and armed, at which point Patty says to me, you're not killing anybody today, the voice of a reason.
But we held him on, and the crowd eventually dissipated.
That 32-second clip that plays endlessly on the news was the last 32 seconds of about a 15 to 18-minute event.
But that was the easier of the two times.
That's what made the news.
Then we got a tip that they were coming back that Friday, July the 3rd, and they were coming back specifically to kill us and burn down the house.
We'd gotten that from a black client of ours who was in the organization and brainwashed by lady that we'd represented for years, nice young lady.
We knew her family real well, went to her graduation, went to her husband's funeral.
We were felt like family with him.
But she called up to tell us that what we did was inexcusable.
We were going to have to die for it.
And they came back that Friday now with twice the manpower.
Now, the FBI estimate was up to a thousand people with the intent to kill us and burn us out.
And we had a hard time getting security.
But earlier in the week, making a short story out of this, a long version was about 40 minutes.
But I'd gotten a call from the White House saying the president supported us.
And if there's ever anything that he can do to help, let us know.
Well, when that Thursday evening happened, and we still were facing death and could not hire any private security, I called that guy back and I said, it's a pretty gosh darn good time now, right?
And so he gave me Mark Meadows' cell phone number.
And I called up Mark Meadows and told him the longer version of the story I just told you.
And when that Friday happened, a miracle happened.
The riot was supposed to start at about 6:30 or 7.
We started getting Navy SEALs showing up.
One ex-Navy SEAL, fourth-generation cattle farmer from Kansas, threw his gear in the back of his pickup truck and drove on in.
One of the things I did was right after I talked to Mark Meadows, I called up Tucker Pearls.
And Tucker, I'm talking, and I'm sitting on the bench in the kitchen.
He can hear Patty crying in the background.
And he says, you know, longer version of what I just said here, that McCloskeys are going to die on Friday, that they can't get any private security to help them.
I hear Mrs. McCloskey sobbing in the background.
The police have been ordered to stand down.
And thanks to that, we got about 10 secondary employment cops from rural jurisdiction that weren't afraid to get dirty if the job required.
So we had on that Friday afternoon by the time the mob showed up.
What we used to call in the Reagan administration peace through superior firepower.
And it kept the crowd at bay.
Once again, second time, nobody got shot.
Nobody got hurt except our psyche and that 130-year-old gate that got smashed on Sunday night on the 28th.
But it shouldn't take having the president's chief of staff on your speed dial be safe from a mob in Mississippi.
You know, we ought to have something called a government that we pay taxes to that protects us from the mob, not supporting it and encouraging the mob.
Why You Are Running for Office00:15:45
Look, by now, you've all heard me talk about my pillow and how Mike has done it again by introducing his My Slippers.
Mike Lindell, he's got a lot of ambition.
He's a patriot.
He loves his country.
A lot of people like Mike Lindell.
In fact, I get emails from people.
They say, Charlie, how can I help you?
How can I help Mike Lindell?
How can I help the country?
Well, if you go to mypillow.com and buy anything with the promo code Kirk, it helps both of us.
That's right.
Maybe you want to go buy the My Pillow slippers.
They're beautiful slippers.
Maybe you want to buy the MyPillow, MyPillow.
MyPillow slippers are so comfortable that you want to get some for the whole family.
So go to mypillow.com and click on the Radio Listener Square and use promo code Kirk.
You'll also get deep discounts on MyPillow products, including the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress toppers, and MyPillow towel sets.
Or call 800-875-0425 and use promo code Kirk.
I'm just stunned by the whole story.
So, did any of the people that stormed the gates or harassed you have any of them been charged for anything?
Well, a few months later, nine of them got charged with trespass, and then about an hour later, those charges were dropped.
This is who charges them then.
This was we have two levels of prosecution of the city of St. Louis.
One is a circuit attorney's office, which is who's charged us.
That's like the regular DA in another city.
And then there's the city counselor's office, which is a lower level of prosecution for misdemeanors and that sort of thing.
And that was the city counselor's office charged these nine people and then dismissed them immediately, as opposed to the what 36 people still sitting in solitary confinement for trespassing on the Capitol ground.
That's a good point.
So then, but you guys have been charged for you didn't fire a weapon.
So, what exactly is the law that was broken?
It was your own private property.
You didn't discharge it.
You're allowed to guard and wave a weapon if you want to, right?
Well, and here's the irony that I find.
You know, on the 3rd of July, that next Friday, when they came back, now I had a small army here and they were heavily armed, right?
Nobody got arrested for that.
Nobody checked anybody's ID to see, hey, are you really an APCO?
Do you really have a right to have that M4 on you, right?
But we got charged for violating the most profound law in the city of St. Louis, and that's standing up to BLM.
And the technical charge was flourishing a weapon.
But I was on my own property with my own legally owned weapons, and I never hurt anybody.
And yet, we got a charge that could land us four years in prison.
Has a judge heard this from the state yet?
No, no, we just got set for trial about a week ago.
We got the Soros-funded prosecutor tossed off the case.
No, when you were indicted, a judge usually has to hear the preliminary.
I can't imagine a judge doesn't throw this out.
Well, you know, and we've got a hearing coming up, and we've got a new prosecutor.
We've got an independent prosecutor now who's taking a fresh look at it.
But, you know, it went up in front of a grand jury, but you know, grand juries, as my wife always says, they'll indict a person.
The prosecutor says so.
So that's our current situation.
We're still facing felony charges, and we still are facing four years in prison and the loss of our law licenses and everything else.
So, but you know, I'm encouraged now to hear free of Soros.
Yeah, and so I'm still trying to understand what the law that was broken.
And I just maybe I'm, I think you're going to win this.
And I want to talk about your candidacy, but I refuse to believe that there's not a check and balance.
And if there isn't, then I'm just, I'm living in a different country, truly.
Well, we have a very good castle doctor in Missouri, which is promoted by, amongst other things, our current Governor Mike Parson.
And Mike Parson has promised to, gosh, I can't believe I'm glitching.
I'm a lawyer.
If we get convicted, but unfortunately, under the Missouri law, we have to get convicted before we can be part.
Well, that's what I was going to ask.
Why does he just not do it?
Why does he just do it now and get this over?
I guess he can't.
Well, it's kind of, it's actually kind of humorous.
We were talking to President Trump during the convention.
Called up to thank us for appearing at the convention.
And one of the first things he says is, Well, why can't the governor pardon you right now?
Why don't we get Governor Parson on the phone and see what we can do?
And so I got a call back the next day from the general counsel for the governor's office saying, Unfortunately, the law in Missouri has been changed and we can't do it until after you're convicted.
So he has said he'll do it.
So I want to give him credit for that.
But here's what I find so fascinating about your story: in a world of fame seekers and sociopaths running our politics, you guys didn't ask for any of this.
You were living your life.
You were pursuing happiness.
You were building a family.
You were about to have a meal with your daughter.
And you own firearms for obvious reasons for moments like this.
And the trouble came to you.
You didn't go looking for the trouble.
You were not prowling the streets trying to do something.
They came into your private property, which is a fundamental belief in Western society that you're allowed to control something, whether it be land or a home or an apartment, whatever, and that you can do whatever you wish with it, right?
So that's what I find so fascinating about this is that this happened to you.
And then somehow you're the villain for daring to not, you didn't kill anyone.
You didn't discharge a weapon.
By the way, you have every right.
I would believe that as soon as they come on your property, you could kill them all.
Like, I don't quite understand how this is even a problem.
But anyway, that's, I don't, I just, I don't quite understand it.
Like, you're not allowed to trespass private property.
Three different no-trespassing signs they had to pass by, plus breaking down the gate.
And I'm the one that gets charged with a felony.
Go figure.
You know, so now you're running.
Yeah, sorry, the oldest law in English jurisprudence is breaking the clothes, the right to use deadly force to stop somebody from entering into your property.
And yet they did it, and I'm the one getting prosecuted.
Just we need to go back to Blackstone just to realize where our laws came from because all these maniacs running our country don't understand any of that.
So now you're running for Senate, which I find to be really interesting.
And again, we have all these professional politicians that always just try to climb the ladder.
Tell us about what you were doing before the mob, professionally, your worldview.
Do you have any ambitions to politics?
Let's talk about why you're running.
I can guess why you're running because your story, but tell us just a little bit about yourself.
I've been a lifelong Republican.
My folks were lifelong Republicans.
My father was a very active anti-communist from when he got back from the Philippines after World War II until the day he died.
My mother was a head of what was for a while the largest Republican club in the country, got a Republican elected in the second district of Missouri, the first time since Reconstruction, I think.
And I've always been an outspoken opponent of the life, but I've never had any interest in running for political office.
I was speaking against, well, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua back when I was in college.
We put on fundraisers for Carl North when he was going through his problems and then when he was running for Senate.
And Ali's endorsed our campaign.
We did a video with him a couple of weeks ago.
So, and I've got the biggest slur, the most insulting slur I've gotten in this since the last, you know, since June 28th of last year, was that I used to be a Democrat.
Okay.
So I've been sending out pictures to different people and accuse me of that on the media of pictures of me with Senator Blunt when I looked like I was about 18 years old and me and Carl North, and we both looked like we were too young to have positions in the world.
And with Jim Talent and Newt Gingrich when he was speaker and everybody else.
So my Republican roots go back to about halfway down the birth canal, I think.
But I've never had any reason or any interest in running for politics.
But then the mob came knocking on the door.
And if you'd asked me June 27th of last year what I wanted most in the world, I would have said for the world, leave me the heck alone.
Let me live out the rest of my life in comfort and peace.
But the world chose not to.
And that Friday night when we had the second assault, that was the night that President gave his Mount Rushmore address.
And he talked about combating Marxist extremism in the United States.
I didn't get a chance to see that speech that night because I was a little busy saving my behind.
But I listened to it the next day and I heard all the pundits and the mass media saying that that was the most divisive speech they'd ever heard.
I said to myself, if fighting Marxism in the United States is divisive, there's something seriously wrong with our country.
If we're expected to live in harmony with the people that wish to destroy us and our lifestyle and our culture, then there's something seriously wrong.
And Patty and I just made a commitment that day that we're going to just put our lives on hold and contribute what we could for the rest of our lives to saving this country.
I absolutely love it because, again, I just want to reiterate this point, which is so dip.
People say, like, some people like, okay, I can't take it anymore.
I got to get involved.
The fight literally came to your door and you were just trying to live the American promise.
And you very well could have just kind of sued for peace and run to the hills and wrote an apology and said, you know what?
Maybe we shouldn't have, you know, had the weapons and maybe we should have invited them in for some sort of a, you know, milk and cookie type session.
Or, you know, they're really angry.
They didn't really realize what they were doing.
No, you handled this perfectly, which is, you know what?
There's some things that are worth going all in for.
And I don't know, busting down a gate to go terrorize private people in a gated neighborhood because you're upset that something happened in Minneapolis that we even know the facts and circumstances about.
That's Nicaragua.
That's not us, right?
That's just.
And so tell us about your race.
You're running for the United States Senate.
It's an open seat.
It's a very competitive primary.
You obviously have kind of an upper hand in the sense that you're very well known.
So I don't think you're going to have a name ID problem.
Tell us what you hope to achieve and kind of the why you're running outside of just obviously what happened to you.
Well, why we're running is that immediately after these events, we joined the Trump campaign.
And we were on the Team Trump bus and giving, you know, when we're actively campaigning for the president, we were doing seven rallies a day, plus stopping at the business owners and supporters' properties and giving the same kind of a speech that I'd give in the full full-blown rally.
So some days I'd be doing 12, 14 presentations a day and meeting people all over the country.
And what I learned was that people are just sick and tired of what's going on in the country.
They're sick of cancel culture and the poison of critical race theory and the lie of systemic racism and the threat of mob violence.
You know, do what we want or we'll burn your cities down and we'll kill you.
And they want real change.
But all they see in DC are the same old, same old, the Republicans have just talk and never affect any change.
The Democrats have been pushing to the left for as long as I've been alive.
And we used to talk about the erosion of our civil liberties.
And that's been going on for decades and decades.
But then we've got the Biden administration that comes in.
Regardless of the legitimacy of it, they're in power now.
And then there's been a wholesale slaughter of our civil liberties.
Every day, some new offense against the Constitution, against our God-given rights.
And things like HR1, now S1, that it ever passes.
There'll never be a free election again.
If H.R. 127, the gun control bill, passes, you know, registration of weapons and ammunition.
My favorite part is having a psychological examination of people that want to purchase guns and not just the person, but their family members and even their ex-spouses.
Can you imagine all the people out there that went through bad divorces where their ex-wife or their ex-husband will be able to tell some psychologist whether or not they think their ex ought to own a gun?
It's just so ridiculous.
Anyway, so we just got to a point where something had to happen.
I had no strings attached.
I could have lived the rest of my life comfortably and peacefully.
But I wanted to do something where people would believe that they would have a politician that would go to DC, tell the truth, regardless of what it would cost them politically or economically or socially.
And what you said a minute ago is so true.
What everybody else does when they make the mistake of standing up for their rights is they go through the apology tour and then they get fired anyway.
If I had been the managing partner of the biggest law firm in St. Louis, instead of being self-employed, I'd have had to apologize until I was blue in the face and I would have been fired anyway.
And that's the problem.
The media and the swamp has such control that if you step out of line and you say anything impolite, if you go more than two points off the middle of what's currently accepted as appropriate discourse, you get destroyed.
Your career gets ended.
You get prosecuted.
And that's, you know, that's not the United States of America.
That is not a free democracy.
That's the Soviet Union or the CCP or Cuba, but it's not the United States I knew.
And it's the reason we're running to try to pull that power back.
The Declaration of Independence, after reciting our God-given right, says that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government.
And my goal in this campaign is to remind everybody in DC that they serve at our leisure, not vice versa.
That we have rights and we've given them, the government, some privileges, not vice versa.
I love that.
What is the website where people can support you and learn more about your candidacy?
It's McCloskeyforsenate.com.
And with no brakes, it's all one word, McCloskey4FORSenate.com.
And if people think we've got a good idea, if they want to support us, donate five, $10, whatever you can, whatever you feel comfortable in.
Obviously, the left is going to come down on us like a ton of bricks.
And I suspect some of my fellow Republicans will too.
I've already heard some impolite things being said about me by others.
We're not going to do that.
We're going to run a positive campaign and just do what I can to represent the genuine wishes of the people of Missouri, not the interest of lobbyists or contributors.
And just go back to making the country what it was when we grew up, where people were free, people felt safe to walk the streets.
I don't know if you saw this video over the weekend of people dancing on top of the St. Louis police car.
But how can that happen in this country?
How can anybody feel safe in their homes if the population of the most dangerous city in the country, St. Louis, feel free to dance on top of a police car and the crowd is dancing and singing and having a great time, absolutely unafraid of any consequence.
Restoring Safety to Our Streets00:00:25
And that's, you know, out of chaos comes tyranny, and that's the game plan.
Well, I love it.
Well, thank you so much, Mark, for what you're doing.
And stay strong.
We have your back.
We deeply appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Erin.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com slash support.