Trump, Barr Threaten Black St. Louis Chief Prosecutor—for Charging Couple Who Threatened Protesters

July 27, 2020 | revcom.us

 

Editors’ Note: What is revealed below, in Trump, Attorney General Barr, and others going after the Black St. Louis prosecutor, is part of a larger pattern of the fascist regime and its thugs going after local Democratic authorities who pose an obstacle to them or oppose their fascist moves and aims. This is also reminiscent of how during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, there was a concerted effort to go after Black elected officials by the Klan and defeated Confederacy forces. From all accounts, it seems there are sufficient grounds for the St. Louis prosecutor to charge this couple—and it is outrageous that all this venom and threats to her life, coming from the top levels of the federal government, including making calls to investigate her, have been addressed at the Black prosecutor for doing her job.

On June 28 in St. Louis, scores of protesters, Black and white, peacefully marched through a wealthy St. Louis neighborhood. They were confronted by a white couple—the McCloskeys—who pointed guns at them and shouted threats. Mark McCloskey had a semi-automatic rifle, Patricia McCloskey a pistol, with her hand on the trigger. Videos of the scene went viral.

Mark McCloskey loudly and falsely claimed the protesters were a violent mob of “terrorists,” and moaned “I really thought ... we’d be dead and the house would be burned.” This was utter bullshit, as videos of the scene showed—protesters chanting “Respect us” and calling for the mayor to resign, never moved towards the McCloskeys, or even onto their property.

A few days later, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, a Black woman, announced that her office would begin an investigation of the McCloskeys’ conduct. (She has since charged them with “unlawful use of a weapon/flourishing.”) Her announcement said she was “alarmed at the events that occurred over the weekend, where peaceful protesters were met by guns and a violent assault [referring to another St. Louis protest that weekend]. We must protect the right to peacefully protest, and any attempt to chill it through intimidation or threat of deadly force will not be tolerated.”

A Modern-Day Night Ride

Leading Missouri Republicans, including the governor, state attorney general, and a U.S. senator, immediately attacked Gardner. They asked the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a civil rights investigation of Gardner for “an unacceptable abuse of power and threat to the Second Amendment.” The governor told reporters that a representative of U.S. Attorney General William Barr informed him that Barr and Trump are “going to take a look” at the case.

Trump, in an interview with the fascist website Townhall, soon echoed the McCloskeys’ lies that they were the ones who had been threatened. “They were going to be beat up badly, and the house was going to be totally ransacked and probably burned down like they tried to burn down churches. And these people [the McCloskeys] ... were legal, the weapons. And now I understand somebody local, they want to prosecute these people. It’s a disgrace.”

Gardner said that after she announced her investigation into the McCloskeys, a note reading “I hope you hang from a tree” was put on her car. She has received numerous hateful, racist emails, including one saying “It is YOU who are the racist, unfairly targeting white McCloskeys for exercising their 2nd Amendment rights, while your people stormed their property. U really need to be run out of town you black b——!” As Gardner told the Washington Post, the attacks on her are a “modern-day night ride, and everybody knows it. And for a president to participate in it, in the larger context of racism and cronyism, is scary.”

Encouraging White Supremacist Violence

White supremacists, emboldened by the blatant white supremacist Trump/Pence regime, have been assaulting and murdering Black people across this country. A few of the more infamous examples from recent months: Ahmaud Arbery chased and murdered while jogging in Georgia; Vauhxx Rush Booker assaulted, beaten, and dragged through the woods by five men shouting “white power” in rural Indiana, until some people forced them to stop; Crystal Caldwell, a 59-year-old motel worker in Mystic, Connecticut, punched to the ground and kicked by two people who “repeatedly called her a ‘monkey.’”

The moves by Trump, his Department of InJustice, and the fascist Republican Party he leads against Kim Gardner are meant to embolden and encourage white supremacists everywhere to use violence against Black people and protesters any time they claim they feel “threatened,” and ensure them that they will have the backing of the federal government and its “Department of Justice.”

They are also part of what Revolution recently described as “... a serious campaign to clamp down on protests against police terror, and attempt to take over the authority for handling—”dominating”—protesters and other matters from Democratic-ruled local, state, and city governments...” They must be condemned and opposed, as people throughout the country continue to forge the powerful and beautiful uprising against police murder and brutality.