Mark McCloskey of St. Louis, Missouri is the kind of guy for whom many of our readers would harbor a deep-seated animus, though he has now achieved a moment of infamy for something he and his wife were 100 percent correct in doing.

It was McCloskey who alighted from the side porch of his palatial $1.15 million manse in the exclusive gated Portland Place neighborhood, rifle in hand, to challenge a mob of “mostly peaceful” protesters who had broken down the gate and were charging up his street to “demonstrate” at the home of that city’s mayor, you see. Upon that action McCloskey and his wife Patty instantly became the face of the terrified White People Of Privilege, the panicked homeowners making a show of deadly force to protect their unfairly-won filthy lucre from the Black Lives Matter movement intent on redistributive justice by any means necessary.

McCloskey has been characterized as your typical right-wing gun-nut loon, though any Second Amendment afficionado could look at the video of his challenge to the protesters, and particularly that of Patty (for a minute you might be tempted to think her pistol is a wine glass based on how she’s holding it) and conclude no dyed-in-the-wool Republican would show that kind of atrocious muzzle discipline.

In fact, he’s a personal injury and criminal defense lawyer. McCloskey is one of Those Guys.

An Open Secrets search shows he’s an equal-opportunity political donor — there are contributions to both Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in the past, but also to ActBlue, which is difficult to reconcile.

And at his LinkedIn, McCloskey describes his firm’s mission as…

We have focused our practice on the representation of individuals suffering brain/head injury, spinal cord injury, birth injuries, and all other serious injuries as the result of the negligence of others for over 29 years. If you have suffered devastating injury or the loss of a loved one as the result of car wrecks, airplane crash, medical errors, dangerous or defective products or machines, explosion, fire, falls, or through any other causes, let us help you put your lives back together. ‘If it wasn’t your fault, why are you paying for it?’

Depending on what state you live in, this is a guy you’d expect would (1) advertise on television or (2) be known as a Democrat politico. As it happens, McCloskey told St. Louis TV station KSDK that he’s a Friend Of The Downtrodden…

I do civil rights cases. Right now, I’m representing a young man who was assaulted by the police who is sitting in prison right now for being involved in a car accident after which the police came in and assaulted him. It’s on video. I’m not some kind of extreme, you know, anti- Black Lives Matter guy. I do these cases. I have been doing them for decades. I mean, I have on the wall of my conference room, I’ve got an anti-slavery broadsheet, the abolitionist broadsheet from 1832. It’s been there as long as I’ve owned this building. I mean, I’m not I’m not the enemy of people that really care about the Black lives, but I’m apparently the enemy of the terrorists and the Marxists that are running this organization.

We call that the Red Pill. There’s a pretty good chance this guy’s donations to ActBlue are kaput.

Why? Because he’s catching death threats, he’s had to turn off his home and office phones, he’s being villified on social media and there are demands for his arrest. And there is this…

Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner said in a statement an investigation into the incident is ongoing. Gardner said, ” I am alarmed at the events that occurred over the weekend, where peaceful protestors were met by guns and a violent assault. 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.”

She added, “My office is currently working with the public and police to investigate these events. Make no mistake: we will not tolerate the use of force against those exercising their First Amendment rights, and will use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable.”

McCloskey won’t be charged with anything. If he is, he’ll immediately sue the city and he’ll win. This Kim Gardner is reminiscent of the wormy assistant district attorney Jed Kramer in Brian DePalma’s film The Bonfire of the Vanities, played by Saul Rubinek, whose actions in railroading Tom Hanks’ McCloskyesque character reek of “steam control.” That there is no corpse in this case, only a few seconds of dramatic cell-phone video, doesn’t lessen the level of farce here.

But “steam control” works both ways.

Buy a million dollar house on a private street in an exclusive gated community, and you’ve purchased the right not to have mobs of idiots parading in front of your house shouting obscenities and threats. And yet while the soyboys of Antifa seem to have less vim and vigor than advertised when it comes to playing suburban commando with their demonstrations, this does not appear true of the increasingly bold Black Lives Matter gang.

Not that there is much difference between the two. Both Antifa and Black Lives Matter are explicitly Marxist revolutionary organizations making absurd demands for the voluntary destruction of American law, economics and culture. And a Mark McCloskey buys himself no indulgences by having taken on a civil rights case or two. The revolution has no allies, you see; only participants and enemies, whether current or future.

One gets the impression that if the weak urban Democrat leaders continue to allow the kind of lawlessness which took hold at Portland Place over the weekend, there will be more of these incidents.

A lot more.

And what you will see is neighborhood watches and homeowners’ associations starting to become local militias, out of a lack of faith that police, whether defunded or defanged by the weak urban Democrat leadership of a St. Louis, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Chicago or whatever other locale, will keep the animals from the front stoop.

Should the next Mark McCloskey end up in a firefight, or get overwhelmed by the mob and lose teeth, or an eye, or his life, the formation of the neighborhood militias in suburbs and well-to-do urban enclaves like Portland Place is inevitable.

And as these incidents escalate, instead of one guy who shows up with a rifle to defend his house there will be 20 guys with rifles who stand at the gate of the subdivision, and the odds of one of the 20 losing his nerve and opening up as the rioters threaten and taunt him will become far greater.

That is how you get a REAL riot and REAL civil unrest.

What we’ve had so far is not quite real civil unrest. So far the action has been one-sided, with Marxist revolutionary agitators attempting to provoke a response and getting little in return, which is why Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey brandishing shootin’ irons at the mob generated so much attention.

But what happened in St. Louis over the weekend is the precursor of that response, and it will turn American cities into Baghdad.

It’s time for law enforcement to rediscover its teeth, and for the pathologically feckless, if not treacherously hostile, urban Democrat leadership, to stop persecuting their own protectors. Or if they won’t, it’s time for states and the federal government to do the job for them.

Fail to regain control of the streets and the whirlwind will come, because there are millions of Mark McCloskeys out there, and their steam is rising.

*****

As a postscript, over the weekend there was also an incident which could well have become a Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, or George Floyd but thankfully did not. In Alexandria, Louisiana on Saturday night a trio of morons, two of them black men and one a white woman, sat in a car blaring rap music in the parking lot of Rapides Regional Medical Center. The music was disturbing hospital patients, and the police were called. The three were instructed to turn it down so the sick could sleep, and they did — briefly. But when complaints persisted about the loud music, a police officer instructed them to leave or they would be arrested.

They didn’t leave, a level of a-holery which gave the cop no choice but to arrest them. And when he tried to put the cuffs on 20-year-old Jonathan Rhodes, the latter resisted. And as the officer grabbed Rhodes’ bright-orange Sideshow Bob-style hair, Rhodes spun away from him, decked him with a hard punch and then fell upon him raining blows to his face. Rhodes even unholstered the officer’s gun before bystanders intervened to stop the conflict from becoming deadly, and another officer arrived to tase Rhodes and effect the arrest.

And according to the internet, Jonathan Rhodes is a hero. A race-hustler from Los Angeles paid his bail. Offers of sex were made public on Facebook.

That isn’t a standard by which a society can survive. Regular Americans will not stand for it much longer. Something terrible is coming.