The city of St. Louis, Missouri has lost a quarter of its population in less than a century, and it s becoming a ghost town. Why is this happening? And how can the city survive it? In this episode, we talk with Mark McCloskey, an attorney, a great American, and a citizen of the city.
00:02:20.980The subject is a country right now with so many economic problems, so many societal problems.
00:02:28.180But when we look specifically at a city like St. Louis, to see what has happened to that city is just astonishing to me, and I'm sure to the audience of this podcast.
00:02:42.740It is unthinkable that it could just lose three quarters of its population and have no way forward right now that's at least obvious.
00:03:16.100There was a new entertainment district developed in downtown St. Louis over the last 20 or so years called the Washington Avenue Entertainment District.
00:03:23.780But it is such a war zone now, people won't go out.
00:03:26.900At night, the streets are controlled by roving gangs of armed young adults out there.
00:03:34.640They're basically street racing, shooting each other, and the cops just stand back and watch it happen.
00:03:40.000They put up the logic of the left, of course, is that people aren't responsible for what they do.
00:03:45.920Their vehicles are responsible for car accidents.
00:03:47.960Their guns are responsible for shooting, but the people are blameless.
00:03:51.900So instead of decreasing the level of violence, they put up road barricades to make the speeding less possible.
00:03:59.660And now, of course, you know, our illustrious mayor of St. Louis has decided that the way to reduce crime is to hold the businesses accountable that have crime in their parking lots, which is just absolutely amazing.
00:04:13.600And, you know, as you mentioned, St. Louis is a ghost town.
00:04:18.560My office is on something called Lindell Boulevard, which is not pronounced the same way as Mike pronounces his name, but spelled the same.
00:04:26.880But it's like Michigan Avenue in Chicago goes from my office straight downtown to the courthouse in the mayor, what used to be the core business district, but there isn't one anymore.
00:04:35.640You could lay down on Lindell Boulevard at nine o'clock in the morning and not get run over by a car.
00:04:41.160There's just nothing going on in the city of St. Louis.
00:05:18.260Where I live, the reason why I don't move, and I've got a nice country place about 45 miles west of here, and we've got our chickens and our vegetable garden.
00:05:29.240We're ready to go out there and have to live off the land if we have to.
00:05:32.440But I have a house here in St. Louis, which is not replaceable anywhere else.
00:05:37.180One of the things that I always say is one of the nice things about the decline of Western civilization is that a guy like me can afford to live in a house like I live in.
00:05:44.800And we've all seen your house, because of the Black Lives Matter harassment of you and your wife, with you and your wife out there with your weapons at the ready.
00:06:53.840$3 a square foot in St. Louis versus $1,000 in New York City.
00:06:58.280The largest office building in the world before the building of the Pentagon, the building in downtown St. Louis called the Railway Exchange Building.
00:07:04.900For most of my life, it was a headquarters for Famous & Bar, which was a department store later, Macy's.
00:07:22.940The bums, the homeless had broken in, stolen everything, started setting fires to it.
00:07:29.520The city condemned it and boarded it up.
00:07:31.380Here was the largest office building in the world for decades, which is now a board-up, condemned building in the heart of downtown St. Louis.
00:07:38.700And that's, you know, when you talk about people fleeing the city, why not?
00:07:43.720I mean, it's for the average person, you're faced with crime, a government that wants to protect the criminals against honest citizens instead of protecting the honest citizens against criminals.
00:07:58.600It is truly gut-wrenching to think of all that has transpired in St. Louis and in many other cities around the country.
00:08:06.980But all in the name of progress, we're looking at disaster.
00:08:12.280We're talking with attorney Mark McCloskey, and we're going to talk about what we see as the possible future for a number of cities, including St. Louis.
00:08:23.700Mark is a very smart fellow, as you've already discerned.
00:08:27.060We need to understand where these policies that lead to these kinds of desperate and dire and devastating consequences, where do they originate and why in the world are so many of them so popular in, well, many of the country cities that are on the same path as St. Louis?
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00:10:28.540We're talking with attorney, distinguished and well-known attorney, Mark McCloskey.
00:10:36.400We're talking about the travails of St. Louis, and that is an understatement.
00:10:42.440Frankly, it is a desperate situation that the city is just, I don't know.
00:10:49.080Mark, is St. Louis actually going to survive?
00:10:53.120Well, it depends on your definition of survival.
00:10:55.100Well, I genuinely believe, I mean, I've been living here most of my life.
00:10:59.180I took eight years going to college and law school in Texas and started practicing there.
00:11:03.080But the rest of my life, I've lived in St. Louis, and it's gone from being a great city.
00:11:07.620We had five of the largest defense contractors in the city of St. Louis and Monsanto and all kinds of major corporate entities, essentially none anymore.
00:11:18.240They used to make Corvettes in downtown St. Louis, not anymore.
00:11:28.240We haven't had a Republican administration in the city of St. Louis since 1949.
00:11:33.020But then it was mostly, you know, in the old days, Democrats weren't over communists.
00:11:37.620In the old days, Democrats had differing political philosophies, but you didn't get the impression that they were intentionally trying to destroy the country.
00:11:45.020I have come to the conclusion that all these places like St. Louis and Chicago and Baltimore and LA and San Francisco and New York, the people that run those cities actively want to destroy our civilization.
00:12:12.080There are some people that are so stupid out there, you can believe that they'd make these kinds of errors.
00:12:16.580My favorite example today, though, is I saw this right before we got on the air.
00:12:21.020City of San Francisco is floating an ordinance to make businesses give six months notice before they go out of business or their customers can sue them.
00:12:30.140OK, I plan on being broke in six months and I'm going to have to close down.
00:12:35.240And if I don't give you six months notice, you as a customer can sue me for the very reason I'm going out of business because I can't make a living in this crime infested.
00:12:45.140You know, I won't use the language that the president used about some other countries, but you know what I'm saying.
00:13:05.240What are all these decisions designed to do is to make small businesses untenable, to force them out of business, to make crimes such that they can't afford the security necessary to stay in business.
00:13:16.560In the grocery store across the street from my house here in the west end of St. Louis, you have to go and ask the clerk to unlock the laundry detergent because it's such a crime ridden area, the laundry detergent.
00:13:39.400And St. Louis is in a further state of decay than even San Francisco, but San Francisco is so obviously on precisely the same track as St. Louis, and we're seeing it across the Midwest.
00:13:55.220And yet there is no change in the policies, the attitudes, the values of the Marxist left in this country, the Marxist Dems.
00:15:02.200It's it's abandoned fields, burned out houses and empty fields.
00:15:05.840You know, it the and then the population that has fled from there has moved further out into the suburbs and and replicating the same situation that used to be here in North St. Louis.
00:15:16.340And so and the government, once again, instead of doing anything effective about controlling crime, is punishing the people who are the victims of crime, punishing the small business owners that are out there, you know, sacrificing their lives and their capital to try to make an improvement in their communities.
00:15:35.200And our mayor wants to hold them accountable for the crime that she is allowing to have happen.
00:15:40.460Fortunately, the police department of the city of St. Louis is going to be taken back over by the state of Missouri.
00:15:48.020It's been under the control of the city only since 2012 had been run by the by the state government because of the rampant corruption in St. Louis for a long time.
00:15:57.700City of St. Louis got control of its own police department again, I think, in 2012.
00:16:01.440But as of August 28th of this year, it's going back to being controlled by the state government for the for the very reasons we're discussing.
00:16:08.540St. Louis is incapable of governing itself.
00:16:12.460And and the power structure in St. Louis, I'm going to ask this this way, because whether it's Chicago, St. Louis,
00:16:21.400we are seeing a decidedly racial divide in those cities, whether that was the the predicate to what the conditions are today or whether it is the result of other forces that were to work over a long period of time.
00:16:38.420Right now, there is a strong, powerful implication of racial conflict at the bedrock of what is happening in these cities.
00:16:49.800Is that true or is that just an appearance?
00:16:53.240Every at least the powers that be want to sell the concept that everything is racist.
00:16:58.320And then but of course, it's all divide and conquer.
00:20:18.460He is, as I said, a terrific, great American.
00:20:23.800Let's talk about what we're witnessing right now in D.C.
00:20:27.780because it is certainly central to a lot of what ails us at every level of government and every part of our society.
00:20:35.020The Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, actually bucking the head of the party, that is, President Donald Trump, who said, kill the FISA bill.
00:21:04.200Well, he's either a damn fool or he's compromised or he's a liar.
00:21:09.780I mean, he takes over the Speaker's position after we get rid of Kevin McCarthy for basically just being a show for the Democrats.
00:21:19.480And he runs on a platform, essentially, of being a constitutional conservative against spending, against endless wars, in favor of the right of privacy and the integrity of our individual personal rights.
00:21:38.360He's going to try to pass $60 billion more for the endless war in Ukraine at a time when our own border is just open.
00:21:47.020And our government, United States government, is putting foreigners on airplanes, illegal aliens, flying them at your dollar and mine into the country and dispersing them without any kind of vetting, without any kind of background checks.
00:21:59.960Just doing everything which in any other country would be considered treasonous and it's going on and Mike Johnson is not doing anything about it.
00:22:08.720But the problem is you get elected to Congress and all of a sudden you become beholden to the power structure that's going to get you reelected.
00:22:47.720They get controlled by going out to nice dinner parties and smoking cigars and drinking scotch at nice clubs, going out to Martha's Vineyard and hobnobbing with ex-presidents.
00:22:57.580And they sell their soul for their political survival.
00:23:02.360And what this country needs is people going to Congress and going to the elected president, people like Donald Trump.
00:23:07.900That aren't doing it for their own self-aggrandizement.
00:23:10.860But doing it despite what it costs them personally, economically, socially.
00:23:15.200And what you need, this country is founded on the concept that Congress would come and meet from time to time when necessary.
00:23:22.100And there would be citizens who would give up their time and give up their lives to come for the benefit of their fellow man.
00:23:28.200Now we have professional politicians at every level, from the city of St. Louis to Jefferson City, our state capital, to Washington, D.C., where what we have is people that want to stay in their positions at all costs for as long as they possibly can.
00:23:43.580Not for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of the people, not to improve our society, not to preserve our culture and our freedom, but to preserve their position and the support of their lobbyists.
00:23:53.720And that's the crux of everything wrong, I think, with the country today.
00:23:57.260And I couldn't quibble with a word of what you've said.
00:24:01.540And I hope everyone really thinks about what you've said and takes it to heart.
00:24:08.180I'm sure that most people listening to you right now agree with you.
00:24:12.980We have also right now a government that is confounding because, and I was thinking about it as you were just talking, I don't believe, I believe that President Trump is the only president since, I think since Roosevelt, who has, or arguably Kennedy.
00:24:39.180But nonetheless, either Franklin Delano Roosevelt and or John Kennedy, they're the only two presidents that have any chance of being those who came in with more money than they left the Oval Office.
00:24:57.540We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:25:00.280We talk about Obama and we talk about Clinton.
00:25:03.100We're talking about pillaging from the Oval Office.
00:25:10.140And no one raises a hand, certainly not the FBI, certainly not any of the investigative agencies and committees of the U.S. Congress or Senate.
00:26:10.180But look at poor old Peter Navarro sitting in jail right now for doing no more than the job he was assigned to do and doing what the Constitution authorized and required him to do.
00:26:23.340And in the process, an illegitimate committee, a committee illegally formed, attacking the man and destroying President Trump's executive privileges, rolling back attorney-client privileges as well.
00:26:41.020That's the worst thing right there, that now that this government is requiring you, you get arrested.
00:26:47.260How are you going to get a lawyer to represent you when you know, A, that if you represent some guy like Donald Trump, they're going to prosecute you and try to pull your law license?
00:26:56.560And then if you do take on the representation, some bizarre leftist judge is going to use the crime fraud exception to require you to testify against your own client.
00:27:10.620I mean, I'd give up my law license in a second if some judge made me do that, because you cannot do that in good conscience and you cannot do it and be a lawyer.
00:27:18.900I mean, that is a very basic foundation of everything we hold near and dear in this profession.
00:27:24.680We don't have a judicial system anymore.
00:27:40.760I mean, if you stand up, there's only one unforgivable crime in America today, and that's standing up against the left.
00:27:46.400You can steal as much as you want to if you're in the power structure, but if you run against and look like you're going to win against the left, they will persecute you, they will prosecute you, and they will.
00:27:57.080I mean, some of these verdicts, like in the judge's decision against Trump in $454 million, $140 million in a jury verdict against Rudy Giuliani in favor of some nameless election judges who could not possibly have been defamed $140 million.
00:28:14.220It is a criminal enterprise from the top down run by the left to destroy the opposition.
00:28:22.200It's no different than the Soviet Union or Great China.
00:28:26.440Mark McCloskey, thanks for being with us here.