A Missouri official has asked the state Supreme Court to suspend the law licenses of Mark McCloskey and Patricia McCloskey, the armed St. Louis couple who confronted Black Lives Matter protesters outside their mansion last year.

Missouri governor Mike Parson announced last month that he had pardoned the couple after Mark McCloskey pleaded guilty in June to misdemeanor fourth-degree assault and was fined $750, while Patricia McCloskey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment and was fined $2,000.

Many in the political and media establishment have cast the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol as one of the darkest episodes in American history, comparing an episode in which one person was slain (a protester shot by police) to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Civil War, and the British sacking of the capital city in 1814. Seizing on the gravity of a mob trying to interfere with the process of recording Electoral College votes after a presidential election, Democrats impeached Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 breach and put him on trial in the Senate.

When Michael McQuarrie entered the George Floyd Square autonomous zone for the first time last year, he felt as if he was entering a freer, friendlier, and, in some ways, edgier America.

To some, the neighborhood had become the “Free State of George Floyd.” To him and many there, it proved more broadly that a community can not only function, but thrive, without police authority: that physical autonomy empowers citizens.

And then there were the gun shots.

Over the past year anti-racism protests have swept the United States, sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of now-convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Marches and protests spanned every U.S. state – a massive expression of public concern but also a movement perceived by some to be violent. 

In January Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona said Black Lives Matter “burns and loots,” for example. And in a Morning Consult poll 13 months ago, 42% of Americans said most protesters are trying to incite violence or destroy property.

They’re not controversial. It’s common sense. It’s something that everyone can agree with, but it blunts the messaging the progressive Left wants to echo about police and the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s like when the Left gets upset when people say that ‘most cops are good.’ The Left wants to destroy policing, liking it to slave patrols.

Many school districts across the country are in the grips of a full-blown moral panic, supposedly over something called "critical race theory" (CRT). Fox News has been blaring deranged propaganda about CRT for months. In Loudon County, Virginia (home to many Republican political professionals), angry conservatives deluged a recent school board meeting, and were so loud and disruptive that two were eventually arrested. Similar stories can be found in Maine, Texas, Pennsylvania, and many other states.

As protests surged across the country last year over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, Officer Lindsay C. Rose in Asheville, N.C., found her world capsized.

Various friends and relatives had stopped speaking to her because she was a cop. During a protest in June around Police Headquarters, a demonstrator lobbed an explosive charge that set her pants on fire and scorched her legs.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis, Missouri, couple that went viral after confronting Black Lives Matter protesters on their own front lawn, pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, Thursday, and agreed to turn over their personal weapons to St. Louis authorities.

Local news reports that the pair, who were originally charged with felonies, inked the plea deal with prosecutors earlier this month despite previously pleading not guilty. A judge approved the plea deal on Thursday.

A Minnesota man has been charged with intentional second-degree murder after driving while drunk into a group of people protesting police brutality, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.

Nicholas David Kraus, 35, purposefully accelerated into a barricade that was blocking off the street where the protesters were gathered Sunday night to protest the death of Winston Smith, a Black man killed by undercover sheriff's deputies on June 3, according to the complaint.