Bullies ascending
More on those wacky scamps who brandish guns at people who walk past their house:
When Rabbi Susan Talve heard that Patricia and Mark McCloskey would be among the speakers addressing the Republican National Convention, she decided she could no longer stay quiet.
“It’s so upsetting that they have a national audience,” Talve said. “It’s upsetting we make heroes out of people who hate.”
The McCloskeys are Talve’s neighbors. Their property’s northern wall abuts the property of St. Louis’ Jewish Central Reform Congregation, where Talve is the rabbi.
They’re not good neighbors.
In 2013, the synagogue placed beehives along the wall to produce honey for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. One morning they found the hives destroyed and all the bees dead. Mark McCloskey had taken an ax or sledgehammer to them.
His issue? The fence between them sat six inches inside the McCloskey’s property line. The hives were his to wreck.
He could have told them so, and asked them to remove the hives, but instead he destroyed the hives and the bees.
The synagogue maintains raised bed gardens on its property that supply some 2,000 pounds of fresh produce to a local food pantry, as well as pear, fig and apple trees.
Ah no wonder then. The McCloskeys won’t approve of that kind of thing. It’s SOcialism.
They were known to be assholes long before the gun-brandishing event.
They were locked in litigation to make their neighborhood association enforce a rule against unmarried couples residing there. Talve said they only cared because a gay couple had moved into the exclusive neighborhood.
Gays, Jews, bees – where does it all end???
By making Trump the face of the Republican Party, they have destroyed the veneer of civilisation which kept such behaviour at least partially in check and replaced it with overt permission to be as nasty as they like.
I keep hoping there’s such a thing as “peak Republican” — that there are multiple tipping points which inspire multiple someones in MAGA hats to put down their beers and goes “hey, wait … what?”
Maybe the Trump-supporting beekeepers are now out. That’ll sting.
Short response: what the FUCK business of theirs is that?
Longer response. They like Trump, though, so they must be good with adulterers, whoremongers and theives.
People who would kill thousands of bees like that are appalling – one feels there is nothing that such people would not do. There was a case in a few years ago Britain of some men, at night and in winter, breaking into a apiary, whose bees, as I recall, were of an ‘old English’ stock and fairly rare nowadays, and smashing every hive, so that all the hibernating bees froze to death. I don’t whether the perpetrators were caught. I hope they were. I find unimaginable that sort of malice, cowardice and vindictiveness. I imagine the McCloskeys did it at night, and probably in the winter.
When Rabbi Talve calls you out for being dipshits, you should probably take note. Just sayin’.
Tim,
I’m very unsettled by the bee-killing, too. It’s callous, it’s brutal and I’ve no doubt that he used the bees as tools to gleefully inflict pain on his human neighbours. I don’t think we even need to ask whether he’d have done the same thing if they were Christian bees.