Judge Rules Missouri GOP Must Carry Klan-Linked Candidate's Term

“Pro-White” candidate. — who was photographed in 2019 giving a “Nazi salute” next to a man in Klan robes in front of a burning cross — will appear as the GOP candidate for governor on the Missouri primary ballot this year. A state judge has ruled that the Missouri Republican Party can only blame itself for allowing Darrell L. McClanahan III to gain access to the ballot and has no legal recourse to end the candidacy of the “honorary” Klan member. The elections are in August.

McClanahan is a controversial figure — but he's no stranger to Missouri GOP politics. He ran, unsuccessfully, in the 2022 Republican primary for US Senate. (He received fewer than 1,200 votes.) Shortly after that race ended, the Center on Extremism, a project of the Anti-Defamation League, published a folder detailing the Republican's ties to white supremacist groups, including a Ku Klux Klan chapter called the Knights Party, and the League of the South, a notorious neo-Confederate organization.

Fueling the public dispute, McClanahan sued the ADL in federal court last year, claiming the group had caused him “mental suffering,” “anguish” and “injury to his name.” McClanahan served as his own legal representative in the matter, and the complaint he filed in court ironically stated that much of what the ADL had revealed was true.

This included his “honorary 1-year membership” in Knight's Party, the KKK chapter. his attendance at what he called a “Christian Identity Cross lighting ceremony falsely described as a cross burning” in 2019; and his choice to write an article in the Klan group's newsletter, the Torch — in which he commemorated the second anniversary of the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, from a “pro-White perspective, denouncing Anti-Leviticus.”

McClanahan also objected that the ADL had linked his “honorary membership” in the League of the South to that group's political goals, protesting that he himself had never “advocated Southern secession or white supremacy in the South.” .

Federal judge he was fired McClanahan's “prejudiced” suit in December. The ruling stated that descriptions of McClanahan as “anti-Semitic, white supremacist, anti-government and bigoted” were matters of opinion and not actionable.

The judge also ruled that the ADL's descriptions of McClanahan's relationships — as well as its publication Photo of McClanahan, as the judge described it, “standing in front of a burning cross next to a person in KKK regalia … giving the Nazi salute” — was not defamatory because they “substantially align with the truth.” (McClanahan has not answered a Rolling rock interview request.)

The current drama with the Missouri Republican Party began in February, when McClanahan filed papers to run for governor on the Democratic Party ticket after paying and receiving a receipt for his party's candidate filing fee.

The Missouri GOP soon claimed that McClanahan's access to the ballot was not consensual — tweeting that his “affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan … is fundamentally at odds with our party's values ​​and platform.” McClanahan responded to that post by stating that “the Missouri GOP knew exactly who I am,” including when he ran for Senate in 2022, and that the party officials now blasting him were “a bunch of anti-White hypocrites.”

The state Democratic Party first tried to refund McClanahan's filing fee, before asking the Missouri Secretary of State to end McClanahan's access to the ballot. When that office countered that it had no legal authority to do so, the state GOP filed a petition suit in state court in March. The Missouri Republican State Committee claimed, improbably, that it was “made aware of Mr. McClanahan's troubling racist and anti-Semitic history” in February. He further claimed that the party was in a helpless position to prevent him from testifying – claiming he has “almost no ability to vet potential candidates”.

The lawsuit said the state GOP “does not want to be associated with Mr. McClanahan” and said it had a constitutional right to block his access to the ballot. Any decision to the contrary, the party insisted, would “force an undesirable relationship with Mr. McClanahan” and cause “irreparable harm” by violating the state GOP's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

But last week, Missouri District Court Judge Cotton Walker issued one scathing opinionruling that the Missouri GOP had “failed to properly plead and demonstrate any constitutional violation” and should instead keep McClanahan's nomination on its ballot.

The judge ruled that the state party is “a sophisticated entity” that should have simply followed its own policy of “rejecting filing fees from any candidate who has not completed a prescribed vetting process.” chided the party for “voluntarily creating the very association it now complains about,” insisting the alleged damage “exists only” because the state Democratic Party “made the voluntary decision to accept filing fees, on two occasions, offered by McClanahan under Missouri law.”

Cotton decided that GOP voters will now have to decide whether they are in favor of McClanahan's Whites platform it reflects the party's values. He insisted the party “remains free to publicly disavow McClanahan” and any views it believes are “contrary” to the state's Democratic Party.

But he argued that Missouri's Republican primary voters will have their say. “If the party's voters ultimately chose McClanahan as their candidate,” Cotton wrote, “it could simply indicate that the plaintiff did not really know, or did not properly represent, the values ​​or interests of its members.”