Source: Jack Benton / Getty
Earlier this month, we reported that the Missouri GOP was grappling with a white supremacist who made it onto the unofficial candidate filing list for governor posted to the Secretary of State’s website, and he may even appear on the official ballot. On Thursday, the party filed an official lawsuit to block the self-described “honorary” Ku Klux Klan member from running, because his candidacy would be an embarrassment to the party, which is kind of rich considering the demonstrable fact that Klan members, neo-Nazis and other assorted white nationalists flock to the modern Republican party like moths to a cross-burning flame.
Still, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Missouri Republican Party is being represented by GOP attorney Lowell Pearson in its bid to keep Darrell Leon McClanahan III, of Milo, Missouri, from tarnishing the Missouri GOP’s good name by running as a Republican, because, as the party stated two days after McClanahan filed to run for governor on Feb. 27, he “fundamentally contradicts our party’s values and platform.” (Seriously, they should tell the rest of the party that, because Klan members and Nazi affiliates feel as at home in the MAGA world as Black people do at the proverbial cookout.)
The lawsuit doesn’t only name McClanahan as a defendant, it also names Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft because he declined to take action and remove the not-so-closeted Klan member from the ballot for governor, which Ashcroft says he doesn’t and shouldn’t have the power to do.
From the Post-Dispatch:
JoDonn Chaney, spokesman for Ashcroft’s office, said Thursday there was no way for the secretary of state to remove McClanahan from the ballot absent a court order, McClanahan voluntarily removing himself, or an action by the Missouri Ethics Commission.
Ashcroft, in an interview Thursday, said “in my official capacity, I have no authority to remove someone from the ballot, and I should not have that authority.”
Ashcroft said that personally he believed it was incumbent on the party to go to court to remove a candidate from the ballot “when they have evidence to believe that someone is a racist or an antisemite.”
“I’m thankful that they have done that,” he added.
At the end of the day, if members of the Missouri GOP are successful in blocking the, again, self-described “pro-white man” from running, they would have only treated a symptom, not the disease. At some point, Republican conservatives are going to have to ask themselves what it is about the ideology of their party that makes white supremacists so comfortable. After all, McClanahan, the guy who described himself as a “pro-white man” who had “honorary memberships” in the Knight’s Party Ku Klux Klan and the League of the South also described himself as “the conservative voice for governor of Missouri” who is “dedicated to traditional Christian values” and opposes the “woke agenda.”
Name one prominent GOP member that this Klan member doesn’t sound just like. I’ll wait.
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