Missouri’s Gubernatorial Ballot Will Feature an ‘Honorary’ KKK Member

A “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 a GOP candidate for governor on Missouri’s primary ballot this year. A state judge has ruled that Missouri’s Republican Party can only blame itself for allowing Darrell L. McClanahan III to gain ballot access, and has no legal recourse to terminate the “honorary” Klan member’s candidacy. The election is in August.

McClanahan is a controversial figure — but no stranger to GOP politics in Missouri. He ran, unsuccessfully, in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 2022. (He received fewer than 1,200 votes.) Not long after that race concluded, the Center on Extremism, a project of the Anti-Defamation League, published a dossier detailing the Republican’s links to white-supremacy groups, including a Ku Klux Klan chapter called the Knight’s Party, and the League of the South, a notorious organization for neo-Confederates. 

Breathing life into the public controversy, McClanahan then sued the ADL in federal court last year, alleging defamation and asserting the group had caused him “mental suffering,” “anguish,” and “injury to his name.” McClanahan served as his own legal representation in the matter, and the complaint he filed in court, ironically, stipulated that much of what the ADL had exposed was factual. 

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 notorious Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, from a “Pro-White perspective, denouncing Anti-Whiteism.” 

McClanahan also objected that the ADL had connected his “honorary membership” in the League of the South to that group’s political goals, protesting that he, himself, had never “advocated for Southern Secession or a White dominated South.”

A federal judge dismissed McClanahan’s suit “with prejudice” in December. The ruling declared that descriptions of McClanahan as “antisemitic, white supremacist, anti-government, and bigoted” were matters of opinion and not legally actionable. 

The judge also ruled that the ADL’s descriptions of McClanahan’s affiliations — as well as its publication of photo of McClanahan, as the judge described it, “standing in front of a burning cross alongside an individual in KKK regalia… giving the stiff-arm Nazi salute” — were not defamatory because they “substantially align with the truth.” (McClanahan has not responded to a Rolling Stone interview request.)

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

The Missouri GOP soon claimed that McClanahan’s ballot access was not consensual — tweeting that his “affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan… fundamentally contradicts our party’s values and platform.” McClanahan replied to this post asserting that “the Missouri GOP knew exactly who I am,” including when he ran for Senate in 2022, and that party officials now blasting him were “a bunch of Anti-White hypocrites.”

The state GOP first tried to refund McClanahan’s filing fee, before asking the Missouri secretary of state to terminate McClanahan’s ballot access. When that office countered it did not have legal authority to do so, the state GOP filed suit in state court in March. The Missouri State Republican Committee asserted, however implausibly, that it “was made aware of Mr. McClanahan’s disturbing racist and antisemitic history” in February. Further, it claimed that the party had been in a helpless position to prevent him from filing — asserting it has “virtually no ability to screen potential candidates.”

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

But last week, Missouri Circuit Court Judge Cotton Walker issued a scathing opinion, ruling that the Missouri GOP had “not properly pled and proven any constitutional violation” and would, instead, have to keep McClanahan’s candidacy on its ballot.

The judge ruled that the state party is “a sophisticated entity” that should have just followed its own policy of “rejecting filing fees from any candidate who has not completed a prescribed vetting process.” He rebuked the party for having “willingly created the very association of which it now complains,” insisting the supposed harm in question “only exists” because the state GOP “made the voluntary decision to accept filing fees, on two occasions, that McClanahan offered in accordance with Missouri law.”

Cotton ruled that GOP voters will now get to decide whether McClanahan’s pro-White platform reflects the party’s values. He insisted that the party “remains free to publicly disavow McClanahan” and any opinions it believes are “antithetical” to the state GOP. 

But he made the case that Missouri Republican primary voters will speak their own minds. “If the party’s voters eventually did choose McClanahan as their nominee,” Cotton wrote, “it could merely indicate that the plaintiff did not actually know, or correctly represent, the values or interests of its rank-and-file members.”