State GOP wants KKK invitee off ballot: Lawsuit

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Left to right clockwise: The Anti-Defamation League surfaced this photo of Darrell Leon McClanahan at a cross-burning circa 2019. (Photo provided by ADL)/ Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft speaks to reporters on June 29, 2022, at his Capitol office in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/David A. Lieb, File)/The Missouri State Capitol is seen Friday, Sept. 16, 2022, in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Clockwise from left: The Anti-Defamation League surfaced this photo of Darrell Leon McClanahan at a cross burning circa 2019. (Photo provided by ADL). Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft speaks to reporters on June 29, 2022, at his Capitol office in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/David A. Lieb, File). The Missouri State Capitol is seen Friday, Sept. 16, 2022, in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

A self-proclaimed “pro-White man” who once said he received an honorary membership to join the Ku Klux Klan is not someone the Missouri Republican State Committee says it should be constitutionally forced to associate with and according to a new petition, it has asked the state secretary to remove wannabe candidate Darrell Leon McClanahan III from the ballot in this year’s state gubernatorial race.

As Law&Crime previously reported, the Missouri Republican Party had declared that it would seek McClanahan’s ouster from the group of viable candidates. The party claimed it had become aware of McClanahan’s associations with the KKK and other hate groups like the League of the South only after he threw himself into the running.

“Based on the ease with which individuals can declare their candidacy, a political party has virtually no ability to screen potential candidates to determine the extent to which the party wants to be associated with a potential candidate. This difficulty is compounded on the first day of filing when hundreds of candidates file for office,” a petition from the committee to Missouri State Secretary Jay Ashcroft states.

The committee claims that it was only on Feb. 28 that it was “made aware of Mr. McClanahan’s disturbing racist and anti-Semitic history.”

According to the petition, this was including but not limited to:

[A] social media post stating ‘If you have nothing good to say about [racial slur] let’s be friends;’ multiple social media posts using Nazi imagery; a social media post stating: ‘White Power’ (using the pseudonym Gordon Kahl); [and] a photograph on social media showing Mr. McClanahan standing next to a person wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe, in front of a burning cross, with both persons raising their right arms in what appears to be a Nazi salute.

The Anti-Defamation League surfaced this photo of Darrell Leon McClanahan with Knights Party leaders Thomas and Jason Robb and at a cross burning circa 2019. (Photo provided by ADL)

The petition states McClanahan sued the Anti-Defamation League in civil court in August 2023 “where he made statements that he was provided an honorary membership with the KKK by Missouri Coordinator Brian Christian and that he was an honorary member of the League of the South.”

“Similarly, McClanahan freely wrote in that August complaint that he was a ‘pro-White man’ and that he wrote an article with a ‘Pro-White perspective denouncing Anti-Whiteism,”” the committee notes.

After the party publicly disavowed him, the committee say McClanahan responded with a letter.

Its attempt to remove him was “Anti-White Discrimination,” the petition states.

Nonetheless, the party says it returned McClanahan’s filing fee and then asked State Secretary Jay Ashcroft to remove McClanahan from the primary ballot.

But Ashcroft, the named defendant in the petition, has thus far refused.

“MRSC does not want to be associated with Mr. McClanahan. His racism and antisemitism are antithetical to beliefs of MRSC. MRSC’s right to not be associated with Mr. McClanahan is protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” the committee argued, pointing to U.S. Supreme Court precedent where it was declared that the right of non-association is constitutionally protected.

“Freedom of association would prove an empty guarantee if associations could not limit control over their decisions to those who share the interests and persuasions that underlie the association’s being. In no area is the political association’s right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee,’” the petition states, citing the 2000 case California Democratic Party v. Jones. [Bold in original]

The committee asked the court to issue a permanent injunction against any forced association with McClanahan and asked that he be enjoined from appearing on the Republican Party ballot for the governorship in 2024.

As for Ashcroft, he has reportedly refused to step in and though he did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday to Law&Crime, he told the Daily Mail on Sunday he felt he couldn’t step in to strip McClanahan’s name off the ballot because it would be “too much authority to have in one person’s hands.”

“I don’t want members of the Ku Klux Klan that are associating with the Republican Party … they believe different things than I do,” Ashcroft said on March 24.

But he added: “‘I wish that we had processes to vet candidates to make sure that this wouldn’t happen. But I am glad that they are going to court to make sure that he will not be a representative of the Republican Party on the ballot.”

Notably, Ashcroft led a coalition of 10 secretaries of state in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting former President Donald Trump’s bid to stay on the presidential primary ballot in Colorado. Despite lower court findings that Trump engaged in an insurrection, typically a disqualifying factor under Section III of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court left Trump on.

Ashcroft has also baselessly accused President Joe Biden of committing an insurrection, The Hill reported in January. The accusation was made during a tense interview on CNN. The state secretary is a well-known conservative, having also successfully led an effort in Missouri to implement a law requiring libraries to adopt a controversial obscene material policy in order to receive funding, ABC affiliate KMBC reported last May.

A representative for the state committee nor McClanahan immediately returned a request for comment Monday.