#2683: Daniel Clevenger

Daniel Clevenger is the former mayor of Marionville, Missouri, a town of some 2300 inhabitants. Clevenger’s stint was brief, ending, in 2014, with him being pressured to resign after telling reporters he “kind of agreed” with Frazier Glenn Miller, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who shot three people to death at two Kansas Jewish centers. Clevenger described Miller – a Marionville local – as “a friend” and claimed that “there some things that are going on in this country that are destroying us. We’ve got a false economy and it’s, some of those corporations are run by Jews because the names are there.” Oh, yes: Anti-semitism is the glue that holds incoherent conspiracy rants together: “The fact that the Federal Reserve prints up phony money and freely hands it out, I think that’s completely wrong. The people that run the Federal Reserve, they’re Jewish”.

Clevenger turned out to have a rather substantial history of anti-semitism, of course, having previously accused “The Jew-run medical industry” of “destroying the United State’s workforce” and the “Jew-run government backed banking industry” of turning “the United States into the world’s largest debtor nation.” He was quick to point out that his remarks were not as racially insensitive as people might think, however: “Just because some people like running those corporations that are destroying us, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the race or religion or whatever is bad. I don’t stereotype.” Well, then.

Some local residents were naturally disappointed with what they perceived as Clevenger smearing the “good reputation” of Marionville, which is probably most famous for being Frazier Glenn Miller’s hometown. One might, in that context, be tempted to ask how Clevenger got elected as mayor of a town in the first place.

Diagnosis: Garbage all the way down. Clevenger may be out, but his ideas remain, for all their lack of coherence, frighteningly popular.