Mayor of Kansas shooter’s hometown: I agree with his views
Dan Clevenger, who once called himself a friend of Frazier Miller, accuses Jews of destroying country
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
The mayor of Marionville, Missouri, hometown of the suspect in the weekend’s fatal shootings outside two Jewish sites in suburban Kansas City, said this week that he agreed with some of Frazier Miller’s views on Jews.
“I kind of agreed with him on some things but I don’t like to express that too much,” Dan Clevenger said Monday in an interview with Springfield, Missouri’s KSPR news.
“There’s some things going on in this country that’s destroying us,” said Clevenger, who also owns a repair shop in Marionville. “We’ve got a false economy. And it’s some of those corporations, are run by Jews, cause the names are there.”
Almost a decade ago, Clevenger called himself a friend of Miller’s in an anti-Semitic letter to a local newspaper.
“I’m a friend of Frazier Miller helping to spread his warning,” he wrote in an October 26, 2004 letter to the Aurora Advertiser.
“The Jew-run medical industry has succeeded in destroying the United States work force,” Clevenger continued. “That is why our factories left.”
He added that the medical industry “made a few Jews rich by killin’ us off.”
Despite Clevenger’s anti-Semitic views and his friendship with the alleged shooter, he called for the death penalty for Miller.
“It was shocking he would do something like that, but knowing him and how much was built up inside of him that, you know, I can understand why he would be the one to do that. I think it’s terrible what he did. He didn’t have any right to do that. And I think he should pay with his life.”
Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, is a 73-year-old Vietnam War veteran from southwest Missouri who founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in his native North Carolina and later the White Patriot Party.
Miller remained jailed Wednesday. It was unclear when formal charges would be filed against Miller, who shouted “Heil Hitler” at television cameras as he was arrested. Officials said Monday that a federal grand jury is expected to consider what investigators are calling a hate crime.
After a 1986 contempt-of-court conviction in North Carolina for operating a paramilitary camp, Miller went into hiding while free on bond and fled to Missouri. There, federal agents found him and several other men in a rural mobile home stocked with hand grenades, automatic weapons and thousands of bullets.
Indicted on weapons charges and accused of plotting robberies and the assassination of SPLC founder Morris Dees, Miller served three years in federal prison but avoided a longer sentence in exchange for testifying against more than a dozen other KKK leaders.
His move to southern Missouri placed him in terrain familiar to those who monitor hate groups. The Ozarks region has long been home to supremacist figureheads and their followers, and Miller’s profile prompted the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights to highlight him during a presentation for FBI and other law enforcement officials earlier this year, said Devin Burghart, the group’s vice president.
Miller’s cooperation with law enforcement has left him on the margins within a movement he’s been part of for decades, Burghart said.
Burghart said his group made a presentation on white supremacists to the Jewish Community Center in August, a discussion that included a description of Miller as an example of dangerous anti-Semitic figures in the region. It wasn’t clear what, if any, steps were taken by the center to act on the information.
Before the shootings, Miller had been contemptuous of some of his like-minded allies’ reliance on social media over violent confrontation, Burghart said.
“He felt it was easy to be a ‘keyboard commando,’ but that the only way activists will ever succeed is by going out on the streets,” Burghart said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
