Marionville Mayor Who ‘Agreed’ With Jewish Center Shooting Suspect Forced To Resign

The mayor of Marionville, Missouri, who was friends with Jewish center shooting suspect Frazier Glenn Miller, and said he “kind of agreed” with Miller’s anti-Semitic views, resigned his post Monday after just 11 days in office, as he faced an outcry from residents of the small community over his “vile and disgusting” remarks — which he made to multiple media outlets.

The shooting attacks that killed three people at a Jewish community center an Jewish retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas, April 13, were allegedly carried out by Miller, who in the 1970s and 1980s was one of the country’s most prominent neo-Nazis. Miller led a branch of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina and subsequently founded his own white supremacist hate group, the White Patriot Party.

Miller most recently lived just outside of Marionville. Now-former mayor Dan Clevenger, 59, who became mayor of the small city of just 2,225 told a local TV station that he was a “friend” of Miller, and that he shared at least some of Miller’s anti-Semitic opinions. But, “I don’t like to express that too much,” he said.

However, the mayor expressed enough to provoke the Marionville board of aldermen to vote for his impeachment.

“There’s some things going on in this country that are destroying us,” Clevenger told the TV station. “We’ve got a false economy and some of those corporations are run by Jews. The names are there.”

In a separate interview, with The Springfield News Leader newspaper, Clevenger said, “”The futures market, the federal reserve, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health — every time I see that on the news, there are Jewish names and they run things.”

At a public meeting in Marionville Monday night, an angry crowd of residents told the mayor that they no longer wanted him representing the community.

“The words that you spoke to the media, on numerous occasions, were vile and disgusting,” the city’s former mayor, Bob Duda told Clevenger. “I am asking you to step down.”

“We must show our neighbors, state, our nation and a global community our true, kind, caring, loving and accepting community,” said one resident, John Horner, who spoke at the meeting. “We simply cannot tolerate a public official who makes anti-Semitic comments.”

Clevenger was asked if the criticism from his fellow residents hurt, to which he replied, “Yes, it does.”

Though the mayor said he regretted writing an anti-Semitic letter to a newspaper 10 years ago, when given an opportunity by a local reporter to renounce his more recent comments, he cut off the interview, saying, “That’s it, we’re done.”

On Tuesdaym Clevenger turned in a letter to the aldermen saying simply, “I, Daniel R. Clevenger, do hereby resign as mayor of Marionville.”

But the Maronville mayor had his defenders at the meeting Monday. One, Gene Smith, told the residents at the meeting, “I have seen a lot more hatred from some of you people than I have seen out of Dan Clevenger. I thought we had free speech in America.”

But though he was outspoken in support of the Marionville mayor, when asked to pose for a photo Smith attempted to strike a reporter with a crutch.