Depending on how a court case shakes out, anyone hoping to run as a Republican in one Missouri county may first need to submit to vetting by members of a far-right church known for its ties to the white identity movement and domestic terrorism.
Vernon County, in the southwestern part of the state bordering Kansas, is one of a handful of Missouri counties whose Republican party has instituted the process of candidate vetting, wherein individuals who want to appear on the ballot as Republicans need to first complete a morals survey and have their criminal and financial records scrutinized by county committees.
In Vernon County, that potentially means some pretty unsavory characters doing the scrutinizing.
That's because within the ranks of the Vernon County Republican Committee are several members of the Church of Israel, an organization based in Schell City that has been labeled an extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League.
According to the ADL, the church's founder and head pastor Dan Gayman, now in his 80s, has long been a thought leader of the Christian Identity movement and helped popularize what is called the two seedline theory, an influential belief in that extremist sphere that contends Jews are the cursed offspring born from a union between the Biblical Eve and the devil. A national leader of one of the largest Ku Klux Klan factions in the U.S. has sat on the church’s board of directors. And Gayman has espoused other explicitly racist views, including being quoted in the Kansas City Star asking rhetorically, "What has any colored person ever invented?"
But church members are not persona non grata in every corner of Vernon County politics.
"They are amazing patriots," says Cyndia Haggard.
Haggard is the Vernon County Republican Committee chairwoman and one of the leading activists behind the effort to make the vetting of Republican candidates the norm in all 114 counties across Missouri.
She confirmed to the RFT that there are members of the Church of Israel on the central committee, and that Gayman is among them.
She tells the RFT she "could not care less" what a church was up to in the 1950s and that if you look closely enough at any religion or specific church, you're likely to find things you don't like.
But with the Church of Israel, you don't have to look too closely to find something many will object to, and you certainly don't have to go back to the 1950s to do so. Gayman is spry and still preaches regularly at his church, which has posted his and hundreds of other sermons given from the pulpit there on video streaming site Rumble.
The RFT spent about half an hour viewing them and even in that short time saw plenty of cause for alarm: in a video from last year, Gayman encourages single men to "find a good, godly Christian woman of our faith and our racial heritage" to start a family with; in a video from nine days ago, a speaker at the church labeled interracial marriage as a sexual perversion along with sodomy and pornography; in a video posted six months ago, another pastor at the church said that for reasons of "ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or racial bonds," the U.S. fighting the Nazis in Europe had been a bad idea.
Gayman's extremist bona fides have long been well-known. Eric Rudolph, who perpetrated the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, had ties to his church. Prior to that, a 1980 Kansas City Star expose on Gayman and his church was headlined: "Church in the woods: Hideout or school of hatred?" He insisted to the reporters of the piece that he and his congregation "do not wish to broadcast our beliefs," claiming they merely wanted to be left alone from the government and "cosmopolitan America."
But as a member of the county Republican committee, he’s not walling himself off from the government; he’s seeking to shape it.
It's unclear how many members of the county committee that vets candidates are members of the Church of Israel. Multiple Vernon County residents say that Haggard has refused to disclose the identities of everyone on the committee. She would not provide a list to the RFT either, and would only say that there are more Church of Israel members on the committee than just Gayman. Gayman's daughter is on the ballot for the upcoming committee race, as are two others who appear to be his relatives.
More broadly, the practice of candidate vetting is currently in place in Christian, Franklin, and a handful of other Missouri counties. Critics say that the practice delegates too much power to the Republican Association of Central Committees of Missouri, for which Haggard is a founding director.
More moderate elements in the state GOP hope vetting dies an early death.
"This is an effort started by a radical, Cyndia Haggard, who has no concern or care for the long-term trajectory of the Missouri GOP," one GOP insider tells the RFT. "[Candidate vetting] is about a fringe of the party trying to dominate the majority."
He adds, "The inmates are trying to run the prison."
Among Vernon County Republicans, the issue of vetting has led to a civil war of sorts, with a lawsuit underway seeking to boot off the ballot eight candidates for office, including four incumbents, who refused to get vetted.
St. Louis attorney Mark McCloskey is representing Haggard and the pro-vetting crowd in their lawsuit against County Clerk Adrienne Lee, who put the eight unvetted candidates on the ballot despite Haggard and Co. deeming them insufficiently pure.
McCloskey and Haggard scored an early win in the suit on Wednesday at a hearing in Vernon County, which was attended by Gayman and other church members. Lee has until April 23 to tell the judge presiding over the case why she should not have to remove the unvetted names from the ballot. Absent good cause, her preliminary order will have them stricken.
McCloskey is a big booster of candidate vetting, with videos of him posted all over the website for the Republican Association of Central Committees. He says he hopes to see the practice adopted statewide.
The former Senate candidate says he's never heard of the Church of Israel, and suspects that neither have any of the high-profile Republican candidates and office holders who support the concept — people like Bill Eigel, Jay Ashcroft, Andrew Bailey and Will Scharf.
"This is just more extreme left-wing red meat you're going to throw out there for your captive audience of left-wing red-meat eaters," he says of this story.
Ironically, one of the primary arguments put forth by the pro-vetting crowd is that a vetting process would have saved the state party the embarrassment of having people like Darrell McClanahan III get on the primary ballot for governor.
McClanahan is the former (honorary) KKK member who, despite being photographed giving the Nazi salute in front of a burning cross, made it onto the GOP primary ballot for governor. The state party has filed a suit trying to boot him off.
McClanahan just so happens to live in Vernon County, population 19,000, and was at the court hearing last Wednesday. He even snapped a photo of Haggard speaking with Gayman, sporting a Trump hat, outside the courtroom, which he then sent to the RFT.
The RFT asked Haggard a question by text message: Does she worry her argument that vetting would keep KKK members off the ballot is undercut by the fact that Gayman and other Church of Israel members are vetting candidates in her home county?
She called the question "despicable" and this story a hit piece.
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