Middle Tennessean voters have soundly rejected a mayoral candidate who refused to to denounce the support of neo-Nazis in a poll that drew four times as many voters than in a similar ballot four years earlier.
Gabrielle Hanson’s bid to become mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, had been dominated in its final months by controversies. Those included an investigation in September that revealed she had posted a photo of a group of women she claimed to be supporters, though at least one later said she had no idea who the candidate was.
In another controversy, Hanson was found to have admitted she had pleaded guilty to a charge of promoting prostitution in the 1990s.
But it was her refusal to disavow the support of neo-Nazis that drew national attention after Hanson blamed the town’s leadership for creating fertile ground for extremist views propagating in the region.
“You planted seeds for years and years against our citizens, and they are coming to harvest,” she told a forum earlier this month. “I just happened to arrive at a time when everything was starting to crumble.”
At the forum, Hanson acknowledged that she was in contact with neo-Nazis and blamed an anti-fascist presence for their attentions.
“They were here because they are an anti-antifa group and the dark web is showing massive antifa activity,” Hanson continued. “I am not going to denounce anybody their right to be whatever it is that they want to be, whether I agree with what they do in their personal life or not.”
Rather than reject neo-Nazis, Hanson said she was in no position to stop them from attending “because they were concerned about what they saw on the dark web”. But, she added: “I said, ‘Please do not make a scene if you are going to come.’”
Hanson also claimed she had had a premonition about the Nashville Covenant school shooting earlier this year – “it could be a Holy Spirit thing, but I felt an active shooter coming,” she said – and sent an email to Nashville international airport that criticized donations it had made in support of a Juneteenth celebration.
In the closing days of the mayoral race, a photo posted on Telegram showed Hanson sitting next to Sean Kauffmann, head of the Tennessee Active Club, considered an antisemitic and white supremacist group. Members of the group were later accused of vandalizing the offices of the local Williamson Herald newspaper.
But on Tuesday, Hanson lost her bid for Franklin mayor to incumbent Ken Moore, who won 80% of the vote. Moore, the Tennessee Lookout reported, was helped by turnout. Some 16,209 ballots were cast compared with a mayoral contest in 2019 that received just under 3,500 voters.
“I don’t think the battle with some of these folks is over, [but] I think we’ve started to win the battle even more,” Moore said in a victory address. The people of Franklin, he continued, had said “we like what we have … We’re not going to let people come in and tear down what people have been doing for 40 years to make this a great city.”
