Nazi-loving anti-LGBTQ+ mayoral candidate pulverized in Tuesday’s election

On Tuesday, voters overwhelmingly rejected anti-LGBTQ+ Franklin, Tennessee, alderman and mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson (R). Hanson lost to 12-year incumbent Republican Mayor Dr. Ken Moore, with local NewsChannel5 reporting that Moore received 79.4% of the vote to Hanson’s 20.6%.

But Hanson – whose campaign was riddled with scandal – decided to go out with just one more blunder.

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As the election was underway on Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported that Hanson insisted that voting machines were malfunctioning, despite the fact that an election official said they were working fine. Hanson then tried to convince voters to commit a crime, posting on social media that they should take photos of their ballots before turning them in. She later deleted that part and replaced it with the following sentence: “Please take note of your ballot, and if you encounter this situation, [SIC] and tell a poll worker.”

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Williamson County Election Administrator Chad Gray told local Nashville news outlet NewsChannel5 that Hanson’s confusion about the voting machines was probably due to the fact that she skipped the tutorial on how the new machines work.

Hanson also reportedly banned the media from her election night party and charged $500 per ticket for those who wanted to attend, whereas Moore did not charge a fee at all.

Hanson’s campaign was riddled with controversy until the bitter end. Most recently, she doubled down on defending the Nazis and white supremacists who supported her campaign.

“I’m just going to tell you, from what I’ve seen, I do not see white supremacists, and I do not see Nazis,” Hanson reportedly said during a recent appearance on the conservative podcast Patriot Punkcast.

And yet, one of the people she was referring to, Brad Lewis, has said of himself: “I’m not a cuckservative, I’m an actual literal Nazi.” Lewis is a self-described friend of Hanson and a leader of the white supremacist group Tennessee Active Club, which accompanied Hanson to a candidate forum earlier this month.

Hanson invited the group to the event to provide security, and afterward she refused to apologize. “I’m 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,” Hanson said at the time. “We don’t discriminate in this community against anyone.”

According to NewsChannel5, Hanson also called Lewis “such a cool guy” since “he doesn’t care about what people think.”

In September, it was revealed that Hanson had pleaded no contest to promoting prostitution while she was a college student in Dallas and that she had used photos of strangers culled from social media to falsely portray them as members of an “executive committee” in support of her candidacy.

Hanson was also confronted with evidence her husband, a one-time Congressional candidate, campaigned in an American flag Speedo at Chicago Pride in 2008, with her encouragement. This is despite her anti-LGBTQ+ claims of “protecting children” from “sexualizing” behavior while opposing Pride in Franklin.

In another brewing scandal, a persistent critic of Hanson alleges the candidate has been complicit in death threats leveled at her by Hanson’s white supremacist supporters.

Hanson was voted onto the Franklin City Council two years ago with the backing of the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a Southern Poverty Law Center designated extremist group.