Nazis bullied a conservative Tennessee town. Locals punched back. Trump should be worried.
One missing element — Nazis.
A coalition of neo-Nazi groups had threatened to march Sunday on Franklin after interjecting themselves in the city’s recent mayoral election, which descended into ever-increasing depths of strangeness as far-right candidate Gabrielle Hanson embraced them and amplified their conspiracy theories.
But throughout the afternoon, as police cruisers circled the roundabout near City Hall, and undercover officers with earpieces scanned the public square and cradled cameras with telephoto lenses from the top of a public parking garage, no Nazis showed themselves.
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Their absence — like Hanson’s overwhelming defeat earlier this month — served as a silent victory for democratic principles and political moderation in this Tennessee city that’s emerged as ground zero in conservative communities’ often awkward fight against right-wing extremism.
Indeed, the cultural contradictions of America in the era since MAGA has taken a stubborn hold on national politics are contained in Franklin, which is part of the region anchored by Nashville.
While Nashville is the undisputed capital of country music, Franklin has become a hub of the Christian music recording industry, and the region has attracted a growing roster of conservative influencers such as Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh.
As such, Franklin, one of the wealthiest cities in the country, plays a crucial role in American mythmaking. While Democratic-leaning Nashville recently elected a progressive mayor, the far right has targeted Franklin and surrounding Williamson County.
America’s cultural contradictions in microcosm
Franklin’s contradictions can be seen in the Confederate monument that soars from a tall plinth at the center of the public square, commemorating the city’s role as the site of a historic battle near the end of the Civil War. It’s offset by a less prominent bronze sculpture of a Black soldier to tell a more complete story about the city’s history by recognizing the contributions of the United States Colored Troops who helped repulse the Confederate advance.
A girl studies the history of the Civil War in Franklin at the U.S. Colored Troops monument on the city's public square. Jordan Green/Raw Story
On weekends, the two-block stretch of downtown Franklin billed by a local foundation as “America’s favorite Main Street district” is chock-a-block with youthful buskers plying a fresh-scrubbed version of Americana that includes fiddle tunes, folk songs and contemporary country music. This past Saturday, teenagers in town for a religious retreat roamed through downtown to evangelize, and they mobbed one of the buskers, a college student, who was taking a break after playing a song by LGBTQ-friendly country artist Tyler Childers.
But social tensions in Franklin are real, culminating last month with Hanson’s neo-Nazi-backed campaign. These tensions also foreshadow a kind of conflict that could rock most any red-leaning corner of the United States ahead of the 2024 presidential election, when Democratic President Joe Biden is likely to face a rematch with former Republican President Donald Trump.
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While the local election in Franklin, along with the recent off-year elections in Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia, have handed Trump and the GOP a succession of defeats, both Trump and neo-Nazis organizing in Middle Tennessee have embraced increasingly violent rhetoric. Trump, with four criminal trials in the next many months, even continues to embrace the policy positions of these right-wing extremists on issues such as immigration, elections and political opponents. And as became clear on Jan. 6, 2021, ahead of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump sometimes embraces the extremists themselves.
More recently, during his Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire on Nov. 11, Trump vowed that, if reelected, he will “root out… the radical left thugs that live within the confines of our country.” On the same day, the neo-Nazis led by the coalition that embraced Hanson’s unsuccessful mayoral candidacy staged a flash rally at the Tennessee state capitol in Nashville, and posed for a photo in front of the monument to Andrew Jackson, the former American president responsible for the forced removal of the Cherokee people from east of the Mississippi resulting in thousands of deaths from hunger, sickness and exhaustion. (As president, Trump hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office.)
A neo-Nazi flash rally and fight club meetup
At first, it seemed as if Nazis would indeed attempt to spoil Franklin’s bucolic Sunday afternoon — and worm their way back into the city’s civic discourse after Hanson’s overwhelming defeat.
For weeks, they had been circulating a digital flier headlined “March of the Tristar Legionnaires” that named Franklin and the date Nov. 12. The flier was otherwise vague on the time and location. But a flash rally in Nashville on Saturday offered one clear indication of trouble.
And Brad Lewis, a 51-year-old self-described “actual literal Nazi,” hosted on Saturday at the Lewis Country Store — a Nashville gas station equipped with a private gym —about 25 members of the neo-Nazi groups Vinland Rebels and White Lives Matter, as well as so-called “active clubs” from Tennessee, Alabama and Ohio.
Lewis had previously warned that local journalists will be killed in a violent purge known as the “day of the rope.” Writing on Telegram, he proclaimed without evidence that “there is no stopping this train now. No deals. No mercy.”
He went on to say that left-wing political enemies, whom he falsely described as “murdering, child molesting degenerate communist cock suckers” will “get everything you deserve and then some.”
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As it turned out, the Nashville gathering was the main event, and not a warm-up for Franklin.
The neo-Nazis did not explain their absence, but Lewis hinted at dissension within the ranks in a Telegram message on Tuesday in which he said that “it saddened me to hear that certain factions of our movement weren’t allowed to participate in our events with us this past weekend.”
Two days after Hanson lost her election by garnering only roughly 20 percent of the vote compared to 80 percent for her opponent, incumbent Mayor Ken Moore, the 30-year-old Kauffmann had boasted on Telegram that he was preparing to “open a new chapter of struggle with the Active Club Crew on the streets to fight the commie foot soldiers who up to now have had minimal resistance.”
City leaders took the threat seriously. And there certainly would be no invitation, directly or indirectly, to extremists bent on causing trouble.
“We’re a very safe community,” Moore told Raw Story last week. “We have a very good police force. We’re prepared.”
The Franklin-Nazi connection
Kauffmann launched the Tennessee Active Club in the fall of 2022, he quickly positioned it at the center of a coalition of other neo-Nazi and far-right groups by using provocative Nazi symbols and gestures while fielding members to intimidate drag shows at a time when state legislation banning gender-affirming care for minors was pending.
Kauffmann stepped into the arena of neo-Nazi organizing with a reputation for violence because of his history of participation in an online community known as “Terrorgram” for its valorization of white supremacist mass murderers as “saints” and for his arrest on a disorderly conduct charge for allegedly attempting to assault Black Lives Matter protesters in Tennessee in 2020.
Kauffmann’s group distinguished itself in the rapidly growing network of so-called active for its open embrace of bigotry and violence. Like other active clubs, Kauffmann’s crew is built around the idea of bringing together young, white men for martial arts training, coupled with strident propaganda promoting the false claim that white people are endangered as a result of racial diversity.
Tennessee Active Club leader Sean Kauffmann gives a Hitler salute during a protest outside a drag show in Cookeville, Tenn. earlier this year. Courtesy of Josh Brandon
But unlike its more optics-conscious counterparts, the Tennessee Active Club unapologetically promotes neo-Nazi ideology, with members displaying swastika flags, giving Hitler salutes and yelling racial and homophobic slurs at rallies.
The Tennessee Active Club began using the upstairs gym at Lewis Country Store in Nashville this past spring for hand-to-hand combat training, further solidifying Middle Tennessee as a hub for neo-Nazi organizing by hosting meet-ups with Nazis from as far away as Ohio and Alabama. Meanwhile, Lewis had developed a friendship with Hanson, a realtor and at the time a Franklin alderman because she was the listed agent when Lewis Country Store was put on the market.Hanson has described Lewis as “an absolutely great person” and “such a cool guy.”
Following a public furor over Lewis and Kauffmann’s appearance at a candidate forum held at City Hall in Franklin in early October, Hanson refused to denounce the two men and their fellow neo-Nazis.
Instead, she issued a press release that prominently featured statements by Tennessee Active Club and posed for a photo with Kauffmann at a taping in which he was interviewed by one of Hanson’s campaign supporters. While Hanson doubled down during the final days of the campaign by flaunting her relationship with the white supremacists, voters turned out in droves to reject her at the polls, with turnout soaring by more than 300 percent compared to the last mayoral election.
“The community said, ‘No,” and it was with capital letters,” Moore, the mayor, told Raw Story last week. “We’re an inclusive community that wants everybody to enjoy the quality of life that we have here. We don’t accept antisemitism and hate in our community.”
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Since losing her bid for mayor, Hanson has predictably leveled unsubstantiated and false claims of election fraud, following a path forged by Trump in 2020, along with Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in 2022.
With Trump using his platform as the leading GOP candidate to amplify election denialism, Hanson’s false claims of election fraud — by extension undermining the legitimacy of democratic governance — are unlikely to fade from public discourse.
Hanson, who participated in a charismatic tent revival in which an evangelist declared that she was “anointed to be the mayor,” used martial language in her campaign. Referencing the famous Civil War battle, Hanson described the mayoral election to conservative podcaster Jeremy Slayden as being “like the next battle of Franklin.”
“This is much larger and has much more significance, not only to Franklin, but to our state and potentially our nation,” Hanson told Slayden. “Williamson County has been in the top 10 wealthiest counties in America for years. Franklin is the county seat. If they topple Franklin, they can take the rest of the country. If they can take Williamson County, they can take our state. And it’s pretty much over for our nation.”
Along with opposing multifamily housing and policies to promote urban density in Franklin, Hanson had vocally opposed “racial terror markers,” her phrase to describe official acknowledgments of lynching incidents that were carried out against African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.
Earlier this year, the city’s ethics commission recommended that Hanson be censured for lobbying the president and CEO of the Metro Nashville Airport Authority to withdraw funding for a local Juneteenth celebration, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.
During the Juneteenth celebration that took place the previous year, masked members of White Lives Matter encircled the celebration at the public square while holding signs with white supremacist messages.
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The forces of white supremacy and Christian nationalism run deeper than Hanson, said Kevin Riggs, a self-described “social justice” pastor who leads Franklin Community Church.
A low-income congregation in a markedly affluent city, the church’s membership is split roughly equally among African-American and Latino worshipers. Hanson’s mayoral candidacy is part of a concerted push by the far right over the past few years to take over the city’s board of aldermen, the local school board and the county commission, Riggs said.
“There were people who believe they have been anointed by God to run for alderman, and if they had won they would have implemented God’s rules and standards — as they see it,” Riggs told Raw Story. “It didn’t end with this election. They got some positions on the school board…. When county elections are up, I’m sure they’ll have someone who is going to run for county mayor.”
Riggs has become an outspoken critic of Christian nationalism, arguing that the movement to promote Christian dominion over government and society violates both the Constitution and Jesus’ teaching to treat others as they would want to be treated.
He told Raw Story that the alliance between Christian nationalists and neo-Nazis, many of whom do not profess to be religious, or instead practice Odinism — an ancient Norse belief system — is unsurprising.
“While a neo-Nazi may not claim to be Christian, it’s the traditional values that they want to go back to, which are steeped in white supremacy,” he said. “Historically the dominant group in our country was WASP — white Anglo-Saxon protestants. When that dominant group feels threatened by immigrants, by the LGBTQ community, they feel that they’re losing their identity, which is whiteness. If you wrap that in religious language, then it becomes powerful. ‘It’s not just what we want — this is what God has mandated us to do.’”
It seems unlikely that Hanson’s ignominious defeat at the polls and her neo-Nazi allies stand down on Sunday signals a retreat for the far right in Franklin and other conservative communities across the country.
Hanson’s loss and a conservative city's rejection of Trumpian rhetoric may be a harbinger of trouble for Trump in next year’s election, but the MAGA forces that Trump unleashed and Hanson stoked are unlikely to go quietly.