Then-City Council candidate Doug Hanks never mentioned he was researching a novel when he was defending more than 4,200 posts on a white supremacist website to a Rhinoceros Times editor. Nor did he mention his acting ability, editor Mark Pellin told Creative Loafing. Instead, as Hanks was quoted in the Aug. 4 Rhino Times, his virulent posts on Stormfront.org were an expression of pride.
“Some people might call them radical or racial, but, like I said, I look at them from a heritage point of view,” Hanks told Pellin. “…You say Gay Pride or Black Pride and that’s OK. But when somebody says ‘I’m proud of my German ancestry,’ then that’s automatically interpreted as being racist.”
Readers of the next day’s Charlotte Observer got a starkly different picture. Hanks’ explanation for posts condemning blacks, gays, Mexicans and Jews was that he was merely a fledgling novelist who needed to gain racists’ trust for research on Stormfront.org, a website founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black. And Rhino Times, which earned praise around town for exposing Hanks, wasn’t mentioned until after the story had spilled to the next page.
Pellin said he wasn’t surprised his conservative weekly wasn’t credited until the sixth paragraph of the Observer story. “If you have a daily newspaper with a staff of hundreds getting scooped by a small weekly, you’re not going to put that in your (first sentence),” he said. But Pellin was surprised Hanks’ novel-writing explanation was included without at least a mention of Hanks’ earlier “pride” defense.
Observer managing editor Cheryl Carpenter told CL the paper doesn’t have a policy on where in stories to credit other news organizations. She said the paper’s readers “absolutely got a sense” of Hanks’ views without including many specific posts. “I’m not sure you need to do a whole lot of overkill with that sort of language,” Carpenter said.
Hanks contends he didn’t initially mention he had posed as a racist for research because the Rhino Times caught him off guard. More than 4,000 posts during three years, he said, actually isn’t all that many, and people have the right to express their views on the website, he said, though “some people seem to be more intelligent than others.”
The Rhino Times story provided several pages of Hanks’ racist posts and outlined how he debated with Stormfront.org posters how white supremacists could advance in mainstream politics “by infiltrating the ranks.”
Until his now-aborted Council run, Hanks was best known for protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from Elmwood Cemetery. Republican Mayor Pat McCrory and Mecklenburg GOP chairman John Aneralla publicly condemned Hanks the day the story broke and asked him to withdraw from the race for an at-large Council seat. He did the next day, though he appeared as of Sunday to be posting to the Web site under a different screen name.
This article appears in Aug 10-16, 2005.
