I’m beginning to think Phil Williams ought to be paying Gabrielle Hanson a commission. He’s been making a living and striking journalistic gold of late while mining her background for political dirt.

Williams is Channel 5’s bull terrier of an investigative reporter; Hanson is the conspiracy-theorist, gay-bashing, neo-Nazi-cozying Franklin alderwoman now running for mayor. It was inevitable that their paths would cross.

At this point I would not at all be surprised to see Williams report that he has uncovered proof that Hanson is a space alien or a not-quite-sentient cyborg.

He’s already delivered the goods on her arrest (or was it two arrests?) for promoting prostitution in Dallas in the 1990s. Her response was to assert that she thought the hooker trysts she was booking were actually modeling appointments. You know, the kind of mistake anybody might make.

The heck of it is, the prostitution scandal might be the least disqualifying fact about her. Among her other exploits, cited by Williams or otherwise surfaced:

• She fought a Franklin Pride event, though her husband apparently showed up in a flag-themed Speedo at one in Chicago in 2008.

• She criticized the Nashville Airport Authority for its sponsorship of a Juneteenth event and called the celebration of that national holiday divisive.

• She refused to disavow the support of a group of neo-Nazis who showed up at a forum, supposedly to provide security for her.

• She claimed to have had a premonition about the Covenant School shooting – “I felt it, I just felt it. Don’t ask me how. It could be a Holy Spirit thing.” – and blamed a love triangle for the carnage, without evidence.

It would all be funny if it weren’t so creepy.

And I can’t help wondering why fringe candidates like Hanson keep showing up from the right end of the political spectrum. I won’t argue that every policy promoted by Democrats is the wisest course to pursue; reasonable people can and do disagree on a number of issues before the country today.

But we’re not talking about reasonable people.

Consider, for example, the twin clown princesses of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. They’re hard-pressed to come up with a single, sensible idea for government between them, dedicated as they are to grabbing headlines and ... whatever else they’ve a mind to grab.

Matt Gaetz, meanwhile, ringleader of the current Republican dysfunction in the House, would rather shut government down than function as a productive member of Congress. (And that’s not the least of his transgressions.)

There are others I won’t get into here. In my 50-plus years of paying attention to politics, I can’t recall such a collection of noisily feckless “public servants.” And yet here they are, playing to the cameras and the Trump Hive Mind, proving that not all the threats to American democracy come from without.

It’s true that, as mayor of Franklin, Hanson wouldn’t pose the same level of peril. When she ran for her at-large seat two years ago, she professed an interest in such normal concerns as affordable housing, building a new city hall and providing incentives to help keep businesses in Franklin and Williamson County.

Read her campaign website for mayor now, though, and the language gets more coded. She talks of “restoring and upholding the wholesome values,” “preserving our traditional family values,” and “promoting cultural values that are appropriate for all ages.”

Somehow I suspect that her “values” might leave a lot of people on the outside looking in. And then there’s this Hanson quote, from a candidate forum:

“This is very likely the most significant election since the Battle of Franklin. This is a battle for the heart and soul of this community, for our culture, for our identity, for our future and for our children.”

“Heart and soul. “Our culture.” “Our identity.” And a nod to the Civil War. Is anybody still unclear about what’s going on here?

Not everybody resorts to such dog whistles when it comes to Hanson. The Tennessee Conservative website, for example, doesn’t feel the need to mince words:

“[I]t seems the reasons most of the people who support her are doing so because of her recent stands she has made in confronting the ever-growing LGBTQ+ agenda, and the effect that is having directly on the city of Franklin.”

Other members of the Franklin Board of Aldermen have entertained the possibility of censuring Hanson. But they held off in the hope that voters would perform that function. When she ran for her current post, she won in a field of four with 38.8% of the vote. She’s running in a field of two now.

Franklin voters, the ball’s in your court.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.