From the Lousy Excuses Department, an apparently unreconstructed racist in Charlotte (my hometown) was forced to shutter his campaign for city council race because it was discovered that he’d posted to a racist website over 4,000 times. He says he did it for research:

Doug Hanks said the postings on the site stormfront.org were fictional and designed to win white supremacists’ trust as he researched a novel he was writing.

“I needed information for the book and some other writings I was doing,” Hanks said. “I did what I thought I needed to do to establish myself as a credible white nationalist.”

Good one, Doug. Yes, “research.” I think the research must have paid off . When you posted on June 1 that black people were “rabid beasts,” man, that really sounded authentic.

I actually have a tangential connection to this story:

In January, amid a debate over whether a Confederate battle flag would be allowed to fly over a public cemetery, Hanks scaled a flagpole and reattached the flag. The city later removed both the flag and the pole.

When I was a partner in ad agency downtown back in the 1980’s, we used to take breaks and hang out in that cemetery, which is like a park on a bluff overlooking the office towers downtown. I remember the fenced-in area dedicated to the Confederate war dead – and the dissonance of the Confederate flag there – but it is pretty small and tucked into the property so that you have to know where to look in order to find it. Who knew it finally be controversial one day.

In the reports I read, it says the Confederate flag had been flying in the cemetery for the past ten years but a faded, tattered Rebel flag was flying there in the early 1980’s.