Millionaire neo-Confederate movement financier and Republican power broker, Richard Hines
North Carolina's grass-fed
neo-Confederate movement appears to be struggling of late to find a way to continue to grow its base. In a new twist, it now appears to pin its hopes for further growth on attracting old-school white supremacists such as Ku Klux Klansmen to its cause, and has turned to an influential but little-known Republican Party operative for help.
Following its splashy success, shortly after the Charleston massacre, in rallying a thousand battle flag-waving protesters around a contested Confederate monument in Alamance County, plus fifteen minutes of fame thanks to it's second-place finish in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mapping Hate Project, more recently the Tar Heel State's 'Southern heritage' movement has found it difficult to maintain that early momentum. A subsequent flag-waving rally in Hillsborough, NC drew only 500 supporters and met with substantial opposition from townfolk, while a third, recently planned for nearby Person County, failed to come off at all. Suddenly, the movement seemed in danger of stalling out.
Chalk it up to the start of the school year, to a loss of novelty, or what-have-you. Still, the movement's organizers have signaled that they are not about to throw in the towel just yet; certainly not while a shadowy Republican political operative and potential sugardaddy - millionaire Beltway bandit and life-long Confederate sympathizer, Richard T. Hines - may be eyeing their movement as a potential weapon in the 2016 election cycle.
Hillsborough, North Carolina 'Southern Heritage' rally, August 8, 2015
We Are the Knights Who Say 'Ni----'
Joshua Fogleman, a pest control technician credited by the Mapping Hate project as the organizer of the Alamance County rally, seems to feel the need for a bigger, better venue for his next record-breaking flagstravaganza (scheduled for September 19th), and apparently hopes to find it in rural Reidsville, NC, where, his group Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County explains on its Facebook page with a surfeit of exclamation points:
The whole point of this event is to GROW AND BUILD SUPPORT!! If we fill the streets and bring in 1000,s [sic] it will be national!! IT COULD BE HISTORICAL!!! If people see us doing it , they will feel they can stand up to [sic]. We must build and grow and show our strength!! Backing down is NOT a option [sic]!!
Reidsville might be a clever choice of venue for the upcoming rally. This tiny farming community in Rockingham County near the Virginia border, along with its nearby neighboring towns of Eden and Pelham, have long been what passes for a hotbed of the now-crippled Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. Back in the Klan's waning glory days of the 1970s, its loyalists managed to murder five protesters at a "Death To The Klan" rally in the infamous
Greensboro Massacre, just down the road a piece. And today, the rambling website of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan lists its post office box in nearby Pelham, and its telephone 'hot line' - from which it dispenses pre-recorded racist screeds - is a Reidsville exchange. In 2012,
fliers appeared across Reidsville issuing an invitation to a "White People Only Cross Lighting,"
a black church's vehicle was vandalized with spray-painted "KKK" lettering, and
a crude banner was staked out in front of the Rockingham County schools administration building proclaiming
"We will get our monument back and no N----- loving City Council will stop us! The REAL KKK does not play!" Most recently, in January of this year, the Rockingham County sheriff's department
notified Reidsville citizens that
the Traditionalist American Knights of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) have been disseminating literature in the area. The packet, which most people have reported was left at the edge of their driveway, contains the group’s manifesto and candy, and is apparently geared towards recruitment.
The rationale for the struggling neo-Confederates to rally in this otherwise obscure country hamlet seems reasonable enough. Here there be monsters, presumably ripe for the picking. Albeit somewhat odd, tiny monsters, creeping around in the darkness, leaving candy and hate speech on nice people's driveways, like some demented Santa's twisted elves. But beggars can't be choosers. If the area's klannish denizens can loosen their grips on their walkers long enough to wave Southern Cross flags in a local Fox News clip, that will have to do. Because nothing spells 'Southern heritage' quite like 'KKK.'
Reidsville, NC, June 11, 2012
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Still, as the clock ticks down to the September 19th Reidsville rally, things have not exactly fallen into place quite as the organizers might have hoped. One of them recently bemoaned on the Facebook page of Rockingham County North Carolina Taking Back Rockingham County:
i want everyone to know that i am on top of everything going on in response to the threats, comments and the people that are being aggressive towards us. Here is whats going on.. Many members of the black community have made threats to myself and have went as far as having a petition started to shut us down. They have took our rally poster and converted it to a KKK rally and pasted it around Social media. Calling it the KKK heritage rally [....] this is the same thing they did back when they had the 100yr anniversary of the monument there [....] They made threat after threat and scared the people of Reidsville to the point that people did not show up to support the city out of fear! THEY ARE TRYING TO DO THE SAME THING AGAIN FOR OUR EVENT!! And its working!! I have lost every speaker i had lined up because they are scared...
One now-unavailable speaker is
H.K. Edgerton, one-time president of the Asheville, NC chapter of the NAACP who nowadays,
for a price, will say nice things about the Confederacy at Southern heritage rallies and pose for photos hugging battle flag-wavers, as he did at the recent Hillsborough rally:
"If that baby boy [Dylann Roof] had gone to the Sons of Confederate Veterans website, he would have learned about the place of honor and dignity that folks who looked like me earned under the Southern Cross," Edgerton said [....] "He would have learned about all those black folks who went out beside our man and fought beside him—a man that he not only called 'master,' but a man he called 'family,' and 'friend.' [....] The only people that ever cared for black folks is the Christian man in the Southland of America. White folks in the Southland of America care more for black folks than they care for themselves."
As perhaps the only African American speaker currently working the neo-Confederate circuit, Edgerton is a perennial crowd-pleaser, and his loss to the Reidsville rally would have been a blow to its organizers.
But - as they would soon learn - all was not lost. A white knight is on his way, like some latter-day Nathan Bedford Forrest leading a last-minute charge to snatch Confederate victory from the jaws of defeat.
The Hines estate in Mayesville, South Carolina, with its welcoming battle flag flying from the balcony.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
That savior is the little-known but influential Republican operative and financier, Richard T. Hines.
Last Friday, an organizer ejaculated on the Rockingham County North Carolina Taking Back Rockingham County Facebook page:
GREAT NEWS MY FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We have joined the fight with those that are at the battle front of where the heart of this Disgusting beast began!!! Our efforts have got the attention from Mr. Richard Hines, a former senate member and lobbyist from the great state of South Carolina!! On Friday Sept 18th, they are holding a rally in Greenville SC against the dishonorable Nikki Haley [....] i,m so proud to say that as soon as the rally is over on Friday evening they are jumping in the car and COMING TO REIDSVILLE !!!! Him and his Daughter Kathleen are coming to join our fight for Southern Support and they are bringing numbers with them.. I have spoke with them and the pure passion they have is overwhelming!!
In a later post, the organizer mentions that Hines will be a featured speaker at the rally.
In a white suit and his signature Confederate flag tie, and with a distinct yet refined southern drawl, Hines seems every inch the typecast Southern gentleman sent over from central casting. And, indeed, much of his biography reads like a Faulkner novel set in the current day.
According to a 2005 profile published in The Nation, Hines married into wealth and influence by taking the hand of the daughter of 'Bubba Jim' Mayes of Mayesville, South Carolina, master of an 8,000 acre cotton plantation and oligarch of the National Cotton Council. Bubba Jim was said to have controlled numerous politicians via his largesse, likely serving the young Hines well as he became the youngest-ever Republican elected to the state House of Representatives.
From the state House Hines moved on to Washington D.C. during the Reagan administration, where he and his wife served in appointed positions in the Dept. of Transportation, General Services Administration, and Army staff. Leveraging those connections, Hines next became an executive at Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems, procuring government contracts by day while serving as a back channel between the Republican Party and fringe elements embraced by the 'Reagan Doctrine.' In that role he is credited with orchestrating a fundraiser at Washington's Confederate Memorial Hall for a group of Nicaraguan contras, Afghan mujahedeens, and Angolan UNITA guerrillas.
In 1997, Hines and long-time friend, Carter Wrenn (a manager of Jesse Helms' 1972 Senate campaign), formed the DC-area boutique lobbying firm, RTH Consulting, where his clients included the Cambodian Peoples Party (for whom he wrote a 2000 Washington Times op-ed arguing against international war crimes trials for Khmer Rouge leaders); Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh; the Nigerian government; tobacco giant Philip Morris (as a media handler in its battle against government regulation of second-hand smoke); and a small arms merchant, Ashbury International (for whom Hines reportedly used his contacts in the Bush administration to win a $156 million Army contract).
Hines' unusually lucrative consulting contract with the governor of the oil-rich Nigerian province of Akwa Ibom - $1.2 million for one year of advice - reportedly ended amid allegations of Hines' non-performance, financial conflict of interest, and failure to pay a third party a promised finder's fee.
Hines is a long-time neo-Confederate and - interestingly, for a man who has made millions representing African nations - has been linked in numerous reports to white supremacy groups. According to The Nation's profile:
In 1996, standing beside members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Jefferson Davis Camp 305, Hines unfurled a Confederate battle flag in downtown Richmond, Virginia, to protest the dedication of a monument to black tennis great Arthur Ashe. He called the Ashe statue "a sharp stick in the eye of those who honor the Confederate heritage."
As Commander of the SCV's Jefferson Davis Camp 305, Hines also
took to task Richmond's historical commission for placing
"a distorted emphasis on slavery versus the heroism, suffering, and sacrifice of the soldiers whose leaders' statues grace Monument Avenue." For nearly two decades he served as the managing editor of
Southern Partisan magazine, which People For the American Way
has criticized for
"attacking Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, discounting the evils of slavery, commending those who voted for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke [and] portray[ing] enslaved Africans or ex-slaves as crude stereotypes."
According to The Nation's 2005 profile,
He has become [the neo-Confederate] movement's hidden hand, from his arrangement of the funding for a race-infused smear campaign against the presidential candidacy of Senator John McCain in the decisive 2000 South Carolina Republican primary that ultimately handed the nomination to George W. Bush, to his financing of a faction of white supremacists seeking to transform the country's oldest Southern heritage organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, into a far-right pressure group.
Hines
has been identified as a member of the white supremacist
Council of Conservative Citizens - which recently
issued a statement defending the "legitimate grievances" expressed by Charleston Massacre suspect Dylann Roof. A recent banner on the Council's web site
reportedly read:
South Carolina Now Has Whiter Beaches! Now that the African-Americans are boycotting South Carolina over the Confederate Flag, Whites can enjoy a civil liberty that has been denied to them for many years at hotels, restaurants and beaches: the freedom to associate with just one's own people. College students, when considering your spring break or summer vacation this year, choose South Carolina and get a taste of the freedom that your generation has been denied but your grandparents enjoyed.
Hines is also reported to have links to the secessionist and white supremacist League of the South. In 2007, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo was embroiled in controversy after speaking at a fundraiser organized by the League. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that public records indicate Hines rented the event's venue for the League.
Most recently, Hines has launched and leads the Southern Heritage PAC to support primary opponents against South Carolina Republican politicians "who refuse to allow the people of South Carolina to decide the future of the Confederate flag." Yet despite his South Carolina roots and residency, Federal Election Commission records indicate that over the past fifteen years the bulk of his frequent political contributions have gone to North Carolina politicians, including Senator Richard Burr (R) and numerous Republican members of NC's congressional delegation. Indeed, Hines' active interest in North Carolina politics runs so deep that, in 1988, he attempted to serve as a North Carolina delegate for presidential candidate Pat Robertson - a gambit foiled only when the state's Republican Party chairman accused him of violating state election laws by being illegally registering to vote in both North and South Carolina concurrently, a charge which state records confirmed but which Hines dismissed as "a technicality."
Ecce Homo
As the patrician Hines once again turns his eye toward North Carolina politics, it is reasonable to wonder what he seeks from the Tar Heel State's neo-Confederate movement. Given his record, a reasonable guess would be behind-the-scenes influence over the pest inspectors, used car salesmen, and other quaint provincials who lead it today. Why else might a prominent Republican power-broker deign to truck with hoi polloi the likes of North Carolina's rustic white supremacists? The Nation's 2005 profile details a butcher's bill of political casualties who have, over the years, mistaken Hines' lavished attentions for 'support,' only to realize, too late, that they were actually in his crosshairs.
The fast-fermenting witches' brew of working-class suburban flag fetishists and old-school rural Klan hardliners, stirred by the hidden hand of a wealthy, well-connected, extremist Republican operative, has the potential to turn into the political equivalent of a toxic waste disaster: Republicans rallying the troops for a hate-based get-out-the-vote effort here in 2016.
North Carolina's Governor Pat McCrory (R), who recently signed into law a bill barring local municipalities from deciding the fates of the Confederate monuments within their own boundaries, may well be praying for Hines' success. Recent polling finds his likely 2016 Democratic challenger, Attorney General Roy Cooper, consistently in the lead.
Thus far the governor - whom few would accuse of being a strategic mastermind - has seemed to lack a plan to overcome the abysmal approval rating the NC GOP's focus on divisive social issues has saddled him with (35% approval versus 48% disapproval). Ditto the Republican-controlled state legislature, whose 15%/60% approval numbers are at a historic nadir. In the face of numbers like those, one road to a Republican victory in 2016 might involve efforts to drive vast herds of teapublicans and other right-wing extremists to the polls, while simultaneously suppressing the African American vote (22% of the electorate). And North Carolina Republicans have proven of late that no road is too low for them.
Can the politics of hate - and its reincarnation of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the chubby pink visage of Richard Hines - pull Republicans' fat from the fire in 2016?
Questions or comments? Reach me at DocDawg666 [at] gmail [dot] com