In race to oust SC GOP chair McKissick, pro-Trump Lin Wood is bringing the ‘weird’
A traditionally non-newsy affair for some of Richland County’s most loyal Republicans — hopeful to grow ranks in one of the state’s bluest counties — slipped into a brief moment of the bizarre last month.
That moment came, observers say, when Lin Wood stood at the microphone at the Richland County GOP convention and took his allotted five to six minutes to describe why he deserved to be the next chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.
Wood gave a winding explanation about how he would take a political party off the cusp of one of its most successful election years and drive it into the future. He described child sex trafficking as the “real pandemic,” said he believed that Trump was “still our president” — a woman responded, ”Amen” — and touted endorsements from Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and the South Carolina-based group “Bikers for Trump.”
He ended his remarks staring straight at his challenger, incumbent Chairman Drew McKissick, twice endorsed in his reelection efforts by the former president himself.
“Have you ever been involved in non-disclosure agreements with relationship to nefarious activities of Sen. Lindsey Graham?’” Wood, standing in the same room as one of Graham’s campaign staff, said to a chorus of boos.
McKissick has denied that any non-disclosure between he and Graham or Graham’s campaign exists.
It was, as former state GOP chairman Katon Dawson described after the convention, “extremely weird.”
In that moment, it was unclear exactly what “nefarious activities” Wood was referring to. But according to McKissick, the remarks came weeks after Wood tried to make a false connection between McKissick and human trafficking and a donation that he made before he was chairman to a Christian conservative Republican political action committee that has since been dissolved. The PAC’s URL has since been bought and turned into an adult website.
A video posted to Twitter on April 27 showed Wood at Hampton County’s GOP Convention confronting McKissick.
“I know about you and Lindsey,” Wood is heard saying, telling McKissick he needs to “get out of the race now.”
In an interview with The State, Wood said not enough is being done to look into child sex trafficking, questioning a reporter’s inquiry about why he considers it a pandemic.
“There’s no conspiracy theory, the children are missing,” Wood told The State, telling the reporter not to report that he was “espousing a conspiracy theory about missing children” and that he was “tired” of reporters accusing him of doing so.
While the convention in McKissick’s backyard may have been an unlikely spot for Wood to find his target audience — delegates included party insiders such as campaign flacks, State House lobbyists and Gov. Henry McMaster’s Chief of Staff Trey Walker — the Atlanta defamation attorney has found some support in pockets of the state. But to win the chairmanship, he needs that support to manifest in a majority of the 870 delegates whom he would need most to become the next chair on May 15.
What Wood has embraced in South Carolina and taken advantage of, some say, is a party in solid control but one still operating in a post-November 2020 world, where a faction of Trump backers still refuses to believe the president lost to then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Wood, who counts himself as in Trump’s orbit — he engaged in lawsuits on Trump’s behalf to try and overturn the 2020 election, though none were successful — is emerging in the race for GOP chairman as a figurehead of that insurgence in South Carolina.
On Mother’s Day, Wood rallied with “Bikers for Trump” in Mount Pleasant alongside Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, who was sued for making unfounded claims that election technology company Dominion Voting Systems changed votes to favor Biden.
In Greenville County, two Wood backers aimed to take over the local Republican Party, making ripples though they were unsuccessful.
And in Horry County — home to Myrtle Beach, a Republican stronghold — a slate of pro-Trump backers won top positions in the county’s Republican Party that will be charged with helping to boost elections in one of the state’s top congressional races next year.
A handful of Republican Party insiders who spoke to The State by phone quickly rejected the idea that Wood could be the next chairman.
On Saturday, the state GOP will get the first real look at just how much support each candidate for chairman has, when delegates statewide vote at the party’s convention. Two other candidates also are in the mix: Michael LaPierre, who ran an underdog campaign against U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham last year, and Mark Powell, who ran and lost to McKissick in 2017.
Wood would not speculate to The State how many delegates he believed he had, but said any insinuation that McKissick has the delegates to win is false and that the incumbent chairman is “trying to cheat.”
And to anyone doubting his staying power, Wood told The State, “I’m not going to go away.”
McKissick, party chairman since 2017, expressed more confidence in his own prediction.
“In terms of delegate counts and everything, he does not actually have a path to win, at all, period,” McKissick said of Wood. “He’s going to get beat.”
Horry County GOP becomes ground zero
Wood may not have found the most friendly territory in Richland County, but in Horry County, he may have the most influence so far.
It is there that Wood has appeared at multiple events, getting mobbed celebrity-style, spending hours shaking hands and posing for pictures. Wood often appears with an entourage, including body guards that he tells supporters are there to protect them, not him. When he speaks at those events, he entertains the discredited narrative that Trump won the 2020 election.
“Everybody in this auditorium is waiting for the day that Donald Trump steps out in front of the cameras and says to the masses, ‘I’m back,’ ” Wood said at a Myrtle Beach rally. “But I’m a little different than y’all. You’re waiting for that day. I’m waiting for this day: The day that Donald J. Trump walks out on the stage in front of the masses and says to you, ‘I never left!’ He did not leave you.’ ”
At the county’s April 24 Republican convention, a new slate of pro-Wood leaders were elected: businessman Roger Slagle as county party chairman, former County Council candidate Jeremy Halpin as vice chair and Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, who got her political start campaigning for former Libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul and in the 2010 Tea Party movement, as the new state executive committeewoman.
“I just think that people are frustrated with leaders who are going along to get along, who seem to bend as the wind blows, say one thing and do another,” said Diaz, who is credited with helping to push the Qanon conspiracy theory into the mainstream. Documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback, who recently produced a six-part series on Qanon for HBO based on years of investigating the conspiracy, said by email Diaz was “central” to the spread from obscure message boards to YouTube and other popular social media platforms.
Diaz told the Sun News, a McClatchy news organization like The State, she involved herself in Qanon from a “journalism standpoint” and that stories about her being part of that world are “wildly exaggerated and false.” Wood’s backers in Horry County say the conspiracy theory has become part of his run for chairman because it’s a way to bother the media, which his supporters enjoy.
A video of Wood’s speech at the Myrtle Beach rally posted on Facebook shows Wood using his finger to draw an “O” shape, with a line through it, resembling the drawing of a “Q” for Qanon, the conspiracy theory started in 2017 on internet message boards. Part of the QAnon conspiracy is the belief that Trump is still president.
“With Lin, he loves it because it’s a way to poke at the press,” said Chad Caton, a former conservative radio host and activist who’s backed Wood, Slagle, Halpin and Diaz. “Every time he does his little Q motion, ... he doesn’t really know what it’s about either. I ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’ and he says, ‘Watch the press.’ “
For all his rhetoric, Wood says he is trying to bring the party into the future, part of which includes aligning himself with candidates for local office, such as Gene Ho, a professional photographer who worked for Trump.
Ho says he is running for Myrtle Beach mayor this year and, like Wood, has embraced theories that have appeared on Qanon message boards — for example, he has said Trump is still president — and has appeared at events with Wood in Horry County.
Ho was in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, the day pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building, but has said he left town before the violence began. Ho also has spoken at Qanon rallies in Washington in prior years.
But South Carolina Republicans who have been laying the groundwork for years to build a party that holds the South’s first presidential primary say Wood is nothing but a disrupter, leveraging off of a dysfunctional election and his once connection to Trump.
“They’re disrupting, distracting,” said Chad Connelly, former state GOP chairman. “Their efforts are to destroy the party, not to build it.”
Not all prominent Republicans in Horry County buy into Wood’s candidacy or the brand of conservative politics he’s pushing.
“Lin Wood is making statements about people that … the level almost approaches bizarre,” said Reese Boyd III, a former Horry County GOP official who ran for chair this year but lost. “All I can say is, we’re taking politics to a level where if you have these facts and you plan to out these people, I encourage you do to so without delay, and if you don’t have the facts, sit down and shut up.”
Others are taking more of a wait-and-see approach to Wood and the politics he supports. And some doubt he will be able to garner statewide support, even though he has had an impact in Horry County.
“If he’s had an impact in Horry County, ... we’re a Republican stronghold but that doesn’t mean other counties will embrace him,” said Duane Oliver, a former Horry County GOP chairman in the early 2000s. But, Oliver added, the post-Trump era has motivated many Republican voters, and has gotten new people interested in the GOP — all good things, he said, regardless of what specifically motivated them.
“If you look at Trump supporters and you look at Trump’s presidency, it was ‘America first,’ ” Oliver said. “If Lin Wood has that same philosophy of benefiting the people, ‘America First,’ I’m not opposed to that, not at all. There’s a whole bunch of new people who want to get active in the party which is a good thing. Again, it goes back to being a big tent.”
They’ll be ‘aggressively pushed out’
How far Wood will go to continually test the state Republican leaders remains to be seen.
He has left zero doubt he will be around, but has not specified what he will do next, whether that means using his time to boost Republican candidates for office or even run for office himself.
State chairman McKissick told The State he’s not worried about Wood’s rhetoric and theories seeping into state party operations and said what is happening on “the fringe” will stay there, likening Wood and his allies’ relevance to a wave that at some point will crash.
Matt Moore, who led the state party before McKissick, said Wood is getting encouragement from a loud but ultimately influential group from the Upstate, where the reddest counties in the state are.
“Lin has been duped by a small but vocal minority from the Upstate. They want to be relevant but have done nothing to deserve relevance,” said Moore, who supports McKissick. “The nationalization of local politics is very dangerous. It distracts attention from the real issues that impact people.”
Besides supporting GOP campaigns, the next chairman will walk into the throes of a contentious political year where he’ll be called upon to help the Republican-controlled Legislature tighten the state’s voter laws before 2022 and shore up its control of the General Assembly in the redistricting process.
How much influence Wood and others like him have as they buck the party establishment remains to be seen. But some political observers say it could backfire on the party’s efforts and cause more harm than good.
“That fervor that Trumpers brought to the party, it gave the party an electric charge,” said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University political science professor and director of the Winthrop Poll. “But, now, it’s going from electrified to electrocuted.”
This story was originally published May 13, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
