Gene Ho has a history with QAnon conspiracies. Could he be Myrtle Beach’s next mayor?
As Gene Ho tells it, the early days of 2015 were a genesis for him: Already an accomplished photographer, he was about to start a new job following former President Donald Trump as a campaign photographer, an experience that would change his life.
“January 19, 2015 — A door opened; I walked through,” he’d later write in his book about the experience, “Trumpography.” “This day began a two-year adventure that put miles on my car and revolutions on my camera’s shutter count. This was my inaugural date as campaign photographer for the man who would become president of the United States of America.”
That experience would eventually propel Ho to now, nearly seven years later: Running as one of five candidates to be the next mayor of Myrtle Beach. He’s running in a Trump-like mold as a “law and order candidate,” pledging to rid the popular tourist destination of crime and clean up city affairs.
But along the way, Ho’s political career has taken dark, and occasionally bizarre turns as he worked to remain a staple in conservative political circles. He’d find himself in the speaking lineup at events like the Redpill Roadshow and Q Con Live, two conspiracy-theory-laden events held in Florida and Arizona. Ho would also step on stage at a bonafide QAnon rally in front of the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital, warning that elites in America had a desire for human blood.
At various turns, Ho would endorse a variety of conspiracy theories and political figures on the fringe of conservative politics. Early in the coronavirus pandemic, he downplayed the seriousness of the virus that would take the lives of nearly 14,000 South Carolinians. Prior to that, he would offer full-throated endorsements of several of the tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges that American elites and officials in the Democratic party are part of a secret cabal involved in child sex trafficking and torturing children. When Trump was in office, the theory alleged that he was working on a secret plan to oust such forces and would hold those responsible accountable via extrajudicial means.
Ho’s social media feeds, in recent months especially, show him spending time with a rotation of figures on the edges of the pro-Trump and MAGA movements, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell, all of whom have played one roll or another arguing that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that Trump was the true winner. Such arguments would ultimately lead Trump supporters to riot at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying election results.
(Ho was in Washington D.C. on the day of that riot, posing for pictures with Trump supporters, though he didn’t take part in the protests or violence.)
Today, Ho’s past raises serious questions about his candidacy: Does he actually believe the conspiracy theories he’s promoted? Would he bring such false beliefs into the mayor’s office in Myrtle Beach?
Other questions also persist, such as if Ho lives within city limits and is even eligible to run for Mayor. On paperwork Ho filed to run in the election, he lists a condo address in downtown Myrtle Beach. But county tax records and state campaign finance reports list a different address for Ho, just outside of city limits.
Ho, however, has largely been silent about his past, and has refused interviews. For this story, The Sun News attempted to contact Ho numerous times via phone calls and text messages, seeking an interview, beginning in September. Ho never responded. Requests sent to his campaign manager, Theresa Balaouras, also went unanswered. Ho has also declined other interviews, including one with a local television news station that sought to profile each of the candidates for the Myrtle Beach election, as well as The Rolling Stone magazine.
But even as Ho has avoided interviews, he’s used social media to attack local and national media outlets.
“...As a note to the media who is questioning my transparency because I won’t grant you an interview? Funny... I was questioning YOUR transparency. In your desperation to interview me? I caught you all,” Ho wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. “Feel free to continue to write whatever you want about me. In my due time - I will expose ANY lie just like I did to Rolling Stone Magazine.”
Ho has also posted on Facebook that he’s pursuing hate crime charges against Rolling Stone for publishing a story about his candidacy and history. It’s not clear if any lawsuits or charges have been filed.
What is known about Ho has been pieced together from videos he’s posted online, previous interviews he’s done, his book and interviews with people who know him, or who have followed his career. Some of those people paint a picture of a photographer and figure who’s dedicated to his family and Trump-style conservative politics who’s toured the country promoting his book and values, not always knowing what his audience members believed.
“I was asking him, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I don’t know a lot about it,’” Chad Caton, a conservative activist in Horry County, said of Ho and his involvement with the QAnon conspiracy theory. He described Ho as an acquaintance and friend, and Ho has appeared on Caton’s radio show. “I’ve never known him to be out there flag-waving for the QAnon movement.”
Others, though, describe a potentially volatile mayor, who could bring dangerous ideas into the halls of city government.
“My feeling is that he is deceiving the voters. It is a simple deception, sometimes deception by misdirection. He deceives by what he doesn’t disclose,” said William “Buzz” Martin, a political activist in Myrtle Beach who’s opposed to Ho’s candidacy and who worries about the influence of the QAnon movement. “Moderators of debates, the general public, anybody and everybody should be asking him these questions. Are you going to bring all this to my village?”
Gene Ho’s history
Gene Ho was born and raised in Long Island, New York, and lived there until he graduated high school. After graduating, he moved to Myrtle Beach to attend Coastal Carolina University, where he’d work as a city lifeguard in the summers. It was during this time, Ho wrote on his website, that he became interested in photography and opened his first studio in his apartment.
Since then, Ho has built a career as a wedding photographer and as a photographer for the occasional celebrity. For most of his life, he’s said in past interviews posted online, he identified as a liberal, but that over time he felt the welcome and acceptance of liberalism shift to the conservative party.
“Somewhere along the line, liberalism left me, I didn’t leave liberalism,” he said in a May interview with the religious lifestyle vlogger Rachel Hamm.
Over the years, Ho built a wildly successful photography business, ultimately employing 25 photographers across seven cities. In a speech he made to a Republican club in New York City, Ho said that his business made him personally wealthy.
“I was cleaning house, I was cleaning house so much that when I was 30-years-old I had my own personal stretch black limo with my own driver,” Ho said. “So I had all the toys, had the Maserati, had everything. Had the two homes, had all the cars.”
In Ho’s telling, though, his work as a campaign photographer for Trump in 2015 threatened to derail his success after being drawn to Trump and his politics, and ultimately becoming a committed supporter. Other photographers though, Ho said, criticized his work with Trump, and it affected his business.
“Here’s what happened, I wanted to be the silent majority….I didn’t want my whole world to be torn apart,” Ho said in his speech in New York. “First, all my photographers quit on me. And others boycotted me. They backstabbed me because I supported Donald Trump.”
After work with the Trump campaign ended, Ho said, his life took a grimmer turn. His business was audited by the IRS, and the investigation took months.
“It was the worst year of my life,” he told the New York Republicans. “I’m going bankrupt, my photographers are quitting, and on top of that, guys, honestly, I thought I was going to prison.”
That experience, Ho said, led him to religion.Though he and his wife had discussed divorcing, Ho said, the couple started reading the bible together, and both became Christians. He described a meeting between him, the IRS and his accountant.
“I pulled up a chair like this, and I said, ‘Jesus, if you want to sit there, sit there,’” Ho said. “I don’t know if it was my imagination or whatever but there was peace and calm, and I always called it the Jesus Chair…after that, the whole thing, the whole ordeal.”
That biography, though, glosses over some of the darker turns Ho’s work has taken in recent years.
Gene Ho’s involvement in QAnon
By 2019, Ho was seemingly all-in on the QAnon movement. His book had been published, and he was spending his time touring the country, speaking at various events. He’d tell stories about working for Trump, promote the former president’s “Make America Great Again’‘ message and ask people to buy his book. Photos and videos posted online show that the events ranged from intimate gatherings of Republican party members, to concert halls packed with people.
But on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2019, Ho, with his family, attended a QAnon rally in Washington D.C. Journalists and podcasters who attended the rally documented the scene: Ho and other speakers stood on a stage in front of the Washington monument and espoused some of the darkest tenets of the conspiracy theory that says Trump was working to overthrow a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles.
“Q has mentioned blood 17 times in his posts, you can check it out later. This whole thing of what we’re doing is all about blood. Q says constantly, ‘Check the blood lines,’” Ho told the assembled crowd, according to a recording of his speech published as part of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. “We know they’ve been misusing blood with the adrenochrome and all this stuff. But ultimately, ultimately what this is about, it’s about blood. And it is about blood from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Adrenochrome is a chemical that is created when adrenaline is oxidized. Myths in popular culture have asserted that harvesting the adrenal glands in living humans is the only source for the chemical, which has various psychosomatic effects. In the QAnon movement, believers claim that powerful pedophiles are harvesting blood from children and consuming it for health benefits.
In his speech, Ho also veered into other conspiracy theories, such as the one that claims the CIA or Dept. of Defense was responsible for collapsing 7 World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks. An investigation by the National Institute for Standards and Technology later concluded that the building had caught fire, and collapsed hours after the Twin Towers because the flames took time to destroy the building.
Ho, during his speech, also denied that his claims about adrenochrome and 9/11 were conspiracy theories.
“But don’t you dare MSM (mainstream media) call me a conspiracy theorist,” he said. “You are a conspiracy theorist. You guys are the losers in your mama’s basement.”
According to Jared Holt, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who’s followed and researched the QAnon movement, Ho’s involvement in QAnon was significant.
“There’s sort of a lot of competing schools of thought in the QAnon movement. There’s the religious folks, there’s people who are into the secret agent stuff, there’s Pizzagate hangers-on,” Holt said, referring to a pre-QAnon conspiracy theory tied to Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails that ultimately resulted in a man opening fire at a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant. That theory alleged that various food items and restaurants mentioned in the emails were a secret code that revealed Clinton and her allies were trafficking children.
“He’s kind of been floating around in the background of the QAnon movement,” Holt added “Gene has always struck me as someone who genuinely believes at least some of what he was saying.”
Ho’s allegiance to QAnon also became a business proposition, according to archived versions of a merchandise website Ho and his wife ran, which Rolling Stone reported. The website, Patriot Forty-Five, in 2020 was advertised as providing, “patriotic, Q & Jesus-lovin’ gear that is Made in the USA.” That description has since been changed to erase the reference to QAnon, Rolling Stone reported.
Blog posts and other photos posted online also describe Ho as attending and speaking at QAnon-related events. The left-leaning news blog Daily Dot reported in Sept. 2020 that Ho spoke at the Redpill Roadshow, which the publication described as a “QAnon tent revival.” And Ho’s own campaign finance reports, which he filed with the South Carolina Ethics Commission, lists him as receiving a $1,000 speaking fee from Q Con Live in Scottsdale, AZ, a QAnon conference held in Oct. 2020.
But Ho has denied that he supports QAnon, and that he was simply speaking at as many events as he could to promote his book. After the Rolling Stone article about Ho published, Ho attacked the publication on Facebook, saying that he had not, in fact, “scrubbed” his website of QAnon mentions.
“The truth is: The site is a consignment website and my wife was in a business partnership with someone that was an influencer in the Q community,” Ho wrote. “My wife bought out the partnership and in the split, the merchandise in question was taken off the site. While I deeply respect those in the Q community – a lie was used as a pretext to begin the Asian Hate.”
That’s a stance Ho has taken as he’s run for Mayor. At a debate earlier this month, he lamented that current Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune didn’t attend because he was ready to refute any attacks she may have made.
Those involved in local politics in Myrtle Beach have taken notice of Ho’s embrace of the QAnon movement.
“There’s little question that he represents a specific fringe political group, a political ideology,” said Walter Whetsell, a South Carolina political operative who is running Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune’s campaign. “He was given the opportunity to distance himself at the NAACP forum, and he embraced it.”
Gerri McDaniel, a former leader in the Horry County GOP, said that while QAnon was “the craziest junk I’ve ever seen” she took Ho at his word that his association with the movement wouldn’t cause any sort of harm.
“Gene Ho is just Gene Ho, he’s not some figure involved in undermining anything,” she said. “People need to be focused on the bigger picture: Who can do a better job for Myrtle Beach.”
That’s an assessment Caton, the conservative activist, agreed with.
“He can’t quote nothing about Q, he just speaks at these events and sells his book,” Caton said.
Ho has also been participating in the Health and Freedom conference as a guest speaker this year. The conservative event, which lasted for two days, garnered some media attention for its portion of the itinerary dedicated to mask burning.
The freedom conference is part of Clay Clark’s Reawaken America Tour, which also features business and homeschooling conferences.
Ho attended the conference near Tulsa, Okla. in April. He was at the event discussing “Trump’s Legacy of Leadership,’‘ according to the itinerary.
In his Facebook post about the event, Ho said: “The movie theaters are going out of business. Sport stadiums are empty. Instead? The arenas are being filled by freedom speakers because the mainstream media is NOT giving us a voice.”
Many other far-right activists spoke at the conference, including Flynn. He was supposed to speak at the QAnon group Patriot Voice event in October before it was cancelled, the Associated Press reported.
The freedom tour has had recent dates in California, Michigan and Florida.
Where does Gene Ho live?
Questions about where Ho lives, and if he’s eligible to run for mayor of Myrtle Beach, have also been raised in recent weeks. Bethune at a recent debate raised the issue, as did Whetsell in a recent interview. Local blog posts have refuted Bethune’s assertion and defended Ho, saying her claim was irresponsible.
Public records, though, paint a different picture. In the paperwork Ho filed to run for office, he lists his address at a condominium building in downtown Myrtle Beach, squarely within city limits.
But on the paperwork he’s filed with the state ethics commission, he lists his mailing address as a home in the Prestwick neighborhood, which is outside of city limits. County tax records show Ho and his wife received a residential discount on the property taxes for that home, which indicates that a person lives there. Horry County property records show that home is included in the county’s jurisdiction, not Myrtle Beach’s
While it’s possible that Ho moved from the Prestwick neighborhood to downtown Myrtle Beach earlier this year — Horry County’s tax records are only current as of Dec. 31, 2020 — Ho appeared to be living at the Prestwick home when The Sun News knocked on his door.
On Saturday, The Sun News attempted to reach Ho at his listed addresses, beginning at the residence on county and state records that sits outside of Myrtle Beach city limits. The home is nestled in a gated community near a golf course and requires security to allow visitors in. A Sun News reporter identified themselves to a security officer at the front gates and said they were attempting to see if Gene Ho lived at the residence. The reporter was given a guest pass and allowed to enter. Ho was at home with his family and was visibly upset when reporters attempted to question him. Ho’s wife was also home and video recorded the encounter between her husband and the reporter.
“You print anything, this is going to go out to everybody,” Ho said, referring to the video of the interaction his wife was filming.
Ho also declined to be interviewed by The Sun News for this story.
“The answer right now, right now, is no,” Ho said. “We’re not talking to the media.”
Ho referred to the condominium listed on his candidacy forms as his “other residence.”
What kind of mayor would Ho be?
Despite his past in conspiracy theory movements, Ho at campaign events has described himself as a commonsense mayoral candidate who would focus the bulk of his efforts on eradicating crime from Myrtle Beach — even if that means little more than pushing it outside of city limits so city police don’t have to deal with it, he’s said.
“If in the next four years I did nothing else but make this city safe, it would make me the greatest mayor in the history of this place,” Ho said at a candidate forum in early October. “I’m here to make Myrtle Beach safe, and we’re going to do that and we’re going to do it together.”
On development issues, Ho promoted a conglomerate of ideas that would loosen regulations on businesses, make builders pay more to the city and avoid I-73 unless it didn’t require a significant contribution from Myrtle Beach.
“When a community grows so big like we are, there is going to come a time where we’re going to have to have an impact fee,” Ho said. “If it’s not impact fees, you get the opposite problem where we’re going to have a moratorium on growth and we don’t want that, we’re at the point where we want impact fees.”
Ho also said he would take harder-line stances on some city-specific issues than Bethune. Regarding post-retirement health benefits for public workers, Ho said he would put all stakeholders in a room and demand that a solution was worked out. He criticized Bethune for being too willing to compromise on important issues.
“We lead, no more compromise,” he said. “We’ve had plenty of compromises with Brenda over the years.”
In Ho’s race, though, some, like Martin, the local activist, and Holt, the researcher, see candidates with fringe beliefs like Ho as potentially dangerous. Holt cited U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor-Green and Lauren Boebert as examples of people who can gain power and cause harm because they have fringe beliefs.
“The danger here is that these are individuals who have perverted views about the government and what its role in society should be and they are seeking levers of power to support their distorted vision of American society and American governance,” Holt said.
“It’s incredibly alarming to me, and in my position, I have to hold my breath and hope they don’t win.”
This story was originally published October 31, 2021 at 10:01 AM with the headline "Gene Ho has a history with QAnon conspiracies. Could he be Myrtle Beach’s next mayor?."
