Backlash, rebuke and disinformation: Grand Strand GOP reeling after riot, impeachment

In the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C., Chad Caton was on the defensive.

“What’s happening is that you’re all attacking us just because you think we should go to jail for supporting Donald J. Trump,” he said in a video posted on Facebook Jan. 10. “Well kiss my a--.”

The right-wing radio personality who hosted the “I’m Fired Up” show on 94.5 WTKN, broadcast out of Myrtle Beach, had traveled to the nation’s capital for “Stop the Steal” rallies protesting the outcome of the 2020 election. He said he was there to “witness history” and attend political rallies, noting that he was “nowhere near” the Capitol when violence broke out.

Days prior, Caton had invited the Proud Boy Jeremy “Immortal Noble Beard” Bertino, who participated in the Capitol riot and who had posted violent messages on the social media site Parler ahead of the riot, to do an interview on his show. During the interview, Caton praised Bertino and the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group aligned with other white supremacist groups. In light of the violence in D.C., the Jan. 3 interview seemed foreboding.

“I’ll walk with you wherever you want to go, bro,” Caton told Bertino during the interview. “And I’ll say it and if any of you (liberals) or people who choose not to learn about Proud Boys as a club or whatever, come at me, bro.”

“Thank you for what you do,” Horry County Treasurer Angie Jones, who joined Caton for the interview, added.

Days later, Caton’s show on WTKN was canceled, due in part to listeners complaining to station managers about his interview with Bertino, he said.

Caton’s cancellation is just one part of the backlash, anger and disinformation that swept across the Grand Strand since the riot and former President Donald Trump’s impeachment a week later. The tumult in the nation’s capital has led an NAACP branch to call for the resignation of Jones, disinformation to circulate on local airwaves and a move within the South Carolina Republican party to formally rebuke Rep. Tom Rice, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. A nearby county, too, wants to formally rebuke Sen. Lindsey Graham for not adequately supporting Trump.

The consequences and anger have led some to question where the Republican party — at least in this part of South Carolina — stands in a post-Trump world. Some party members said Republicans who won’t back Trump should be punished. Others worry that too much resentment towards members who are backing away from Trump could split the party in two. Anger, frustration and debates about where the party should go course through the Republican party in the Grand Strand in the meantime.

“I don’t think there’s any way that we can move away from him. We can’t pretend he doesn’t exist, that will blow up in our face,” said Shannon Grady, a local GOP organizer and leader of the Horry County GOP Women’s Caucus. “But we can’t put all our eggs in one basket. We have work to do. Unfortunately, the Grand Ole Party has been the Good Ole Boy Party. We’ve talked about change every election cycle but talk is cheap, I want to see some action.”

Cancellation, formal rebukes

On Jan. 2, four days before Trump supporters and other far-right groups stormed the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Caton invited Bertino, a Locust, North Carolina native and member of the Proud Boys, onto his show. Bertino, self-described as the vice president of a local Proud Boys chapter, was stabbed in Washington D.C. during an earlier “Stop the Steal” rally, and Caton told The Sun News he worked for “about a month” to get Bertino on his weekly radio show.

Urged by Trump “stand back and stand by” during the 2020 campaign, the Proud Boys are known for making appearances at conservative rallies and have a history of fighting with anti-fascists who show up to oppose them.

“I was really excited. I worked my up through (the right-wing social media site) Parler,” Caton said. “I asked him about racism. I asked him about all the things that are written about them.”

During the interview, which Caton has since taken down from his social media platforms but that The Sun News obtained a recording of, Caton and Jones ask Bertino a series of questions about the Proud Boys and frequently praise the group. At one point during the interview, Caton and Bertino agree that Kyle Rittenhouse “did nothing wrong.” Rittenhouse shot and killed two demonstrators, and injured a third, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during Black Lives Matter protests after a white police officer was captured on video shooting a Black man multiple times in the back in August.

At another point in the interview, Caton seemed to agree with Bertino that street violence against those who oppose their right-leaning values could be justified.

“I’m always the one saying, ‘Let’s keep our barrels cold and our fists in our pockets,’ but at some point we may have to go to the street and if we have to go to the street, it’s about what’s right in this country,” Caton said.

He later mentioned that he hoped to join Bertino in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6th for the next “Stop the Steal” rally. He and Jones, the Treasurer, would eventually travel to D.C. for the political rallies, but not participate in the riot. By the time he was back home in Horry County, Caton said, he was facing threats and calls for his resignation. He announced on Facebook Jan. 13 that WTKN had canceled his show.

Caton recalled his firing.

“His exact words were, 13 people contacted my owner that I did an interview...with ‘Nobel Beard.’ They went at the owner and said I was inciting violence,” Caton told The Sun News.

Station management disputes Caton’s version of events.

John Henis, the general manager of WTKN, said the station canceled Caton’s show due to “creative differences,” not because of any recent controversies.

“I was trying to develop the show and at the end of the day we had creative differences about the content of the show, the tone of the show and the direction of the show,” Henis said. “It was simply, we’d done this for a little over a year, it wasn’t working out and we ended it.”

Traveling with Caton, Jones told The Sun News she went to “see the President and be in support of fair elections,” attending a GOP dinner Jan. 5 and attending political rallies in support of overturning the 2020 election results the following day. Jones didn’t march on the Capitol, she said, and would have stayed home if she knew there would have been violence.

A week later, several local Black leaders, including Marvin Neal, the head of the Georgetown County NAACP and Cedric Blain-Spain, an Horry County Democratic Party official, held a press conference calling for Jones to resign. They said her being in D.C. was inappropriate and unbecoming of an elected official.

Jones laughed off the calls for her removal.

“It’s disgusting, it’s stupid, it’s laughable,” she said at the time. “I’m not going to resign. I’m not going to apologize.”

The events Jan. 6 also brought consequences for Rice, who represents South Carolina’s 7th congressional district that includes the Grand Strand. Forced to hide out while rioters vandalized the Capitol building — leaving five dead — Rice said later that he was disappointed in Trump’s lack of rebuke of the rioters, a feeling that led him to vote to impeach Trump.

Several local Republicans are already exploring bids to unseat the 5th-term congressman, all of them citing his impeachment vote as motivating them to run. South Carolina Rep. William Bailey (R-Little River) announced Tuesday that he’s forming an exploratory committee ahead of a potential 2022 primary race against Rice. And Horry County School Board Chairman Ken Richardson has told news outlets that he’s exploring a run against Rice. Former Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark McBride is also debating a run.

“We are for President Trump and when someone does something like that against the President everyone is up in arms,” explained Dreama Purdue, co-chair of the Horry County Republican Party.

At once, the GOP in the Grand Strand is facing criticism for its full embrace of Trump, but also faces challenges as it seeks to keep that base engaged now that Trump is out of office. Local party leaders said that if the Senate votes to convict Trump, barring him from holding elected office again, or if Trump forms his own political party, the Republican party could fracture irreparably. A lack of Black and brown people in party ranks also poses serious challenges, Grady, of the Horry County Republican Women’s Caucus, said. Party members, she said, “are really angry.”

“We have to take tangible action to demonstrate that we’re serious about getting back to the constitutional boundaries of government instead of running over it,” she said.

Disinformation

As the local party continues to navigate the post-Trump era, one constant has already emerged: A belief in false information.

Several local party leaders in the 7th congressional district, which stretches across northeastern South Carolina, told The Sun News they believe President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was tainted by widespread voter fraud. Officials in all 50 states have said no such irregularities tainted the outcome of the election.

Some, like Caton and Grady, said they also believe that anti-fascist and Black Lives Matter activists infiltrated the mob at the Capitol, and were the true instigators of violence. Before marching on the Capitol, Grady said she was given information that anti-fascist interlopers would be dressed as Trump supporters, and that true supporters could identify him by their backwards-facing hats. Grady said she saw a young man wearing an “Oath Keepers” hat backwards and informed him of that. She said the man cursed at her and moved away from her.

“I thought, ‘Huh, that’s probably not how a patriot would respond to another patriot,” Grady said. “There’s no way to deny that there were members of the right in the capitol but there were also members of Antifa.”

Fact checks by multiple news outlets, as well as an assessment by the FBI, have found no evidence that antifa or Black Lives Matter groups played a role in the riot.

But taken together, belief in those false claims has convinced local Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — that he, not Biden, was the rightful winner — and that left-wing activists are now trying to smear Trump’s supporters as violent people when they showed up to protest the outcome of an election they believe was unfair.

“What I can say is that it’s just a convenient distraction, it’s a convenient talking point,” Nicole Cooke, a University of South Carolina professor who studies fake news and how information is shared, said of the falsehood that antifa and Black Lives Matter activists were behind the violence Jan. 6. “It’s garbage and it’s a distraction.”

Matthew Costello, a Clemson University professor who studies online behavior and political extremism, said a long build-up of false beliefs on the right, including that antifa was a primary instigator of violence at Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, led to that being an easy excuse for Republicans to use when the political rallies early in the day Jan. 6 turned into Trump supporters storming the Capitol.

“I don’t think the event we saw is going to become the new normal,” he said. “(But) I don’t think it’s going away either because there’s no reason to believe that misinformation online is going to get better, that there’s going to be less of it.”

Horry Co. GOP Future

Republican leaders, Costello said, will have to be clear about what’s true and what’s false if the base of the party is going to shift away from believing false information. Authoritative leaders telling the truth, plus other media literacy tools, can help spread true information, he noted.

That could prove challenging. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, came out several days after the Capitol riot and affirmed that antifa did not play a role in the violence.

“I don’t believe a thing Kevin McCarthy says in the first place,” said Jeanne Bassett Lumpkin, the chair of the Marion County Republican Party, and one of the party members pushing to censure Rice. “I believe (McCarthy) is Deep State, stab you in the back. That’s just like (former Attorney General William) Barr saying there was no evidence of voter fraud.”

Cooke, also a trained librarian, said the emotional connection people form to certain information or beliefs can cause them to give a “cognitive authority” to certain people or sources of information. Those emotional ties can be tough to break and sharing rage with like-minded people can be a powerful feeling, she said.

“The emotional connection can almost supersede our rationale thought,” she said. “We can be enraged together. People consume things that make them angry.”

For her part working to organize the Republican women of Horry County, Grady said Trump offers the party a conundrum: They can’t live with him and can’t live without him.

“I believe folks are at their wits end,” said Shannon Grady, a local GOP organizer and leader of the Horry County GOP Women’s Caucus. “It’s gonna blow up. That is the genuine experience I’m hearing from multiple people, that they’re frustrated with the feeling of helplessness.”

This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 9:00 AM.