Two weeks from yesterday North Carolina congressional candidate Bo Hines will turn 27. A victim of Buy Bull school and some football head injuries, he comes off dumb as a brick, as you can see for yourself in the video from Friday (above). Jesus! How about that interviewer, John Fredericks, keeping a straight face! A spoiled rich white kid, most of Bo's campaign cash has come straight from mommy and daddy.
Hines played ball for North Carolina State, transferred to Yale, worked for a couple of third-rate GOP politicians in Indiana and South Dakota and then, briefly tried law school, which didn’t work out too well for him. So he decided to try Congress, declaring his intention to primary poor old Virginia Foxx, flipping, at Madison Cawthorn’s suggestion, to the open 13th district when Ted Budd announced he would run for the Senate instead of for reelection. Cawthorn also got Trump to endorse Hines, who won his primary May 27 based almost entirely on Trump's endorsement.
Ted Budd’s 13th district was a totally safe red seat with an R+38 Republican lean. The newly redrawn 13th south of Raleigh is a far more compact swing district, with an R+3 partisan lean, the most competitive district in the state. As of the June 30 FEC reporting deadline, Hines had "raised" $1,677,108 (mostly from his parents) to Democrat Wiley Nickel’s $1,720,640 (also mostly self-funded). And Hines had $103,349 in his campaign account to Nickel’s $510,440. A few million dollars had been spent by outside groups in the Republican primary, including over $2 million to bolster Hines, mostly by the extreme right Club for Growth.
Anyway, the interview with Hines started with him calling for defunding the IRS and FBI because they’re “targeting middle class Americans on a daily basis” and quickly turned into a demonstration of what happens when Bible school idiots play football instead of paying attention in history class and then wind up not knowing what a Banana Republic is, other than the one at the mall. He “studied” political science at Yale.
A DCCC poll from June showed Nickel leading Hines narrowly. Hines has said he would like to run for governor of North Carolina and then president (of the U.S.). Before the primary, the NY Times reported that the district-shopping Hines wasn’t quite sure who he was politically.
Hines has described his political philosophy in different terms over the years. In a 2017 interview with The Hartford Courant, he said he was “not a social conservative.”
He added: “I call myself a social libertarian, I guess. I’m a lot more liberal on certain social issues. I think it’s part of our generation. I’m hoping the Republican Party in the future will not be so bogged down by the 80-year-olds sitting in Congress who want to regulate how people live their lives.”
...Although Hines previously spoke of Cawthorn in glowing terms— hailing him as a “steadfast leader in the conservative movement,” appearing in Instagram posts together and highlighting his endorsement— he has lately sought to distance himself from the congressman, who has alienated many Republicans in Washington and in North Carolina with his claims that lawmakers had used cocaine and had orgies, his cavalier driving habits and a leaked nude video.
“We’re nothing alike. We have completely different backgrounds, completely different pasts,” Hines told Axios in a recent interview. “Our only similarity is our age and our social conservative values.”
In a podcast interview from January 2021, well before the Club for Growth and Trump endorsements, Hines spoke about running a grass-roots campaign focused on bringing economic development, rural broadband and infrastructure to his would-be constituents.
Now, Hines has a Telegram account where he publishes more MAGA-friendly posts accusing Democrats of being “the real segregationists,” of declaring “war” on the police and of “gaslighting a war” in Ukraine. During his speech introducing Trump at a rally last month in Johnston County, Hines said he was running for office because, “I will not sit idly by on the sidelines and watch radical, Marxist leftists destroy our country for the next generation.”
Echoing a line of attack he has deployed against Daughtry, he continued, “I also will not stand for cowardly, RINO Republicans that seek to dismantle the America First movement.”
A few weeks earlier, in another podcast interview with Matt Beaudreau, a self-improvement guru, Hines passed along some wisdom he had absorbed during his career thus far.
“If you’re not genuine, people are very intelligent,” he said. “They see through that.”
To other young people seeking to enter the political arena, he advised, “Make sure you know what you believe before you try to tell others what to believe.”
This video is from when Cawthorn and Hines were still boyfriends or besties or whatever those two closet cases were up to with each other. I wonder if Bo will replace Madison in Patrick McHenry's affections next semester.
