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by WILL FOLKS
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This week, South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson stormed to an unprecedented victory in the Republican runoff election for governor – decisively defeating lieutenant governor Pamela Evette, the hand-picked successor of governor Henry McMaster and the (first) choice of president Donald Trump to succeed him.
Wilson’s win was monolithic – a clear mandate from the Palmetto State’s Republican electorate and a sharp repudiation of the status quo embodied by McMaster and his allies.
If recent history is any indication, the landslide is also likely to carry Wilson to the governor’s mansion – as no Democrat has won a statewide race in South Carolina in twenty years.
“I was surprised at the margin – and I’m incredibly humbled by it,” Wilson said during an extended sit-down interview with FITSNews earlier this week.
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According to Wilson, his campaign prevailed because he stayed focused on the voters he was trying to court – not all of the mud being thrown at him by his political rivals.
“My intent was not to make my campaign about my opponent – and I really didn’t want to make it about me, or who endorsed me,” he said. “I really tried to make it about the people, the voters. That was always my focus. While people were saying bad things about me, I was saying ‘this is what I want to do for you.’ I think people wanted that. I think they were tired of the negativity.”
Asked about the moment Trump initially endorsed his opponent (the president later “co-endorsed” when it became clear Wilson was going to win), the state’s top prosecutor said it was “resiliency training.”
He added that a mutual friend of ours sent him a movie clip that inspired him to roll with the punch… literally.
“It’s that scene from Rocky Balboa when he’s talking to his grown son on the street corner and he says, ‘life is not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep getting up and going forward,” Wilson said. “I played that clip over a couple of times.”
“There were a couple of days there that we were nervous,” Wilson said. “But when I saw that clip come in, it was like ‘okay, get back up, Alan. get up. You can’t control those things, focus on the things you can control – and don’t stop fighting.'”
He didn’t…
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Wilson and I talked about the barrage of negative attacks he absorbed – and the fact that both Republican and Democrat primary voters ultimately rejected wealthy self-funding candidates like Rom Reddy and Billy Webster, choosing instead to pick more blue-collar options like him and state representative Jermaine Johnson, the Democrat nominee.
We also discussed the outlier in the primary election – Horry County. A GOP enclave, Horry was one of the only counties carried by Evette. Many attributed her victory there to negative publicity surrounding a high-profile wrongful death case involving Wilson’s office.
FITSNews has extensively covered the Scott Spivey case – one of three true crime sagas that was heavily politicized during the 2026 gubernatorial primary. Wilson has referred the case to another solicitor, but that hasn’t stopped the barbs from coming his way.
“People exploited that family, they exploited – they misled people on the facts of the case,” Wilson said bluntly when asked about the interplay between the investigation and the election.
In our extended conversation, Wilson and I talked about his upcoming general election against Johnson, the issues he would seek to advance if elected governor as well as the latest developments in Alex Murdaugh‘s retrial, which he is continuing to oversee as attorney general.
To watch the full interview, click here…
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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4 comments
You, FITS, could have asked Alan Wilson about my posts proving Alex Murdaugh’s actual innocence.
I do not do it for the acknowledgement or to hear the sound of my own voice.
Jesus Christ enjoined us to sow the seeds of truth far and wide and promised that some seeds will hit fertile grounds.
He also enjoined us to not cast our pearls before swine.
And you should be flattered that I do not consider you spine but gift with this latest pearl of mine.
That kennels video and Paul and Maggie’s last meal tell us of Alex Murdaugh’s ACTUAL innocence.
How many “minutes before” the shootings people say Alex Murdaugh was at the kennels?
If you want to say under ten minutes before, what is anyone’s proof of when Paul or Maggie were ACTUALLY shot?
If you mean more that the 13 minutes between the kennels video and Alex starting his car towards Almeda, then Alex could NOT possibly have been the shooter or a shooter or a silent witness to the shootings.
?If Alex had been the shooter, he would have SEEN Paul making the kennels video with his phone and putting it in his pocket. IF Alex wanted to hide evidence of Alex’s having been at the kennels supposedly under 10 minutes before the shootings, Alex would have taken the phone and PHYSICALLY destroyed it or drowned it or hid it or whatever.
Alex did NOT need Paul’s password for that.
If Alex has, as pretended by his FALSE accusers, been able to hide the big-sized shooting weapons, he would have been able to dispose of that supposedly-incriminating phone along with the shooting weapons.
Remember? The FALSE accusers also pretend Alex took Maggie’s phone AFTER shooting her and PHYSICALLY disposed of it.
Why would Alex NOT have done the same with Paul’s phone?
Remember? If Alex had been the shooter, he would have SEEN the phone in Paul’s pocket and KNOWN that Paul had made the kennels video with it. He would have taken it along with Maggie’s phone and destroyed it or hid it along with Maggie’s phone.
Alex did THE OPPOSITE of what the real shooter would have done:
(1) Alex returned to Moselle from Almeda that night. Had Alex been the real shooter, he would have spent the night in his hospitalized father’s bed in Almeda (as Maggie expected him to do, incidentally) and left the bodies to be discovered in the morning by one of the Moselle farm/kennels workers.
(2) The next morning, Alex helped SLED locate and retrieve Maggie’s phone after it had been noticed missing. Had Alex been the real shooter and the real disposer of Maggie’s phone, he would have kept his silence until the battery died and the phone would have never been located.
And AGAIN, Alex NEVER said the phrase, “I never went to the kennels.” He just omitted to report that he had gone there before going to Almeda.
And again and again, Paul’s and Maggie’s stomach’s contents AT AUTPOSY put the REAL time of the shootings closer to 9:30 pm on 7 June 2021.
SLED arrived at Moselle THE NIGHT of 7 June 2021 and took Alex’s clothes and the guns they found in the gun room and many other things.
SLED returned in the morning of 8 June 2021 to re-interview Alex and interview Buster and John Marvin and Rogan Gibson and take their buccal swabs for DNA.
SLED also, THAT MORNING and with Alex’s and John Marvin’s help, located and retrieved Maggie’s phone and left with it NEGLECTING to swab it for fingerprints and/or DNA or to place it in a Faraday bag, which resulted in loss of information from it.
Blanca did not arrive at Moselle until AFTER SLED and Co. had left a bungled scene more bungled and SLED had left with their heart’s content of interviews, swabs, clothes, and DNA evidence.
No one made SLED so incompetent and corrupt other than SLED themselves.
And no one made Blanca such a BS-er other than Blanca herself and her co-author and her published.
How else are they going to sell books and bait clicks and views on YouTube?
Will, I’m hoping to see you do a one on one with Jermaine Johnson in the coming days as well.
I shall, God willing and FITS permitting, keep pasting here my most relevant replies to comments on FITSTube and YouTube. Here is the most recent one:
@ritaeichler2066 , relax and listen!
I did not write that Alex saw the video ITSELF.
I wrote that Alex must have SEEN PAUL MAKING THE VIDEO. The threesome, who had just had dinner together, were in the narrow confines of the kennels.
If Paul and Maggie could see Bubba-the-dog closely enough to debate whether what its jaws held was a chicken or a another bird, and for Alex to summon Bubba-the-dog and extract the bird from its jaws, then Alex MUST HAVE BEEN close enough to SEE PAUL MAKING THE VIDEO then put Paul’s own phone back in Paul’s own pocket.
Had Alex been the real shooter, or had he known that some shooters would show up at the kennels and confront Paul and Maggie, Alex WOULD NECESSARILY HAVE KNOWN that video on Paul’s phone would cast suspicion on Alex and Alex would have taken the phone from a lifeless Paul’s pocket and disposed of it along with the shooting weapons.
“by 8:49” Paul and Maggie were NOT “dead.”
There is ABSOLUTELY no support for the assumption that they were.
And for the nth time: the food in their stomachs AT AUTOPSY was too little and too digested for their lives to have ended ONLY 19 MINUTES after their KNOWN large and relatively fatty last meal.
These are NOT false facts. These are long known MEDICAL facts about human digestion.
I understand that some people’s ideas are cemented. But I can no more accept that than accept, for example, a man being can be executed for saying the earth is round while most people have a cemented idea that the earth is flat.
I am NOT an Alex troll. I am one who had been FALSELY excused of crimes but, thank God and WITHOUT A LAWYER, ultimately COMPLETELY exonerated myself beginning with a 22-26 February 2010 jury trial in the court of none other than Judge Clifton Newman.
Please respect that or hold your peace.