Mullins in the Middle: Uniparty Corruption is destroying South Carolina
- Javar Juarez
- 7 minutes ago
- 11 min read
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC | Governors Race
Winnsboro, S.C. - Before Mullins McLeod ran for governor of South Carolina, he spent 25 years inside the machinery that governs this state — not as a legislator, not as a lobbyist, not as a donor — but as the man on the other side of the courtroom from the institutions that prey on ordinary people. He sued Walmart. He sued prison systems. He sued corporations and governmental entities and won judgments that set records in South Carolina history.
He knows how the deal works because he has been dismantling it, one case at a time, for a quarter century.
That history matters. Because when McLeod stood before a room in Chester, South Carolina earlier this year and described the structural corruption of this state's government, he was not delivering talking points. He was delivering a closing argument built on 25 years of evidence.
South Carolina's political class has spent considerable energy framing the story of Mullins McLeod around the night in Charleston when officers placed him in the back of a police car and dashcam footage captured a man in visible distress. That footage circulated statewide. The South Carolina Democratic Party publicly suggested he step aside. The political establishment, in both parties, moved quickly to define him by that moment.
What the political class did not expect is that McLeod would explain exactly what happened that night — and that the explanation would reveal something far more uncomfortable than one man's breakdown.
What Happened in That Police Car
In Chester, McLeod addressed the arrest without deflection.
"Many of y'all probably have seen my police tape," he told the audience. "Do you know what set me off in that police car?"
The answer was Ariane McCree — a 28-year-old former NCAA Division I football player from Chester who was shot and killed by police officers in a Walmart parking lot in November 2019. McLeod Law Group filed a wrongful death and civil rights action on behalf of McCree's family. The lawsuit alleged officers opened fire while McCree was handcuffed and posed no threat.
"When they put me in the back of that police car," McLeod said, "those handcuffs dug into my wrist. You see, when they chased Ariane through that Walmart parking lot with his hands cuffed behind his back, those handcuffs tighten when you move, and they cut into your wrist. Ariane's wrist in the autopsy report was cut down to his bone."
McLeod described what went through his mind in the police vehicle: the autopsy. The injuries. The case he carried home with him every night.
"When those handcuffs started cutting into my wrist, the first thing I said was exactly what happened to Ariane McCree."
This is primary source testimony from a lawyer describing the weight of the work he has carried. The Charleston incident happened. What McLeod is offering, in his own words, is an account of what lives inside a man who has spent 25 years immersed in South Carolina's most violent civil rights and wrongful death cases — not as a distant legal exercise, but as a personal obligation.
"My cases are very personal to me," McLeod said. "They're not a file number. It's not just a name."
The political establishment wanted voters to see a man who broke. What McLeod is showing them is a man who broke because of what he has seen.
Whether South Carolinians ultimately view those qualities as conviction or controversy remains to be seen. But before they make that judgment, voters deserve to hear the full depth of what McLeod is alleging about the political, economic, and moral condition of the state they call home.
$600,000 In. A Statute Out. $67 Billion Acquired.
In Winnsboro, McLeod laid out what may be the clearest expression of his campaign’s central argument: that political corruption in South Carolina is not abstract ideology, but a measurable chain of transactions with visible beneficiaries.
He described it as a three-step process.
First, Dominion Energy spent roughly $600,000 lobbying the South Carolina State House.
Second, lawmakers passed the Energy Security Act, legislation McLeod argues fundamentally shifted power away from ratepayers and toward utility companies.
“The Energy Security Act literally gives Dominion a personal guarantee of profitability,” McLeod said. “If they have a bad year, they can increase their rates to make sure they have a profitable year.”
Third, McLeod argues that the protections embedded within the statute dramatically increased Dominion’s value, helping position the company as a far more attractive acquisition target. Soon afterward, NextEra entered discussions surrounding a deal reportedly valued at approximately $67 billion.
“If you don’t think all this is connected,” McLeod said, “it is.”
McLeod frames the sequence less as political rhetoric and more as a prosecutorial timeline: lobbying, legislation, corporate protection, market valuation, acquisition.
The lobbying expenditures are public record.
The Energy Security Act is South Carolina law.
The rate mechanisms McLeod references are written into the statute itself. The acquisition discussions surrounding Dominion and NextEra were widely reported financial developments.
For McLeod, the larger issue is not simply whether the process was legal. It is whether the public fully understood who ultimately benefited from it.
“You can stop the whole thing with one word: no,” he said. “But these selfish, prideful politicians, they don’t like to tell these large for-profits no. They’d rather take the money.”
Every South Carolinian struggling with rising utility costs has already experienced the outcome of those decisions.
The question McLeod is forcing into the public conversation is whether voters were ever shown how the sequence began.
The Uniparty Indictment
Perhaps the most politically consequential thing Mullins McLeod said in Winnsboro was not directed at Republicans.
It was directed at Democrats.
“We don’t even have campaigns in South Carolina,” McLeod said. “It’s like a charade. The Democrats run, and they just have these talking points. They don’t speak the truth. They don’t reveal to people that they voted for the Energy Security Act. They talk about affordability, but they don’t tell you they made your life more expensive by voting for the Energy Security Act.”
That statement cuts to the core of McLeod’s broader argument about what he repeatedly calls “uniparty corruption.”
His thesis is not simply that Republicans hold power in South Carolina. It is that both parties, in different ways, have become structurally dependent on the same donor networks, corporate interests, lobbying forces, and political incentives that ultimately place institutional power above the interests of ordinary people.
And unlike broad anti-establishment rhetoric often heard on the campaign trail, McLeod attempts to anchor that accusation in specific legislative decisions.
The Energy Security Act is central to that argument.
McLeod alleges that Democratic lawmakers who publicly campaign on affordability and economic fairness also supported legislation that strengthened utility protections and contributed to rising costs for working-class South Carolinians.
In McLeod’s framing, that contradiction is not accidental.
It is the system functioning exactly as designed.
What makes the critique politically volatile is that McLeod is not merely attacking the opposing party. He is accusing members of his own party of participating in the same machinery of donor influence and corporate accommodation they often criticize publicly.
That accusation becomes even sharper when placed beside South Carolina’s current financial position.
The state is currently operating with a multibillion-dollar budget surplus while many South Carolinians continue struggling with rising housing costs, utility bills, healthcare expenses, and stagnant wages.
McLeod referenced that disconnect directly in Winnsboro.
“They’re sitting on a $9 billion surplus right now,” he said. “Can you believe that? The people all over South Carolina are struggling. They made that money. And they’re sitting on it.”
For those familiar with the culture surrounding the State House, McLeod’s criticism taps into a deeper frustration that extends beyond party labels.
Inside Columbia’s political ecosystem, particularly around Gervais Street and legislative circles, budget surpluses are often discussed as signs of fiscal strength and governmental success.
McLeod sees something else.
He sees working-class taxpayers generating wealth that the government accumulates while many families remain economically trapped.
During the interview, McLeod referenced a phrase often heard around political power brokers in Columbia: “We’re awash with money.”
To him, that phrase reveals the emotional and political distance between those managing public resources and the people generating them.
His proposed response is deliberately simple and populist: no permanent surplus under his administration.
McLeod says that if elected governor, unspent public funds would be returned directly to taxpayers as rebates rather than remaining stockpiled in state reserves.
“All funds that are not spent for the public benefit will be returned to the taxpayer who earned that dollar,” he said.
Whether voters see that as responsible fiscal populism or politically unrealistic rhetoric remains an open question.
But McLeod’s larger point is unmistakable: South Carolina’s political establishment, in his view, has become increasingly insulated from the economic reality facing the people outside the State House walls.
Dark Money, Citizens United, and the Abortion Machine
When CUBN asked McLeod how truth and town halls compete against the infusion of dark money into South Carolina's political system — specifically referencing Adam Kincaid, the executive director of both the National Republican Redistricting Trust and Fair Lines America, operating in South Carolina on behalf of Republican interests — McLeod offered an answer that reframed the entire debate about abortion in this state.
"This whole zero ban on abortion thing that's going on — that is a classic case of political corruption. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court passed Citizens United, and it basically legalized bribery.
These large corporations are able to spend unlimited money to influence elections as long as they don't coordinate with the candidate.
All this abortion debate is coming from these dark money interests. They're driving this debate, and they're trying to get the legislature to pass a law that is against the will of the majority of people in South Carolina."
McLeod's argument is structural: the abortion debate, as currently staged in the South Carolina General Assembly, is not a genuine moral disagreement among elected representatives.
It is a dark money product.
The corporations and interests that cannot get what they want through open democratic persuasion manufacture division — racial, religious, gender-based — because a divided electorate is a powerless electorate.
The abortion fight is the current instrument. The purpose is the maintenance of the conditions that produce the Dominion transaction, the $9 billion surplus, the Energy Security Act vote that Democrats will not acknowledge.
"They divide us on race, they divide us on religion, they divide us on gender, they divide us on anything they can think of," McLeod said. "For one reason: because if the people of South Carolina are divided, we have no power."
The Governor Is Not Weak — That Is Part of the Crime
The prevailing narrative about South Carolina's governorship — that it is structurally weak, that real power lives in the General Assembly — is itself, McLeod argues, a piece of disinformation.
"The reason why they tell us that is because that is part of the crime. That is part of the corruption. The governor is the only office in our state who has a constitutional obligation and responsibility to be the voice of the people — all the people."
His proposed use of that office is concrete. Weekly town halls during the legislative session. Every state contract involving a taxpayer dollar published on a publicly accessible website. Transparency as the governing mechanism. And the pressure that follows: when constituents know what their representative voted for, and why, the representative answers for it on election day.
"There's one good thing about politicians," McLeod said. "They always fold like cheap suits. What they have never had is heat."
Henry McMaster, the current governor, did not hold a single town hall during the Energy Security Act's passage to inform South Carolinians that the power company was about to receive a statutory guarantee of profitability funded by their own rate increases.
McLeod's argument is that the governor's silence was not passive. It was complicity.
"Of course he didn't," McLeod said. "Why? Because he's in on the deal."
South Carolina Is One of Five
South Carolina is one of only five states that does not have a mandatory minimum wage above the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. McLeod named this in Winnsboro without drama, because drama is not necessary when the fact stands alone.
All five of those states are in the Deep South.
McLeod's response: "I don't think that's a coincidence."
He is the first gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina history, by his own account, to run explicitly on a mandatory livable wage — not as a progressive platform item, but as a statement of elemental respect for people who get up every day and go to work to make someone else rich.
"When you show people the respect they deserve, they show up, they work hard," McLeod said, drawing on his own experience as an employer.
"That's how you make money. There's nothing wrong with making money. But greed is the problem."
He is also self-funding a significant portion of this campaign. He told the Chester audience directly: he has three young children, and he is spending a meaningful portion of his life savings to run, because when he becomes governor, the only two entities he will owe are God and the people of South Carolina.
"I am the first person in South Carolina political history to show the donor class something they have never seen before," McLeod said, "and it looks like this" — and he held up a hand with nothing in it.
What This Campaign Is
Mullins McLeod is not running a consultant-built campaign. He is running a legal case. The defendant is the structure that has governed South Carolina for generations — not one party, not one governor, not one utility company, but the arrangement between all of them that converts public resources into private profit while the people who generated those resources work two and three jobs and cannot make rent.
His evidence is 25 years of courtroom work. His witnesses are Ariane McCree's family, the inmates whose Eighth Amendment medical rights were outsourced to contractors who didn't provide standard care, the client stabbed to death in a prison riot while standing in a hallway because the facility was understaffed and its officers carried no liability insurance.
His exhibits are the Energy Security Act, the $600,000 lobbying spend, the $67 billion acquisition, the $9 billion surplus sitting in Columbia while the people who produced it cannot afford their power bills.
The Charleston arrest happened.
The pain McLeod described in Chester — the handcuffs, the autopsy, the weight of 25 years of other people's worst moments carried inside a man who built his entire identity around not being able to leave them at the office — is also real.
Both things are true simultaneously.
What the establishment — and, frankly, the earlier coverage of this campaign — has tried to do is use one truth to erase the other.
To make the arrest the story so that the transaction never has to be examined.
McLeod's answer to that is the same answer he gives in every courtroom.
He keeps talking.
“The people of South Carolina don’t have a seat at their own table. We’ve been on the menu. What I’m offering is transformative change — a complete shift in the balance of power. Turn the tables over. When they’re reset, the only people with seats at the table will be the people of South Carolina. And it’s the corrupt political establishment that will be on the menu.”
Mullins McLeod is a candidate in the 2026 South Carolina Democratic gubernatorial primary. CUBN recorded interviews with McLeod in Fairfield County and Chester, South Carolina. All quotations are drawn directly from those recorded transcripts. The Dominion lobbying figure, the Energy Security Act, and the Nextera acquisition are cited as stated by McLeod and are independently verifiable through public records.