South Carolina has been my home since the day my parents dropped me off at The Citadel over 40 years ago. I graduated with honors knowing I wanted to build my career here. And for most of my life, this state has had something rare in modern America: a strong sense of identity rooted in faith, family, work, and personal responsibility. We didn’t need to be told who we were. We didn’t need permission to live by our values. South Carolina was allowed to be South Carolina.

That is changing.

Not because our people have changed, but because the world around us has. We no longer get our news from the local paper or the evening broadcast focused on our communities. Today, nearly everything we see and hear comes through social media feeds and national cable news. We now live inside one national media ecosystem, and it is overwhelmingly controlled by the most liberal voices from the most liberal states in the country. Their values are no longer contained by geography. They are pushed into every living room, every classroom, every smartphone, and every child’s pocket.

With that flood has come a relentless message: that South Carolinians are backward, hateful, or ignorant if we don’t accept ideas that contradict everything we were raised to believe. We’re told we’re bigots if we oppose illegal immigration. We’re told we’re intolerant if we don’t believe boys should be in girls’ bathrooms. We’re told we’re dangerous if we question whether social media companies should be allowed to bombard our children with sexualized and ideological content. You can’t even turn on a Disney app anymore without your child being exposed to messaging that says it’s perfectly natural to reject the reality of the body you were born with.

I sat in Democratic meetings for years. And I watched something change.

At first, when this woke ideology started creeping in, reasonable Democrats pushed back. They said no. They said this doesn’t reflect who we are. They said South Carolina families won’t accept this. But the pressure from national Democrats never stopped. It came through funding. It came through messaging. It came through activists and consultants and national organizations. And slowly, person by person and county by county, the resistance broke.

What spread wasn’t progress. It was a kind of ideological sickness. A woke mind virus that replaced common sense with fear and biology with ideology. Eventually, South Carolina Democrats became indistinguishable from national Democrats: disconnected from working families, dismissive of faith, hostile to tradition, and obsessed with appeasing the loudest voices on the far left.

That was one of the reasons I left the Democratic Party. It no longer represented the values I was raised on. It no longer stood for what is natural, reasonable, or good for children and families. I couldn’t stand by while a political movement chose ideology over reality and activists over parents.

I believe deeply in the rule of law. That is the Attorney General’s first responsibility. But the Attorney General also has a duty to protect the values of the state he serves. Those two things are not in conflict. They go hand in hand.

When I say I will fight federal overreach, I don’t just mean Washington bureaucrats. I mean national cultural forces that believe they have the right to reshape South Carolina in their image. I will fight back against social media companies that profit by pushing harmful content onto children. I will fight back against groups that pretend borders don’t matter and expect communities to absorb the consequences. I will fight back against anyone who tries to label South Carolinians as hateful simply because we believe in family, faith and common sense.

And when I say I will protect our children, I mean all of it. Physically. Mentally. Morally.

South Carolina does not need to apologize for who we are. We need leaders who are willing to defend it.