Latest / Conversations With the Hoff / Alaina Moore, Co-Founder & Chief Noisemaker of Palmetto State Watch

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Alaina Moore, Co-Founder & Chief Noisemaker of Palmetto State Watch · Conversations With the Hoff

• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's a beautiful day on the South Strand.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Conversations with the Hoff.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Steve Hoffman, your host, and with me in the studio today is my executive producer, Tripp Detmering.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, everybody.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: We also have a special call-in guest from Palmetto State Watch, an organization promoting election integrity, transparency, and holding our political leaders and government agencies accountable.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds like a pretty good omission to me, I'll tell you that.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Our guest is Elena Moore.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Elena Moore is a resident of South Carolina, and she was driven by a passion for the Constitution since her homeschooling days, when she discovered her love for law in the seventh grade.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: She went on to earn national recognition in speech and debate and spent years traveling the state teaching students public speaking, government, and critical thinking.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: At Furman University, Elena completed the mock trial A team, helping secure multiple national victories.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: She graduated cum laud with degrees in politics and international affairs and communications studies.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Fueled by a deep belief in truth, transparency, and integrity, Elena has seen firsthand the corruption that plagues political systems.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now she's on a mission to equip South Carolinians with the knowledge of their constitutional rights and the tools to organize, push back, and hold power accountable.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the show, Elena.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you all so much for having me today.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, before we get into the uh, you get a lot of really neat blogs on your uh website where you talk about various issues, but I thought maybe you could tell us a little bit about the founding of Palmetto State Watch and what it what it is to be the chief noisemaker.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, so we started Palmetto State Watch for we're coming up on four years now.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: We started um Palmetto State Watch on the campaign trail, actually.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I met my co-founder in the summer of 2022, and we started doing some digging into some candidates that were running that year, and we we found a lot of stuff, let me tell you.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we thought, wow, we've got to give this to somebody.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we looked around and we're like, wow, okay, there's not really a watchdog organization in South Carolina that we feel comfortable giving this to that would actually do something with it.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we started our own thing.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And and why do they call you why do they call you the chief noisemaker?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we decided, you know, we didn't want to go with boring names.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided to really think about it, research some other groups, and you know, I'm uh Janice, my co-founder, she's a homeschool mama five.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We decided she's a big researcher.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've never seen anyone FOIA like she foyer, so we gave her the name Chief Muckraker.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm usually the one that's speaking it and making people mad um out in public.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't noisemaker fit well.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're both in the just the Department of Disruption, yeah.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty much.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're starting our own Doge, but it's more disruption.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: If people go to the uh Palmetto State Watch website, there's a lot of on the issues, there's a lot of blogs there, and most of those blogs I saw were written by you uh with some pretty interesting stuff in there about uh the shenanigans, I call it, that are going on in our state legislature.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um early on you you talked about you seem to fixate on the roads, on the DOT, SC DOT.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Who will build my roads?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, who's gonna build the roads, right?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Building roads is a good one, but it seems it's harder to maintain roads than it is to build them these days.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: Are we actually spending money to build roads, or are we paying taxpayer dollars to fund a massive bureaucracy?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: It really does seem that way because uh the South Carolina legislature, and this is on PalmettoStatewatch.com, one of our uh volunteers wrote this because what Palmetto State Watch does, and I'll back up just a little bit, we expose corruption, we promote effective transparency, and we also create a network for like-minded uh South Carolinians to share what's going on in their county and within their state.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it kind of tells um we train different people in order to it that want to expose corruption, how to do that.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So one of our volunteers, Anna Heron, wrote an article on the massive SCDOT bills that the state legislature uh started parading the beginning of this year.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: The reason that they were doing that is because uh, well, the half speaker Merle Smith decided last year at the end of session to create a committee.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's one thing that we've learned looking at the South Carolina legislature, is they love study committees.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: They love studying things.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So they started a modernization committee to study the SEDOT and the roads.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: They went around to a lot of people, uh different areas of South Carolina, asked people what their main issue was, which I don't really understand why they had to do that, because I mean you could ask anybody on the street and they they'll tell you infrastructure, our roads need work, they or the potholes need to be filled.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: It really can is that simple many times.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But they decided to study it, and uh what they came up with was not really anything to do with filling potholes, I mean, other than creating an app where you can do it yourself and and report the potholes, but it was also several different ways to raise taxes.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they uh the original bill had um multiple places where they were uh one of the biggest ones, they wanted to do debt and toll roads.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's still in the bill.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The bill has had many different changes to it, I will say.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: But um, and and the recent ones have been better in the House.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: They've taken out some of the bad stuff, but it's being put back into a conference committee, and we uh we know what usually happens in the conference committee.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They elect a couple of people to go into this, um go into a room and usually make things worse.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: But what the original bill did was it created a new coordinating council and more unelected bureaucracy.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, mind you, these bills were requested by the Secretary of DOT Justin Powell, and it creates more government and it also um would allow increasing of local taxes and uh property tax pressure where the counties could double their sales tax.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: They took that part out of the House bill, but we'll see what actually happens to it.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: It also creates more public-private partnerships, which seem to be a really big issue in South Carolina these days.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And on top of the debt and toll roads, it the original also had massive fee increases on EVs, hybrids, and truckers.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that that part was also taken out.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: I have a feeling a lot of this is gonna end up being put back in because that's what they like to do in conference committees.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: That uh public-private partnership thing, that kind of tells me uh cronyism.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that that's a way of uh rewarding the cronies.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: They find the um contractors that they want to work with, and then uh, you know, I mean, we've seen this in a lot of ways, especially our energy uh area of South Carolina.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: They love going into public-private partnerships and almost making this in-between.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's no free market.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's more of a, hey, you know, we're gonna work with you and you always work with us type deal, and we'll give you a lot of bumps for it.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Has anybody in the state legislature come up with the idea that, hey, South Carolina has an extremely weak executive branch?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: This whole DOT mess should probably be transferred to a department under the executive branch, have the governor control of the DOT.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that way it would definitely streamline the bureaucracy.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: He could put one person in charge of the Department of Transportation, and now you have one person who's accountable for the roads, for the state roads in South Carolina.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, if you go to the legislature, who's really accountable for the roads?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is there anybody?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's a great idea, but why would they give it over to the executive branch when that would take away their power?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I hear you.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then their campaign donations on top of it, because now you don't have anyone related to roads or the contracting of roads or any public-private partnership when it comes to expanding roads and making toll roads, so that would be a a lot of money they'd lose out on.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: So they definitely have a vested interest in expanding the bureaucracy, adding more and more regulations and committees for the Department of Transportation and grow the government like they have been doing for the last three or four sessions, growing at a much rapid, more rapid pace than the growth in the population of the state.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it it really is sad.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it all South Carolina really wants, I mean, okay, widen a couple of roads, that would be great.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: A couple interstates would could really use that.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, going over 95 from Georgia and South Carolina is like going through the twilight zone.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: It would be great if we could actually fix, you know, some of the problems that we have with our current roads before we start building new ones.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've been stuck on that word.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Georgia, you got three lanes on each side from 95, and all of a sudden you enter South Carolina and it goes to two lanes and it's backed up for 20, 30, 40 miles.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Bad news.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's tough.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: But also we need here in the the the low country in uh Ory County, we need a hurricane evacuation route uh out of the the Grand Strand.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: We have none.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: We have one highway, 501.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And everything kind of funnels into that, and it would be impossible if a major hurricane hit here to have uh uh to get out of to get out of here.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just want to interject on that.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: There the solution was already created down in Florida on their US 19.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And what they did for their evacuation route to get out of that the little peninsular area of uh of the Tampa Bay area, which is very narrow and very dangerous, was that they overpassed all of the places that had the red lights.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the same thing that we could do on 501.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this offering that we've put on there.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: It would be really fast, really uh effectual, but uh they have this fear that somehow, some way it would deteriorate the traffic to the local businesses if they did that.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Which is weird in my opinion.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, plus they keep diverting money.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: They can spend billions of dollars on Scout Motors for an EV plant, battery plant, that hasn't even been built yet.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then they can add another$500 million this session for that same project.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: But they can't spend a billion dollars to fix our roads.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's where our money is.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: God forbid, give us a tax break at some point.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: Or they can enter into a joint venture for a nuclear power plant that utterly failed and has now cost the taxpayers billions of dollars.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: So we know where our money is going.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's going down a rat hole rather than going where it should be going.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a good thing.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, don't you know Steve Go ahead.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was just gonna say, don't you know, Steve, that if something doesn't work the first time, then you try it again the second and the third time.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that that's called the definition of insanity.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, we can always, you know, create something that's fictitious, like uh a major uh U.S.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: highway that would be coming to Ory County and then have people try to invest in that.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Alena, you also wrote a very interesting uh article on the uh the primary fiasco going on here in South Carolina.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: And you mentioned about uh they might want to consider the convention method over the primaries.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, definitely.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is probably one of our more controversial opinions.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and Anna also worked on this one really hard last year.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: I we worked on it, and the GOP did not receive it that well, I will say.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but really what it did was it just it looked into you know the two different types of methods because you hear a lot of times in South Carolina, oh, we need closed primaries, oh, we need closed primaries, but it gets a little bit more complicated than that because back in 2012 there was a group that took um our open primaries to court, and the GOP was behind it for a little while, except the GOP pulled out last minute, and the judge found that since South Carolina has another method that they could use within their code of laws currently, that we couldn't have closed primaries, which and it does make sense this has been held up in in several different um courts across the U.S.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: around the same time.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Both Idaho and um Virginia had different opinions on this.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: But pretty much the judge said, hey, so you either have the primary method or the convention method.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: The primary method being, okay, well, um, you know, the two parties, uh the ones that can afford it, can uh uh use, you know, basically state dollars with the state election commission to um run their own primaries, and then you choose the uh which primary you want to vote in when you get there to the ballot box.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: The convention method is a little different because it doesn't use um state taxpayer dollars, and it's done within the party itself.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of going to the ballot box, or let's say you haven't been involved for a while, um you wouldn't uh actually uh do the voting um at a precinct.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: You would have to be a part of a party and and elect your chosen primary candidate through the state convention.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how all the other parties in South Carolina do it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the uh the Democrats and the Republicans are the only two parties that actually are able to hold a primary because they're big enough and they um qualify for it.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: And we're very aware of the convention method here at Liberty Crack Media because most of us are members of the Libertarian Party of South Carolina.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, our party uh members or any party that's uh third party that has a uh uh a convention method, when they go down to um and register to uh get onto the ticket, end up having to pay a fee that goes into paying for the primaries for the major parties.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's really interesting because my biggest thing is, hey, well, if you want people involved in politics, they should actually have to be involved in politics.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: You shouldn't have to worry about Joe Blow coming in not knowing what he's talking about, what he's doing, and then helping with the deciding vote because of a few mailers of somebody who had enough money to uh to put those mailers out, and all of a sudden the person with the most money tends to be the one that gets elected because they're the ones that can mass message to five million people in the state.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And the the state GOP has done their utmost to bastardize the actual primary process uh uh in such a manner that it favors incumbents.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Matter of fact, it tries to exclude some of the people that are trying to come into the party to actually reform state government.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: You wrote an article about the backlash uh against the South Carolina Incumbent Protection Act.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the um that was earlier this year was actually the first bill that we stopped.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was H 3643.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what we pretty much called it was kind of the Anti-David Pasco Act, because it's something that the GOP did a couple of years ago in their um own uh state convention, they passed a rule saying, well, you couldn't hold a seat in the county or state um GOP to a certain level.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: You could only be on the precinct level if you hadn't voted in two of the last three Republican primaries.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this would have taken out a lot of people, obviously younger voters who hadn't been able to vote in that many.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, you know, I was a younger voter.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then it would also rely completely on the voter rolls of the state election commission and the county election commission.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: What we found with many of our volunteers and supporters is they were sending us their records because they were going to make sure, hey, you know, we we qualify for this rule.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: However, there were several people who were disqualified because the state election commission said, oh yeah, you voted in the runoff of this primary back in in 2018.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the county says you are so the state election commission says you didn't, and then the county election commission says they did.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you have these really dirty voter rolls that we're working with, and that's a uh I could go on a very long rant about Eric, the system that we use for our voter roles, but we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a outside company to hold very dirty voter rolls that don't show many times who has voted and and how they voted correctly.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that became an issue because then you had county election uh GOPs deciding which one uh which record they wanted to look at, depending on whether or not they liked that person and wanted that person to be involved, and then it would go to the state GOP and the same thing would happen all over again.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: So they passed a bill, or excuse me, they presented a bill that the GOP, I personally believe was it had a very big part in and was said to have a very big part in because Drew McKissick was supposed to testify until I well he said he had a work trip, but I would probably say there was a lot of backlash.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Connolly testified in instead of him, right?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: He did.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: The prior SC GOP chairperson?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the former GOP chair that actually, I believe, was the GOP chair when it was taken to court over the open primary.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: So what this bill would have done was um it would have raised the candidate filing fee period uh by five days.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: It would impose filing fees on third-party candidates that do not hold primary elections.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um it also enabled party to charge candidates an extra$100 for a certification fee, you know, because one thing that we have learned is they love to throw a lot of fees in there when it comes to um election-related bills.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the fourth one was to require it was, as we spoke, about partisan candidates to have voted in two of the last three statewide primaries of a certified political party.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if it passed, it would have taken effect March 26, 2026, four days before the South Carolina election filing period ended.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the biggest threats to the establishment who has been running before this bill was offered was uh David Pasco, who's running for attorney general, and he's made several people mad over that fact, especially in the Republican Party.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, both Republicans and Democrats, it's impressive how you can really tick off so many people on both sides just for exposing corruption.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: But he was one of the citizen uh one of the candidates this bill would have uh taken out.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe there was also Alex Pellbath from who's running for District 1 currently Nancy Mace's seat, who would have also been removed as well.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, this bill was filed by Representative Brandon Newton of Lancaster County.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's been the SCGOP poster trial for filing bills that benefit the Republican leadership when it comes to elections.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it is uh every year he files probably at least three bills uh on the matter.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh are you familiar with uh House Bill 3021, the Small Business Government Accountability Act, uh where they would reduce uh regulations and uh increase public oversight instead of government oversight?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's one that's uh I guess the Americans for Prosperity uh group has really been uh trying to bring to the attention and um uh of the the the public.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I remember give me that bill number one more time.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: 3021.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: 3021.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: The Reigns Act, as some some people call it, to rein in uh uh government.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: And um unfortunately we've had our local representative uh Luke Rankin, who keeps wanting to shove it in a committee and take the teeth out of it.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but they've been very very good at uh trying to make sure that the teeth are back in.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it's supposed to be up for a a vote fairly shortly, and they had to put the teeth back in because uh uh even though they tried to sneak it into committee where they kind of muck it up, like we were talking about earlier, uh it's it kind of got forced back into the uh into the public eye.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I do remember that bill.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: I know we had some hesitancies over it because it seemed to um increase more state.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Controlling parts of it.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: That was kind of our analysis back when it was first filed back in November.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that we found interesting about it was that, you know, it was called the Small Business Regulatory Freedom Act, but it seemed to almost regulate a little bit in there.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And now I I haven't seen the um the most recent version, so I can't speak to it.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know we had some um hesitancies in the beginning with it, but that's one thing, you know, it would be great if we did actually uh deregulate some of our small businesses.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um one thing we have learned is that's nearly impossible when it when it comes to the state legislature, and that's why those type of bills don't work as much.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: And Alina, you know, you're talking about you're surprised both the Democrats and the Republicans.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: We only have one party in the state of South Carolina.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's the G O B.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it in the G-O-B, it's not G O P, it's the G O B, and they're comprised of Dixiecrats uh that are in the in the group.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: So these are just Democrats who put on a cloak of being Republican because their churches wanted them to change parties uh back in the 70s uh in order to stay with their, I guess you would say, their social uh programs instead of changing their tax and spend ways.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I how I've been been seeing it.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: So uh they've been protecting both the Democrats and the uh Republicans and protecting their stranglehold on um really on just keeping the uh the plantation uh in the plantation owner's arms.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: I and that's if if you spend any time watching the House or the Senate floor, which I put that on in the background a lot of times, I highly recommend doing it.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it go to SCstatehouse.gov and watch it.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: They usually have streams from Tuesday to Thursday between January and May.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: This I believe is their last week in session, unless they get called back for a special session, which almost always happens.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing that you will see is that the the establishment leaders in both the Democrat and the Republican work together a lot and they vote along the same lines.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are some people I'd call the agitators on both sides of the aisle who push back and many times link arms against the establishment of both parties because it is such a uniparty.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what it is at the end of the day.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that we've uh we've actually been working on a series recently, and this is over on our other website, which is Palmetto State Watch Foundation.com, excuse me, we um, which is our 501c3, we started a couple of years ago that does more of the nonpartisan work.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've been going through a series looking at the Attorney General's litigation retention agreements.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Back in November, we filed for the last 10 years of it, and a litigation retention agreement has been used by the South Carolina Attorneys General Office extensively in the past recent years for political insider law firms that engage them to represent the state and political subdivisions in litigation, including and usually major class action lawsuits.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: What normally happens with these bills or what we have seen recently, and this is through class actions like the plutonium settlement and the opioid settlement, what our attorney general likes to do is take a lot of lawyer legislators and pop them on these huge settlements.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the day, they end up getting tens, hundreds of thousands, and some in some cases, millions of dollars.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: One thing we've learned is that it's not just Republicans he puts on there, it's both Democrats and Republican lawyer legislators, the ones that tend to vote on his budget.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we actually released the third article of this installment yesterday.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's created quite a storm recently about the House leadership and and who's on the payroll.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the House speaker, for instance, the past three years, he's received over$2.1 million.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: His law firm has received over$2.1 million between 23 and 25 over these um litigation retention agreements or LRAs, as we call it for short.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then the House Ways and Means speaker, Bannister, his law firm received half a million dollars between um 2024 and 2025.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: What's really interesting about this, you would think they would put this kind of stuff on their um SEI reports, their statements of economic interest.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: That would make sense, which is really interesting because we went back to both Smith's and Bannister's SEI reports.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: For Smith, he didn't report it in 2023 or 2024.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: He did in 2025, I will note.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he misspelled opioid, but you know, he did file it.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what really matters.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then Bannister didn't include it on his original uh reporting filing for 2024.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: But what he did do was he amended his disclosure for the year of 2024, 11 and a half months after that report was due, to include the settlement fees that his law firm received.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: That amendment was only filed four days after our second report on the Attorney General litigation retention agreements with lawyer legislators.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: We had uh kicked out a piece about some of the Democrats in the Senate and also some of the old law uh some of Alan Wilson's old law firms that had received uh gigantic um settlements.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so Bannister did amend it after I guess we got onto it and he saw where the writing was on the wall.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he also threw in there that he had represented a private citizen that sued SC D OT and earned$90,000 in fees, which I guess he forgot in his original disclosure the year before.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: So uh we definitely know that the Uniparty in South Carolina does not like competition.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you know that because of H.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: 3557, which is a mandatory filing fee uh bill.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure where that is now, but that would definitely take uh a lot of the uh the other party third party candidates out of the they couldn't raise enough money to actually file for for public office.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: It just raise raises the amount of money for the filing fee trem tremendously.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: And also, they don't like people to watch what they're doing.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: You probably know all about S960.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: The gag the gag South Carolina watchdogs.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: It makes me gay.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh absolutely.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um S960 is honestly one of my favorites.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was filed um or it started to move around the time we stopped a um bill that would have removed the MMR uh religious exemption, um vaccine or religious exemption.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: So uh honestly, we kind of uh saw it as a feather in our cap that they filed this bill.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that was S 10927, 1029, I'm sorry.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh well, actually it was the one before that, which was I believe S853, if I remember, or excuse me, S897.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then they filed um S1029 as a response to that, which was really interesting.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: We've had a lot of dialogue about religious exemptions and and um freedom of uh vaccination or freedom to vaccinate.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um but what what actually ended up happening was uh lawyer legislator Margie Bright Matthews, who has been a part of those settlements um from her sole practitioner law firm um with the Attorney General's office, she filed S897, which would eliminate the religious exemption for the MMR vaccine and was scheduled for a hearing thanks to watchdog group efforts like our own.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: This bill did not move out of subcommittee.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they said, oh, well, let's file a bill that, you know, helps religious exemption, which you never really want to hear that because South Carolina has one of the strongest religious exemptions in the U.S.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: that is still standing right now.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: So anything that touches that is a little scary.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's exactly what S 1029 would have done.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: It would have, it was actually presented by some people who are pro-medical freedom.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: However, the bill would have um put in a personal exemption for only certain people, but then allow private schools for children and private daycares to deny any exemptions uh related to the vaccinations that they wanted to.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it was quite a wolf in sheep's clothing.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um thankfully, thankfully, that bill um did not move because after our article, they called a lot of people a lot of people that were related to that bill, and um it it did not even get to a subcommittee hearing.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a really big win.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to go to what you were talking about, S960, that was a um bill that would have threatened the effectiveness of watchdogs, and it was filed in February on February 26th and began moving almost immediately.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided, okay, well, the Senate probably isn't taking too kindly to what we're doing.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um but S-960, uh, what it does is it redefines or it defines election communication to encompass any paid message supporting and opposing a clearly identified candidate or ballot measure over TV, radio, internet, or print.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then it also defined independent expenditure committee for any groups that spent$500 or more on political messaging, which if if you worked for a campaign at all, you tend to, you know, pay out of your own pocket.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lot of people.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the Libertarian Party would have to file all kinds of paperwork just to be able to put their message out there.
• 33:18
  unknown: Yeah.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: And they could consider pretty much any messaging.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, by those standards, a ballot measure, are you kidding me?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the stuff that we talk about would probably be considered that.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't even have to talk about a candidate.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: But what was in the fine print of this bill was that you would have to um provide donor disclosures.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: So anyone that has contributed$1,000 or more, you're going to list all their personal information out in the public almost as if you're a candidate.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you would have to do spending disclosures.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: So any vendor that you've worked with, or um you'd have to include all of their personal information and report any personal services, salaries, and reimbursements.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and then another, the third thing it would do was it would force disclaimers and communications.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: So for any communications on the internet, print or mail, you would have to put the include the committee name and address in a legible and conspicuous area for broadcasting that you would have to say it out loud.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: So anytime you're like, oh, this guy doesn't seem great, and they think you're, you know, uh pulling for somebody, oh well, all of a sudden you've got to fulfill these requirements.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: You would also have to have uh record retention um to maintain records four years, and then a filing schedule, which, you know, if if everything else wasn't enough, this is probably what did me in.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: You would be required to file with the state ethics commission on the same schedule as campaign reports.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: So they're trying to cut down on people actually looking over their shoulder and saying what the heck they're doing.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: We need more organizations like yours that monitors what's going on in our state legislature.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: We we look at the uh South Carolina Policy Council with their legislative updates, I follow Fitz News, I follow uh Jonathan Hill's bad bill sheets and other organizations out there.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: We can really see what our legislature is doing.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not an easy task, as I'm sure you're aware, Elena, because thousands of bills are pre-filed every year.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you go through those and see, well, what's good, what's bad?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the good, the bad, and the ugly of what's going on in our state legislature.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we had to be.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like taking water in from a fire hose every time.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and one thing that we've learned is that we're not going to be able to unfortunately we're we just don't have the manpower as of yet, and that's what our goal is.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't have the manpower right now in order to stop all the bad bills or or to read all the bad bills.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: But what we can do is we can find the ones that we believe are the worst and and really do our best to get calls to action out to the grassroots, those that are paying attention and that follow us in order for them to take action.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we have stopped several bills every single year.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we have stopped uh tax hikes, uh, we have stopped um a health czar that was uh attempted uh two or three years in a row.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, it the list goes on and on.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, a lot of election bills like the one we were talking about earlier with the supposedly closed primaries, it's just it's it's a lot to take on.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: It and it is like taking water from a fire hose constantly.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: But our goal, you know, we are supported off of grassroots donations, people just like me and you who sign up for a monthly, you know,$25 donation or$10 donation.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's really what keeps us going and helps us grow our staff, which is the main goal, so we can keep doing this.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're not owned by anybody, trust me.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've I've turned down several um offers.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, if you you you know, if you don't talk about this and and focus more on this, we'll give you this much money.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: We don't work like that.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we started out as uh uh as two women who who wanted to uncover corruption, and and we have grown into um several different volunteer uh several different counties with volunteers that are doing the exact same thing, and we're gonna stay that way because if there's one thing that that happens with us, we're we're definitely not gonna be bought.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, hopefully this org this podcast will help your organization grow.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's organizations like yours that make a lot of these bad bills that they actually die in committee, or they're not put on the floor for a vote.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it's because of your pressure that that happens rather than streamlining the bill, fast tracking the bill through the legislature and getting it signed by the governor.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really exciting to see how many people are starting to pay attention because we're seeing also a lot of uh a lot more people run for office and and and flip some of these incumbent seats.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of the really big ones that happened um last year was um in special election.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there um well, actually, there were three really big ones.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: Diane Mitchell was um elected in Greenville, and she's been very outspoken.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think John Lassinger from Lexington filled RJ May's old seat, and then you had Senator Um Lee Bright make a comeback after several years.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: I campaigned for him about uh ten years ago when it was running for the legislature.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason the reason he lost his seat was because Plan he made Planned Parenthood very mad due to his his pro-life stances.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he's still up there.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that I found really interesting, he, you know, and he was always gonna say it like it is in his uh earlier this year, there was a bill that was uh it was called the Homestead Act, and it would have allowed um property tax breaks up to a certain extent for I believe it was at the time$50,000, or right now we have$50,000 tax breaks for seniors, anyone over the age of 65, but they wanted to increase that.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Lee Bright offered an amendment to allow that tax break for everyone.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: He said, you know, this is gonna create a generational divide.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: We've got enough of that going on.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um we seem to be able to find the money for$1.3 billion to Scout Motors and one uh$130 billion for the uh uh uh Panthers uh failed stadium.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Why not, you know, give a little bit of a property tax break, uh to a certain extent, up to$150,000 for everyone.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they voted against it.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we have that whole record of everyone that ended up voting against that bill.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he's definitely one of my heroes.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's good to have somebody in the state legislature who actually believes in limited government, individual, and economic freedom.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: And Lee Bright is one of those people.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: So, Alina, we're running out of time.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, thanks for being a guest on Conversations with the Hoff.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: I hope our listening audience can appreciate the work being done by organizations such as Palmetto State Watch.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with the last sentence on your mission statement.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: It is time to rid our state of slimy politicians and backhanded deals by exposing corruption and ridding our state of it.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: We encourage you to get involved with our organization and put uh Carolinians first.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, I I encourage all of our listeners to please support uh Palmetto State Watch and other organizations that expose those slime balls.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: And Congaree and uh Morador on the Congaree.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: So thanks again, uh Elena.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, now it's time for a word from our glorious leader and executive producer Tripp Detmering.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to thank Elena, and I hope she hangs on to the phone after this uh this interview so we can talk to her a little bit more.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in our show notes, you're gonna find if you can donate to Palmetto State Watch the link to Palmetto Statewatch.com and also to Palmetto Statewatch Foundation.com.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to listen to more interesting podcasts like Conversations with the Hoff, and you want to have a few laughs, listen to Microphone Monkeys.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you're interested in books, you might want to listen to the Bookworm Mom.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: You can find all of these wonderful podcasts at Libertycraft Media.com.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: I want to thank everybody again and hope to see you next week.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_04: Let's read take the more open doors.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_04: The powder's vision was fighting for hands off my train, hands off my train.