TWIBS: Nancy Mace’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
For a woman who regularly throws childish fits and embarrasses herself in public, at work and on television, Nancy Mace has outdone herself this week in the public spectacle department.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Come one, come all, come hear a new update about virulent transphobic South Carolina House Representative Nancy Mace! I’ve talked about Nancy a few times before, like when she gleefully segregated women’s bathrooms at the Capitol, and when she feigned great injury over a completely normal handshake, and even when she tried to pick a fight with her colleague Representative Jasmine Crockett despite being too fragile to withstand hand-to-hand contact.
Well, Nancy’s had a rough week in the press, believe it or not.
For a start, on Sunday the 20th Mace shared a video to social media in which one of her constituents brazenly tried to speak to her in public… doesn’t he know the common rabble aren’t meant to address their elected representatives? In the video, she calls him “fucking crazy” for calmly asking her if she planned to hold any townhall meetings with her constituents, and on Twitter she called him “nuts” for “wearing daisy dukes in a makeup store.” She later went on Fox News to claim that she felt threatened and harassed because the person confronting her was a man, even though he stood ten feet away from her and never even raised his voice at her.
Mace seems disinterested in the sort of townhall meetings her constituents are asking for, though. She’s also in hot water this week for hosting a cozy RSVP-only Q&A in a gated community that “boasts 36 holes of golf, a private marina, a 25,000 square-foot clubhouse and about 1,100 homesites, with completed homes ranging above $2 million,” where she espoused Christian Zionist viewpoints about Jews in Israel.
For her third and final trick this week, at a Turning Point USA-sponsored speaking engagement at the University of South Carolina, Mace got into a verbal altercation with a USC student who simply asked her to apologize for saying the t-slur. If you simply must see an elected congresswoman flip out like a six year old when she’s told not to use hurtful, derogatory words, Mace posted the confrontation to Twitter, as usual. She misgenders the student in her post, unsurprisingly, and accuses her of intending violence without any proof.
This is far from the first time Mace has used that slur, and it isn’t even the first time she’s fired it off three times in a row with the intent of pissing somebody off. Back in February, after being called out for using the word in a House Oversight Committee hearing, she did exactly the same thing prompting Representative Gerry Connolly to ask Chair James Comer to counsel Mace to maintain the absolute bare minimum of decorum during an active committee hearing.
I know what some of you are thinking, I’m sure. That Mace is a pest, a minor political player seeking attention by being loudly offensive in an era of The Great Culture War where proudly being a bigot is one of the most surefire ways to earn money and fame as a conservative grifter. I get it, and you’re not completely wrong, but here’s my stance on the matter:
If American elected officials are going to show their bare asses in public and be loudly hateful, I’m going to point at them and laugh every single time. If even one South Carolina voter learns that their Representative (who has expressed tentative plans to run for governor, I might add) is a hateful childish loser? That’s one more mark in the W column, folks.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
