00:00:08.280And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:13.720So, Adrienne, today we are talking about the woman, the myth, the legend, the, I think it's fair to say,
00:00:21.780very incomparable and very strange and perhaps a little bit troubled congresswoman from South
00:00:29.400Carolina named Nancy Mace. What do you know about Nancy Mace? Well, I believe we've done a show on0.95
00:00:35.920her before, right? Oh, well, we had her in our sort of like anti-Epstein lady conservatives,0.99
00:00:42.020right? Yeah. She was one of a few of them from the MAGA right, these like far-right women,0.99
00:00:47.840Republican congresswomen who went really hard on the Epstein files.0.81
00:00:52.920Yeah. And so that's where I learned most of what I know about her, which is that she's had this
00:00:59.220interesting trajectory from moderate or comparatively moderate GOP to full MAGA to then this
00:01:07.540weird kind of apostasy and most importantly, a kind of gendered apostasy from the Trump line.
00:01:12.880And yeah, that's sort of all I know. And the little bits and hints you've dropped over the last few weeks make me think that this is going to be a less than cheerful hour of In Bed with the Right.
00:01:27.440Yeah, this is actually going to be a dark one.
00:01:29.200I recently wrote about Nancy Mace for The New Yorker, and I got interested in her because I thought she was doing something really weird, right?
00:01:37.980Like she is, as you said, Adrienne, a gender apostate a little bit from the MAGA movement because she's really, really militantly anti-sexual violence, right?
00:01:48.880She has been going really hard on Trump about the Epstein files.
00:01:52.820She's really been going after a lot of her colleagues, including her Republican colleagues in Congress, who have been accused of sexual abuse.
00:02:01.740She has been at the forefront of trying to drum sexually abusive men, including Republicans, out of the Capitol.
00:02:08.160She's also been really, really militantly anti-trans in this way that seemed for a little bit like she was trying to do like a British-style turf positioning, right?0.99
00:02:19.700With some, like, sort of female chauvinism.
00:02:23.020At other times, she was drawing from a kind of, like, raw, raw girl power boosterism that I associate with, like, the pop feminism of the aughts that has now been, like, very aggressively rejected by the MAGA movement.
00:02:35.640Sometimes she seems to be aping this kind of, like, I don't know, crossfit, like, pull-up doing female machismo that you see from a couple of these female characters on the MAGA, right?
00:02:47.200I think of, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are, like, they're very physically fit, even though Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace actually hate each other.
00:02:53.720But they're, like, women on the MAGA right who are really into demonstrating their own capacity for, like, toughness and vulgarity, you know what I mean?0.99
00:03:00.460Yeah, so she's basically Pete Hexeth, except with the opposite attitude towards sexual violence.0.90
00:03:31.160This is a sad story of somebody who's really unraveling.
00:03:34.900So, like, lately, Nancy Mace has been getting a lot of press for this, like, really bizarre and erratic personal behavior that has raised a lot of questions, not just about, like, her character, but really about, like, her well-being, right?
00:03:47.880Did you hear about this thing about the airport?
00:03:50.560She was trying to fly out of the Charleston airport, and I guess, like, members of Congress or general fancy people get, like, a security detail to escort them to their gate.
00:05:21.300And she got him thrown in jail overnight.
00:05:25.280And finally the charges were dropped because the incident, like everything, was just videoed from a million different angles and it was very obviously just a handshake, you know.
00:05:32.960Not since Michael Tracy got brutally knifed by Maxine Waters as a member of Congress and violence been in the same sentence.
00:05:39.540but like this is a story where a person we don't like is behaving badly in some ways that are like
00:05:49.560kind of gross at moments kind of high stakes because of her power at other moments
00:05:56.600but sometimes just kind of like low stakes trashy like yelling at tsa agents but also
00:06:03.740There might be less dunking in this episode than some of our listeners might hope because, you know, as often is the case, the more you know about what's going on with a crazy, messy person, the less it seems funny and the more it seems really sad.
00:06:20.460This is also one I want to provide a little bit of a content note for.
00:06:23.480There is a lot, a lot, a lot of sexual violence in this episode.
00:06:28.060There's also lots and lots of transphobia in this episode, including the use of a transphobic slur that Mace likes to throw around a lot.
00:06:36.840I think kind of for shock value, I'm going to have to at one point like read a quote of hers.
00:06:40.760So, like, please keep in mind that there's some tough stuff in here, both like bad stuff that happens to her and bad stuff that she does.
00:06:48.300And we're just going to have to sort of try to keep in mind that all of this is, you know, involved with the same person.
00:06:53.260And also just like looking at the difficult stuff might be hard for people.
00:06:56.880So just a heads up. So what do you know about, like, Nancy Mace? Just who is this woman?0.96
00:07:02.720So she's a congresswoman from South Carolina's first district, which I looked up the last time we did an episode that involved her, which is not where you'd think.0.98
00:07:12.480Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think, is from a fairly rural corner of Georgia.
00:07:17.000Nancy Mace is from urban or suburban Charleston, right?
00:07:20.880Like, it's a wealthy district. And her genesis sort of bears that out.
00:07:25.700Like she didn't start on the wing, not right, but in a much more genteel place for a Republican.
00:07:31.380Yeah, she came in in the 2020 election.
00:07:36.780She won her congressional race in a year that Donald Trump lost.
00:07:41.860And she came in sort of positioning herself as somebody who is going to be the head of like a post-Trump Republican Party.
00:07:50.220This lasted like two seconds in early 2021, but it did for a second after January 6th look like the Republican Party was going to have to move on from Donald Trump like they were sick of this guy and they were going to get rid of him now that he was out of office.
00:08:06.640And for about like 20 minutes, there were a bunch of people trying to position themselves as the head of a new post-Trump Republican Party that was like more moderate on social issues in particular.
00:08:33.280Even Q. Two spirits would have been a bridge too far, but she made it all the way to the Q.
00:08:38.200And then it's really interesting because now she is like probably famous for people outside her district who aren't really following this story.0.93
00:08:45.780If you know anything about Nancy Mace, you probably know that in 2024, I think it was actually early 2025, she introduced a resolution to ban trans people from using appropriate bathrooms in the Capitol complex.0.56
00:09:01.740So the Capitol building itself and then the various like office buildings around it.
00:09:05.400And she introduced that specifically to target, like, literally one person, Sarah McBride of Delaware, who is the first trans, openly trans member of Congress.
00:09:15.820And she did that right as Sarah McBride was coming into office and sort of seized on this moment to make a big transphobic political stance, right?
00:09:22.720So this is somebody who has been on a journey.
00:09:26.840And she's also, like, probably known pretty well for her ability to, like, alienate Donald Trump.
00:09:32.840But Donald Trump does not like this person, even though she has really positioned herself now over the past couple of years as like one of MAGA's strongest soldiers.
00:09:42.180But she's disliked by Donald Trump and she's disliked by other members of the Republican Party.
00:09:47.480And that kind of comes not from her transphobia, but from her opposition to sexual violence, as we touched on before.
00:09:53.380Her pursuit of the Epstein controversy and her willingness to break with Trump over that combined with her like real outspokenness over what she says is a culture of sexual harassment in Congress and her willingness to like pretty aggressively and like pointedly and in ad hominem terms antagonize Republican colleagues, male colleagues who have been accused of sexual violence.
00:10:17.640She's, like, made herself a problem, right?
00:10:49.340This sexual violence issue that she came to, I want to say, like, starting around, like, 2023, really, and especially after an incident in February 2025 that we're going to get to, she really leaned hard into anti-sexual violence politics in a way that has actually cost her in terms of her career, in terms of her ambition.
00:11:14.440And she stuck to it like a dog with a bone.
00:11:16.680And that's interesting to me, because when most people on the right talk about sexual violence, they seem insincere.
00:11:25.400They're using it as a cudgel against immigrants often.
00:11:39.540What's interesting about Nancy Mace is that I think she is sincere, actually, in her anti-sexual violence politics. She really does seem to believe that, like, rape is real and a problem, which is more than what you can say for a lot of people, including some Democrats, right?
00:11:57.860Although she's also like pretty selective about that, like a fun game that journalists like to play is to try and get her on the record about E.G. Carroll, who she says is, you know, like tacky seems to be her objection.
00:12:09.260Like she will never go there with Donald Trump himself, but she'll go there with other Republicans.
00:12:15.420But it's interesting. She does seem to have a real strong objection to sexual violence.
00:12:21.160I think that might be because it is personal for her.
00:12:24.180So Mace has long discussed a rape that she experienced at the hands of a high school classmate when she was 16.
00:12:32.560That story has been like central to her account of her own early life, to her account of some of her political positions regarding things like abortion.
00:12:42.200That has been like a longstanding feature of her own story.
00:12:47.640But more recently, she has made some waves for accusations that she made actually on the House floor in a speech in February of 2025, saying that her former boyfriend and several of his friends deliberately made her and other women incapacitated with drugs and alcohol.
00:13:08.640alcohol. It's not clear exactly what she's accusing them of. Either they deliberately got these women
00:13:14.120really, really drunk and really, really messed up, or she may sometimes actually seem to be
00:13:18.420implying that they have like slipped these women something. Oh, God. But either way, like these are
00:13:22.840guys who she says deliberately incapacitated women with drugs and alcohol, sexually assaulted and0.85
00:13:29.460raped them when they were unable to consent and like videotaped it and passed it around to each
00:13:34.140other um so nancy mace alleges and she alleged this on the house floor that she was four months
00:13:43.840the victim of a pelico style like drugging and assaulting conspiracy by her boyfriend and a
00:13:49.580couple of his friends while she was in congress wow we should say that the ex-boyfriend and the
00:13:54.620friends all deny wrongdoing and that with accusations she's made are now like the object
00:14:01.680to have a whole bunch of ongoing legal battles in South Carolina.0.96
00:14:58.080and she, like, had it blown up and, like, put it on the house floor.
00:15:00.460Like, this is nuts, right? So this is going to be an episode about somebody I really don't like. And it's also going to be an episode about some really dark, bad things happening to somebody I really don't like.
00:15:14.780So a lot of times in sexual violence cases, and I'm like, I'm trying to be delicate about this, but like perpetrators or people who are trying to like stand up for perpetrators and the accused, they will like try to smear the character of the victim, right?
00:15:27.420They'll be like, well, she's not really trustworthy.
00:15:33.300And they do that because it works, right?
00:15:35.680When people hear that a woman has a bad trait or bad opinions or that she has, like, done bad things, they start to think that a rape perpetrated against her seems a little less wrong or, like, less serious, you know?
00:15:50.720I don't think anybody is, like, avowing this.
00:15:52.580Like, okay, no, there's categories of women that it's okay to rape, but, like, that is functionally how a lot of these arguments play out.
00:15:58.380It's like, okay, well, she can't really complain about this or I'm not going to stick my neck out that this is wrong.0.82
00:16:03.560Or who's to know what's really true, that kind of thing.0.96
00:16:06.140Right, because she seems like a nut job, whatever.
00:16:08.040But, like, it is wrong and it is serious.0.98
00:16:11.280Sexual violence is bad no matter who it happens to.1.00
00:16:15.500And it happens to women who are bad people, like, every single day.
00:16:19.860And it's horrendous when it happens to them just as much as it's horrendous when it happens to people you like, right?0.99
00:16:27.520So I'm going to ask everybody who listens along with us today to keep both of these things in mind, that this can be somebody you judge harshly, somebody you wouldn't want to spend time with.
00:16:37.400And we can still acknowledge that she was wronged or may have been wronged, allegedly, in a way that's, like, very serious.
00:16:45.140I don't think doing that, I don't think holding that reality in our brains requires us to excuse her own behavior at all.
00:19:00.360What's different is that, like, after the rape, especially, Mace, who was, you know, 16 years old at the time, conservative family, she had a really, really hard time.
00:19:46.360It's not as old as West Point, but it's one of the older senior military colleges in the U.S.
00:19:52.640And, yeah, it's very highly regarded, right?
00:19:56.120It's fancy. It's prestigious. It's very, very Southern. It is very, very conservative.
00:20:02.560And when Nancy Mace graduated, it was a huge deal because the Citadel,
00:20:07.260especially I think even more than a lot of other military colleges, had really resisted sex integration.
00:20:12.740Yeah. Is the Citadel the one that's like really rigidly hierarchized?
00:20:16.400Like the students all get sort of slotted into like, not houses, but like sort of like echelons?
00:20:22.540I don't know any military college. It's not really rigidly hierarchized. In her account of her time at the Citadel, she's going to talk about, you know, obligations she had to older students, obligations she had to alumni, obligations she had to like random parents, like to just sort of like stop and stand at attention basically for anybody who demanded that she do so, which is going to be an opportunity for a lot of abuse, right?
00:20:50.880This is a place where they did not want women.
00:20:52.960She was the first woman to graduate.0.99
00:20:54.280It made her briefly famous, right?0.96
00:20:55.920So, like, now we know her as a congresswoman because decades later she entered politics.
00:21:01.180But she had this earlier brush with fame and then sort of stepped out of the spotlight and then, like, came back to become a congresswoman.
00:21:07.880This is going to become, like, a recurring theme with Nancy.
00:21:10.860But, yeah, the Citadel is South Carolina's military college.
00:21:13.460And it was originally formed in the 1820s because, get this, South Carolina, a slave state, caught a black man who they said was planning a slaver's vault.
00:21:28.620But like the psychological terror of a slave revolt was really potent in the antebellum mind, right?
00:21:34.900And so they started this citadel, this place, as a training corps for militia that they wanted to build up to combat potential future slave revolts, right?
00:21:46.860So it was developed as an institution meant to enforce slavery, right?
00:24:08.640So Mace talks about the decision to enroll in the Citadel as being really about her own sense of endurance and like pretty directly linked in her own mind to her rape in high school.
00:24:20.700So like in Politico in 2024, she says, looking back on it now, I had something to prove to myself and I wanted to prove that I could go to a challenging environment.
00:24:32.180I could face an obstacle and adversity unlike anything I had ever faced before and I wouldn't quit.
00:24:37.920From a psychological perspective, to me, this honestly kind of makes sense.
00:24:41.880Like when you get raped, you're not in control of your body, right?
00:24:46.340And then she had to quit school in the aftermath.
00:24:49.240she wasn't in control of her own life, right?
00:26:43.940It is very Old South, like, sort of preserving a pantomime of, like, European aristocracy the way that, like, the slave-holding South did.0.97
00:27:39.080Yeah. So it's 1996. Mace enrolls in the Citadel with a cohort of three other women. Right. So she's not the only one. And that's right after Faulkner leaves. Right. Yeah. So it's four women in this class. Only two of them eventually graduate. Mace is one of them. But she has something that the other women don't have that Faulkner didn't have either. And that is that her dad is working in the school administration.
00:28:24.140So after she graduated in 1999, Mace very quickly published a memoir based on the publicity around her being the first woman to graduate from the Citadel.
00:28:35.540It was ghostwritten by Mary Jane Ross and Adrian.
00:28:39.220What is the title of this memoir that I'm holding up to the webcam?
00:28:48.280So I'm seeing here in the Company of Men, a woman at the Citadel.0.99
00:28:52.040Well, it is, according to this blurb, provocative, hilarious, illuminating, and true, according to Pat Conroy, author of The Lords of Discipline, which also sounds like a gay porno.0.85
00:29:04.080It is all in military gray, and it has someone looking like a member of the cast of Police Academy on the front.0.98
00:29:12.020That is little Nancy herself, now with the butch haircut.
00:29:16.680I think I am the only person to have read this book.
00:29:19.960It is neither provocative, hilarious, nor illuminating.
00:29:23.100I can't speak for whether it's true, although I am kind of trusting Nancy on this one.
00:29:27.860But it is an account mostly of her first year.0.84
00:29:31.200That very short, high and tight haircut that she has on the cover was basically a punishment.
00:29:37.120She really wanted to keep her hair long and the Citadel wouldn't let her.1.00
00:29:40.460And she had a whole like gender panic about it.0.62
00:29:43.000I mean, people can't see this cover, but basically that haircut does not exactly scream hilarious hijinks ensue, I have to say.
00:29:51.660She clearly tried to write this so that it would be kind of a comedy.
00:29:55.080So, like, in the book, I swear I'm the only person who read this book, and I kind of can't believe I did.
00:30:02.320Like, there's this whole thing about how they do bunk inspections in the dorm, and they had requirements to, like, fold their laundry in a very specific way,
00:30:10.120but there was no regulation for where to put bras
00:30:12.560because she was one of the first women ever.1.00
00:30:15.020So they would open her drawers to inspect them1.00
00:30:16.800and there would be like bras in there1.00
00:30:17.980and they would get visibly uncomfortable.1.00
00:30:29.760At like the scandalous sight of a bra or a tampon.0.50
00:30:32.740It's basically legally blonde, but at the Citadel.1.00
00:30:35.500That's what she's kind of trying to make it.
00:30:37.140But like this description of her first year at the school is actually like just shocking in its hostility.
00:30:44.980So because it's a military school, professors, upperclassmen, alumni, seemingly just like random people, all have the authority to make freshmen stand still and stay there until they tell them they're allowed to go.
00:31:00.920and for more or less her whole time there like people like including classmates including like
00:31:06.460grown men including like alumni and parents will say okay brace which is their term for like when
00:31:13.220you stand like at attention she describes it very specifically like your shoulders are back
00:31:18.260she says your uh like hands have to be at a 45 degree angle to your body uh you like can't make
00:31:24.660eye contact you just sort of have to like look straight ahead and you know you're like flat as
00:31:28.620board and they'll go okay brace and then she has to just stand there and listen to them berating1.00
00:31:34.640her telling her she's a piece of shit telling her to kill herself all she's allowed to say back is1.00
00:31:41.160yes sir and she can't leave until they tell her they're done this is happening to her kind of1.00
00:31:46.180constantly they do this to her at football games which she's required to attend they'll like sneak
00:31:53.060up behind her and say brace and then she has to stand still and then they'll start screaming and1.00
00:31:58.380telling her what a piece of shit she is1.00
00:32:00.000and how much they hate her from behind1.00
00:32:35.860Eventually, after a battle with the administration, she's also required to shave her hair into a crew cut, which she really, really didn't want to do.1.00
00:32:43.160And then, and this is kind of actually fucking crazy to me when you consider what comes later and what she did to Sarah McBride, but she starts getting hassled in women's bathrooms.1.00
00:34:21.280and her response to that is to go to the citadel to go encroach again on an even more male world1.00
00:34:27.200right and then after the citadel like clearly a pretty like in its own right like traumatizing0.51
00:34:31.700experience what she winds up doing is like recreating the hostility that she endured0.91
00:34:38.420like her kind of like feminism such as it is is all about being men's equals in like strength and0.57
00:34:48.980And I think strength to Nancy comes to mean cruelty.
00:34:52.360I said this in my New Yorker piece.0.76
00:34:53.860I think that transphobia she issues out to like Sarah McBride and like also just random trans women whose existence she happens to become aware of.
00:35:03.840I think it's like an imitation of the misogyny that's directed at her, right?
00:35:08.000It's like a kind of woman that she can be the strong man degrading and it puts her back up higher on the hierarchy, right?0.70
00:35:16.080Like, it's very useful for people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.0.97
00:35:19.520Like, one, like, I think often very tempting way to deal with that degradation is to have somebody even lower down than you that you can punch.
00:35:28.100This is a classic analysis of, like, working class men's misogyny, right?0.59
00:35:31.160It's like, well, you're degraded in the factory, but you can go home and degrade your wife and that makes you feel like a big man again.0.50
00:35:36.020Something about transphobia can offer that as well.
00:35:39.580I think to, like, cis women who have, in, like, the TERF model, like, become victims of misogyny, they find a misogyny that they can issue out, and it can be, like, libidinally gratifying.
00:35:51.760I mean, a lot of what you're describing to me is someone who challenges power structures, but I haven't heard a whole lot about that pushing her into common cause with other people.
00:36:02.840There is a kind of me versus the world kind of thing here, where in the end, maybe it really doesn't matter that much that you recognize the plight of this other person, because that person is not you, right?
00:36:14.000It's very, very her versus the world, especially now.
00:36:17.300I can't speak to what she was like earlier in her life.
00:36:21.660The sort of like texture of her character is harder to access when there's just like less media coverage about her, right?0.88
00:36:29.400But I will say, like, she's often speaking in the first person, even before she's in Congress.
00:36:34.660And she seems to understand herself as sort of like an island.
00:36:38.520You know, she got this, like, kind of, you know, qualifiably nice group profile with two of these other far-right MAGA women in Congress who have been, like, really gung-ho on sexual violence in the Epstein files.
00:36:49.960Like, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
00:36:55.440And in that New York Times profile, we should link it in the show notes.
00:36:58.460Even in that New York Times profile, the writer was like, it's clear that like Luna and Boebert are friends and Mace is kind of not hanging out.
00:37:05.060It's like Luna and Boebert are friends.
00:39:20.520She gets married to a JAG attorney when she's, like, 19 years old.
00:39:25.240It's one of these things where I'm like, is this the kind of, like, super Christian thing where you guys just wanted to have sex and so you had to get married?
00:39:32.900Then she has a longer second marriage to a Charleston-based entrepreneur.
00:39:37.680That one produces two children who are now teenagers.
00:39:40.780And she gets divorced for the second time in 2019.
00:39:44.420Something that I've often thought about does seem to me that, like, because Trump is such a flawed guy, the kind of biography that you used to have to have in order to run in either Democratic or Republican politics had a kind of smoothness to it where there wouldn't be these weird gaps.
00:39:59.940But one thing that I think MAGA has brought to the fore are gaps, because, like, it's totally fine to have, like, spent a little time in prison or, like, a decade that's just kind of unaccounted for, right?
00:40:10.860Like, the MAGA wave has allowed genuine oddballs to sort of get into politics.
00:40:17.000Like, there are interesting detours and weird turns and, above all, like, just unanswered questions where it's like, what was she doing?
00:40:26.220I mean, to be fair, it's not entirely the rule on the Democratic side either. One of the most charismatic, you know, famous, popular Democratic politicians in the country right now is a former SoundCloud rapper who I have seen shirtless in a halal cart.0.63
00:40:40.520You know, that's true. It's it's I do agree with you. I think it is a product of Trump and sort of like the memification of politics.0.97
00:40:50.080Yeah. And I do think it's especially pronounced on the Republican side. On the Democratic side, you see more of these like Buttigieg type people. It's like, OK, Harvard to perfunctory military service to McKinsey. It's like you were made in a lab to run for president.
00:41:06.460Yeah. Or, you know, John Edwards, right? John Kerry's running mate. Like, if ChapGPT hallucinated a Democratic senator from the South who then runs for vice president, it would be indistinguishable from John fucking Edwards, you know?
00:41:20.880Did ChapGPT give him the sex scandal with a concealed love child? That also felt very like movie of the week a little bit.0.99
00:42:42.940They're basically a first invitation to the Supreme Court to take the pickaxe to row, right?
00:42:50.080Well, not the first, but one wave of many.
00:42:53.300Yeah. The one where you can tell that the Supreme Court might actually go for it, which is the idea that, like, you prohibit abortion after a certain point in the pregnancy, but you keep it legal before that. Is that correct?
00:43:07.640Yeah, but it's so early in the pregnancy that's really flimsy. So these so-called heartbeat bans say that abortion is banned after the detection of a quote-unquote fetal heartbeat, which begins at six weeks.
00:43:20.380It's interesting because the actual legislation refers to, like, fetal cardiac activity or embryonic cardiac activity because there's no heartbeat.
00:43:28.580Yeah, a fetus has no heart at six weeks.
00:43:30.680Right, no heartbeat because there's no heart.
00:43:33.300What there are are, like, cells that will pulse a little because they're starting to specialize.
00:43:38.560and a ultrasound machine is often equipped with a artificial heartbeat sound
00:43:45.840that plays when people get that ultrasound done1.00
00:43:50.420and this sentimental bullshit is supposed to be why women don't have control1.00
00:43:54.140over their own bodies and lives, right?1.00
00:43:55.920Well, it's good enough for Republicans.
00:43:57.540A made-up simulacrum told me once, yeah.
00:43:59.980A feature of a lot of these bills that reflected the sort of growing radicalization
00:44:06.440of the anti-choice movement in like sort of the end of the 2010s
00:44:25.340They had been like, okay, this is a concession we're making
00:44:27.980to popular opinion that raped women should not be forced0.95
00:44:32.180to carry their rapist fetuses to term.
00:44:34.780And in the South Carolina State House, advocates of this bill, you know, like Nancy Mace's colleagues at the time, are passing out literature that describes rapists as fathers and says we have to get rid of these exceptions because they are trampling on the rights of fathers.
00:44:52.420And in Nancy Mace's account, this really pisses her off.
00:44:56.860She goes public and confronts the colleague she says has been distributing this literature.
00:45:03.040And she goes to the local press and says, look, I was raped when I was 16.
00:45:06.880And because I was a victim of rape, I want a rape and incest exception in this bill.
00:46:25.960you're not allowed to, like, murder a person
00:46:29.060because of the way they were conceived.
00:46:30.560She's not, like, the smartest tool in the shed.1.00
00:46:32.480You know, this woman is not consistent1.00
00:46:34.740in her feminist politics such as they are.1.00
00:46:38.360You know, she's not especially coherent.0.74
00:46:41.240I think the temptation to try and find, like, an underlying solid principle in Nancy Mace's conduct that allows her to be, like, anti-rape, but pro-abortion ban, but a little bit anti-abortion ban in some cases, but, like, really anti-trans, but used to be pro-trans, I think that's a fool's errand.0.85
00:48:19.260She also says, I will not vote to impeach him.
00:48:21.880So once again, not a very consistent person.
00:48:24.980Right. But then I think it's really important to know that for as like intensely transphobic as she has become over the past couple of years, she is like pretty consistently and like outspokenly pro LGBT beforehand, especially like for Republican, even at a time when like by 2021, they're starting on the groomer thing.
00:48:49.220Right. Like they're doing that by now. They're turning away from like the love is love, like bullshit they were doing in like the earlier part of the 2010s. They are now like leaning in more harshly to homophobia and transphobia and she's not following them yet. Right.
00:49:06.480Right. So in 2021, Nancy Mace co-sponsors a bill for LGBT veterans. And it's like kind of about putting a like source for LGBT veterans in the VA. But really, it's about trying to retroactively give veterans benefits to people who had got dishonorably discharged for being gay during Don't Ask, Don't Tell.0.98
00:49:28.660She tells the media she is, quote, very strongly pro-LGBTQ.
00:49:34.180And you know she's woke, Adrienne, because she's using the Q.0.60
00:49:51.640It was a repeal of DOMA, of the Defense of Marriage Act,
00:49:56.440and tried to secure full faith and credit for any marriage performed in a particular state.
00:50:05.180And this was done in 2022 as a kind of response to Dobbs, right?
00:50:11.460Yeah, Dobbs, June 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade.0.96
00:50:15.820There was a sense, oh, shit, the, like, sexual freedom games of the late 20th century and early 21st century are endangered by this court.0.99
00:50:25.680Like, people were really scared for gay marriage, right?0.99
00:50:29.280Which was only made legal by the Supreme Court nationwide in 2015, not that long ago.
00:50:34.240And there were some hints that the Supreme Court might be interested in revisiting Windsor and Obergefell and even Loving.
00:50:41.340They seem to be fully open to maybe making all that stuff illegal again.0.73
00:50:45.780Well, I don't know about Loving because Clarence Thomas, that's the one he wants to protect because it made interracial marriages legal and he happens to be in one.0.62
00:50:54.160But I think the one you're thinking of is Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized sodomy in 2003.
00:50:59.000That's the one I think they I think like Sam Alito would sniff around at sodomy laws.
00:52:01.560So she's running for re-election in 2022.
00:52:04.380Because he is still mad at her about opposing the January 6th riot, Trump, who at this time is out of office but has already, like, re-established himself as a kingmaker, he actually endorses one of her primary opponents, right?
00:53:08.260The way that, like, white men age sometimes where they get these, like, little, like, weird stick legs and then their belly will look like they're pregnant.0.96
00:53:40.800Around Halloween 2023, there's different accounts of this.
00:53:47.300Nancy Mace's account is that she gets a text from a woman she kind of knows saying, hey, I saw Patrick on a dating app.
00:53:54.300In Patrick Bryant's version of events, Nancy Mace hacks into his phone and his devices, thus committing a violation of his rights, right?
00:54:04.560In Nancy Mace's account, Patrick Bryant hands her his phone and devices and invites her to go through them in an effort to, like, reestablish trust.
00:54:14.080A distinction, by the way, that matters for any legal proceedings, by the way.
00:54:18.580But ultimately, like, if she finds what she professes to have found on his phone, it doesn't really matter how she got access to it.
00:54:26.820Yeah, this will become an issue because Nancy Mace's account is that she takes what she finds on his phone.
00:54:33.040to the South Carolina Attorney General's office.
00:54:36.540The jurisdiction would have been to local police.
00:54:38.860She doesn't mention going to local police.
00:54:40.260She mentions in her floor speech going to the Attorney General's office
00:54:43.340and that the Attorney General's office,
00:54:46.560run by a guy who ran against her in that South Carolina gubernatorial primary,
00:54:56.020So she says that she finds lots and lots and lots
00:55:00.180of sexually explicit material of women who appear to be unconscious.
00:55:03.720She says that one of these people appears to be an underage girl.
00:55:09.780She says that some of them are people she recognizes, and she says that she eventually sees herself.
00:55:16.020So, like, the pattern she alleges, you know, in her account, it kind of sounds like Patrick Bryant and a couple of his friends, like, one of whom he owned a house with, a couple of guys he had done business with.
00:55:28.600They were, like, white guys in their 50s and 60s in Charleston.
00:55:31.980And there's like, I think, four of them she accused altogether.
00:56:00.140I know that Patrick Bryant and his associates have all denied this.
00:56:03.960I will say this doesn't strike me as like a crazy outlier example of like male behavior, right?
00:56:09.720Like what she's describing strikes me as the way that like a lot of rapes happen, which is like drunk guys trying to impress their friends.
00:56:16.620Like that seems to be a pretty typical instigator of sexual assault is like male drinking and male bonding.
00:56:23.860Yeah, I mean, I might have found it a little less plausible, had very similar things not been sort of exposed over the last couple of years.
00:56:32.100Well, there's Pellico, but also this is just like, I mean, this is frat boy behavior.
00:56:37.160This is like very typical, like the banality of sexual assault and how it actually happens is contrasted with its horror in this way that I think it makes people bad at understanding it when they see it.1.00
00:56:48.580It's like, oh, but that's just that's just like drunk idiots goofing off.0.99
00:56:53.060And they seem so stupid and intellectually unserious and like beneath my contempt that I have a hard time imagining that their conduct counts as this kind of like grave violence.1.00
00:57:08.760But in fact, it does. Right. So she breaks up with him.1.00
00:57:14.320She says that in the ensuing dissolution of their relationship, he also hurt her and abused her physically and that she had to flee her home in the middle of the night with her kids all while she is in Congress, right?
00:57:26.900This is something she discloses publicly on the House floor in that floor speech in 2025, February 2025.
00:57:36.300She like reads it into the public record.
00:57:38.100By the time that that all goes public, her behavior has been sort of deteriorating for a while, right?
00:57:45.500So all the stuff about Sarah McBride, the anti-trans stuff, that's all like been underway since 2023, right?
00:57:52.240Her erratic behavior has been underway.
00:57:55.920Some of her staffers start telling places like New York Magazine that did a big profile of Nancy Mace that I drew on a lot for the reporting on this,
00:58:03.700that they are weirded out by the extent of her alcohol and marijuana use.
00:59:01.780I think it's very tempting. I think in Me Too, like 10 years ago at this point, one of the concerns put forward by like critics of Me Too was like, look, raped women are in acute mental pain and that mental pain makes them bad narrators or unreliable narrators of their own experience. Right.
00:59:20.900Right. And so there's like a danger in saying I think there's a political danger in saying being raped makes you crazy. But there also might be like a danger in being precise, because according to people who actually study trauma, that's not exactly what happens.1.00
00:59:37.600So I'm relying for this analysis on Judith Herman, who I've written about a lot.
00:59:42.860She is a Harvard faculty psychiatrist, or she was, I think she's Emerita now.
00:59:47.900She's known for originating the CPTSD diagnosis, and she has done some of the most intense research on rape trauma and sexual abuse trauma.
01:00:00.260And her account, both in her 1991 book, Trauma and Recovery, and then in this, I believe it was a 2022 or 2023 book, Truth and Repair, a follow-up, a long-term follow-up book, she's talking about like what it takes for the rape trauma victim to heal.
01:00:18.380And she's like, look, the most acute symptoms that really persist for a long time are not the ones that happen right after the rape itself.
01:00:31.040They're the ones that happen after the rape testimony is rejected by the victim's community.
01:00:36.540So what you have with Nancy Mace isn't just somebody who went crazy after a rape, because frankly, like that would have happened before.
01:00:43.660Right. If like being raped makes you like insanely transphobic. Why didn't that happen to her after she was 16? Right. If you believe her account of what happened to her at the hands of like her, you know, former fiance and his friends, that's like nuts.0.99
01:01:00.760That means that there's, you know, this is a person who has responded to evidence of her own vulnerability over and over again by chasing demonstrations of status and chasing demonstrations of strength.
01:01:13.420Right. And she got like to a pretty superlative position of status and strength.
01:01:18.800She's a U.S. House of Representatives.1.00
01:01:44.120I've never seen anything even close to it.
01:01:46.060And, of course, the very fact that she chose to read it to the public record that way sort of suggested, like, oh, my God, it's going to be a feeding frenzy.
01:01:52.200And none of that really happened, did it?
01:03:24.980And I just think that there's another way to do it.1.00
01:03:28.820Nancy Mace, might I introduce you to actual radical feminism where you can, like, make the bad things that happen to you have a moral logic that doesn't require you to shit on other people?1.00