My Dumb State: Bless Her Heart – South Carolina Nancy Mace (T-SC1) Has a Hissy Fit With a Constituent In Public

Apr 26, 2025 09:54 PM EDT, Sat

Normally, my series, My Dumb State, focuses on South Carolina hyper-partisan Attorney General Alan Wilson. However, Nancy Mace’s hissy fit with a constituent in an Ulta beauty store warrants addition.

Mace and Wilson are two of the expected front runners in the South Carolina Trumpian Primary.

It should be an entertaining primary campaign. I hope that mud wrestling will be a feature in their campaign.

Nancy Mace ‘Goes Off’ On Effeminate Constituent - FITSNews
Drama at the beauty salon…
by FITSNews April 21, 2025
Rep. Nancy Mace (T-SC1)
- “I have a message for the Left, all lunatics and the establishment machine: I didn’t ask for this battle, but God trusted me to fight it. Not just for myself, but for all those who don’t have a voice. Keep coming at me. I was built for the battle. Good morning to everyone except men who wear daisy dukes.”

Is Nancy Mace redefining SC politics or ruining her career? / The State

By Matthew T. Hall. April 25, 2025 6:00 AM

It’s now abundantly clear that U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (T-SC1) thinks cursing and demeaning constituents is the best path to the South Carolina Governor’s Office.

In a pair of viral videos, she called a constituent “absolutely fucking crazy” last Saturday and a college student a slur four times in two seconds on Monday, after being told the word was derogatory.

In the end, she will be judged by voters and by God.

Do her antics reveal a winning political strategy? A mental illness? A social media addiction?

So. Many. Questions.

One is: What happened to Nancy Mace?

Channeling Cruella de Vil on X

Just two years ago, she sounded like an entirely different person.

“I strongly support LGBTQ rights. No one should be discriminated against,” Mace tweeted on May 2, 2023. “Religious liberty, gay rights, and transgender equality can all coexist. I’m also a constitutionalist. We have to ensure anti-discrimination laws don’t violate religious freedom.”

That same month, she sat down with CBS News journalist Major Garrett and told him, “I’m pro-transgender rights. I’m pro-LGBTQ. Just don’t go to the extreme with our kids… Sex change surgery, the hormone blockers that sterilize our children, we shouldn’t be doing that when a child is prepubescent or going through puberty. Let that child go through the natural process of life and let them make that permanent decision when they’re older. Now, if they want to take on a different pronoun or a different gender identity or grow their hair out or wear a dress or wear pants or do those things as a minor, those are all things that I think most people would support. Be who you want to be. But don’t make those permanent changes when it’s a child.”

Now Mace ridicules men for wearing short shorts and transgender women for wearing dresses.

I hope hers is not a strategy for others to emulate, and I wouldn’t dare to diagnose her. But I do see a recovering social media addict whenever I look in the mirror, so I recognize an addict when Mace so desperately shares and reshares her posts, seeking likes and social validation.

She certainly can’t share too many legislative wins. Since taking office in 2021, she has introduced 117 bills and resolutions. Just one bill has become law.

She successfully designated a post office building on Hilton Head Island the “Caesar H. Wright Jr. Post Office Building.”

That lone win needs some context. Five other bills she introduced to name post office buildings have not passed. It’s true that relatively new politicians don’t have a lot of success introducing legislation. Maybe that’s why Mace devotes so much energy to channeling Cruella de Vil on X.

Means to an end or just mean?

One of the biggest questions for millions of South Carolinians in the coming months will be this: Are Rep. Nancy Mace’s mean, confrontational politics a means to victory in the South Carolina governor’s race or just an unconscionable way to feed her addiction to cameras and attention?

Her public remarks and social media feed have been peppered for months by casual cruelty.

Mace says she’s standing up for herself and women while staring down leftists and ill individuals but she’s really falling down on the job of being a leader for all South Carolinians. Republicans and Democrats alike in our red state should expect policy disputes but also common decency.

People are people. But less than 1% are transgender and just four transgender athletes played high school sports in South Carolina in the six years before the state banned it. We should debate transgender policy issues without insulting people.

Monday, at a speaking engagement at the University of South Carolina, a student asked Mace to apologize for using a slur to refer to transgender people. She did not, just as she did not in a House hearing in February when a colleague asked her to stop using a slur widely recognized as derogatory, defamatory and dehumanizing. That day, she replied, “I don’t really care.”

Monday, Mace quadrupled down. “Is (the slur) derogatory to you?” Mace asked.

“Well, yeah,” came the reply.

“Of course, it fucking is.” “(The slur),” said Mace.

“Yeah, (the slur, the slur, the slur).” Mace is unapologetic and vocal about standing up for herself and for women and girls. She said she felt threatened by the man in the beauty store and worried the student might throw a potted plant at her after picking it up during their exchange.

She may not have liked their tone or questions, but, to me, both seemed respectful of her space if not her decisions. Everyone should decide with their own eyes.

These days, we see what we want to see — as well as what’s shown to us on any viral video. We don’t think enough about what happened before or after the videos.

These days, it’s all about winning on social media, not working toward mutual respect.

Mace is Exhibit A.

‘You’re absolutely fucking crazy’

Mace is a complicated figure. She is a survivor of sexual abuse who talks openly about it. As a member of the male-dominated South Carolina House of Representatives in 2019, she stood before other lawmakers and successfully argued for exceptions for rape and incest to be included in a restrictive abortion bill. Her openness about something so raw is rare in our modern day politics.

“I hope and pray any women or teenager who is raped or assaulted or a victim of incest would choose life,” she told her peers. “I’m not going to take that (decision) away from anybody else. You have no idea what a woman or child goes through who is a victim of rape, of incest.”

Compare that mature approach to her immature conduct in the video she shared on X (and later retweeted to get more likes) of her exchange with a constituent in a beauty store the Saturday before Easter.

The man had asked her if she was going to hold a town hall meeting this year.

As the video begins, she says she holds them every year and asks if he wants to “keep harassing” her. As he firmly continues asking if she will hold another, she firmly says he could’ve gone to a dozen last year, that she had held one this year and that she would do more and he was “always invited.”

Then the conversation takes a sharp turn.

“And by the way I voted for gay marriage twice,” she says.

“What does that have to do with me?” he asks.

“So, I’m just saying. It has everything to do with you.”

“You think everything about me has to do with gay marriage?”

“I do. Absolutely.”

“That’s your first stance when you speak with me?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“There’s no other humane conversation you can have about me?”

“If you want to get in my face about town halls, you should have shown up to one last year.” Some cross-talk devolves into >m Mace saying, “You people on the left are crazy.”

“So I’m on the left?”

“You’re absolutely fucking crazy,” she says.

“I’m ‘absolutely fucking crazy’?”

“You are, and get out of my face.

“You’re insane,” he says from several feet away.

“Goodbye,” she says.

“You’re insane,” he repeats.

“Fuck you,” she says.

“Fuck me?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to get voted out so fast this year.”

“I’m not. I won by so much.”

“You’re a disgrace to this state,” he says. “That’s what you are. You’re a disgrace. I asked you a simple question and you just go on this tirade and tell me ‘Fuck you’?”

“Yes,” she says. “Fuck you.”

You can watch the video online if you want to see the rest.

Giving a bully the bully pulpit

For the record, Mace has held two “town halls” this year. One was by telephone and announced moments before it began. The other was Wednesday in person on Dataw Island, a private, gated community of about 1,000 homes outside of Beaufort. It was limited to residents there.

Mace’s conduct is embarrassing for a top elected official. We elect our leaders to be the best of us. In many ways, Mace is the worst.

Cursing at constituents and proud of it? Demeaning transgender people so viciously after they tell her the insult is derogatory, which she, of course, already knew? These are not acts to brag about. They have no place in kindergarten, let alone Congress. Mace could have ended both conversations better, but she judged and demeaned two people and quickly elevated the exchanges to DEFCON 1. She added new insults on social media and sought more attention in an interview with Sean Hannity.

Proverbs 16:18 tells us, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

We are either witnessing the explosion of Nancy Mace’s political career or the death of decency.

Do South Carolinians really want to give a bully another bully pulpit? Luckily, the governor’s race hasn’t even formally begun. And it won’t be settled in columns like mine or on social media. That decision will be made irl — in real life — by you and your family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers and fellow congregants.

Ask them what they want. Ask them if character still counts.

Matthew T. Hall has been the South Carolina opinion editor since April 2024 and a journalist for 30 years. He has worked in New Hampshire, where he covered the 1996 presidential primary, and in California, where he spent 23 years at The San Diego Union-Tribune, eight as its editorial and opinion director. He is a past national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and currently serves on the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation.