On August 7th, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace tweeted the following:
Mace did not retract her statement or back down on the sentiments behind it when questioned on CNN. She did seem to imply that she was not saying in her tweet that all Muslims are a threat to the country, but she went on to make remarks that sure make it sound like she does in fact mean that or at least that she wants a certain questionable segment of the population to believe that's what she means. For instance, she said in the CNN interview that she does not want to hear a Muslim call to prayer five times a day in an American city. She said, "I think that's wrong. It's not our values."
I wonder what Mace's final solution is for the Muslim Question. Perhaps she will release a book about her struggle with this important issue. Or maybe she will simply explain her thoughts in a letter to a constituent who asks about her views on Muslims.
I am not one to carelessly throw around Nazi comparisons or call people Hitler for the wild and offensive things they say. I have written 40 posts for this website, and I do not believe I have once compared someone to the Nazis or Hitler.
Unfortunately, that ends today. This tweet is one of the nastiest and most pernicious things I have heard from a legislator. If you check out Mace's Twitter, you will find a litany of similar vitriol aimed toward Muslims in America. Their culture and values are strange and incompatible with ours. They aim to undermine our great nation from the inside. They should not be allowed any authority in our political system. Their loyalty is, at best, divided, and they can never be fully trusted.
I cannot help but wonder if she truly believes all of this. Is she prejudiced toward Muslims? Does she truly believe Muslims are collectively a danger to America and, thus, some serious actions should be taken regarding or against them?
Truly holding these views would be vile and sinister, but I personally think it is worse if she does not believe these things. If indeed she does not truly believe them, it means she is willing to disparage and try to gin up trouble for a group of people based on their culture, religion, place of origin, and perhaps race in order to please others.
Unfortunately, I lean toward the latter. She is an opportunistic, greedy, self-interested political whore. She has looked at the American body politic and the core of her political party and decided that acting this way and saying these things will be best for her career and bank account. It takes a special kind of person to resort to sounding like a true Nazi to maneuver herself for a lucrative career as a Trump-supporting personality on Fox News or in the online MAGA-sphere.
Mace's Twitter is full of other red meat for the hardcore Trump-supporters. Women are born with vaginas. The WNBA is for women. Something something communism. We need to make American food healthy again. Military, military, military. Criminals deserve the death penalty. America is being invaded by immigrants. She is well-versed in the MAGA best hits.
But Mace was not always like this. Long, long ago, when she was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2020, she was not a die-hard Trump-supporting MAGA automaton. Shortly after she was seated, she was one of only seven Republicans in the House of Representatives to sign a letter in opposition to Trump's illegitimate attempts to have Congress reject electors from States he falsely asserted he had won.
When Trump supporters staged their putsch at the Capitol, she blamed Trump for putting legislators' lives at risk. She seemed to support prohibiting Trump from ever holding office again. She criticized other Republicans for questioning whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
Naturally, Trump endorsed her primary opponent in the 2022 election. She immediately changed her tune and started pathetically cozying up to Trump. She managed to win the primary and eventually won re-election to the House. Likely sensing that her political future depended on pleasing Trump and his supporters, she began morphing into a loyal Trump stooge in direct contradiction of much of what she said and did in early 2020.
It is one (albeit horrible) thing to be stupid or ignorant enough to earnestly adopt prejudices and engage in bigotry against an entire group of people, particularly as a legislator with actual authority to harm them. It is another to understand what you are doing is wrong but engage in it nonetheless to further your ambition and enrich yourself. For this, Nancy Mace is deserving of our uttermost contempt and disdain.
But what is truly contemptible and troubling is that she not only feels safe to openly make these remarks, but that she's calculated there is a big enough audience for them that it'll benefit her politically and/or financially.
I used to wonder how the Holocaust could have happened. How could so many people have embraced or at least quietly tolerated such intense hatred for a group of people that a government-run extermination of millions could proceed with little trouble. In seeing how suddenly and strongly the Trump cult took hold and how quickly comments like Mace's have become acceptable to or supported by millions of people, I wonder no more.