Nancy Mace has some “splainin to do.” (Sorry I Love Lucy fans) Journalists are scared to death of putting tough questions to Trump, but many a politician has learned the hard way only Trump gets away with being Trump for any length of time. That includes being confronted with embarrassing question on camera. Mace has most recently been fronting the “bathroom police” crap worrying about some trans person in women’s bathrooms in the Capitol, and boy does she like to make hay over Diversity and DEI. Yet Mace herself is a beneficiary of DEI! It wasn’t called that back when she SUED to gain admission to The Citidel but yep, she used the law to force her way into what had previously been an all-male and Elite Military Academy. And boy has she made a big effing deal out of being The Citadel’s first female graduate!
For those who don’t know the Military Academies at West Point (Army), Annapolis (Navy) and Colorado Springs (Air Force) have always been public institutions. Very tough to get into, and the academics alone are tough as hell. It’s an elite education provided at taxpayer expense and in return graduates are required to go on active duty and serve five years of active military service upon graduation. However they aren’t the only Military Academies that crank out graduates who take up Commissions in our Armed Forces upon graduation. There are some private and public ones where graduates take up a Commission too, albeit not the five years of mandatory active duty service those from the three places I listed are required to do. Some go into the Guard or Reserves. The two elite Academies that have produced some truly distinguished graduates that in some cases have gone on to stellar military careers are VMI (the Virginia Military Institute) and The Citadel located in South Carolina.
The Citadel is a place I honestly didn’t know much about other than it having been the setting for an old movie (The Lords of Discipline) that was pretty decent. Over time I’d learn it’s actually a highly rated university. What I didn’t know for too long is that unlike VMI where everyone is in the Corps of Cadets only about half those who attend the Citadel are. Of those, about a third take military commissions upon graduation (vs. about two-thirds from VMI) but unlike the three we think of as the “Service Academies” graduates aren’t required to go into the military upon graduation.
As for Mace, it’s commonly perceived (with her clearly wanting people to think so) that she’s the first woman to attend and graduate from The Citadel. Neither is true as the institution’s Wikipedia Page tells us. It notes Maxine Hudson having received a graduate degree in 1969, and that she went on to a 50 year career in Charleston as a beloved teacher. It was after an over two year legal battle that Shannon Faulkner was allowed to enroll as part of the Corps of Cadets in 1995. However she withdrew rather quickly. So Mace wasn’t ‘the first’ after all although that’s what she’s gotten the general public to believe. To her credit she IS the first female to graduate. That’s not nothing. In fact it’s quite a lot from a place like that. However by then we’d had plenty of graduates from our main Military Academies that had good military careers. I actually got to know one of them (Lt. Pam Svendson) from when I did duty at the Pentagon back in the 1980s. She was part of the first class of females at Annapolis.
Anyway, details on Mace’s admission into The Citadel’s Corps of Cadets and her military career are murky if not downright sparse. She seems to have served in the South Carolina National Guard and that’s about it. After graduation she went on to graduate school, and seven or eight years later started a consulting group. And she of course played up her Citadel roots getting started and has never stopped. But there are shall we say ‘gaps’ in the whole story. An article from a publication one would think would put a bright shine on a ‘gun totin conservative’ did a little digging. The Gun Zone lists some basics. And I do mean basics, as the phrase ‘not widely known/publicized’ appears multiple times in response to the questions and answers format of its piece. Check it out for yourself. The bottom line is that Mace served an unknown and it seems relatively short stint in The Guard and left at the rank of Lieutenant.
What I find more interesting looking at her background is apparently she went off the rails for a while in high school. Born on a military base (it was called Ft. Bragg back then) her dad would go on to become a Brigadier General. It seems Mace dropped out of high school over bad grades but got it together and earned her GED. However admission to something as elite as the Citadel’s Corps of Cadets or that of any of the nation’s military academies would be unthinkable after that. Unless one’s daddy happened to be a Brigadier General and could pull some strings, if not with our main Academies then at a place like the Citadel! So there’s that, PLUS the fact someone else did the initial legal heavy lifting to allow her, as a female to even apply. Not that Mace didn’t have to fight some court battles herself to get admitted (from what I can gather) but a pathway had already been cleared by someone else. What’s most important is that even though the term hadn’t been invented at the time Mace’s legal argument was the equivalent of demanding admission in the name of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion!
The more I think about it the more I’m kicking myself this morning after reading an article from The Independent. Mace has made a BFD about not only being a graduate of The Citadel but being ‘the first woman’ – implying she WAS the first woman to attend this elite Military Academy. Except it’s not a private school (nor is VMI) as most people assume. She’s not even the first woman to attend or gain admission to the Corps of Cadets. FINALLY however the irony is getting a break as Mace’s HYPOCRISY (take a good look at the title pic – FYI the Daniel Library is at The Citadel) is being called out and she’s getting trolled for it. From The Independent:
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace is being mocked for being a “DEI admission” to a South Carolina military school after she bragged about being the first woman to graduate from the institution while bashing transgender people.
“I didn’t fight like hell to become the first woman to graduate from The Citadel just for some man in a miniskirt to take away that achievement,” Mace wrote on X on Wednesday morning. “Protecting women’s accomplishments isn’t a political talking point for me—it’s personal.”
Really? Mace keeps ‘going there’ and it seems I’m not the only one who is tired of putting up with Nancy Mace and her bullshit. The internet has decided it’s time (long past IMHO) to slap her down. I promise you it’s worth the time to read The Independent’s article. There are simply too many awesome responses (not all from us liberals I should add) not to but I’ve got to include some of what you can read – and enjoy:
But as Mace’s post on X went viral, garnering nearly six million views, she was quickly blasted for being a beneficiary of DEI policies herself.
“A reminder that Nancy Mace was a DEI admission. The courts ruled that The Citadel couldn’t exclude women from attending under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment (the one that Donald Trump wants to eliminate),” one X user wrote.
Again, what’s really fun is that CONSERVATIVES are calling her out:
Rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh said, “The girlboss feminism routine isn’t just cringy. It also directly undermines our argument.”
“The Citadel was a male-only space forced by law to admit females in the name of diversity and inclusion,” he added. “That is the exact argument trans-identifying males use to invade female spaces. Nancy Mace was literally a beneficiary of a DEI program. It’s a ridiculous and tone deaf thing to brag about in this moment.”
John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist added, “The lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling. When a society destroys sex-segregated spaces, they all get destroyed. Maybe Mace should have thought about that before she destroyed the male-only Citadel to satisfy her own ego.”
Mace is one of those so addicted to attention she can’t help herself. Even when shooting off her mouth puts her own damned self into the crosshairs! My bet is that she won’t STFU, and try to brazen her way through this. If memory serves all the mess and scandal about goings on in her Congressional office got her a primary challenge. I guess voters in her solidly conservative district decided to stick with the proverbial devil they knew. THIS however might be the needed dynamite a challenger can use to dislodge her when the 2026 primary season rolls around. I know if I were a conservative and embarrassed by her enough to run against her what I’d do. I’d have ads, billboards and pictures to pass out that my own supporters could take to events including hers if she has any. A picture of Mace in the full dress uniform worn at The Citadel. With the words “DEI ADMISSION” in bold lettering.
In the meantime I hope the internet, including and especially conservatives keep piling it on Mace. There are lots of GOPers who deserve to go down in flames. Mace has hoisted herself on her own flaming ‘DEI Petard’ so let’s hope fuel keeps getting dumped on her and her self-righteous and hypocritic ass!
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If they didn’t have HYPOCRISY, they’d have NOTHING. Talk about having some strings pulled due to daddy’s elite status. Sickening. That being said, no matter who your daddy is…he can’t install character into your being.
““That is the exact argument trans-identifying males use to invade female spaces. Nancy Mace was literally a beneficiary of a DEI program.”
If Walsh is trying to say “transwomen use to invade female species,” then he’s still a forking moron. Transwomen ARE women (just as the amazingly forgotten transmen are men; funny how almost zero talk about the trans community mentions transmen*). But, “trans” is not an actual identification. (Technically, a “trans identifying male” would be a transman, but, again, Walsh is a moron.)
*Even when the first bathroom bills were being discussed over a decade ago in North Carolina, dozens of transmen were posting pictures of their bearded selves asking if the (then-Republican Governor) would feel comfortable with them being in women’s bathrooms. All the talk kept focusing on keeping “men in dresses” out of women’s bathrooms but there was NO talk about “women with full facial hair” in those places. (I can only conclude that these pearl-clutching conservatives so concerned about keeping the helpless women and girls from being preyed upon by degenerate men wearing dresses were far less concerned about those poor helpless females opening the door to the ladies room and coming across some random guy with a full beard, wearing a shirt and jeans.)