Rep. Nancy Mace’s former communications director isn’t buying Mace’s claims that she was attacked by a trans activist. On Tuesday night, Mace wrote that she was “physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women.”
According to reports, James McIntyre, cofounder of the Illinois chapter of Foster Care Alumni of America, was arrested and charged with assaulting a government official after an event at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, Tuesday night. Witnesses have said that what they saw does not match Mace’s claims.
Mace posted a picture of herself wearing a sling, writing on X “Just sitting here with your run-of-the-mill gentle ‘normal handshake,’” an apparent reference to the claim that she was assaulted.
Natalie Johnson, who served as former communications director for Mace during her first year in Congress, responded to Mace’s tweet. “This is the same woman who told staff, myself included, during Jan. 6 that she wanted to get ‘punched in the face’ by a rioter so she could get on TV,” Johnson wrote. “She’s full of shit and her prop of a sling is a pathetic ploy for attention.”
According to the Washington Post, Elliot Hinkle, a foster-care advocate from Wyoming, witnessed the interaction between Mace and McIntyre.
“What we witnessed was a handshake, a passionate shake, but it didn’t look like an assault or intended aggression,” Hinkle said, referencing several people they said also saw the encounter. They said McIntyre told Mace, “Trans youth are also foster youth, and they need your support.”
Johnson has been critical of her former boss in the past. Recently, the former staffer slammed Mace after the lawmaker promoted a bill, disingenuously called “Protecting Women’s Private Spaces Act,” that bans trans women from using single-sex federally owned bathrooms. (snip-MORE)
This is something that a lot of people get wrong because the US debt is never explained. The US debt is held in bonds which anyone can invest in. Yes, it’s technically borrowing, but it’s borrowing like one lends money when they invest in even a 401k or savings account. That money earns interest. And the money “borrowed” from social security is really that the social security fund is held in interest-bearing bonds. What republicans want to do is cut medicare and social security so they don’t have to make good on those bonds.
PSA: migrants desperately seeking shelter may be in your area. Call ICE asap if seen.
Donald Trump’s latest grift is cologne which can be added to the long line of other useless crap bearing his name, like Trump sneakers, Trump watches, Trump guitars, Trump coins, Trump stock, Donald Trump Jr, etc. Like most things Trump, there are no refunds. Trump learned that with Jr. Naturally, all proceeds go directly to Donald Trump.
Trump announced the “fragrance” on his shitty social media platform with a photo of him sitting a seat away from First Lady Jill Biden. This is a sign that Trump will take credit for all of President Joe Biden’s accomplishments, just like he did with President Obama’s accomplishments. Why didn’t he put his wife in the post instead of Dr. Jill Biden? Maybe Melania already learned to sit several seats away from Donald…or is often the case, several states.
The new cologne costs $199.00 and comes in fragrances for men and women, because why should women be left out of the grifting? It’s called “Fight Fight Fight” because Trump can’t remember anything longer than three syllables. In case you’re a Republican, a syllable is a unit of pronunciation having a vowel sound that’s with or without surrounding consonants. For example, “Space Force” has two syllables. “Build the wall” is three syllables. “Cult” is one syllable. “Lock her up,” “Send them back, and “Daddy’s home,” each contain three syllables. Who knew syllables could be creepy and racist?
Trump said this cologne is a “great gift for the family,” if your family wants to wear cologne from a bottle that looks like a Pez dispenser. Yes, Trump’s head is the bottle cap, jowls and all.
So, what does the cologne smell like? The website for it doesn’t describe the odor…er, fragrance, but let’s take a few guesses. It could possibly smell like Russian hookers, Cheetos, golden showers, a Trump diaper, six-day worn tightie-whities, shitshow, dumpster fire, Stormy Daniels after 18 hours on a porn set, Ivanka, the inside of Putin’s ass, classified documents, the inside of Trump sneakers, hair spray, Big Macs, ketchup, KFC, Elon, covfefe, etc, etc.
And like most Trump merch, the cologne is a conflict of interest. Of course, America doesn’t care about corruption anymore. It’s also guaranteed to be cheaply made and ridiculously overpriced like Trump shoes, Trump watches, Trump guitars, Donald Trump Jr, etc.
I do think it’s a good idea to spray something on MAGAts so you’ll know when one is in your vicinity. My biggest concern is that the Oklahoma Department of Education will force every public school student in the state to be covered in Trump funk.
Good luck to Trump trying to sell this smelly shit to people who haven’t discovered soap yet.
On another note:
I patted myself on the back two blogs ago about my ability to produce a daily cartoon while traveling, which is HAAAAAARD. Not only did I produce a new cartoon every day on my trip, but I think created some good ones.
The cartoon I drew on the flight between Reykjavik and London made The Washington Post before I even went to sleep that night.
And I found out yesterday that not one, but TWO of the cartoons I produced during my trip were published by Newsweek Japan. How about that? Cartoons I drew in Europe were published in Asia.
It’s always fun to see your work in another language, especially Japanese since it’s so artful in text. This cartoon was drawn in London. I didn’t know the Japanese could appreciate something so dark.
This cartoon was drawn in Dublin. As Lester Burnham said in the film American Beauty, “I rule.”
“[Trump’s] been very open for a while about how he plans to end this core constitutional principle, end birthright citizenship.” Watch Mehdi Hasan break down the flaws in Donald Trump’s argument against the 14th Amendment.
Unaccompanied children detained at the border are first processed by Customs and Border Patrol before being handed over to other US authorities.
Donald Trump’s incoming border tsar, Tom Homan, has said that the US government “can’t find” more than 300,000 migrant children – and that many have been lured into forced labour and sex trafficking.
President-elect Donald Trump and his political allies, including Vice-President-elect JD Vance, have repeatedly made similar claims.
Some experts have accused them of distorting statistics to suggest the children are “lost” and victims of crime, although there is agreement that aspects of the system need to be changed.
The incoming administration has made immigration enforcement a priority, promising to clamp down on the US-Mexico border and conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Let’s take a look at the claims of missing migrant children.
What are the Trump team’s claims?
In an interview with Fox News on 26 November – just before a visit to the US-Mexico border in Texas – Homan accused the Biden administration of “bragging” about how quickly children are released from custody, as well as “not properly vetting” adult sponsors in the US.
“Shame on them,” he said of the Biden administration. “They have over 300,000 children that they have released [to] unvetted sponsors that they can’t find.”
“Many are going to be in forced labour. Many forced sex trade,” Homan added. “We need to save these children.”
In his October debate against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, JD Vance also said that the Department of Homeland Security “effectively lost” a total of 320,000 migrant children.
Concerns over the plight of migrant children were also starkly highlighted earlier this week when authorities in Texas shared an image of a two-year-old girl from El Salvador found at the border clutching a piece of paper with a phone number.
“Putting optics over safety has led to countless children in danger or unaccounted for,” Tennessee Republican representative Mark Green told the New York Post.
“This refusal to protect vulnerable alien children from abuse, exploitation, and human trafficking will be one of the defining failures of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Are the children actually missing?
According to immigration experts and attorneys, the claims largely stem from an August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office, which found that 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up for court dates at immigration courts from 2019-23.
The report noted that 291,000 migrant children received no court notices at all. It also called on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to “take immediate action to ensure the safety” of unaccompanied migrant children in the US.
Migrant children “who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor”, the inspector general’s office reported.
But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a migrant advocacy group, told the BBC the figures are indicative of a bureaucratic “paperwork issue” rather than “anything nefarious”.
“When you hear the phrase ‘missing’, you think that there is a child that someone is trying to find and can’t,” he said.
“That’s not the case here. The government has not made any effort to find these children.”
Many of the children, experts say, may well be at the addresses that are on file with the government, but were simply unable to make their court dates.
“That doesn’t mean something bad happened to them,” Mr Reichlin-Melnick said. “It means you missed a court hearing.”
Mr Reichlin-Melnick added that there are “valid concerns” about exploitation.
“We cannot, however, suggest that all 320,000 of those children are being labour trafficked,” he said.
Eric Ruark, an immigration researcher with NumbersUSA – which calls for tighter border controls – said that the children are difficult to track “because of some combination of apathy, incompetence and bureaucratic inefficiency”.
“Many, hopefully even most, are safe with caring sponsors,” he added. “But the Biden administration can’t actually say one way or the other, and apparently doesn’t care enough to find out.”
What happens to children at the border?
Unaccompanied minors detained at the US-Mexico border go through a complicated process that begins with detention and processing by Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP.
If the child is from a foreign country that is not Mexico or Canada, they are placed into removal proceedings and transferred to the US Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
HHS, through its Office of Refugee Resettlement office, cares for the children in a network of state-licensed providers.
The office also seeks to reunify children with family members in the US or with individual or organizational sponsors – who in turn are obligated to ensure they arrive at immigration court dates.
What can the Trump administration do?
Homan and other Trump administration officials have so far not provided many details about how they plan to address the issues that plague the detention of undocumented minors.
Several immigration attorneys contacted by the BBC suggested that the administration is likely to make becoming a “sponsor” for undocumented children much more difficult, even if the sponsor is a member of their family.
In practice, this would mean that more undocumented children are kept in detention.
“They could do what the Obama administration did, and detain them,” said Alexander Cuic, an immigration attorney and professor at Case Western Reserve University.
The controversial “Remain in Mexico” programme could also be applied to children, forcing them to wait across the border for the outcome of immigration proceedings.
“I’m not sure even they know what they’re going to do with the kids,” Mr Cuic said of the Trump administration. “But there’s a border problem they’re trying to figure out first, and that’s the first concern before whether they’re going to be harsh to both children and adults.”
When the BBC asked the Trump transition team what plan they have for the undocumented migrant children, spokesman Taylor Rogers said only that “Democrats’ wide-open border policies” have led to the children going “missing”.
“President Trump and leaders in his administration will deliver on their promise to end the invasion at our southern border that puts innocent children in harm’s way,” she added.
Remember Mace is a notorious attention hound, demanding her staff book her constantly on different media. She does any stunt she thinks will gain her attention. She made over 500 tweets in two days about a new trans member to congress and the bathroom ban she was pushing but at no time did she mention anything helping her constituents. She even sent a staffer back an hour or so later to ask the man to repeat what he said to Mace. So she clearly did not feel assaulted then. But after a time thinking how to spin it for more attention she suddenly claimed to have been badly assaulted with damage to both wrists and her arm so bad that she is parading around with her arm in a sling. What a phony. Slandering an advocate for foster youth and trans kids for clicks and views. She never grew up, she is still a high school girl chasing fame on social media. Hugs
This breaking news story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Aformer foster youth and award-winning advocate for children was arrested at the U.S. Capitol tonight — a bizarre twist in an otherwise celebratory day of events — after South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace accused him of assault.
The incident took place outside a House of Representatives office building following an event honoring the anniversary of a landmark child welfare law where Mace, a firebrand Republican, had given a speech. Three witnesses at the scene told The Imprint their accused colleague James McIntyre had done nothing more than shake the congress member’s hand at the House reception, and asked her to protect the rights of transgender people.
But in a post on the social media platform X, Rep. Mace described a violent confrontation.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace
“I was physically accosted at the Capitol tonight by a pro-tr*ns man. One new brace for my wrist and some ice for my arm and it’ll heal just fine,” she posted at 8:43 p.m. “The Capitol police arrested the guy. Your tr*ns violence and threats on my life will only make me double down.”
The arrest stunned onlookers.
A group of McIntyre’s fellow foster youth advocates rushed to the outside of the Rayburn House Office Building to watch the scene unfold. They stood by tearfully as he was searched for several minutes by police, asking officers where he’d be taken and calling frantically for an attorney who could represent him.
McIntyre, 33, has spoken publicly about his excruciating experience growing up in foster care, and is now a leading voice in policymaking in his home state of Illinois. He is also a chapter co-founder of the influential group Foster Care Alumni of America. In 2019, the National Association of Social Workers’ Illinois chapter named him the “Public Citizen of the Year.”
An officer with the Capitol Police Department told a reporter present at the scene that they were responding to a call about an “assault.” McIntyre was then placed into a police van and driven off.
Other attendees have reacted with outrage since McIntyre’s arrest.
“I want to express deep disappointment in the fact that Congresswoman Nancy Mace came to a national foster youth event, told participating youth that it was a safe space — and literally had one of them arrested by Capital police for simply shaking her hand and asking about trans rights,” said Lisa Dickson, a veteran advocate for foster youth from Ohio, in a Facebook post.
Mace is not new to such publicity. In recent weeks, she has been in the news for her successful campaign to bar newly elected Rep. Sarah McBride — a Democrat from Delaware who is transgender — from using the public women’s bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol.
At tonight’s event, Mace, who co-chairs Congress’ bipartisan foster care caucus, joined a group of legislators at a House reception celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999. The act created the John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood, legislation that significantly expanded federal support for foster youth who leave the system after turning 18 without a permanent home.
Today’s events featured speeches from some of the former foster youth whose advocacy led to the writing and passage of the law known as the Chafee Act.
In her remarks at the House event, Rep. Mace told the crowd that while she was not an adoptee or former foster youth, she had been a victim of sexual abuse as a child. She called the dozens of advocates and foster youth in attendance — McIntyre among them — “the cream of the crop.”
“I look forward to working with each and every one of you. God bless you, I will be praying for you,” Mace said.
As she finished her comments and moved to leave the room, McIntyre approached her near an exit door, witnesses said.
Elliott Hinkle, a former foster youth and advocate for LGBTQ rights, said McIntyre shook her hand, and made a comment about how many transgender youth are in foster care, adding: “They need your support.”
“From what I saw, it was a normal handshake and interaction that I would expect any legislator to expect from anyone as a constituent,” said Hinkle, a consultant who has advised the federal government on issues affecting youth in foster care.
Later, Hinkle said, one of Mace’s aides returned to the reception and asked McIntyre his name and whether he would repeat what he had told the legislator. Two other people who witnessed the interaction confirmed that description of the brief episode.
McIntyre left the celebration, but he was later summoned back to the Rayburn Building by police.
Hinkle said his subsequent arrest “sends a chilling effect of, you’re not actually safe to go to the Capitol Hill and share an opinion that is true for you, that isn’t violent — because right now if you do, a congressperson might say that they were physically assaulted and call the police on you. So how would a young person in care feel safe?”
Michael Fitzgerald contributed to this report.
I hope everyone can see what the rabid right haters are trying to do. Not only gaslight everyone lying that a horrible assault happened and trans people are the fault and guilty party, but that the left endorses it. A woman was assaulted by a pro trans … trying to hint or make it sound like it was a trans man who did it. The log cabin people are the silliest as they claim she is a supporter of the LGBT, notice the last letter. They can not find a real attach on a woman by a trans person so now they are trying to make one up. Normal maga right dirty tricks. Hugs
12.9.2024 Xiajing Zhu and Cornelia (Connie) Pechmann
Many top Republicans, including Donald Trump and Senators Tim Scott (South Carolina), Marco Rubio (Florida), and Ted Cruz (Texas), refuse to accept the 2020 election results. Many other Republicans falsely assert the 2020 election was rigged and have stated that they stood ready to fight if Trump was not declared the 2024 winner.
In a new Journal of Marketing study, we explain what underlies these Republicans’ thought processes and behaviors and how the majority of news media and social media contribute to this problem.
The Lethal Combination: Polarization and Misinformation
Our team finds that political polarization triggers Republicans, but not Democrats, to spread misinformation that is objectively false. Although Republicans may understand the content is very likely false, they are willing to spread it. We also discover the reason why Republicans respond to political polarization by conveying misinformation, while Democrats do not: Republicans strongly value their party winning over the competition. Democrats do not value winning nearly as strongly; they place more value on equity and inclusion, seeing the world in a fundamentally different way than Republicans.
In other words, whenever there is political polarization—that is, fierce competition between political parties—Republicans feel their backs are against the wall and come out swinging. They are willing to convey misinformation that is likely untrue, but not definitively false, to help their fellow Republicans win and Democrats lose. Democrats are less triggered by political polarization—they do not value their party winning over other values, so they do not respond this way.
We conducted six studies that demonstrate this. Our first study examines fact-checked statements in the news media and on social media by public figures over 10 years (2007–2016). Our second study extends this analysis to 16 years (2007–2022). We find that when there was political polarization in the news cycle, Republicans conveyed significantly more misinformation than Democrats.
We verify our findings in three online studies where we surveyed U.S. adults who identified as either Republican or Democrat. We put these individuals in politically polarized situations—for instance, we showed them Senate Republican and Democratic leaders arguing. We then showed them misinformation from current social media. For example, Republicans saw news such as “Democratic Senators are secretly pro-Russia” and “Democratic Senators are purposely manipulating gas prices,” while Democrats saw news such as “Republican Senators are secretly pro-Russia” and “Republican Senators are purposely manipulating gas prices.” In politically polarized situations, Republicans were significantly more willing to convey misinformation than Democrats to gain an advantage over the opposing party.
Our last study examines the speeches of U.S. presidents over 94 years (1929–2023), spanning the 31st president Herbert Hoover to the 46th president Joseph Biden. We find that in political polarized situations, such as during election periods, Republican presidents talked more about “we” and “us” than Democratic presidents, indicating they were more focused on their own party and partisanship.
To summarize, Republicans react to political polarization by putting out partisan misinformation. This can have a deleterious effect on the state of democratic institutions and processes. For instance, in the year following the 2020 U.S. presidential election and accompanying misinformation about election fraud, 400 restrictive voting bills were introduced in 47 U.S. state legislatures. Additionally, 14 states passed restrictive voting bills that, for instance, shortened the mail-in voting period, eliminated election day registration, and/or reduced ballot drop box access. These changes have decreased voter turnout and engagement, particularly among minority voters. (snip-MORE; it gets more interesting as it goes along, to me)
Scottie's Playtime 