The Ben Shapiro Show - August 17, 2026


Nancy Mace Has Joined the Hells Angels


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

202.72

Word count

1,865

Sentence count

131

Harmful content

Misogyny

18

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 If you had a friend who got like nine tattoos in the span of just a couple of months, you might check in to make sure they're doing okay.
00:00:06.000 Now, imagine your friend then told you they got all those tattoos because they needed to feel pain.
00:00:10.000 Now, you'd probably urge them to seek some professional help if you were a good friend.
00:00:14.000 Now, what if I told you that this very thing just happened to a member of Congress, Nancy Mace, out of South Carolina?
00:00:19.000 Not kidding.
00:00:20.000 She has near sleeves of tattoos on each arm, and nobody really knew about it until she publicly revealed it.
00:00:25.000 Stay tuned till the end to find out what tattoos I would get in an alternate universe.
00:00:29.000 So, I know Representative Mace. 1.00
00:00:31.000 I know Nancy. 1.00
00:00:32.000 She's a nice lady. 1.00
00:00:34.000 She's always been a rather attention seeking political personality.
00:00:37.000 This goes all the way back to 1999 when she attempted to and successfully integrated the Citadel, which is a military boys' school, it's a military academy.
00:00:47.000 And then she ran for Congress and then she has been rather performative while she was in office.
00:00:52.000 Well, she made big headlines over the weekend because in the second most awkward bodily reveal of the week, the first one was AOC revealing she was freezing her eggs and then doing an entire routine about it in order to run for president.
00:01:04.000 Now, Nancy Mays.
00:01:05.000 Has decided to do a body reveal in which apparently she joined the Hells Angels. 0.99
00:01:10.000 So she now has sleeves, which none of us needed to know about, actually. 1.00
00:01:16.000 And if she did, I mean, okay, but she revealed it on national TV. 0.51
00:01:21.000 According to the New York Post, Nancy has gotten nine tattoos as a member of Congress because getting inked, quote, provides the pain that I need to feel.
00:01:30.000 She said that in a profile released on Friday.
00:01:34.000 She got the tattoos in rapid succession between a period in late 2023 and early 2024.
00:01:39.000 Marked by the breakup with her fiance and an exodus of staffers from her office, some of whom viewed working for Mace as toxic, according to Politico.
00:01:46.000 Aside from a need to feel pain, Mace described getting tattoos as a way to reclaim her body and her identity. 0.94
00:01:52.000 That's a lot of tattoos.
00:01:56.000 I will admit, I am not a tattoo fan.
00:01:57.000 As you might have guessed, tattoos, not my thing.
00:02:01.000 Or the book of Leviticus is actually.
00:02:03.000 So, not a fan of the tattoos.
00:02:05.000 I think there are certain circumstances in which tattoos are more understandable than others.
00:02:09.000 If you're a member of the military, if you're a member of a police force, if you're a rock star, If you are a sitting congressperson and you just show up with Hell's Angel sleeves, it's a little weird.
00:02:18.000 It's a little weird.
00:02:19.000 And it's a sign of a thing.
00:02:21.000 It's obviously a sign of a thing.
00:02:24.000 One of those tattoos is the opening line of Virginia Woolf's famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, which is weird because if I were going to get a tattoo, it'd be the first line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which is 119 words.
00:02:36.000 I'd wind it all the way around my torso multiple times, probably.
00:02:40.000 I feel like that would be good.
00:02:41.000 Maybe something from Faulkner, a 1,300 word opening.
00:02:46.000 Or maybe the verse from Leviticus where it says, don't get tattoos.
00:02:49.000 Anyway, Nancy May said in this profile with Politico, she says, quote, How's it going?
00:02:59.000 I asked her.
00:03:00.000 This is the profiler.
00:03:01.000 It's a February 2026 profile.
00:03:03.000 That's a very loaded question.
00:03:04.000 How are you feeling?
00:03:05.000 I said, cautious.
00:03:06.000 She said, it's a very, I would say, cautious time for me because I have a lot going on and I have a lot of folks that are trying to stop me.
00:03:11.000 By this point in late January, I'd been talking to Mason, to others around Mason, about Mason for hours and hours for months and months.
00:03:16.000 I wanted to know what so many wanted to know and still do. 0.96
00:03:18.000 What is happening with this woman? 1.00
00:03:20.000 What is happening or has happened to her? 0.98
00:03:21.000 Why does she say the things she says? 0.93
00:03:23.000 Why does she act the way she acts? 0.88
00:03:24.000 Is she okay? 0.86
00:03:26.000 Macy's a 48 year old, twice divorced mother of two.
00:03:28.000 She often walks with a gun. 1.00
00:03:29.000 She sometimes shops in a wig. 0.97
00:03:31.000 She always sleeps under a 20 pound heavy blanket she thinks isn't heavy enough.
00:03:34.000 She says she does what she does because of an engine that she can't control and that just effing goes and is going to go and go and go and go.
00:03:41.000 In the wake of her shocking speech last year, in which she, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, accused her ex fiance and three of his business partners and friends of grievous sexual crimes against her and other women.
00:03:50.000 In the spiraling subsequent litigation in which alleged abusers are suing Mace and other alleged victims and vice versa, and a judge instituted a gag order for all parties involved, and Mace is taken to representing herself, she at times is all but asked to get sent to jail.
00:04:04.000 She has, according to scores of ex staffers and ex friends, operatives and colleagues from both parties, and a spectrum of people who know her and have known her for a long time, unstable and unhinged and unwell.
00:04:12.000 Okay, I mean, listen, this is honestly, it's kind of sad.
00:04:14.000 Now, again, what we're talking about here is that Nancy Mace was in a spat with an ex boyfriend, and she actually used the cover of the house.
00:04:22.000 If you go on the house, Floor and you say things, this gives you congressional immunity.
00:04:26.000 You cannot be sued for things that you say on the floor of the house.
00:04:29.000 She used that immunity in order to go after a bunch of men that she knew.
00:04:32.000 Now, again, I'm not a fan of this sort of thing.
00:04:34.000 I really don't like it.
00:04:35.000 I don't like it because, again, if it is factual enough to say publicly, you should say it not from the floor of the house and make yourself subject to the legal process.
00:04:43.000 I feel the same way about that time when you had members of Congress go on the floor of the house and throw out a bunch of names in the Epstein files who had literally nothing to do with trafficking of women.
00:04:53.000 If you're using congressional immunity, not for any Useful purpose, but in order to just shield yourself from liability when you have no actual basis for saying the same thing, I don't know whether it's true what she's saying or not, but I am less likely to actually believe that what she was saying was true because she was using her congressional immunity to do it than I would be if she said it outside of the floor of Congress.
00:05:12.000 Here's what it sounded like.
00:05:14.000 Today, you will hear about the depraved men behind these gutless and evil acts.
00:05:20.000 These men didn't just harm their victims, they recorded their depravity as if it were a badge.
00:05:28.000 Of honor.
00:05:31.000 When I uncovered evidence of rape and the illegal filming of women and sex trafficking, I didn't just see victims.
00:05:42.000 I saw a system that failed to protect them.
00:05:48.000 I saw criminals who thought they could get away with it because no one had the guts, no one had the courage, no one had the bravery. 0.99
00:05:59.000 To hold them accountable because we are filled with cowards. 0.99
00:06:06.000 I will burn this system to the ground if I have to. 1.00
00:06:13.000 These men aren't just criminals, they are predators. 0.99
00:06:19.000 And you can see the names and the faces of these predators on this board to my right tonight.
00:06:26.000 These predators are not untouchable.
00:06:30.000 These predators.
00:06:32.000 Are not invisible.
00:06:34.000 And these predators are not invincible.
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00:07:41.000 First of all, if you are openly saying that you got tattoos in order to feel pain, I mean, there are lots of ways in life to feel pain.
00:07:53.000 Over the weekend, my three year old decided to climb into a hamper.
00:07:55.000 I don't know why.
00:07:56.000 He's three.
00:07:57.000 And then he lost his balance and he keeled over and clocked his forehead on the floor and got a bump.
00:08:02.000 He felt pain.
00:08:04.000 Difference is that bump's going to go away.
00:08:06.000 He's not going to have gigantic tattoos all over his arms.
00:08:09.000 I don't know, man.
00:08:10.000 I feel like if you are a person in need of reclaiming your body and feeling pain, probably what you need is some psychiatric care, not the tattoos.
00:08:18.000 If one of your friends or a person you knew did this, the responsible move is not to feature them on national TV.
00:08:24.000 The responsible move is not to do gigantic profiles on them.
00:08:27.000 The responsible move with people who are obviously going through a thing is to sympathetically see that they actually get the treatment that they need.
00:08:35.000 And it's not a matter of, you know, quote unquote, personal choice.
00:08:39.000 Obviously, we live in a free country. 1.00
00:08:40.000 Nancy has the right to do what she wants to do when it comes to getting her tattoos. 1.00
00:08:44.000 I will say that obviously she's going through something, and I really, really hope that Nancy goes and gets the care that she needs because this is not healthy behavior. 0.99
00:08:53.000 Now, maybe unpopular, it is not healthy behavior.
00:08:56.000 It just isn't.
00:08:57.000 It isn't.
00:08:59.000 Now, again, this is my perspective when it comes to all mental health issues.
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