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Thomas Jefferson said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Having lost many of our liberties a long time ago, eternal vigilance has become the price of having a Republican Party not entirely dominated by snakes and traitors. 

The sad truth is a new roster of swamp creatures is coming up in the GOP in the wake of the 2020 election and it is best embodied by Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina. We will find out who the frauds and fakes are of the freshman congressional class in no time, but Mace right out of the gate—along with Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan—is leading the charge for the next generation of RINOs at the ready to deceive and betray for the highest bidder.

Before she was elected, Mace posed as a pro-Trump Republican to win her primary and win conservative votes in the general election, where she rode the president’s coattails to a victory that was almost five points smaller than Trump’s in her district. Yet the moment Election Night concluded, she barely paid lip service to the rabble and their concerns about suspect mail-in ballots and hackable vote-processing computers. She did not want to dwell on the past and take on fights that could hurt her standing in the Beltway. 

After all, she is the future, as the consultant class has made abundantly clear. Mace checks all the right victim group bubbles on the survey, so she can be a leader in the age of diversity. After all, that’s what matters in a modern society. She intends to take full advantage of all the advantages and privileges at her disposal.

To demonstrate her empowerment, Mace will posture on behalf of the establishment’s norms. She puts on the COVID mouth diaper to show what a strong woman she is. Mindless conformity is cool. It’s just something that liberated women do. Mace wants to show that conservatives can do it too. 

She is a maverick in the John McCain sense. She will posture in ways that the mainstream media eats up, like when she opposes overturning electoral fraud and betrays her loyal followers. Mace showed the pesky pro-Trump masses that she was above them, she knows more than they, and their priorities are moot. This is the type of “courage” that the fake news media loves to herald from conservatives. They love nothing better than when Republican politicians tell their voters to get stuffed.

We always hear about how the new generation of conservatives is walking through that door. They’re going to be hip, young, diverse, and, by God, they’re here to shoehorn through the same stale messages that the public has forcefully rejected. Perhaps that’s why they named the Republican Party’s answer for the squad, “the force.”

Although Mace is not a member of the force, it represents her brand of politics. She wants an identity politics veneer to cloak a return to the George W. Bush agenda so the GOP can resume its traditional role of losing to the Democrats with dignity. 

The minorities who enter the Republican Party typically have been co-opted into a condescending milieu of rank tokenism that has consistently failed in outreach efforts. Trump’s minority outreach efforts were more successful than anything the GOP establishment devised because he offered actual substance rather than a handful of diverse faces reciting corporate talking points.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. You will never hear the establishment regale Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia for the courage of her convictions. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado is in the same boat, after being targeted by the deranged Left over the U.S. Capitol siege. These strong freshmen congresswomen receive no plaudits from a lapdog left-wing press because they are authentic conservatives representing the populist vanguard that is rising within the GOP. 

The only female leaders who are promoted by the liberal media are actors following the establishment’s orders, and Mace has made it clear that she is their willing hitwoman who will not hesitate to toss cheap shots at her colleagues to get ahead.

Mace’s actions toward Boebert and Greene, her freshman rivals, show her lack of maturity, grace, and dignity as a lawmaker. She chastised Greene, using a debunked smear that she is a QAnon supporter, for supporting the president after the U.S. Capitol siege. Meanwhile, Mace herself was blaming Trump in media appearances and rooting for his impeachment. Mace took her crusade against Trump and his supporters to an even more personal level with her attacks on Boebert. She called for Boebert to be investigated over a fake news report that she threatened House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). 

Mace is proving her establishment bona fides by showing that she will stoop to the lowest level to gain prestige and favor from the federal swamp.

Mace may have served her country admirably as the first female graduate from The Citadel, but she has turned her back on the Constitution by calling for one of her colleagues to receive Soviet-style retribution for exercising her First Amendment rights. She served in the military, as did Benedict Arnold and John McCain before her, but a military background does not necessarily translate into being a patriotic lawmaker. After all, many bureaucrats whose chests are adorned with beautiful medals have sent troops to die in Third World hellscapes based on lies, oftentimes deliberately selling the public on laughable falsehoods, to get a better position in the Pentagon or a fat lobbying paycheck with the likes of Raytheon or Boeing.

President Donald Trump was among the greatest presidents for the troops, even though he never served and received multiple deferments to prevent him from fighting in the Vietnam War. He brought troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He spoke truth to power against military bureaucrats who regularly invent “intelligence” from whole cloth to justify an endless occupation of the Middle East. He transformed the previously ailing Department of Veterans Affairs into an institution that honors our beloved veterans with high-quality healthcare. 

Mace will never have the courage to stand up to the deep state power structure because she only possesses illusory strength, compared to Trump’s genuine strength. She prostrated herself beneath the powers that President Trump rooted out and fought valiantly. This is why Mace likely will never be more than a one-term congresswoman, while Trump’s legacy will span generations.

Gavin Wax

Gavin M. Wax is a New York-based conservative political activist, commentator, columnist, operative, and strategist. He is the Executive Director of the National Constitutional Law Union. He also serves as the 76th President of the New York Young Republican Club and as an Ambassador for both Turning Point USA & Live Action. He is co-authoring an upcoming book entitled 'The Emerging Populist Majority.' You can follow him on Twitter at @GavinWax.