Representative Nancy Mace’s crusade against Representative Ilhan Omar has dredged up an old, Islamaphobic rumor.
The pair were going back and forth on X Wednesday, ahead of a scheduled floor debate over Omar’s potential censure, and Mace referred to the Minnesota lawmaker as “Somalia Ilhan Omar.”
“Is your ridiculous censure about me being born in Somalia? Because that’s just as crazy as you are,” wrote Omar.
But then Mace reached for the top shelf to offend her colleague.
“Who knows, maybe it’ll be about you marrying your brother next!” Mace responded. “Tune in!”
MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the United States. The conspiracy first emerged during Omar’s 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature, in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.
Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother to be “absurd and offensive.”
But that hasn’t stopped Mace from digging the details back up. Over the last week, Mace has advocated stripping Omar of her committee assignments and censuring her, and has publicly suggested that Omar should be deported back to Somalia for having allegedly “smeared Charlie Kirk and implied he was to blame for his own murder” during an interview with Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan.
Clips from that interview were similarly picked up by far-right personalities, who claimed that Omar had said Kirk deserved to die. But that’s not accurate.
“No one said he deserved to die. Ilhan Omar said the exact opposite to me,” Hasan wrote on X. “She condemned his killing. And she said her heart goes out to Kirk’s widow.”
Omar also pushed back against Mace, arguing that she never made the comments that Mace was attempting to silence her for.
“Her [resolution] does not contain a single quote from me because she couldn’t find any,” Omar said. “Unlike her, I have routinely condemned political violence, no matter the political ideology. This is all an attempt to push a false story so she can fundraise and boost her run for Governor.”
Even other Republicans didn’t appear to galvanize behind Mace’s cause, apparently wiping their hands of the South Carolinian’s vendetta.
“It just seems like every week or so we want to censure somebody for something,” Texas Representative Troy Nehls told Fox News’s Chad Pergram on Tuesday. “A lot of people say a lot of stupid stuff around here.”
Ironically, Mace’s mudslinging comes just days after she insisted that she never bad-mouthed her Democratic colleagues.
The post Nancy Mace Launches Racist Attack on Ilhan Omar for Made-Up Quotes appeared first on New Republic.
