Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) made her first public appearance in some time this week while launching her new YouTube talk show — and along the way revealed the nine new tattoos covering her arms.

The new ink caused much conversation online.

The outgoing Republican congresswoman shared in February to Politico that she got all nine tattoos in rapid succession between late 2023 and early 2024 during a period of turmoil in her personal and professional life.

Mace joked on Twitter that her ink should “NOT” be a news story.

“Thoughts and prayers to all those affected by my sleeves,” the outgoing congresswoman wrote on X. “Made the mistake of opening my social media this afternoon. Some of yall are OUT OF CONTROL. My biceps should NOT be a news story. We have more important things to worry about. Goodness. And God Bless America.”

Mace unveiled her tattoos on her new YouTube show “Get Maced” over the weekend, appearing in a sleeveless tank top. The daily web show will cover the political headlines of the day.

Her broadcast scheduled for Monday afternoon plans to address her tattoo reveal, titled “Nancy Mace BREAKS THE INTERNET with Tattoos & Exposes the Radical Takeover of America.”

Her political tenure in Washington is ending because she gave up her House seat to run for Governor of South Carolina and suffered a decisive defeat June 9.

Some users on X called the tattoo reveal a cry for attention. Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen shaded the congresswoman saying that he wished he “loved anything as much as Nancy Mace loves attention.”

Far-right political activist Laura Loomer defended Mace, saying that it shouldn’t matter if she has tattoos. She was grateful to her for being one of the few members of Congress “who speaks truth about Islamic terror and she is a major advocate for animals.”

“I don’t really care if she wants to be tattooed,” she wrote. “Not sure why so many people attack her in such a personal manner. I can think of way worse members of Congress.”

Who cares is Nancy Mace has tattoos? I for one appreciate how she has used her time in office to speak out for what is right.

She is one of the few members of Congress who speaks truth about Islamic terror and she is a major advocate for animals. I don’t really care if she…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) August 17, 2026

For more reactions, keep reading.

Meghan McCain sounded off on conservative media for their takes on postpartum depression amid the Lindsay Clancy trial, warning they were “scaring the normies” ahead of the 2028 election.

“As one of the few women left in conservative media who isn’t trying to live a trad wife life or peddle trad wife content – a lot of you sound so weird and mean talking about fertility, pregnancy, postpartum,” the conservative commentator posted on X Monday afternoon. “You’re scaring the normies. And you’re gonna need them in ‘28.”

Lindsay Clancy is a Massachusetts woman currently on trial for the January 2023 strangulation of her three children. She currently faces three counts of first-degree murder, while her defense has argued that she lacks responsibility due to suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and other mental health struggles at the time.

The case has garnered widespread commentary on social media, prompting debate regarding postpartum struggles. In fact, McCain’s comment came hours after far-right political commentator and podcast host Matt Walsh went viral on X for suggesting that “the more selfish” a person is the more they will struggle in postpartum.

“A lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this but much of the ‘depression’ that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake,” he wrote Monday morning on X, garnering over 2.3 million views. “The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.”

It didn’t take long for the controversial comment to blow up, with many, including fellow conservative pundits, pushing back on Walsh’s take.

Kylie Jane Kremer, the executive director for the pro-Trump advocacy group Women for America First, called Walsh’s post “genuinely diabolical,” adding, “And then people wonder why so many women run screaming from the Right.”

“Reducing postpartum depression and serious psychiatric illness to women being ‘selfish’ and hating their children isn’t Christian, compassionate, or medically serious,” she continued. “It’s cruel. I honestly cannot believe he posted this.”

Corinne Clark Barron, Republican strategist and co-founder of FreePressFail.com, expressed a similar sentiment on X Monday, writing, “The hormone crash after birth is REAL, and pretending it’s just women being narcissistic is so beyond stupid. And I like Matt Walsh usually!!”

“I didn’t have PPD. But for weeks after birth I could barely sleep, even when my baby was sleeping well,” she continued. “I had obsessive thoughts about my mom’s death and panic attacks so awful they still make me want to cry if I think about it too much, now almost 4 months later. I had an incredible support system and good doctors who didn’t try to poison me, and I am happy I made it through the worst of it. I can imagine how easy it would be to get stuck in that loop.”

While Barron clarified that no one was “excusing murder” by validating the existence of postpartum struggles, she noted that “reducing one of the most dramatic hormonal hardships a human body can experience into some kind of character flaw is anti-woman.”

“The View” co-host and conservative political strategist Alyssa Farah Griffin also posted a reaction to Walsh’s post.

“Conflating Postpartum Depression with Postpartum psychosis is either ignorant or willfully misleading,” she said in an X post. “If you think postpartum anxiety/depression/or psychosis is a result of being selfish & not your body experiencing the greatest hormone crash of your life while recovering from something extremely physically painful – you’re deliberately ignorant.”

Other conservative men weighed in with their thoughts on the ongoing trial. Andrew Kolvet, a TPUSA spokesman and executive producer on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” said in an X post, “PSA for the internet today… LINSDAY CLANCY IS NOT A VICTIM. LINDSAY CLANCY’S CHILDREN ARE THE VICTIMS.”

As for Walsh, he stood by his comments, doubling down in a new post on X Monday.

“People are reacting to this point and predictably ignoring the words ‘a lot,’ ‘much’ and ‘not just moms.’ Instead they’re pretending that I said PPD doesn’t exist and every depressed person is selfish,” he wrote. “This is the kind of blind, hysterical panicking that makes it impossible to have any sort of productive discussion about the actual reality of raising young children (a subject for which I have plenty of firsthand experience). In any case, I stand by what I said. Yell about it all you want.”

As Mariska Hargitay reflects on the past year in her life – a momentous one for the actress and filmmaker – a word comes to her mind to describe it: “cathartic.”

She completed her 27^th season starring as Capt. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU and in May made her Broadway debut in the drama Every Brilliant Thing – both exceptional achievements. But the catharsis emerged through an even more personal endeavor: her nonfiction directorial debut My Mom Jayne. The HBO documentary, an intimate exploration of Hargitay’s mother, the late actress Jayne Mansfield, and of a mystery surrounding the identity of Hargitay’s father, has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Nonfiction Program.

“The film has been, for me, the gift that just keeps on giving,” she tells Deadline. “It was an archeological dig of me not knowing what I was going to find, hoping that I had the internal architecture to support myself… Going into the unknown and not knowing what the other side was going to look like, it’s been so extraordinary to come out the other side with the results beyond my even dreams or comprehension, not knowing that the film would resonate with so many people the way it has.”

Hargitay was just three years old when her mother was tragically killed in an auto accident outside New Orleans in 1967. Mariska and her two older brothers, Zoltán and Miklos (Mickey Jr.), were in the back seat of the vehicle but survived. Mariska and her older siblings were raised by Mickey Hargitay Sr., the man she grew up believing to be her biological father.

Jayne Mansfield possessed great beauty and talent. She was multilingual and played classical piano and violin, but her exceptional good looks and curvaceous figure limited how the men who ran Hollywood perceived her. Mansfield accommodated herself to the sex symbol persona. In the film, Hargitay recalls growing up without her mom and becoming uncomfortable with how Mansfield had presented on screen.

“I didn’t really appreciate the sort of bombshell image and didn’t like some of the [acting] choices she made,” Hargitay told us at the Cannes Film Festival, where My Mom Jayne premiered. “I felt myself being embarrassed by her and just wanting a normal mom and a regular mom and ‘pick me up from school’ and like that… I just felt like I dissociated myself and said, yeah, I don’t want to be part of that, and I want to do it differently.”

In the course of the film, Hargitay reevaluates her mom, forming a fuller picture of how Mansfield’s career choices were circumscribed by the egregious sexism of the 1950s and ‘60s. She also explores her mother’s complicated love life, and the blended family Jayne raised that included Mickey Hargitay’s daughter by his first wife. The honesty of the portrayal, coupled with the reality that many people experience blended families or complicated family dynamics has allowed viewers to connect with the film.

“You could say, ‘Oh, [this story is] about Jayne Mansfield, a movie star in the ’50s and her TV star daughter’; that’s not what the movie is about. It’s a family film. It’s a story about generational trauma, and it’s a story about identity and recovery and reclamation and forgiveness and so many things,” Hargitay says, expressing pride in “the way the film has been received and the way that people have said, ‘That’s my story,’ and the spark that has led people to investigate their own families to uncover their family secrets or just deal with them or just look at them closer.”

Hargitay captures on screen her reaction to learning as an adult that Mickey Hargitay in fact wasn’t her biological father. Her dad was Nelson Sardelli, a Brazilian singer with whom Jayne Mansfield became romantically involved during a break from her marriage to Hargitay. That revelation triggered conflicting emotions in Mariska, who felt intensely loyal to Mickey Hargitay as her loving father and didn’t want it to seem as if, somehow, she were turning her back on him.

“When we keep secrets, I think that occupies a big part of our psyche — knowingly and unconsciously,” Hargitay observes. “Holding this secret and feeling bad about it and knowing that there was a part of me that just wasn’t clear and allowing myself to be my authentic self — but out of duty thinking this is how it had to be to honor my father. And then when I came to the realization like, no, no, no, that secret isn’t honoring anyone. We have to tell the secret.”

She adds, “I wanted to make a love letter for my father, Mickey. That’s what I wanted to do. But in the process, it turned out to really be a love letter to all three of them [Jayne, Nelson, and Mickey] because the film deals with the complexity of the human condition, the real complexities of what it is to be human and how two things can be true at once.”

In My Mom Jayne, Mariska connects with Nelson Sardelli, and the half-sisters she never knew she had.

“It was very cathartic and mind-blowing to hear Nelson’s side of the story and understanding why he made the decisions that he made and how complex the decisions were for all three of them in so many ways,” she shares. “I was freed up; I felt like this giant exhale.”

The freeing of psychic space has allowed Hargitay to pursue new avenues of creativity. She made her Broadway debut 40 years after her late mother had done the same.

“She was 22 [when she made her debut] and I was 62. That was also a deeply extraordinary feeling for me,” Hargitay affirms. “And when I went to Broadway, one of the things that I took with me was a plaque that she got that said ‘Broadway’s Rising Star 1955.’ And so every night I would hold that before I went [on stage].”

Hargitay will continue an extraordinary year by embarking on the 28^th season of Law & Order: SVU and taking on another major challenge – hosting the Primetime Emmy Awards on NBC on Monday, Sept. 14.

We’ll have more on Mariska’s plans for hosting the show in a separate piece we’ll publish on Tuesday. She won’t be simultaneously hosting and hearing announcements of winners in the documentary categories – those are presented at the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 5 and 6.