A man accused of assaulting Rep. Nancy MaceR-S.C., on Capitol Hill was arrested Tuesday night, U.S. Capitol Police said.

The man was identified as James McIntyre, 33, of Illinois, NBC News reported. He is charged with assaulting a government official.

Mace, who has faced criticism for introducing a bill to ban transgender women from using the women’s restrooms at the U.S. Capitol, wrote on X that she had been “physically accosted” by a man advocating for trans rights. Capitol Police said a House member’s office had reported an incident in the Rayburn House Office Building.

“One new brace for my wrist and some ice for my arm and it’ll heal just fine,” she added.

Capitol Police did not offer any details about McIntyre to NBC News. Three witnesses with McIntyre’s foster care advocacy group told The Imprint that Mace and McIntyre merely shook hands and that he made a comment about the number of transgender youths in foster care who “need your support.”

The Washington Post later similarly reported that witnesses said the encounter was not physically aggressive. Elliott Hinkle, a foster care advocate from Wyoming, told the Post:

Mace’s office did not immediately respond to BLN’s request for comment Wednesday.

It’s unclear what exactly transpired in the exchange; whether there is video of the incident is unclear. Mace appeared to dispute the witnesses’ characterization of the incident, writing on X: “The usual suspects in the media are using the assault on me to prop up misogyny on the Left, giving a platform to activists chasing their 15 minutes of fame.”

Mace had said her bathroom ban measure was “absolutely” written in response to Rep.-elect Sarah McBride’s becoming the first transgender person elected to Congress. Mace has also repeatedly misgendered the Delaware Democrat and publicly used a slur for transgender peopleand she is selling T-shirts centered on her bathroom ban.

In her posts on X about Tuesday’s incident, the South Carolina Republican characterized it as an example of the dangers that she claims transgender people pose.

Research does not back Mace’s claims. In fact, a study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that transgender women and men were more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender counterparts. Research published in the journal Nature Human Behavior this year also showed that state laws targeting transgender people made trans and nonbinary young people more likely to attempt suicide.

Clarissa-Jan Lim

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find killing people — for any reason — laudable, or funny, or cute, or hot. And online these days, that can feel like an isolating worldview.

Which is to say, I’ve been pretty disgusted over the past week, watching many Americans engage in one of the nation’s most disturbing pastimes: the valorization of deadly white vigilantes.

Of course, I’m talking about the overjoyed — at times, even lustful — reactions to Luigi Mangionethe man arrested in last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and Daniel Pennythe man acquitted by a New York City jury after the chokehold death of a Black subway passenger last year.

The circumstances of the killings are quite different, to be sure. But the praise for Penny and Mangione has looked alike.

Both men have been on the receiving end of hero worship that, in the U.S., frequently seems intent on shrouding white men’s violent acts with adoration or mythological valor — even if it’s a stone-cold murderer.

Penny has become a folk hero among conservatives, who have framed him as a defender of public safety from the beginning. Immediately after his arrest, when little was known about him other than that he’d been filmed choking Jordan Neelya homeless subway rider with a history of mental illness, right-wingers donated millions of dollars for his legal defense. And after his acquittal, Republicans have basically been falling over one another in their race to lionize him.

Glutton has”https://www.tmz.com/2024/12/10/luigi-mangione-cheered-online-super-mario-sopranos-memes/” target=”_blank”>achieved meme status in his own right and has been portrayed by some — including on the left — as someone who allegedly turned to homicide as a means of holding the exploitive health care industry accountable. (A defense attorney said Wednesday that Mangione is expected to plead not guilty in New York.)

I must say, it’s been startling to witness the raft of liberals praising someone accused of a brazen killing. To hear them tell it, Americans — in the same country where voters broadly supported hoisting Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies into power — are fed up with rich elites, and the person who shot this CEO is a byproduct of that moral rage.

Color me skeptical.

One reason? To state the seemingly obvious: When Black and Latino people kill, there doesn’t tend to be an obsession over why. And we certainly don’t tend to see a groundswell of sympathy — or worse, celebration. Yet, in the U.S., softened depictions — and at times, outright praise — of white killers have become common. (See: Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeighBoston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and serial killer Ted Bundyjust to name a few.)

Yet, in the U.S., softened depictions — and at times, outright praise — of white killers have become common.

This has all had me thinking about a piece that filmmaker Terence Nance wrote a few years ago on the tired trope of the “angelic” white savior in movies and television — and I think his critique is worth considering as we witness this latest hero worship.

“The trope is a bedtime story designed to rock the white masses to sleep with a smile on their faces and peace in their hearts, knowing that someone who looked like them, at the end of the day, did the right thing, and they too … are doing the right thing,” Nance wrote. “It is an aspirational fiction that somehow does not self-perpetuate. White angel movies do not model angelic behavior for the white masses; if they do, this modeling has yet to produce more real-life white angels or at least a critical mass of them (unless Bill Gates decided to start his foundation after seeing Blood Diamond).”

Ya’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He’s a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”