How To Be a Profoundly Shitty Person 101, taught by Prof. Bethany Mandel
Hypocrisy and trying to pass as a Democrat is only part of her self-ascribed "brilliance"
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Milan Kundera, The Joke
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink
George Orwell, 1984
Reading about Bethany Mandel, one might legitimately wonder how someone could mature into such a deeply and profoundly shitty person…and I’m not sure I’d have an explanation for you. It’s not as if someone beat her with a stupid stick during her formative years. And yet, not to put too fine a point on it, she’s just an awful person.
When writing about people I disagree with, I endeavor to find something good about them. After all, no one is defined solely by their politics. Each of us is so much more than politics and ideology.
Bethany Mandel, f’rinstance, is hatred, bigotry, self-superiority, and virulent anti-wokeness (she wrote a book about it)…even though she couldn’t define “wokeness” when challenged to do so. Yeah, she’s just that dumb and profoundly rotten.
I can’t define “woke,” but I sure as Hell know it when I see it….
And she’s just a rotten, fugly, virtually unsalvageable human being with a block of coal for a soul and a heart of stone. For humanity’s sake, I can only hope she’s single and not inflicting her prickliness and lack of redeeming social value on anyone else. And then I found out she’s married and has six kids. Go figure.
I have a vast well of sympathy for her husband. He has to wake up next to that miserable excuse for humanity every morning…and her kids will probably require years of intensive therapy after leaving home. How does such an awful person teach their offspring to be good people? Is that even possible?
It’s like a sex addict teaching their kids about the importance of celibacy. How does that even work?
A self-declared kill-’em-and-grill-’em Republican, Ms. Mandel is running for the Montgomery Country (MD) school board. Of course, Montgomery County is a staunchly Democratic stronghold, so Ms. Mandel knows she’s fighting an uphill battle, no?
Yeah, about that….
Hold on just a damned minute here. Something’s wrong with this picture…and it’s not that Bethany Mandel looks like a soccer mom from a porn film.
Wait, wait…don’t tell me….
Since when is Bethany Mandel a Democrat?
What’s interesting about this is that school board elections in Montgomery County are nonpartisan, so candidates need not disclose party affiliation. So, Ms. Mandel’s lie is wholly unnecessary yet entirely in character. Like the leader of her party, Donald J. Diaperload, there is NOTHING she wouldn’t lie about if she thought doing so would give her an advantage.
But what she thought she might gain from this deception is difficult to imagine, especially when promising that in her tenure on the school board, she’ll be an “anti-woke, Moms-for-Liberty-style Republican.”
So, we’ll be burning librarians, administrators, and “woke” kindergarten teachers at the stake?? And she’ll take the Oath of Office with a cigarette lighter and a jerrycan full of gasoline?
No, “the Left” isn’t “coming for your children” or anything else, for that matter. Ms. Mandel is stirring up fear among the ignorant, easily propagandized, and poorly informed (because fear and rage beat critical thinking).
They are, after all, her people.
Those who know Mandel recognize her for writing molten-hot takes and far-right political commentary. The most infamous was a column, published in the wake of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, titled "We Need to Start Befriending Neo Nazis." (Mandel is Jewish.) Her content can be cringey, like her column defending Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' wife: "If Casey DeSantis is a Karen, she's our Karen." She's posted dehumanizing rhetoric, too. "Not nuking these f****** animals is the only restraint I expect and that's only because the cloud would hurt Israelis," she's written about Palestinians.
In recent years, Mandel has built up her profile campaigning against Covid-19 lockdowns, starting early on in the pandemic. ("You can call me a Grandma killer," she posted in May 2020.) She's also gone to war against "woke indoctrination" in public schools, writing a whole book chapter about the topic before being unable to define the term "woke" in a viral interview moment on The Hill Rising.
Interestingly- and somewhat hypocritically- Mandel’s website says that she’s worried about how much the school district spends on legal fees.
So, guess who’s suing the Montgomery County School District?
If you guessed Bethany Mandel, with help from Stephen Miller, the white nationalist who pushed the child separation policy, you would be correct! For good measure, Mandel is also suing a group Montgomery County teachers who blocked her on Twitter. She argues her first amendment rights were restricted because she, a person with access to multiple media platforms, was unable to argue for restricting what books are offered to students in a school meeting.
Mandel complaining about the legal costs of the school district she is suing is like an arsonist complaining about the rising costs of fire insurance.
Mandel is part of a wave of Conservative culture warriors determined to force their views about what children should be taught in public schools upon school boards across the country.
It’s a war for the hearts and minds of our children, who represent the future of our country. Suppose they can force public schools to teach a fear-based agenda that omits certain “inconvenient” parts of American history that make the White race look bad. In that case, students will grow up with an incomplete picture of what America was.
The problem is that’s precisely what the Far-Right culture warriors are after. They want children to be taught a curriculum that minimizes slavery’s evil, softens the impact of racism on American history, and emphasizes America’s role as a Christian nation. That none of those things are true or accurate is beside the point.
Those who control what is taught to our children control the future. If America’s children grow up believing that the USA is and always has been a shining beacon on the hill and an inspiration to the rest of the world, then that’s what the future will look like…or so goes the plan.
And if you believe, as Bethany Mandel claims, that our children are being used as guinea pigs by the Radical Left, then you’re convinced that “culture war” is a righteous and appropriate term.
The problem, of course, is that Mandel’s claim is utter bullshit. There is no radical plot by Liberal teachers and their unions to “brainwash” America’s children and turn them into mindless Left-wing “Lib-bots.” If there’s any “brainwashing” happening, Right-wing culture warriors are doing it.
It’s an old Nazi technique perfected by Josef Goebbels- loudly accuse your enemy of the very same tactics you intend to you. Then, in the resulting Sturm und Drang, it will be easy to sneak in under the radar while your enemies are being battered from all sides for their treachery.
Mandel is using that fear of Liberal “brainwashing” in her campaign to steer attention away from legitimate issues and onto the culture war issues she prefers to campaign on.
"For a lot of them [on the school board], there's a Democratic machine … so they can use this as a stepping stone to run for another office and another office and another office and I do not want to be part of this machine," she said. "But there is a ladder that people use within this county to be on the planning board, to be on the county council, to then move on to being a legislator, and it's all in service of their own political ambitions."
"There's a five-alarm fire right now within progressive lefty people in this county because they think I'm going to take over, [but] I will be vastly outnumbered," she said. "But we need someone on the school board who will raise their hand and say: 'Is this the best use of our time, when 75% of children in the school district can't read on grade level?' and I will just keep on saying that over and over and over."
"They're afraid of that, they're afraid of someone interrupting their priority and their priority is not children," she added. "It's not their advancement. It's not their betterment. I don't know what they're doing there. "
But, Mandel said this "self-serving cycle" is only going to hurt children and their futures, especially those impacted by the learning loss that resulted during the pandemic.
"This is going to lead to crime, it's going to lead to depression, it's going to lead to lower GDP," she said. "You name it, the societal issues that will stem from this educational crisis will impact every single person in our society."
"All of these kids in kindergarten, first, second, third grade even, were on Zoom and then behind masks, that's years of a critical window in time for learning that they have fundamentally lost and has been stolen from them … those kids are not going to recover," she added.
One of the worst things about Mandel’s philosophy is her refusal to countenance the social contract. The idea that we contribute collectively to a social safety net that is there if needed makes America better collectively. If not for that, America would be a dog-eat-dog Randian meritocracy where everyone looked out only for themselves and would never care for or about others. That would be a very different and sad place, but it’s the world Mandel seeks to create.
Even though she claims to have benefited substantially from that social safety net.
America is not 100% a meritocracy, and if Mandel grew up on welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps, her success story is not wholly her own. We- the American collective- assisted her until she could pull herself up and make it on her own…if that’s even what happened.
It’s amazing how many Republicans with similar origin stories have conveniently forgotten that part.
And I probably shouldn’t get started on Mandel’s anti-vaccine silliness. That self-serving madness is about as hypocritical as it gets. Still, Mandel became a raging anti-vaxxer, yet nowhere is there any mention of her having a Ph.D. in epidemiology.
What Mandel fails to understand is that COVID-19 had by then become a leading cause of death among children. Or perhaps she didn’t give a shit about what happened to other people’s children because she certainly doesn’t care about doing anything that contributes to the public good.
The fact that Mandel has to lie and pretend she’s a Democrat tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her. Honesty and integrity aren’t high on her dance card…while grabbing political political power by any means necessary, however dishonest, is.
A school board seat in Montgomery County is nonpartisan, so why not keep quiet about party affiliation? Sure, her background and beliefs would’ve come out, but she could’ve stuck to the issues and left the ideological part of the discussion to others. She could’ve at least tried to rise about the partisan fray and stuck to the reason people generally run for school board seats in the first place- to influence curriculum, teacher compensation, etc.
Ah, but she can’t pass up a half-decent chance to dunk on Democrats, can she?
No, she can’t. And that’s precisely the problem.
Instead of engaging in coalition building and determining how best to move forward to educate Montgomery County’s children, Bethany Mandel has decided her best move is to attempt to force her narrow, fear-based ideology on the entire Montgomery County school system.
I can hardly wait for her to break out the “some kids are identifying as cats and schools are providing litter boxes” argument. It’s an oldie, but still a goodie that occasionally gets trotted out (see Oklahoma Edumication Superintendant Ryan Walters).
I find it difficult to understand how a mother of six can be such a genuinely miserable, awful, and profoundly rotten person…but Bethany Mandel manages to pull it off with aplomb.
If Mandel has her way, the children of Montgomery County will grow up to be goose-stepping, brainwashed Nazi bots incapable of independent thought.
Which means they’ll be perfect as tomorrow’s Republicans.
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