By Adam Pagnucco.
Four years ago, MoCo saw one of its wildest school board races of all time. (I wrote about it back then – here are links to Parts One, Two and Three.) This year, given all of the scandals and problems in MCPS, the school board elections could be even more intense. Consider just one of the current candidates: District 4’s Bethany Mandel.
Mandel is a conservative author and a self-described home school mom who lives in Silver Spring. She is a strong defender of Israel and opposes a Gaza ceasefire. And she really does not like masks, as seen in the tweet below.
But that’s not why I am writing this column. Consider the following.
Mandel is suing the school board.
Back in November, Mandel and former congressional candidate Matthew Foldi filed a federal lawsuit against the school board for physically excluding them from a crowded school board meeting. Many of the public attendees were there to express concern over the board’s approval of 22 LGBTQ-themed books for MCPS’s curriculum. Mandel also filed suit against a group of MCPS teachers for blocking her from what she alleged was an official MCPS Twitter account.
Incidentally, the seven adult members of the board were listed as co-defendants of the suit. This means that if Mandel is elected and the suit is still active, she will be suing some of her colleagues on the board.
Mandel’s books celebrate conservatives and condemn “woke indoctrinators.”
About a year ago, Mandel co-authored a book titled, “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” Here is its description on Amazon.
*****
The kids are not alright.
The Left is waging an all-out battle on the American family, particularly the youngest members. If they can make our children miserable, lead them to question every building block of society, and rebuild their entire concept of reality, then the Left and their woke indoctrinators will consider that a victory.
But we can’t let them win.
As concerned parents and American citizens, we have to understand what’s truly going on before we can do something about it. Stolen Youth provides an urgent deep dive into issues surrounding the current woke indoctrination happening in politics, education, medicine, mental health, entertainment, and culture.
These issues may seem subtle, insidious, and hard to make sense of, but armed with the information provided in this book, we now have a framework from which to fight. While we may simply be trying to parent our children well and create a healthy and happy home environment, this is no longer enough.
We must now go on the offense to protect our kids, and this book sheds a bright light on the reason why. We can no longer afford to stay ignorant. Our children’s lives and the survival of our families are at stake.
“A win is a family who is free.”
Stolen Youth outlines how to fight for our children’s freedom—and win.
*****
Mandel is also the editor and spokeswoman of the Heroes of Liberty book series, which profiles many political and cultural figures for kids. At the moment, the “heroes” include Rush Limbaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Elon Musk, Clarence Thomas and Benjamin Netanyahu. (To be fair, Harriett Tubman is also profiled.) See the complete book series graphic below.
Despite writing an entire book about “woke indoctrinators,” Mandel struggled to define “woke” when asked.
Mandel appeared on the Hill Rising show a year ago and was asked to define “woke” by one of the hosts. Her struggling response appears in the video below and was widely mocked on YouTube.
Mandel once tweeted, “You can call me a Grandma killer.”
Lots of people hated the COVID lockdowns but Mandel took it farther than most. In a long Twitter thread criticizing the lockdowns, Mandel wrote, “You can call me a Grandma killer. I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.”
Mandel was criticized but she did not back down. She told Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “It’s not like, ‘Please call me Grandma killer because I want to kill Grandma,’” the Jewish writer, homeschooler and social media influencer said in a recent interview. “It’s like, ‘You can say those things but I don’t care because this is the situation.’ I thought that was pretty clear.”
For a time, she added “Grandma killer” to her Twitter bio.
Mandel once suggested using nuclear weapons against Hamas.
In 2014, Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers, provoking a month-long war with Israel in Gaza. Mandel tweeted, “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis.”
Nine years after that tweet, Mandel commented on it again. She tweeted:
I think it’s funny that I’m getting this tweet thrown back at me today. It was sent in the heat of the moment after another brutal attack but I… had a point.
I’d say the tweet aged pretty fucking well tbh.
I’m sorry I just need to clarify something really quickly.
I am not apologizing for the original tweet.
Some people construed my first tweet in this thread as an apology, and I’m sorry you read it that way.
Mandel once mocked marriages of Black people.
Granted, this tweet in which she asked, “Considering marriage rates in the black community, why is @BET promoting a movie called ‘Why Did I Get Married?’” is more than twelve years old. But it provides more insight into Mandel’s unfiltered approach to Twitter if nothing else.
Mandel confirms that she “will blow shit up.”
The retweet below from Mandel’s campaign account on the day she filed for school board says it all.
You might be tempted to dismiss Mandel as a flake with no chance of getting elected. If so, you would be wrong.
Bethany Mandel is an experienced commentator and writer. She has nearly 130,000 Twitter followers as of this writing. She is connected to national right-wing media and political networks. She has absolutely no fear of criticism. She should be able to raise money. Consider that since 2010, winning MoCo school board candidates have raised less than $18,000 per cycle on average. Mandel ought to have several orders of magnitude more than that.
But she also has a potentially strong message. MCPS’s leadership scandals have brought it to its lowest point, at least reputationally, in recent memory. There is a growing hunger in the public for accountability and change. School board challengers can and should capitalize on that. The question is how and whether voters obtain information on the candidates, and if they do, whether Mandel is the change they want.