Bethany Mandel’s decision to run for Board of Education in Montgomery County, Maryland seems like perplexing choice. The self-described “homeschooling mother of six” is a right-wing author who supports “school choice.” Montgomery County, on the other hand, skews heavily Democratic, with nearly 80% of voters in 2020 casting their ballots for Joe Biden.

Perhaps that’s the reason why a post on her campaign’s X account misleadingly refers to her as a Democrat — despite years of bigoted and “anti-woke” rhetoric. But in spite of this weak attempt at downplaying her beliefs, Mandel’s campaign should be viewed as part of the broader right-wing attack on public education, spearheaded by organizations like Moms for Liberty.

Battling the ‘Woketopus’

“Hi, our children’s souls are in danger,” Mandel said at the beginning of a 2022 video. “All over America, parents are waking up to the danger that a woke education system is having on their kids’ mental health, not to mention their futures.” She went on to claim that the “biggest problem” was sitting “on our children’s bookshelves.”

In the video, which was promoted on Fox Business, Mandel warned parents of the danger posed by the publishing company Scholastic, which she dubbed the “Woketopus.” The video cut to a child-like drawing of a smiling octopus, grasping “CRT” and pride flags, as Mandel talked about how Scholastic smuggles “poisonous books into your home.”

What makes these books so “poisonous,” she claimed, was their themes of “gender fluidity, LGBTQ, CRT, and other toxic ideas that will make your child sad and confused about their identity, sexuality, and heritage.”

In recent years, “wokeness,” critical race theory (CRT), and depictions of LGBTQ people have become right-wing bogeymen — despite the fact that right-wing figures cannot explain what they are or why they’re bad in the first place.

Bethany Mandel is no exception to this, as an appearance on The Hill’s online show Rising demonstrated. During an interview to promote her book Stolen Youth, co-host Briahna Joy Gray asked Mandel to define “woke.” Unable to do so, Mandel froze, admitting that “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”

Twitter’s Main Character

On Twitter/X, Mandel has a long history of making questionable remarks — many of which have been dredged up by her critics years later to mock her. Like one from 2010 where she joked about wanting to “kidnap an asian [sic] baby.” Or one from 2012 where she admitted to receiving “welfare, Medicaid and food stamps” while insisting she “made my own success myself.”

In a post from 2015, Mandel wrote that “My mom had abortions before & after me. She was told I would be severely retarded& [sic] chose life anyway.” In 2021 she revealed that, years earlier, she “got an STD in my eye while I was at a rave in a bathhouse in Budapest.”

In May 2020 Mandel became Twitter’s main character — a term reserved for people whose tweets receive overwhelmingly negative attention — over her aggressive stance against COVID precautions.

“You can call me Grandma killer,” she wrote angrily. “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.”

A year later she ranted about her children having to wear a “dirty, bacteria-filled cloth on their faces for 8-9 hours without complaint” to prevent the transmission of COVID. When another Twitter user pointed out that his children didn’t reuse the same masks, Mandel replied with a photo of a dirty, yellow-stained mask she said was used for one day.

‘There Goes The Neighbourhood’: Bethany Mandel’s History of Bigotry

Other posts are expressly bigoted, particularly against Black people, Palestinians, and the homeless.

In a post from Jan. 20, 2009, the day America’s first Black president was sworn in, Mandel wrote “there goes the neighbourhood” — a phrase used by white racists who oppose housing integration. And while Mandel didn’t support the racist “Birther” movement, she did share Donald Trump’s interest in President Obama’s college records.

“Forget the birth certificate,” she wrote on Jan. 9, 2010. “I want to see the records from Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard!” Mandel used the hashtags “#tcot” (meaning “top conservatives on Twitter”) and “#teaparty.”

On one occasion Mandel recounted how she “took the subway with [a] group of kids who had a vocabulary of seven words.” She added that “nigger and nigga were two of them.”

Mandel has made cruel remarks about the homeless, claiming in a Feb. 15, 2009 post that “Homeless people are crazy and fun to hang out with, but not to smell.” In 2013 she complained that a “Smelly homeless lady just got on the train and sat near me.”

She has also spent years disparaging Palestinian people and belittling their suffering. On May 15, 2011, Mandel retweeted Iraq War apologist Eli Lake, who wrote, “As Arab regimes teeter and topple and terrorist leaders are shot in the face, #Israel is still standing. Happy #nakba day!”

“Nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” and is often used to refer to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948.

In 2014, Israel responded to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers with a monthslong military campaign against the Gaza Strip. Dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” it resulted in the deaths of 2,251 Palestinians, of whom 1,462 were civilians according to a U.N. report.

During this military operation, Mandel came just short of calling for mass murder. “Not nuking these fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis,” she fumed. After Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians, Mandel doubled down on this sentiment.

“Mother fuckers committed the worst crimes against humanity imaginable – that’s what you’re replying to. And you think a 9yo old tweet about destroying them is what’s the problem here?” she wrote. “Get fucked.” She later clarified that she had not apologized for the original post about “nuking these fucking animals.”

Mandel has also amplified disinformation and defended apparent war crimes during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza.

On Oct. 30, 2023, for example, Mandel spread the falsehood that Hamas murdered an Israeli baby by baking it in an oven. And after IDF soldiers killed three Israeli hostages — after mistaking them for Palestinians — Mandel excused the incident because, she said, hostages were sometimes dressed in hijabs.

“Important to keep in mind as we discuss how the IDF may have mistaken three hostages for militants,” Mandel concluded.