Bethany Mandel, the controversial right-wing pundit, home-schooling advocate, and prolific social media poster, is running for county school board — as a Democrat.
Though the school board race in deep-blue Montgomery County, Maryland, is technically nonpartisan, Mandel’s campaign published a graphic on Tuesday listing her as a Democrat. The move quickly raised eyebrows online, and prompted a community note on X (formerly Twitter) stating, “Bethany Mandel has identified as a Republican numerous times on her personal Twitter account.”
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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 fucking animals is the only restraint I expect and that’s only because the cloud would hurt Israelis,” she’s written about Palestinians.
As somebody whose dad was involved in getting 2 schools built while I was in school and was also president of the schoolboard for a time before that, I can confidently say that anybody who runs for a schoolboard position is doing so because they have an agenda.
Oftentimes, that agenda is “I want our schools to be better for our kids,” but not always. Sometimes, people run because they have differing opinions on what making schools better means, but sometimes (and rather often right now, it seems) you get somebody whose only goal is to burn it to the ground. Those are the kinds of people who care about political parties in schoolboards - because they’re so obsessed with the us vs. them of their politics that it shapes the rest of their lives.
Local politics can be a cutthroat and dirty game. I’ll always remember my dad telling me about how he was walking out of a town meeting one time when he saw an old lady point to him and loudly say to her friends, “That’s him! That’s the enemy!”