Who the heck is Bethany Mandel? I had to look her up on Wikipedia to find out: she’s a conservative pundit, one of those weird libertarian goons.
She transferred to Rutgers University in 2005 for its strong Jewish Studies department and Jewish student community, and worked full-time while a full-time student, graduating in 2008 with a degree in history and Jewish studies. During her college years, she adopted conservative views after finding that Medicaid and other government welfare programs she had expected to help her after her mother’s death were inefficient and ineffective, objecting to the idea that as someone who had grown up in poverty, she had any ‘white privilege,’ as well as due to the influence of college friends and the writings of Ayn Rand.
She has recently written a book titled Stolen Youth, about how 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.
Right. That kind of popular right wing fanatic.
I don’t have any sympathy for the kind of fame she’s getting right now. She was being interviewed, and was asked to define “woke”. Watch her brain short circuit — it’s quick.
“Woke” is
the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression
She did manage to scrape up a very bad definition: “woke” is not about being aware of systemic bias, it’s about creating hierarchies of oppression, which is kind of the absolute opposite of the idea. No wonder she hates it!
That’s a good way to handle these clowns: just ask them to define what they’re railing against, and either they’re going to give an accurate definition (as Desantis did, “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them”), which made him look like a hateful idiot for opposing it, or they have to invent a fake definition (like Mandel, the need to reimagine society in order to create hierarchies of oppression
) and look like an ignorant idiot.
Good work, Briahna Joy Gray. You made that skewering look effortless.
I suppose this political genius never asked the question “who has rendered Medicaid and the government welfare programs inefficient?”
Or “did you expect more of the safety network to remain after 43 years of Reaganomics?”.
The followers of Ayn Rand exist for the same reason as flat-Earthers exist; to give us something to point at and laugh at without a bad conscience.
It ain’t all about the money. I look forward to her telling about the times she was pulled over for ‘driving while white’ or hunted while jogging.
Okay, so she learns that the current welfare programs are not enough and decides it would be an improvement to completely eradicate them?
Is that a case of wanting anybody else to be have it even worse than herself?
@ ^ mordred : Yes.
@mordred: A lot of conservatives definitely choose to get rid of programs that help them if they also help ‘the undeserving’. See history of communities closing down public pools rather than integrate them.
I’m not sure where “hierarchies of oppression” fit into our society but I do know that it would make for a really cool band name.
@ 1, 4, & 6
Her backstory sounds a little too “I was a devout atheist until I found Jesus” to me.
Me@4: Okay, I think I can write better when I don’t have a migraine.
So, if I was a Conservative, would I now wish for everybody else to have a brain tumour?
Well, we should at least give her credit for accurately predicting her self-own would go viral…”Oh dear, I think I just put my foot in my mouth, gotta keep marching on though…”
I’ve had that conversation with a staunch conservative — a former nurse no less — who, having contracted cancer and was on permanent chemotherapy, had lost her job, exhausted her savings, and ended up on social security disability. She had reached the limit of her Medicaid assistance, and was now entirely dependent upon Medicare to keep her alive.
But despite all that, she said she would tear down the entire welfare system in a heartbeat, period. No reform, no alternative system of entitlements. When I pointed out she would die without the assistance she’s getting, she argued it was only because of the current welfare system that she was dependent on welfare programs in the first place. If they didn’t exist she wouldn’t need them.
Of course, when I asked her to explain how that would work, she had no answer. As a conservative American, it was an article of faith that a country without the “evils” of social welfare would be a nation where everyone prospered and had access to all the healthcare they needed, somehow. No matter how much I pushed and probed after that, she wouldn’t — couldn’t — move an inch.
These shitheads don’t usually have problems with hierarchies. In fact, their pop-psychologist Jordan “Daddy” Peterson has made it a point that hierarchies are written into the very fabric of the universe, so we should just shut up and accept our lot in life rather than complain about it like wimps.
Either this is a very ham-handed attempt to appropriate leftist language to advance their fascist agenda (i.e. the hierarchy they fear are non-whites somehow dominating whites), or she REALLY doesn’t know that the fuck she’s babbling about.
@Akira MacKenzie, # 12: I’d go with option B.
Isn’t she the “we must befriend Nazis” person or is that a different libertarian goofball?
… Jewish studies … – one of those ridiculous, contrived, liberal ethnic academic programs?!?
Why does she want to make gentiles feel so guilty???
Mandel has since attempted a clarification. [sigh]
So to summarize, she can’t define woke, has no real understanding of concepts like privilege or intersectionality, couldn’t see the obvious flaws in Ayn Rand’s writings and she took entirely the wrong lesson from the fact that some government health programs weren’t as supportive as she’d hoped. Maybe Bethany Mandel is just really stupid.
The lawyer of Ron DeSantis has stated the (correct) definition in court, so if MAGAistas provide rubbish definitions you can just say, “no, no, this is the DeSantis definition” and tell them. As DeSantis is the current favv neof*schist they can hardly fault that definition.
I’m guessing it must have been pretty difficult to define a term that was appropriated from the Black community (and has been in use since the 1940s) to a black person’s face without sounding like she’s a really bad person.
I think her brain just short-circuited when she fully realized who she was talking to and how she would sound if she made up some bs reason to someone who actually knows what that word means and would probably correct her.