Bethany Mandel, the controversial right-wing pundit, homeschooling 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 non-partisan, 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.”
Mandel tells Rolling Stone she has been a registered Democrat for several years, as a matter of political necessity. “Elections in this county are decided at the primary,” she says. “The county executive won by less than one hundred votes.”
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.
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.
Now, Mandel is running for a seat on Montgomery County’s board of education. It’s an interesting decision for several reasons. She homeschools her kids. The county is a Democratic stronghold. Mandel is also currently suing the county board of education for denying her media access to an event about LBGTQ+ books. Her counsel in the case: the America First Legal Foundation, which is led by Donald Trump’s hard-right White House adviser Stephen Miller.
Mandel’s campaign is part of a broader push by conservative culture warriors to take over school boards and decide what children can be taught. Nationally, the fight has been led by an organization called Moms for Liberty; Mandel attended its annual summit last summer. State Republicans are involved, too. Under Ron DeSantis, Florida has banned hundreds of books. Oklahoma’s Republican superintendent of public schools recently appointed the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, the anti-LGBTQ+ meme account, to a state library advisory committee.
Mandel spoke with Rolling Stone this week about her school board campaign, under an agreement the conversation could be mutually recorded.
Despite her persona as a right-wing firebrand, Mandel is relatively buttoned-up over the phone. She is very open, though, that she’s been having some misgivings about running for office.
“I think I might hate myself, and my husband definitely hates me, because I don’t have the time for this,” she says, before explaining her thought process: “I sort of saw myself as the sacrificial lamb a little bit. Someone needs to come in. And I have a very large profile, with a lot of name ID. If not me, then who?”
Mandel says she waited until the very last minute to file, driving from New York to Rockville, Maryland, to snag the last available appointment before the filing deadline. She says she “talked to no one about this race,” not even her husband, Seth, who is a senior editor at the conservative magazine Commentary. “This is not a joke,” Mandel reiterates. “Truly, he’s actually very angry at me.”
“I’m laughing when people say it’s a publicity stunt,” she continues. “I deeply don’t want to be doing this. There’s a lot of other better publicity stunts that I could do that would make me more money and not take up nearly as much time — but this is a $3.3 billion budget that’s being mishandled. The people who suffer are the kids.”
Mandel has six young children, three of whom are of school age. They do not go to school; Mandel educates them herself, and says she will continue to do so even if she manages to win her longshot bid for school board.
“I’m not sacrificing my kids’ education,” she says. “That’s what I feel like right now … What I’m doing is a privilege. And I recognize it’s a privilege. And it’s a privilege that not enough people have. But it’s not a game — my kids are not a game. I’m not like sending them somewhere that is not currently adequate to prove a point.”
Mandel admits it’s a bit “weird” to want to help lead the school board when her kids don’t attend their local schools. She points out, “There are members of the board who don’t have children in the public schools. There are members of the board in other areas who don’t even have children. I think that’s weird. I do at least have children. At least I have this window into life with young children, because no one on the board has young children.”
Separately, Mandel notes, “I went to public school my entire upbringing. And my mom was a single mom.” She adds she taught fifth grade in Cambodia at one point.
Mandel says she and parents who have protested the school board have kicked around the idea of starting a charter school: “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Middle Eastern-focused, classical charter school where they teach Arabic [and] they teach Hebrew?” she says.
Making that idea a reality would require approval from the board of education, she notes, adding, “That’s not gonna happen with the current board.”
Mandel is known as a conservative culture warrior, a perception she agrees is fair.
“I would say I’m definitely part of that circle of folks who, on the right, are trying to fight these culture wars,” she says. “For me, what it comes down to is, I’m not comfortable with schools taking on a lot of the social issues that they have. I think the biggest negative of that, is that they’re doing so in lieu of teaching math and writing and reading, and you’re seeing it in the test scores. Every minute that you spend on this stuff, you’re not spending on math.”
Online, her commentary about LGBTQ+ people has been more deliberately cruel. In a column defending her refusal to use trans people’s chosen names and pronouns, she wrote: “Playing along with delusions isn’t a kindness to those suffering from other psychological conditions.”
Mandel doesn’t necessarily expect to win the school board race.
“I’m not naive about my chances. I’ve seen an electoral map. I understand where I live,” she says. However, she claims she’s seen people on local message boards in recent days leaving comments to the effect of: “‘I fucking hate Bethany Mandel. Everything about her makes my skin crawl. But maybe someone needs to shake things up.’”
Mandel says she isn’t leading this campaign “for money or fame,” and just wants to “hold people accountable.”
“I have a unique position to try to affect change,” she says, noting her public profile should bring attention to the race. “I couldn’t not try, and think that I could have made a difference.”
