Sugar nepo baby: The Bethany Mandel story

Bethany Mandel has made a career, such as it is, of saying idiotic things that get attention from liberal/left types pointing and laughing, which she then uses to leverage her status on the wingnut welfare circuit.

Speaking of welfare:

People are of course pointing out the classic right wing mindset, whereby benefitting from a bunch of government programs that the person now wants to eliminate somehow still counts as making it totally on your own.

But I want to go in a slightly different with this, give Mrs. Seth Mandel some more of that sweet sweet publicity she so craves.

Note that this tweet is more than ten years old. What was going in Bethany’s life back then? Well according to this Twitter thread, she had been married to Seth Mandel for about a year at that point, and wanted to divorce him, but couldn’t because she was supposedly too poor to do so. This, you will be shocked to learn, illustrates the virtues of poverty — or at least what Beth Mandel considers poverty, which needless to say has very little resemblance to actual poverty. (Seth Mandel comes from what appears to be a solidly upper middle class clan of religious nutcases, New Jersey Orthodox Jewish Division, and was already worming his way up the right wing scream machine career ladder at the time that his newlywed bride was fantasizing about dumping him).

Anyway, after marrying well enough to escape whatever SES disadvantages she was born into — her mother died when Bethany was 16, after raising Bethany as a single mother in what Bethany now claims were strained economic circumstances, and her father died by suicide when she was 19 — Bethany has been pumping out lots of Orthodox babies at an impressive rate: six is the current count I believe (Her father was Jewish, her mother was Catholic, and she converted to Orthodox Judaism when she married Seth. During the conversion process, her rabbi used a hidden camera to film her while she prepared for the ritual baths Orthodox women are required to take to wash away all those cooties).

She is now home schooling her brood of nascent Jews for Fascism, because of course she is. Speaking of which, here’s the charming story of how, when she was 16, she decided her own mother was in the life unworthy of life category, and was apparently given the medical authority to shove Mom into the void, in an enthusiastic burst of adolescent euthanizing. (Note to self: don’t give my rebellious 16-year-old medical authority to kill me). ETA: As several commenters have pointed out, this story is almost certainly either enormously embellished or wholly fabricated, as no hospital is going to give this kind of decision making authority to a minor. This should also lead to considerable skepticism regarding the rest of her autobiographical claims about poverty, food stamps etc.

Where exactly does she find the time to home school/stay at home parent six kids, ages approximately nine to newborn, while writing — or “writing” — books, appearing on Fox, getting into Twitter fights, etc. etc. etc?

My wild guess is that she has a lot of help with child care, homemaking etc., possibly from various dusky-hued persons of extra-national provenance and questionable immigration status, while Seth is off editing whatever right wing rag currently employs him (Just guessing here: Somebody might want to look into it). ETA: Commenter SomeBrad notes there’s a whole trove of tweets in which she complains about the help.

Blech.