If you know conservative writer Bethany Mandel at all, it’s possible you remember her going viral for tweeting a rather disturbing image of a soiled mask as part of a bizarre rant against wearing masks during the pandemic.
Now, we can add one more viral infraction to the Mandel log. Appearing on The Hill’s “Rising” web series on Tuesday, Mandel ranted about the purported dangers of “wokeness” — that is, the Black slang term Republicans have appropriated to denote things they don’t like, from truthful, inclusive education to Disney, the FBI and beyond.
As we’ve discussed in the past, before many Black people discarded the term because it had grown stale, and before white conservatives tried to turn it into a bad thing, “woke” was a term meant to signal cultural awareness or consciousness.
But when “Rising” host Briahna Joy Gray asked for a definition of “woke” … well, Mandel struggled quite a bit:
Yikes. Pray for Bethany (or whatever Republicans say when something bad-yet-avoidable happens).
As I mentioned in the TikTok below, Mandel’s flop shows conservatives have so perverted the term “woke” that they can’t even define it on their own terms.
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