Days After Conservative Writer Bethany Mandel Blundered While Trying To Define 'Woke,' Twitter Discovers The Time She Appeared To Let Her Mom Die

A week that starts with your viral blunder to define the central concept behind one of your prominent political ideologies is a bad one. Having Twitter discover that time you purportedly chose to let your mom die turns that bad week into something of an all-timer.

Such is the plight of conservative author Bethany Mandel, who, around all the talk of the supposed Woke Bank discourse, failed to come up with a satisfactory definition for "woke" on The Hill's online show Rising.

"So, I mean, woke is, sort of the idea that, um … uh, I … this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral, I mean, woke is something that's very hard to define," she said during the segment.

LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define "wokeness" pic.twitter.com/uwRSSH0LaM

— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) March 14, 2023

Mandel has made fighting against educating children about homosexuality and transgenderism a prominent part of her brand and was on Rising to discuss her book about the topic, Stolen Youth.

The clip seemed to confirm in many left-leaning posters' minds that those who crusade against "wokeness" have merely begun using "wokeness" as a catch-all term for anything they don't like. This prompted many conservative Twitter posters to rush to define woke, and Mandel herself gave it another crack, tweeting that "wokeness" is:

A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.

While some users quibbled on whether or not Mandel saved face, others seemed to smell blood in the water.

Enter Ken Klippenstein, an Intercept reporter with a habit of trolling conservatives on Twitter, who decided to take a deep dive into Mandel's Twitter history.

Klippenstein spent last night retweeting several old Mandel tweets to his 503,000 followers, showing that the author purportedly had something akin to a nasty "Karen" streak in her, and routinely complained about customer service she'd received from various companies. However, in his journey, he also discovered a real viral moment of a tweet showing Mandel talking about that time she apparently chose to let her Mom die.

In the tweet, Mandel says she chose to take her mom off life support "before we knew if she would survive." Out of context, it seemed to many like Mandel was confessing to pulling the plug on her mom in a critical situation when she still had a chance at living.

Twitter had a field day with this information, with several users noting a tweet from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when Mandel said she would accept being called a "Grandma killer" because she did not want to wear a mask.

Of course, there is some context to Mandel's tweet, and she was not randomly confessing to matricide in 2014. Once her old tweet went viral, Mandel clarified that when she was 16, her mother was suffering from multiple organ failure. An infection had put her on life support and she was no longer eligible for organ transplants.

Mandel conceded that her mother may have survived "another week" if she made it through the infection, but it would have been a painful and brief remainder of her life, so she made the decision to pull life support. Mandel stated that her 2014 tweet was from a conversation in which she was saying that in extreme circumstances like her mother's, she supported euthanasia.

As she trends on Twitter, Mandel has spent the morning firing back at her haters, boasting "I don’t care about literally anything you say because I have a bestseller and wonderful life off of this stupid app," but many have argued that her statement rings false, as she has made over 170,000 tweets and continues to seemingly corn cob through her controversy.