Bethany Mandel

One of the most disturbing pieces of recent documentary journalism follows Lily Philips, a petite blonde Englishwoman and popular OnlyFans creator, on a deeply unsettling quest: to sleep with 100 men in a single day. The footage, produced by YouTuber Josh Pieters and viewed more than 10 million times, doesn’t leave viewers shocked by her “empowerment," it leaves them queasy. Philips doesn’t come across as a liberated woman expressing her sexuality. She looks like the product of trauma. That look of trauma is more easily understood when it becomes clear that her mother is her manager. As a parent, I have a visceral reaction to my children being exposed to pornography, let alone participating in it.

In recent days, babies have taken center stage at the US Capitol, carried by their congresswoman mothers advocating for a rule change to allow proxy voting for new parents. Representatives Anna Paulina Luna, Republican from Florida, and Brittany Pettersen, Democrat from Colorado, crossed the aisle to propose that House members be allowed twelve weeks to delegate their votes after childbirth. This effort, while well-intentioned, ignores the historical and practical significance of in-person voting in Congress. Article I, Section 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution states: “The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year.

In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: “Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? ‘Oh, I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.” At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Stewart’s rhetoric “dangerous and short-sighted.” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman fumed that “celebrities” shouldn’t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes rounded up viewers uncomfortable with Stewart’s words.

It’s no fun being canceled by a mob, but it is useful in one respect: it's an easy way to tell who your friends are. Recently, a young conservative writer, Nate Hochman, learned this the hard way after a hit piece appeared on the Never Trump site the Dispatch that was in part about him and comments he made while on a Twitter Spaces call last winter. Twitter Spaces, if you (like me, before this) are unfamiliar with it, is basically a group conference call platform. In the winter, Hochman hosted a Space about what role, if any, white supremacists like Nick Fuentes should have in the conservative movement. Fuentes then showed up and the Dispatch reported what happened next: The Dispatch obtained an audio recording of the Twitter Spaces conversation from an individual who listened in.

Americans just got a window into why the left holds the “right” to an abortion to be so sacrosanct. During an exchange between Senator Tim Scott and Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Yellen told Scott, "What we are talking about is whether or not women will have the ability to regulate their reproductive situation in ways that will enable them to plan lives that are fulfilling and satisfying for them. One aspect of a satisfying life is being able to feel you have the financial resources to raise a child." What message does that send to young women? That money, not starting a family, is how one lives a life that is fulfilling and satisfying. That one cannot lead a life that is meaningful with a burden, er, baby.

“Wearing a cloth mask to keep safe from a virus is like installing a chain link fence to keep mosquitoes out of your backyard.” That’s what a doctor friend joked to me in the early days of the pandemic. On 60 Minutes on March 8, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.” Just a month later, the CDC guidance changed.

The last two years have felt a lot like a cosmic joke. I sometimes like to recap it to myself, just in the hopes of actually believing everything that’s going on. There’s a virus that strikes the elderly and obese and spares children, and two years later the most common mitigation strategy is putting ineffective and dirty cloth masks on schoolchildren. For adults in many blue areas, we’re forced to wear masks in a restaurant from the door to our table. In New York City, it’s even worse: you have to show proof of a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission in order to enter an indoor space, and also wear a mask. Yet it was at just the moment that life became laughably absurd that comedians stopped daring to tell jokes.

There is something deeply sinister happening in the world of children’s literature. Whereas the children’s section at your local library or bookstore was once filled with fables and fairy tales, it's now filled with titles like The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish and Race Cars: A Children’s Book About White Privilege and How Mommas Love Their Babies featuring wholesome lines like “Some mommas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!” The illustrations accompanying that page are an outdoor shot of a strip club at night, with glowing neon lights and a woman protesting for fair wages for strippers. This is a recent tweet from the author: https://twitter.com/juniperfitz/status/1458215711805956101?

I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. It’s one of those places where you see lawn signs proclaiming “In this house, we believe in science.” Naturally, our Democratic leaders have consistently ignored science over the last year, at least when it comes to COVID mitigation. Here in Montgomery County, our return to normalcy is currently being held hostage in exchange for near-universal vaccination of our least at-risk residents. If you believe that local governments are in a hurry to surrender “emergency” powers, I have a bridge over the Potomac to sell you. Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, has dropped our indoor mask mandate. But we still have a locally mandated one in place. Our county leaders reckon that they know better.