Do you remember Bethany Mandel’s now-infamous “grandma killer” thread from last May?
You can call me a Grandma killer. I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) May 6, 2020
Mandel took a lot of heat for that. She’s still taking heat for it almost a year later, despite being proven right about a lot of things.
Back in early May with the infamous Grandma Killer thread, I warned about the destruction of our society of we kept it closed. I saw how the two weeks had already stretched into the second month, with no projected end in sight. We had empty hospitals and ERs & no vent shortages.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
I listed a number of vulnerable places that would never be the same if we continued with closures. One of these, museums, I later wrote about here for the @dcexaminer. https://t.co/eQsEbG3ogL For this piece, I spoke to museum professionals and the picture they painted was dire.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
Fast-forward to today:
Well, now here we are. One of the best and richest museums in the country is SELLING ITS ART TO PAY THE BILLS. https://t.co/URXlpKQTxv It’s cannibalizing itself. As a lover of the arts, this makes me feel physically sick.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
Because it’s sickening.
Where are its patrons? They’re the folks who are too scared to leave their houses and maybe never will. This is so, so bad for the future of our culture. I cannot impress this enough. If the MET is this bad, I cannot imagine how smaller museums with fewer donors are faring.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
It’s like shouting at the wind at this point, but this cannot continue. But it will, and when these people finally emerge from their privileged holes they’ve made in their homes after spending 18m making poor people do their shopping, they’ll discover the wreckage.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
And they’ll exclaim, “Why didn’t anyone warn us? Why didn’t the government plant money trees so that we could emerge from our self-imposed hibernation to a functioning and unchanged society?”
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
That’s not how this works. That’s never how this worked. The time for begging people to donate to their local cultural institutions is gone. The jobs are already lost, people are leaving the arts and culture in droves. And they will never recover.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) February 8, 2021
The same people who branded Mandel a “grandma killer” while fêting Andrew Cuomo have let America’s vibrant arts-and-culture culture wither away.
Worthwhile thread about some of the cultural and societal costs of the Covid lockdowns https://t.co/mDFw0HjZyo
— Samuel Svarc (@ssvarc) February 8, 2021
It’s no comfort to Mandel to know that she being proven right about this, too.
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