BENSON BYTE: Bethany Mandel Discusses D.C's IRL "Sh**s Creek," UCLA's Bari Weiss Cancellation

Now it's time for another Guy Benson, Guy Benson Fight, where we bring you the day's most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit Guy Benson.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well, joining us now from our DC studios, Bethany Mandel. She is a conservative podcaster, writer, and co-author of the bestseller Stolen Youth with our friend Carol Markowitz. Bethany, always great to have you here. Thanks for having me, Guy. I saw earlier today you were on the news channel talking about what I'm calling a real-life S Creek, the fictional television show. They've turned the Potomac River into this sewage dump, a quarter of a billion gallons of raw sewage just flowing into the Potomac River. And I talked about it at great length on the show yesterday. What blows me away more than anything, because big disasters happen from time to time, They have handled this terribly. They've communicated about it terribly and almost not at all. Until weeks into this ordeal, when they almost got shamed into it by President Trump, there was so little attention being paid to this ecological and public health nightmare by the politicians in the region, the media in the region. Now it's becoming a national story. Yeah, I co-host morning radio here in the DC area on WMAL, and I do that two or three times a week. And so we've been talking about it for over a month. And every single show I've said to my co-host Larry O'Connor, why is no one talking about this? I don't understand. I felt like I was taking crazy pills. And so I decided to write a piece for the website for Fox News.com. And my argument has been for the last month, why hasn't Trump called in FEMA? Obviously, we need to. Obviously, Wes Moore is not doing anything. Abigail Spanberger is not doing anything. Muriel Bowser, the D.C. Mayor, is not doing anything. And it's... horrible. My husband was driving right past where this break happened. He was driving from our home in Maryland into D.C. And he mentioned to me in passing, we saw so many dead deer on our drive. And I said, where exactly did you see it? And he said where? And I was like, that's exactly where the pipe broke. And so it occurred to me at that moment, like, I really do need to write about it because this isn't just polluted waterways and the fish and all of that. This is going to be an ecological natural disaster in this area that's going to have. have it's going to stretch way longer than anyone anticipates and it's you know thank God President Trump called in FEMA because it is a it's a national disaster and I did see finally a number of public statements and tweets from some of these Democrats in the region like four weeks into this expressing concern and being troubled like where have you been for all of these weeks and then we were also talking yesterday about the guy who runs DC water he had a very I would say

sinister role, allegedly, in the Flint, Michigan water disaster. We played audio of him fixated on skin color and DEI stuff rather than the actual job. I mean, it just feels like yet another glaring failure of left-wing identity politics incompetent governance in places where the residents, the citizens, get charged through the nose in terms of taxes and This is what their return on investment is. Yep, absolutely. I mean, the chair of D.C. Water, it's... very much one of these like DEI hires that she had no experience in anything related to infrastructure oh this is another woman by the way we were talking about the guy this is this is a separate person you're talking about yes yes I'm talking about a separate person she her name is unique Morris Hughes and and she she's her expertise is in DEI like I'm not being I'm not making a joke here like Her professional expertise is in DEI, and she is running D.C. water and running it into the ground. But the problem is that local politicians had to be shamed into doing this by President Trump, because God forbid they actually, you know, explain that their lack of attention on infrastructure led us to this point. In the D.C. area, we've had water main breaks. for the whole stretch that we had a very cold spell under freezing, there were water main breaks all over the area. And it exposed really lagging infrastructure. How is that possible, by the way? We have spent so much money on infrastructure, both at the national level through the years. And all these American taxpayers who are listening to us right now are like, yeah, we remember those. And then this is the seat of government. I keep saying it's the city of government. run by the party of government, surrounded by the party of government, and the infrastructure is terrible around here? What are we paying for? What are we electing these people for? Well, we're electing them because they want to have higher office. And so that's what we're seeing with Wes Moore, is what we're seeing with Abigail Spanberger. They always have their eye on the next prize. They're not here to do the job that they were elected to do by people, or there are not us. We certainly didn't elect Abigail Spanberger and we're stuck with them. But they've decided that this is going to be their stepping stone to higher office. And, you know, that's where their attention is. Wes Moore is, you know, doing a CBS roundtable town hall debate. And that's what he's. doing instead of you know he's also passing the buck he he's claiming that this break happened in dc and therefore maryland can wash their hands of it and that's not the case i want to turn to a story that i saw this week and it just broke my heart one of the released hostages out of gaza and the dungeons of hamas revealed that she was sexually assaulted quote almost every single day while in captivity

And I just noted that this has not really been a big global story or outrage because I think certain victims are just not convenient victims for, quite frankly, the hard left and therefore many in the media follow that lead. Still, it does not change the waking nightmare that she experienced day in and day out for hundreds of days. You can comment on that specific situation, but more broadly speaking, you're very plugged in with the hostage families. You know a lot about this. Now that many of them, thank God, have been released for a period of time. And we've gotten all of the hostages out of Gaza. How are the living ones adjusting? How are they coping? What is life like for them now? Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FM Radio 20. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026. Must be 21 order to order to order. Please drink responsibly. Yeah, I had a feeling that this was going to sort of make the news and happen when she was first released. of I think all of the released hostages was clearly in distress when she was released. She couldn't make eye contact. She was clearly very nervous. There was deep trauma that was visible to me as soon as she was released. And she had to wait another nine months for her boyfriend to be released. He was among that last batch that were released. And she was afraid to approach him. When he came out, everyone else who came out, there was hugs and boisterous, and it was very gregarious for all of the reunions. She was not gregarious when he came in. And so he had his mom hug him, his brothers hug him. And you could see someone have their hand on her back and push her towards him. You could tell that there was real severe trauma there. And so I think that it's a long road ahead for both of them. Both of them have experienced extreme trauma. And they're going to have to sort of walk that path together side by side after, you know. They had very different experiences, but there's not one person in that relationship that can kind of pull the other one up. And it's really heartbreaking and really sad. As fate would have it, I was eating lunch near the Gaza envelope in January, and I ran into the brother of her boyfriend who was released and they look identical and I did a double take. And in a lot of the family, you know, they've come together because the two brothers were taken. There was three brothers total. The one that wasn't taken was the one that I ran into. But the two brothers were taken. The entire family experienced a lot of trauma and so they're going to have a long road ahead. Israelis donated over a million dollars to their sort of

GoFundMe campaign to help them recover. So they have that cushion of time to figure out how they're going to do that without figuring out how they're going to pay their bills. But this has been very frustrating watching all this Jeffrey Epstein coverage, for example. Everyone's very upset obviously and justifiably about what he did. But there's some victims who are more worthy than others. And unfortunately, this is one of those victims that... the world has decided is, you know, they can move past and move beyond. There was a clip that went viral on social media from the Winter Olympics where a Swiss... sports commentator during a bobsled event spent the Israeli run, the Israeli team's bobsled run. He spent his time attacking Israel, attacking the athletes, saying that the Israelis supported genocide, wondering how the Israelis are even allowed to participate, if Russia isn't allowed to participate. And I know that's stirred quite a lot of outrage. Of course, the usual suspects cheering this guy on. They love all of those lies and those smears. I think it's really something to compare Israel to Russia when Israel had a defensive war that they didn't start, whereas the Russians did start the war and refused to end it just like Hamas refused to end it for so long. In any case, that moment... Kind of went everywhere. Now, I guess the Swiss outlet has taken it down off of their official page. It just feels like this propaganda, even though it is not as loud and as all-consuming anymore, it is still very much out there every single day. Yeah, no, and it's funny because, well, not funny at all. I'm friends with the bobsledder, A.J. Edelman, and the hotel room of the Israeli bobsledders was ransacked. Their passports were taken. Everything was, they were harassed in the Olympic Village. And that story also got no attention. We don't know. The hotel room was broken into, their passports were stolen, and we don't know. And there was very little world attention on that, especially in the wake of what happened to the Israeli athletes during Munich. One would think this would be... Yeah, 1972. Yeah. You would think this would be a massive news story. And by the way, I blame the Israelis for not giving them adequate security. Like that... Something went wrong there. But, you know, this is the attention that they're getting from the world. They're getting attacked, both, you know, verbally by these Swiss commentators, but then also presumably by someone with access in the Olympic Village. Meanwhile, back at home, here's a headline from the LA Times. CBS's Bari Weiss pulls out of UCLA lecture.

the students and the crazies, but are the administrators and the faculty part of the asylum? Oh, 100%. I mean, from what I've heard on the inside at Columbia, the professors and the teaching assistants and all these people were egging it on. They all support these students and what they were doing. And there was no consequences for any of these things. And so obviously, you know, why would they stop? Why would they think that there's a limiting principle here? They'll just keep on going forever into eternity. And then, you know, the... they'll sort of pass the baton. So the students took over the campus physically, and then they passed the baton and they say to the administrators, okay, now you do your job. And what they did was uninvite Bari Weiss from giving a speech because the presence of a five-foot-one Jewish lesbian was just too much for them. They couldn't take it. And it's wild to me because Barry has showed, yeah, Barry has showed how you can leverage. a career in media. It's a fascinating arc that she has had. She was at the New York Times. She resigned. She started her own substack. And when no one had really heard of substack, and then it grew to such a, such a. platform that CBS News decided they wanted to have her and now she runs the whole network. Like this is someone that college students should learn from. You should replicate how do you become this? And by the way, she's not even right wing, right? She's not even conservative, right? I think she has maybe a few right leaning views, mostly left to center. She's very thoughtful. She's very open-minded. She's very tolerant. If they're doing cancel mobs for her. I mean, it's a pretty dark time and to, again, cave to these people and cater to these shouters where someone of this reputation and achievement is not welcome at a place like UCLA. And I'm sorry, the fact that she's Jewish is obviously a part of this. I think we're talking about almost an irreparably broken institution. Yeah, no, 100%. And what's crazy to me also is that they could learn from her and figure out how they can make a left-wing version, like a total progressive, bullhard, left-winger out of someone like Bari Weiss. They could use the blueprint that she's created and then make someone who's actually interesting and influential on the far left, which they don't have right now. But she used to be, I think, more left than she is now because the leftists have been horrific to her. Right? It's kind of like Joe Rogan, right? It was longtime Democrat, and now he's much more heterodox. Sometimes these braying, angry, intolerant, stupid, frankly, hyenas force people away and caused them to move rightward because it's such a toxic environment on the hard left. Bethany Mandel, thank you so much for your time today in our DC studios. Always appreciate it. Thank you, Guy. Have a good one. That was yet another Guy Benson bite. For full episodes of Guy Benson, go to Guy Benson.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the show ad-free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your prime membership, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.