January 15, 2022 American Thought Leaders

Bethany Mandel Talks ‘Subtle Indoctrination’ in Children’s Books and K-12 Education; New Heroes of Liberty Series

JAN JEKIELEK
Discover American Thought Leaders: In-Depth Discussions on Key Issues with Jan Jekielek and His Reporting Team

“There’s all of that very overt indoctrination, but I think what’s more damaging is the very subtle indoctrination.” Woke ideology about race and gender often aren’t explicitly included in lesson plans, but instead appear in books teachers use to teach subjects like counting or sentence structure, says conservative commentator and writer Bethany Mandel.

“It normalizes it,” says Mandel, and also makes it so that parents will not necessarily see that such ideas are being taught in their children’s curriculum.

Mandel is the editor of Heroes of Liberty publishing. Their children’s books made headlines after their Facebook ad account was locked and subsequently reinstated. We discuss what she sees happening in the children’s book industry and growing red flags in K-12 education.

Jan Jekielek: Bethany Mandel, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought leaders.

Bethany Mandel: Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek: I just read the most amazing book. It’s a kids’ book, but I learned a ton from it myself, “Thomas Sowell A Self-Made Man.”

Ms. Mandel: Yes. That sounds very familiar.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, so you’re the editor of this new series of books. It’s encountered a bit of controversy lately, but we’ll talk a little bit about that, but mostly I want to learn about these books. It’s so fascinating, beautiful illustrations, beautiful stories, and frankly, as I said, I learned a lot through it.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. I did too honestly. So, we have a series of three books out with Heroes of Liberty. The first one is about Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan is the second, and Amy Coney Barrett is the third. And we started this project because we saw a hole in the market and the hole was like wholesome, patriotic, pro-American really educational books for children that were captivating.

And part of that captivation for kids is the illustrations. The illustrations are really just beautiful and stunning and were a really high priority for us. I’m a mother of five and I’m a connoisseur of children’s books as a result. And kids need to be hooked into books with great illustrations and so that was what we did.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, okay, so let’s start with the whole conceptualization of these books. Why is this particular picture book, and I understand it’s from about 8 to 12s, needed at this point?

Ms. Mandel: The children’s book industry as it stands now is extremely woke. From the top to the bottom of the pyramid, it’s like the Schoolhouse Rock, like how a bill becomes a law, how an idea becomes a book, it’s woke from top to bottom. So, the authors who are able to get contracts ideologically fit this box that is woke or they can’t be authors. And so they pitch books to agents who know what the editors want.

Then the editors have to go through the cycle of making sure that these fit the parameters of the dialogue that they need and the agenda that they need in the children’s book industry. And so then you follow the book through the editorial process, into the publishing houses, and the next up for a book to become a well selling book is it needs reviews.

And so, they get lots of good reviews and the more woke the book, the better the reviews. For well-reviewed books, they land at the top of the award lists. And then once you get lots of awards from again, woke award givers, then they land at the top of the recommendations for schools and librarians to purchase in bulk.

If you were to put any blame on any part of the industry of what’s driving this, it’s the educators, it’s the librarians and the teachers. And so they have mass purchasing power. And so they buy the most woke books in bulk and then the cycle keeps on perpetuating.

So, we saw a hole in the market because for the everyday parent, for content that you don’t have to pre-screen that you know imparts your values, at the very least you don’t have to pre-read. For me as a parent, I’m happy with a book that I don’t have to filter in any way and that I can just read to my kids. But we saw that there wasn’t just a market for that, but there was a market for books that were patriotic, that taught children about our country and about these great figures.

And the nice thing about the books, using a biography is a really special way for kids to learn and for me, honestly, personally also to form a connection with a human being and a person and then learn about who they were and their morals and everything, but also helps them learn about that time period as well because they’re forming a personal connection with that time period.

So for example, “Thomas Sowell” would probably be the best example of the first three. You learn about Jim Crow and Civil Rights and you follow him through his life of what it was like to be a black American from when he was born until the present day.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, and it’s very interesting because it obviously covers a lot of ground. Thomas Sowell thank goodness is still with us and still writing.

Ms. Mandel: Thank God.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s not a preachy book. It’s not trying to tell you how you need to be. It’s a story of someone who chose to make their life a particular way.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. And that’s something that I believe in deeply as a connoisseur of children’s literature. I homeschool my five children and we have a literature-based philosophy that we follow in our homeschool, the long predating my involvement with Heroes of Liberty. So, I incorporated that belief and that understanding into what we were doing.

People think that children are stupid and they’re not. They understand when they’re being condescended to, they understand when they’re being spoon-fed, and they can handle big ideas and they can handle serious topics.

And so we wanted to treat our readers, parents and children alike as intelligent human beings and give them the whole meal, the nice thing about children’s literature. Our age range is between like 7 and 12, I would say, but even my four year old takes something from it. He might not eat everything on the plate, but he takes some of the green beans from the Thomas Sowell plate.

Mr. Jekielek: There’s this culture today. And I think it relates to wokeness and so forth that you in some ways shelter children from a certain range of things and expose them dramatically to another range of things, but the sheltering part, this book, the Thomas Sowell book doesn’t hide the realities of Jim Crow and the difficulties and this whole realm. And I found that interesting and different from the limited number, having nephews, of children’s books that I’ve seen recently.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. And so that’s another thing that I believe very strongly about in treating children as human beings. The homeschool philosophy we follow is Charlotte Mason. And so I slip into that dialogue a little bit, but she treats children as born persons. And so, this idea that children are capable of eating the whole meal is part of the idea of how we treat children’s literature.

And so, children understand that there is hardship and that there is difficulty in this world. And I struggle with this when I read any number of books with my children. Oh, that’s like “Aesop’s Fables,” I would say 80 percent, pretty violent, pretty scary.

Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely.

Ms. Mandel: And so, one of the first questions that I had when I had my oldest was three or four years old was, do I really want to be reading this with her? This is scary. And this is violent. And what I noticed and what I talked to other homeschool moms and what they told me and I’ve absolutely found this to be true is they’re not scared when they’re on your lap.

All of these things, they will eventually become exposed to these ideas to life and death and all these things. And what better place for them to learn about the difficulties in the injustices of this world than on their mom’s lap. And that’s the safest entry into the hardness of life especially with the Thomas Sowell book and going through all of our books.

The Ronald Reagan book, there’s the introduction of the alcoholism of his father in that book. And that’s a difficult topic, but that’s unfortunately a topic that a lot of children are going to be familiar with in their lives or become familiar with, the idea of alcohol addiction and dependency. And it’s treated very gently, very carefully, we’re not going for shock value, but this was part of Ronald Reagan’s life story and it helped shape who he was as a person. And what better way for kids to be exposed to it than very gently, very subtly, but on their mom’s or dad’s lap.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s really interesting you hear about Critical Race Theory, not being taught in schools, right? And whenever I hear that, I think, well, okay, perhaps that’s true for young children. You’re not going to teach the theory to young children, but it’s the practice, it’s the whole ideology being infused into the educational materials, right?

Ms. Mandel: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: That’s the question. So I guess my question is, why do you see this as a problem? Or what is the problem? What does it bring into children that you don’t want to see?

Ms. Mandel: So, for children I think the biggest issue with CRT in my personal opinion is that for white children, it teaches them that they should feel sorry for being white. That’s just who you are and that’s okay. It’s okay to be white. And for black children, I think it’s actually more damaging because it’s teaching them that they are inherently victims and that they have been victimized by everyone around you and by everything around you. And so, it’s a pretty toxic way to raise a child to either peg them as a victim or victimizer.

And all of those things come with emotional baggage and there’s no need for that because a white four year old boy is not a victimizer and a black four year old girl is not a victim—they are equal humans. And that was something that we really wanted to drive home, especially in the Thomas Sowell book that he had difficulty absolutely, but he still pulled himself up by his bootstraps and didn’t take any favors and he didn’t want any shortcuts and he was better for it.

And that’s a lesson that I think every child needs to hear that the shortcuts in life are not going to… It’s the road, that is the journey. The journey is as important as the destination. And that’s an important lesson for any child to hear.

Mr. Jekielek: And so, you indict the publishing industry for prioritizing wokeness within the literature, within the writing and the picture books. And so how does this actually manifest, like presumably you’ve seen things that you were like, okay, no, this isn’t going to be something my kids are going to be reading. What are the sorts of things that you’re seeing?

Ms. Mandel: It’s so funny. I was at my husband’s office right before I came here and I was going to grab it and I forgot. There’s a new picture book out, “The ABCs of AOC.” So A is for Activist, B is for Bronx and there’s all of that very overt indoctrination, but I think what’s more damaging is the very subtle indoctrination. And so I’ve spoken to a number of authors and different people who are much more intimately familiar with the children’s book industry, the mainstream of it and how it stands.

And what they’ve told me the most insidious thing that they do is slip in gender ideology in a book that’s completely separate. So accounting book or things like that. There’s a girl who thinks she’s a boy in a book about accounting, for example.

And from the teacher’s side of it, which I’ve heard from literacy experts who work in schools, is they’re not teaching it at explicitly like a boy and be a girl. And that’s not what they’re doing. They’re using these gender ideology books in lessons that are totally separate.

So, if you’re learning a sentence structure, you could use a book called “I Am Jazz” which is about a young boy who decided he was a girl and it’s the subject of a TLC show, it’s a very famous transgender child. And so that book,” I Am Jazz,” isn’t used as an indoctrination tool at the Read Aloud which by the way, then would have to be put on the curriculum list that the teacher is supplying to parents, but instead a teacher would use that to teach about sentence structure. And so that does two things. It normalizes it and it also makes it so that parents might not necessarily see this is the list of read aloud books that we’re reading aloud in our classroom this year.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, yeah, and that’s just makes me think of this other theme that there seems to be, this activism around teachers. You say that the teachers are the one who are driving this whole through their purchasing power. There seems to be this idea that the teachers have the right or even perhaps the duty to function outside of the realm of the parents’ knowledge, because otherwise, how can we get our plan across or ideas across, right?

Ms. Mandel: Yes. You pretty much verbatim told me what I heard from a teacher last night. This is a topic that animates me in my professional life as an opinion writer as well. And I spoke to a teacher literally last night who said that same thing. They see it as their job because these knuckle dragging bigoted parents are not going to introduce these topics to their children. So it’s our job. It’s our responsibility to make sure that they’re being exposed to these topics so that when they grow up, they’re not bigots like their parents.

Mr. Jekielek: Presumably the Virginia Gubernatorial Election or the Virginia elections with Governor Youngkin being elected speaks to what parents think about that.

Ms. Mandel: I think it does, but I’m not sure how much of the governor election was about CRT and how much it was just… They kept the schools closed for a year and a half in Northern Virginia and people were really mad. Youngkin did not have Randy Y. Garden give his closing statements. So that can be pretty damaging. I think it’s all intertwined, but it’s hard to sort of pin down what percentage is CRT.

And I think that the school closures added to a lot of this also and I think that you can’t really separate it because a lot of parents over the course of the school closures saw firsthand what their kids were learning, and they were alarmed by it and they should have been alarmed by it. So, I’m not sure how much I would put it on CRT versus I think just parents have lost faith in the education system as it stands—rightfully so.

Mr. Jekielek: There seems to be… Many people I’ve spoken with, let’s put it this way, a number of people have spoken with tell me that one of the things in these woke books as you describe them is that they’re explicitly not patriotic or even anti patriotic.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek: So, explain this to me.

Ms. Mandel: Yeah. This is a part and parcel of the whole woke and progressive ideology not necessarily as it pertains to kids, but America is a flawed nation. So, one of the things we want to do in the future with Heroes of Liberty is do a Founding Fathers series, because a lot of books that tackle the founding fathers will talk about their slave owning and will degrade our founding fathers.

And that’s not to say that they were not imperfect people. They were absolutely imperfect people, but there’s so many dimensions to issues like slavery and the fact that many of our founding fathers did own slaves. But the impression that you get when you read mainstream children’s literature written about people like George Washington, there’s such a heavy emphasis on his slave owning that it really detracts from the larger picture of who he was and who he accomplished.

And I think that it’s important for children to know about those things. We’re not whitewashing this… Not a great part of our history, but at the same time, we don’t want them to hate America. We don’t want them to hate themselves. And that seems to be the goal of a lot of these books about American history in the mainstream is to view America as a flawed nation built on crumbling rock, basically.

Mr. Jekielek: You said something interesting, they hate themselves.

Ms. Mandel: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: How so?

Ms. Mandel: Yes. We’re Americans and so if you raise children that white people are victimizers and men, especially are… There’s that whole other aspect of the anti-masculinity stuff. And then Americans are inherently racist because this is a country built on the foundation of racism. That’s basically the entire objective of the 1619 project is to tell children, because now this is a curriculum that’s in the rules. The 1619 project wants children to believe and know that this country was built on a foundation of slavery and racism.

And when we teach all of that, that has a lot of longstanding implications for children on an individual basis, but then also as a society. Do you want to live in a country where everyone hates the country and that self hatingness when it comes to America? So I think that what their objective is, is they want to be able to tear themselves down.

It’s very Marxist. They want to tear children down to build them into the way that they want them to be. And so the first step in building a child into what they want is to tear down everything that came before, that’s-

Mr. Jekielek: That’s the Marxist project, right?

Ms. Mandel: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: Right. Fascinating. So, there was actually some controversy with your books. Apparently, Facebook took you down or took away your ability to market for some time, but then fate smiled on you. Tell me the story briefly and what you think happened.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. We were doing advertisements for our books in the lead up to Christmas. And I think it was about two before Christmas, we got a notification that our advertising account was turned off. And that was a final decision on Facebook’s part. And we tried to figure out how to reach a human being at the company which turned out to be really impossible. And so we brought this story to a reporter at Fox Business named Tyler O’Neil and he was like, this is crazy. What they deemed us as it was disruptive or low quality—disruptive content or low quality.

And so these children’s books were disruptive content. And so the story got published on Fox Business and it got a lot of play and Congressman and people who work on the Hill, they saw the story on Fox Business and they contacted Facebook on our behalf. And they said, what’s the deal here and even sharks have predators and Facebook was like, oh, okay, sorry about that. They turned our account back on and notably told the members of Congress about a day and a half, it was about a half a day before we heard.

So, they told us and then the next day at noon, Facebook told us, but it’s an interesting sort of… People ask me why did they do that? My personal pet theory, because we’ve never been told why they never actually said this was what you were in violation of. What I think happened was we were doing these ads for the books on Reagan and Sowell and Amy Coney Barrett and we had a lot of negative comments on them, calling Ronald Reagan a war criminal and a fascist and Amy Coney Barrett, gender trader.

And we think that they also clicked report on our content and they reported our advertisements to Facebook. And it probably landed on the desk of a very woke pencil pusher at Facebook whose job it is to just field all of these complaints. That’s my sort of pet theory as to what happened.

And it speaks to what happens when there’s ideological capture of an entire industry. That’s what happens when there’s ideological capture of the entire tech industry. That controversy put us on the map for a lot of people and a lot of people wanted to support us and it taught us a lesson. We decided to shift our business model much more towards subscriptions so that we wouldn’t be dependent upon marketing it.

So going into the future, we’re releasing a new book every month. And so next month will be “John Wayne” and “Alexander Hamilton.” “Margaret Thatcher” and “Winston Churchill” [will] be in the future. I’m really excited because we’ve been talking a lot about Winston Churchill in our house.

And so with a subscription plan, we don’t have to depend on the whims of big tech to market every single book. And so we’ll just send a book directly to folks and they get the first peak and a lot of people have asked like, how are you changing the way that you’re marketing your books? And it’s a lot more towards building a community and getting them directly into people’s hands so that this doesn’t happen again.

[Narration]: Our team reached out to Facebook, but we did not immediately receive a response.

Mr. Jekielek: And the illustrations of the Thomas Sowell book are wonderful, truly wonderful, but I understand you had trouble finding the people to do the illustration here in the U.S.

Ms. Mandel: Yeah. So if you thought that “Thomas Sowell” was great, wait until you see “Alexander Hamilton,” because that will just blow you out of the water. But yeah, we offered an enticing bid for illustrating these books and folks were interested until they heard who they were illustrating. And then when they heard they were illustrating books about Amy Coney Barrett and Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell they were like, I’m actually really busy for the next six months and can’t illustrate any of those books for you.

And what it came down to was they were afraid of being canceled. They were afraid that illustrating conservative books would pigeonhole them and hurt their careers in the long term. And they could be sort of the center of a firestorm of some sort in the illustrator world.

And so we had to go and find illustrators from around the world. And so this incredible Alexander Hamilton illustrator is based in Bulgaria, but we have folks who are working with us from, I think every continent but Antarctica because Bulgarian don’t care. Folks from Brazil, that’s another one of our illustrators, they just want to get paid and they want to do good work. And that’s a lesson of Thomas Sowell also, he just wanted to get paid and do good work. And so, we don’t have any American illustrators as a result because they were too afraid of getting into the fray of the mob cancel culture.

Mr. Jekielek: Although I suspect as they get more prominent, you may get some interests.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. We have already.

Mr. Jekielek: So Thomas Sowell, yeah, you’ve talked a little bit about that. It’s him just starting out in a very difficult situation at home, quitting school, figuring out he might want to go to school and then building himself into the intellectual powerhouse that he became. So what about, for example, Amy Coney Barrett, I don’t know much about her story. What is the story?

Ms. Mandel: That’s my favorite of our books to talk about actually and it was surprising because we have the three books, and we had the three names and I was the least excited about Amy Coney Barrett. She’s very new on the scene and doesn’t have much accomplishment wise under her belt besides being a justice of the Supreme court.

So who am I to say she’s not very accomplished, but she hasn’t been there very long is what I’m saying. And so it was funny, we were reading the book the other day with my children and we watched the video that we have a picture in the book of her holding up the blank note card and saying like my notes are blank. It’s all coming from memory.

And so we pulled it up on YouTube and we showed the video to my kids. And in the background, you see people wearing masks and my kids know the duration of the pandemic. And they were like, wait, is this in the last two years? And I said, “Yeah, she was just nominated and she’s pretty new on the Supreme court.”

But the thing that I love about the Amy Coney Barrett book, my oldest daughter is eight years old and there’s so many books on the market for young girls and universally, the books that are on the market in the last 5 to 10 years are very empowering, which I love. I love that my daughter’s told that she can be an entomologist or a NASA scientist and all these things. And that’s what boys and girls should be told, but there’s something really big missing from all of those books and it’s motherhood.

And my daughter is the oldest of five and she wants to have a family like her own. She wants to have a big family and she really wants to be a mom one day, in addition to like the 17 jobs that she wants to [do]. She wants to be a store owner, an anthropologist. I couldn’t even list, engineer.

She’s very ambitious, but that ambition is shown in all of the children’s books where we read except for the mom of a big family. And that’s something that my daughter wants too. And that’s something that we showcased in the book; we really showcase Amy Coney Barrett’s motherhood. So for example, she bakes a cake for every single one of her children’s birthdays from scratch. And that’s a priority in her house and now my kids are like, why don’t you bake us cakes? I’m like, well, I don’t like to, but now Amy Coney Barrett is setting me up.

That’s the message that my daughter is getting that you can do amazing things in your career while also being the mother of a big family. And that’s not a message that young girls are getting now. And we talk a lot as a society about the birth rate as it stands now, and a lot of people blame it on young women or young men also who don’t want to have families.

And there is absolutely that component of it, but people want to have their career and then they want to have kids, but when you start having kids when you’re 38, you’re not going to have six kids. It’s just a biological fact, but when a girl reads a book or a boy, honestly, reads a book that you can have six, seven kids and also be a Supreme court justice, that’s a really powerful message and one that girls are not getting now.

Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely fascinating. And so you mentioned that the alcoholism of his father in the Ronald Reagan book, he’s actually like rescues his father. I don’t know the story.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. I didn’t either. This is one of the things that I love about our books is that I also learn things. And so his father was drunk and fell asleep in the snow, and Ronald dragged him out from the snow and saved his life because he would’ve died of hypothermia had he just fell asleep drunk outside, which is a thing that happens.

And the Ronald Reagan book follows him through his life, he was a movie star, he was all of these things and it’s really interesting for… I think it’s a little bit less interesting now that we’ve had president Donald Trump, because generally the road to presidency as a child would understand it now it’s like, well, you’re a Senator and then you’re this, but President Trump broke that mold a little bit.

But it was fun to talk about the comparisons between President Trump and Ronald Reagan because we’ve talked about other more recent presidents like Barack Obama and George W. Bush and they had more traditional government roles. And so we’ve talked about how President Trump did not [have] a government role before he became president. And then as we’re reading the Ronald Reagan book, oh, here’s another president who didn’t take that traditional route. And so that was a fun conversation that was sparked by the Ronald Reagan book.

But the Ronald Reagan book is also just about him as a person. And I think that when you’re exposed to his anti-communism ideas and everything, they’re especially powerful when you can see what parts of his life and his personality sparked those passions. And you can see that within the Reagan book, and it also lends itself to conversations about communism more generally which seems like hard conversation to have with an eight year old, but you can have them.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, I can tell they’re very important conversations to have. I remember having them, but I had them for a different reason. My parents escaped from communist Poland in the 70’s and frankly all the parents that did that thing from central and Eastern Europe. First of all, I actually loved Ronald Reagan across the board because of his role in ending the cold war so to speak, but also I remember learning those lessons of the realities of that system, helped me a lot to see changes in this country and in my home country of Canada and so forth. Very, very valuable and I think probably almost not taught at all in the mainstream, right?

Ms. Mandel: Yes. No. It’s not. And especially, the conversations about communism in my household have really been spurred on by the situation in China with everything that has happened with COVID over the last two years. There’s been a lot of conversations. Separately, one of my many passions, I’m passionate about the North Korean human rights situation.

And so I went to South Korea several years ago with an organization called Liberty for North Korea. And so they remember mommy left for 11 days and have never let me live it down. And so we talked about communism in North Korea and what that means and communism in China and that it’s not unique, the role that president Reagan played in ending communism in such a huge part of the country or part of the world rather. All of these things intertwined, it’s like to be like nerdy homeschooler, again it’s the science of relations. That’s what Charlotte Mason talks about.

The goal of an education of a child is so that they form relationships and everything that they learn has a relationship with something else in their present day or something else that they read and everything has to make a connection. And so the Ronald Reagan book was a really wonderful tie in to the conversation about communism and about China and North Korea and human rights and all of these things. And it can spark a lot of really interesting conversations.

Mr. Jekielek: And you’re saying you’re having these conversations with your kids as young as how old? Eight?

Ms. Mandel: Eight. Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: Yes.

Ms. Mandel: They’re very deep thinkers and they’re very passionate, young children and I know where they get it from, but they have a lot of opinions and they’ve been really wonderful to spark these conversations with my kids and read them over and over. Every time I get a box because I’m getting lots of boxes of these books to bring to different things, they break them out and they break them in, they read them again and again.

Mr. Jekielek: That’s wonderful. Well, so for parents that are, for example, aren’t homeschooling, whose kids are in the either the public system or the private school or something like this, I guess these books are a compliment, how do they fit into the-

Ms. Mandel: That’s exactly what we wanted to do with these books. There’s a growing number of homeschool families and a lot of homeschool families have told me that they incorporated them into their lessons. But the thing about homeschooling is that it’s not school at home it’s just parents teaching their kids and homeschooling is just you’re doing that for bigger parts of the day. And so our job as parents is to teach our kids and these books are that.

One of our taglines with Heroes of Liberty is taking back our kids for 15 minutes a day at bedtime and changing the narrative and growing their minds and planting these ideas in their minds and their hearts, 15 minutes before bed which I think everyone should be reading right before bed. I’m a really, really big proponent of the power of reading out loud. There’s a wonderful book called “The Read-Aloud Handbook” by Jim Trelease and he talks about the science of what happens to a child’s brain when they read aloud. It’s fascinating. I could talk about that for another hour and a half.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, I can tell you my mother read to me aloud a lot. That was one of the things we did. And it’s quite memorable to me. I’m sure there’s something to what you’re saying. Well, as I said, I love the Thomas Sowell book. That’s the only one I’ve read thus far. I’m looking forward to reading all of them frankly.

Ms. Mandel: Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek: And just very briefly, how can people find them?

Ms. Mandel: Yeah. So we’re at heroesofliberty.com and we just started a subscription plan and we’ve already sold hundreds of two year subscriptions. So I’ve [had] job security for two years, but the hope is one a month at least for the next two years, but the subscriptions are definitely a great way to go and you get the books before anyone else, but you can also buy individual books. We’ll have “John Wayne” available pretty soon, but in the meantime, we’ll have “Annie Coney Barrett” and “Ronald Reagan” and “Thomas Sowell.”

Mr. Jekielek: Well, Bethany Mandel, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Ms. Mandel: Yes. Thank you.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.