I even saw conspiracy theories online saying that Mandy was in on the attacks, you know, and that like, she had helped the terrorists plan them, and it was like: People were NOT fucking happy. People were really losing their minds.

And it’s not like Mandy was trying to shock anybody or anything. I mean, it’s not like Mandy was saying what she was saying to be controversial or to make people upset or to piss people off. I really hated that, actually, when people were saying shit like Mandy was doing this as a marketing strategy or, like, she was trying to “rebrand” herself as some radical or something, because the truth was actually so much simpler. It was just like, she did all the research, and she came to her conclusions, and she was like: This is obviously the truth, and so I should obviously be saying it. And it started to feel like NOT addressing all this shit, like, NOT fully examining all the causes of what happened—like, just giving the sort of measured and careful and meaningless statement that everybody was expecting her to give—would’ve actually been the political thing to do, because as far as Mandy was concerned, that would’ve been the thing that would’ve required her to have an angle. The way she saw it, she was just stating the facts.

And I think the most upset people got, you know, like, the thing that really pissed a lot of people off was that like, before Mandy even went and visited some of the families of the victims—like, before she even went and saw all the people who were still in the hospital—she went and visited the mother of the guys who had done it.

They were two brothers, and they grew up in Germany, but, you know, they had all this family in Yemen. And they weren’t even particularly religious or whatever—like, the mom said that they weren’t even that conservative—but a year or two before the attacks happened, a bunch of their cousins got killed in a drone strike for like, apparently no reason at all—like, apparently, they were just walking down the street one day, and then: BOOM. They were gone—and the mom told Mandy that this thing really did a number on her sons. Like, apparently, it was all they could talk about for a while. And the mom didn’t know it—or like, that’s what she says. There’s a lot of people in the newspapers and online who think she’s full of shit—but the mom said at least that she had no idea that like, in the time between their cousins dying and the sons carrying out the attack, they were just getting completely indoctrinated online. And anyway, they were able to get their hands on some guns and get tickets to the concert and somehow get through the security and then, like, you know, that was that.

And I mean, obviously, Mandy wasn’t coming out and saying that she SUPPORTED what these guys had done. Like, obviously, Mandy was totally horrified by all this stuff, and she thought that what these guys did was the worst possible way to respond to all that horrible shit that had happened to them and their country and their family, but still like, I think Mandy was sort of determined to use this thing as a way to grow as a person, you know, and to understand the world a little better. One of the first things she did was to come out and plead with people to see this thing in its larger context. She posted this thing online that said like, this didn’t happen in a vacuum, and if we want to condemn this act of violence, we need to all examine all of our individual and collective roles in perpetuating violence around the world. And at the end of the post, she pleaded with the German government to go easy on the brother they were able to capture and try to actually rehabilitate him and understand him, you know, instead of just punishing him.