John Fetterman: Sluggish Schizophrenic? Once praised, John Fetterman now faces Soviet-style smears from the left, deemed mentally unfit for defying party orthodoxy and supporting Israel. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/john-fetterman-sluggish-schizophrenic/
Readers of a certain age or a certain educational predisposition will undoubtedly recall the name Andrei Sakharov—for good reason. Sakharov was a hero, a dissident, and a brilliant man who paid an enormous price for his convictions. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The European Parliament honored him for his bravery and sacrifice by naming its coveted human rights award after him. He was, in short, an extremely impressive person.
Before he became a brilliant human rights and peace activist, Sakharov was a brilliant physicist, one of the most brilliant of the twentieth century. He was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, at the tender age of 32. For his work on developing the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was named a “Hero of Socialist Labor” three times—in 1953, 1956, and 1962. He was a member of the Soviet Atomic Energy Commission and is credited as being a key contributor to the advancement of the Soviet thermonuclear weapons program.
Near the end of the 1960s, however, Sakharov’s concern about the (literal) fallout from nuclear testing morphed into concern about nuclear weapons in general and then into peace activism and advocacy for civil liberties. His manifesto, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1968, was published by the New York Times, and turned Sakharov into an international icon, a respected and admired dissident.
Just over a decade later, Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. In the conventional telling of the story the dissident and his wife (fellow physicist and activist Yelena Bonner) were arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. In truth, what happened to Sakharov was much more nefarious. He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.” On December 9, 1983, The New York Times explained precisely what that meant:
A prominent Soviet official implied at a news conference today that Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and human rights campaigner, was mentally disturbed. The official, Vitaly P. Ruben, who is chairman of one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, called Dr. Sakharov “a talented but sick man” and said an article the physicist published in the West earlier this year had invited an American nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.
“A sane person would not say such things,” Mr. Ruben said, tapping his head with his forefinger in a gesture suggesting mental trouble….
Sakharov had been diagnosed in absentia with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a condition identified and articulated (i.e. “made up”) by the founding father of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky. Like countless others in the Soviet Union, Sakharov ran afoul of the regime, and, as a result, was labeled “mentally unfit” by that regime. He was never diagnosed with any mental illness in person. Indeed, he was never even examined in person (hence the in absentia bit). He was never treated for anything other than having a contradictory political predisposition.
Andrei Sakharov and his diagnosis with the uniquely Soviet mental illness of sluggish schizophrenia have been much on my mind lately. Sakharov’s experiences—along with those of literally thousands of other Soviet “troublemakers”—serve as a stark warning of how totalitarians and wannabe totalitarians deal with those whom they find ideologically inconvenient. Vladimir Bukovsky, another heroic Soviet dissident, focused his activism on exposing Snezhnevsky and the Soviet abuse of mental illness, and he too paid a steep, steep price. As Bukovsky noted on his personal website, his efforts exposed the fact that “it was the official policy of the USSR to declare its critics insane and lock them up in state care—taking them out of action, discrediting their words as the delusions of a lunatic, and avoiding the repercussions of putting critics on trial.”
The Soviet Union was a monstrous place that did monstrous things to nonconformists and called it “concern” for their mental health.
Enter Senator John Fetterman.
Fetterman, you may recall, was elected to the Senate as a Democrat from Pennsylvania in 2022, after a long, bizarre, and controversial campaign, during which he suffered a stroke. Republicans opposed Fetterman—and not just because he is a Democrat. They also opposed him because they thought he was unfit for office. He nevertheless won his race and went to Washington, where the controversy continued. For the first several months of his term, he still appeared unfit. He needed considerable help understanding documents. He had difficulty communicating. And, of course, he famously dressed like a teenage vagrant. Eventually, however, Fetterman settled into the job, and the controversy and criticism both faded—or at least that bout of controversy and criticism faded.
Ever since October 7, 2023, and the grotesque terror attacks on Israel by Hamas, Fetterman has courted controversy again. His adamantly pro-Israel and anti-Hamas stance is rather atypical in today’s Democratic Party, and it has rendered him unwelcome among a great many on the political left. He has been roundly and repeatedly condemned for his steadfast loyalty to and support for Israel. And now, in true totalitarian fashion, the left, including his fellow Democrats and the mainstream media, has decided that he really is unfit for office, not because of his stroke, but because he has dared to engage in “wrongthink.”
In the last week, the senator has been the subject of no less than four hit pieces by left-leaning media, all questioning his mental health. It all started with a piece in New York Magazine, which cited current and former staffers who profess to be “worried” about him: “Staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported.” Interestingly—and tellingly—those who have “diagnosed” Fetterman are not his actual doctors and have no basis on which to render medical opinions. Moreover, the tales of his mental meltdowns are told almost entirely by anonymous sources, who, in many cases, didn’t even witness the alleged events. The AP, for example, attacked Fetterman’s well-being the other day, based on the reports of “one person who was briefed on what occurred” and “a second person who was briefed separately on the meeting.”
It is hardly fair to compare John Fetterman to Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Bukovsky. They truly suffered for their dissent. At the same time, it is perfectly fair to compare Fetterman’s accusers to theirs. They are all petty totalitarians who are unable to tolerate disagreement and who are not above stooping to any means necessary to discredit their enemies.
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