The left claims Sen. John Fetterman is crazy because he supports Israel By Andrea Widburg
And when I say crazy, they mean in the literal sense, for they’re following the Soviet model of pathologizing opposing views.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is a leftist, make no mistake about that. It’s why I opposed his election to the Senate. Having said that, Fetterman has proven surprising in two ways: First, from the beginning, he’s been willing to moderate his views for the good of the country, and second, he’s pro-Israel, a viewpoint that’s increasingly out of step with the Democrat party. And now, the Democrats, like any good cultists confronted with an apostate, are trying to destroy him. More than that, they’re using the old communist playbook of contending that he’s insane.
As you may recall, Sen. John Fetterman was recovering from a serious stroke when he ran against Dr. Mehmet Oz to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate in 2022. Many, including me, felt that his verbal abilities were so limited that it was ridiculous to place him in Congress. I stand by that.
As it turned out, Fetterman seems to have recovered completely, but that recovery included checking himself into a psychiatric ward. It was a huge gamble on the part of Pennsylvania’s leftists to send to Congress a man who could have remained seriously impaired for the duration of his term (kind of like Joe Biden or the late Dianne Feinstein).
However—and this is a lovely reflection on the strength and plasticity of the human brain—Fetterman did recover. Moreover, his recovery has revealed a principled man who recognizes that, as between Israel, a liberal democracy in which all citizens have civil rights and that occupies a minute piece of land, and the Muslims arrayed against her, who are religious fanatics who believe that anyone who is not Muslim should be slaughtered, enslaved, or subordinated, Israel is on the side of the angels.
What Fetterman’s principles have revealed is that, while Democrats are good with brain damage, they’re not good with supporting Israel. So, Democrats are doing what they always do: Engaging in the politics of personal destruction.
According to the left, while Fetterman’s overt signs of brain damage from his stroke (that is, scrambled speech) are over, the real damage has revealed itself. And, in case you didn’t see where I was going, that “real” damage is that he is insufficiently hostile to Israel and solicitous of Hamas, a terrorist group that slaughters its enemies without regard to civilian status and uses its own civilians as human shields.
This information came first from the leftist New York Intelligencer, although it’s now being repeated everywhere on the left. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The original article and the subsequent pile-ons are obviously coming directly from a Democrat party anxious to get rid of someone who won’t follow the Democrats’ increasingly overt antisemitic party line.
According to the Intelligencer, even as Fetterman insists he’s in good shape, his staffers (and do remember that staffers pretty much run D.C.) claim that he’s a mental basket-case. His former chief of staff, part of the cadre that insisted that Fetterman was totally capable of serving in the Senate even when he couldn’t speak, now believes this powerful, principled, and coherent Fetterman is clearly suffering from traumatic brain injury:
In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital. “I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,” the email began. If things didn’t change, [Adam] Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer.”
It’s telling that one of the “symptoms” of Fetterman’s alleged brain damage is that he will not toe the party line on Israel:
“We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” Jentleson wrote. “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos)…”
That point about Fetterman’s support for Israel occupies a lot of real estate in the article. Indeed, we learn that Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, the non-American narcissist who abandoned him in D.C. when he went there alone and was still manifestly experiencing post-stroke struggles, is also worried about his mental state, given that he believes that Hamas is flooding the airwaves with anti-Israel propaganda.
Another alleged sign of Fetterman’s mental breakdown is that he exercised his Second Amendment rights and bought a gun:
He had also bought a gun. “He says he has a biometric safe and takes all the necessary precautions, and living where he does I understand the desire for personal protection,” Jentleson wrote, referring to Fetterman’s rough-and-tumble town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. “But this is one of the things you said to flag, so I am flagging.”
Yes, on the left, gun ownership is a sign of mental illness. (I’m proud to say that, under this metric, I’m very mentally ill, and I just had a great day at the local range last week.)
Fetterman is also alleged to feel alienated from those around him. That sounds believable, given that those around him are planning to go full Soviet on the man (which may also explain the gun).
And when I say “full Soviet,” I mean it literally. The Soviet Union famously declared that its political opponents were mentally ill and locked them up in insane asylums.
On the left, if you’re not with them, you’re the enemy. If they really hate you, they kill or imprison you; if they don’t really hate you, or need you alive, you’re called insane and locked up in a “medical” facility, where you might even be brainwashed into once again unreservedly touting the party line.
I am sorry for John Fetterman, something I didn’t imagine myself ever saying a few years ago. He’s still a leftist who espouses policies with which I strongly disagree (socialized medicine, so-called trans rights), but he’s also shown himself to be a principled man on one of the pivotal moral issues of his time. And for that sin, he’s being isolated and targeted.
Here’s my suggestion for Fettterman: Given his party’s immoral stance on Israel and its war against him, he should reconsider whether leftists are right or moral about anything. Fetterman might discover that conservativism will achieve his political goals (affordable healthcare, respect for individuals without unduly elevating the sexual perverts) and, even better, do so without offending his most deeply held principles.
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