Fetterman Stands By Israel Despite NY Magazine Smear Piece

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It’s been an interesting weekend for Senator John Fetterman, to say the least. If the senator was at home this weekend, the atmosphere may have been just a wee bit tense.

The wild times began with a piece, published on Friday in New York Magazine by Ben Terris, regarding Fetterman’s mental health journey post-stroke. In reading it, one comes away with several conclusions.

First of all, it is obvious that John Fetterman was in much worse shape physically when he was elected than Democrats wanted Pennsylvania voters to believe. Should this really surprise anyone, after what we witnessed with Joe Biden, and the media’s rush to now profit off that cover-up? While we reported at the time that Fetterman’s debate performance showed huge problems, he was still elected. And when Fetterman had the mental health break that sent him to inpatient care at Walter Reed, the evidence seemed clear that he should have resigned to preserve and restore his health. However, the same staff that is now casting aspersions on his mental fitness NOW, had no issue taking on the role of senator-by-proxy THEN, and the media applauded it.

The prime mover and shaker involved in all of this – and one of the primary sources for this piece – is Adam Jentleson.

Jentleson is a longtime Washington operator. He’s worked for a liberal think tank and written a book about the filibuster. He and I first met back when he worked for Harry Reid, then the Democratic leader of the Senate, and later we became friends. Jentleson continues to believe, broadly, in the Fetterman project: that Democrats would benefit from punching left more often and that voters crave a heterodox candidate willing to stick a thumb in the eye of his own party. He says his disagreements with Fetterman are, by and large, not political but rather an expression of genuine worry for Fetterman’s well-being. He told me he hadn’t gone public with his concerns earlier because he had hoped Fetterman could correct course.

“I believed in John’s ability to work through struggles that lots of Americans share,” he said. “He’s not locked into a downward trajectory; he could get back in treatment at any time, and for a long time I held out hope that he would. But it’s just been too long now, and things keep getting worse.”

To put it bluntly, Jentleson was brought in because Democrats wanted to make sure that Fetterman stayed under control, even if his health failed. Jentleson’s “worry” over Fetterman is an act, and the proof of that is this entire article. His account is literally selling out his previous boss in order to undermine him for the Democratic Party’s own benefit – conveniently filtered through Ben Terris, his personal friend, as Terris himself admits in the above quote.

Jentleson’s intent is spelled out when he gets the doctor who treated Fetterman, to break HIPAA and tell Terris about Fetterman’s treatment while at Walter Reed.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

The new medication worked, and over the next few weeks, Fetterman’s “mood steadily improved,” according to a public discharge briefing from Williamson. He started sleeping and eating better. He was staying hydrated. He’d come into the hospital burdened by thoughts of self-harm and an indifference about whether he lived or died. “If the doctor said, ‘Oh, by the way, you have six months left,’ I would have been like, ‘Okay, whatever,’” he later told Time magazine. Now, with the new treatment plan, Williamson said Fetterman quickly “evidenced better mood, brighter affect, and improved motivation, self-attitude and engagement with others.”

Someone slap this doctor down, and hard. There is no way that a journalist should be getting this level of information from a doctor. However, this also seems to be Jentleson’s doing.

In February 2024, Jentleson announced he was stepping down as chief of staff while remaining on the payroll as an adviser. For months afterward, he debated whether to contact Fetterman’s doctor. When he was still working for Fetterman, he had been explicitly told not to, and when he did so anyway, there were massive fights. According to Fetterman, “In December 2023, Adam Jentleson took action that jeopardized the privacy/sanctity of my confidential medical records. I subsequently directed my doctors to sever any access Adam could have to my medical information.”

Second, Gisele Fetterman, who once upon a time saw herself as “a great lady in the Senate,” as Joe Biden once called her before the election, ended up not following him to Washington DC, which, as we mentioned at the time, was not exactly the most supportive move for someone still recovering from a massive medical episode. But her problems apparently weren’t with the medical issues, but Fetterman’s strong support of Israel after October 7, 2023.

But it wasn’t just staffers who were upset. There was also Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, who had become something of a political celebrity in her own right: She is a kindhearted philanthropist (the proprietor of a “free store” in Braddock that gave away goods and clothing), a formerly undocumented immigrant from Brazil, and a vocal progressive. In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument.

“They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes.

“That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied.

Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true:
Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

A few days later, Gisele texted a different staffer: “I am at breaking point and I can’t co-sign this any longer. Id love some help in language to separate myself from this. Can anyone help me?”

Gisele is now pointing the finger at Jentleson.

In our conversation, Fetterman downplayed any supposed arguments with Gisele, telling me that she “has her own voice” and that he would never try to change her views, even if they differed from his. “I think that’s very common in political marriage,” he said. In a statement, Gisele suggested Jentleson was part of a conspiracy to damage her husband’s reputation, saying Jentleson fed her “scary, untrue stories about John’s health.” She added, “I would talk to John’s doctors about what Adam was telling me and they would be confused. Those doctors would tell me that their concerns were not with John, but with Adam. Any alleged ‘concerns’ heard from me came straight from those lies, not from John’s doctors or my own eyes.” In response, Jentleson said, “I stand by everything I said, and I hope Senator Fetterman gets the help he needs.”

How very KIND of Terris to give Jentleson the last word on Gisele’s statement. (That was sarcasm, if you couldn’t tell.) And this now leads directly into the third point – this is all about Fetterman’s support for Israel. I once wrote that his stalwart and unflinching support post-October 7th was one of the biggest political surprises I had ever seen, especially given the weak and tepid support that the Democrats under Biden were giving Israel. According to Terris, his stance on October 7th was “roiling” his staff.

The war in Gaza was also luring Fetterman back to X. He had handed over his social-media passwords to his staff as part of his recovery plan, but when he saw in December that Pennsylvania protesters had stuck BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS stickers on hummus containers, he approved a post for staff to send. The message adhered to a classic meme format featuring two photos of Drake: one in which the rapper appeared disgusted by text that read PROTEST THE RAPE OF ISRAELI WOMEN + GIRLS and another in which he nodded approvingly to PROTEST HUMMUS.

The post roiled his staff. According to one former aide, a group of women who worked in the office argued that the message could be read as hurtful to sexual-assault survivors. Members of Fetterman’s senior team spent hours urging him to take the post down. The point he was trying to make — that protesters didn’t care about the atrocities committed by Hamas — was being lost in the controversy. According to one of them, Fetterman’s response was that he didn’t want to give in to the “woke mob” and that anyone upset was welcome to resign. Eventually he took it down.

So, just weeks after being sworn in, Fetterman suffered such a strong mental break that required him to be hospitalized, but his staff was fine with that. But he supports Israel, demands the return of the hostages, and wants Hamas eliminated?

Why, something must be wrong with him!

Multiple things can be true at once. John Fetterman should not have been elected to the Senate, given what we all saw after his stroke, and he was not fit to serve, given the hospitalization. Also, his support for Israel, which sent his staff into conniption fits, is not evidence of a mental problem. His staff also is apparently complaining to Terris that the senator is not easy to work for, and that he’s had some driving accidents that really should be a concern. All that can be true, and he still doesn’t deserve to be sold out like this by Adam Jentleson – whose name should be political mud after this. Who would hire this viper to work on Capitol Hill, or anywhere, knowing that he could do this to the next employer who doesn’t toe the line for the Democratic left?

Hilariously, like the honey badger, Fetterman proved on Sunday afternoon that he doesn’t give a shit what his staff thinks.

This tweet was precipitated by the Houthi attack on Ben Guiron Airport early Sunday morning, for which Israel blamed Iran, who has been supplying the Houthis with arms.

Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, responded to the attack by saying: “Anyone who hits us, we will hit them seven times stronger”.

In a later statement, Netanyahu said “attacks by the Houthis emanate from Iran”, adding Israel would respond to the Houthi attack, and to Iran “at a time and place of our choosing”.

Senator Fetterman has been a proponent of striking Iran’s nuclear capabilities now, in order to prevent their movement toward acquiring a nuclear weapon, and has been clear about this for months, calling on President Trump to not negotiate with Iran or enter into a new deal with them. After Sunday’s attack on Ben Guiron Airport, Fetterman obviously feels vindicated on his stance against Iran and in support of Israel.

It seems the smear attack, intended to strike down Fetterman, may have made him more powerful than the Democrats could possibly imagine. The Houthis and Iran proving him right is only going to fuel his convictions. While Fetterman is never going to leave the Democrats, or switch parties, or gain a more politically conservative outlook, it is quite telling about the current state of the Democrat party that they simply cannot deal with one senator who dares challenge the sentiments of the anti-Semitic left wing, so they will wink and nod at an attempt to undermine him by casting aspersions or making outright accusations about his mental state.

Featured image: John Fetterman via Wikimedia Commons, cropped and modified, CC BY 2.0

The post Fetterman Stands By Israel Despite NY Magazine Smear Piece appeared first on Victory Girls Blog.



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