The day will come when Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman returns to the form we feared in 2022. Thankfully, today is not that day.
Our friend Salena Zito interviewed the junior senator from the Keystone State last week and has followed Fetterman’s political career for quite a long time, since they’re both from the same part of the state. Zito was just as concerned about the apparent incapacity Fetterman displayed after suffering a stroke during his 2022 campaign, and that concern was only magnified once he joined the Senate and still struggled with speech and comprehension. That said, continued treatment added to the healing properties of time have revealed the John Fetterman that Salena Zito remembers from years past.
Fetterman closed out 2023 raising a lot of eyebrows with his full-throated support of Israel in its existential fight against Iranian proxies all around it. He wore the Israeli flag as a cape and walked through the crowd at a pro-Israeli rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in mid-November. He also was the first Democrat in the United States Senate to recognize the corruption of New Jersey Senator Bob “Gold Bars” Menendez, calling for him to resign.
As 2024 begins to unfold, Fetterman continues to show that he’s thinking very clearly about a lot of subjects, and it’s very easy to understand how he’s rapidly become conservatives’ favorite Democrat in the upper chamber. And by favorite, I mean the only member of the club.
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On January 5th, speaking to a little press gaggle, the topic of the border came up, and Fetterman put words to a crisis that very few elected Democrats are willing to say.
He may not know how anyone can pretend the border isn’t a crisis, but 50 of his Senate colleagues are doing precisely that. He followed this up a three days later with another drive-by on Gold Bars Bob.
Menendez is a sleazeball? Don’t make me love you, John Fetterman. He’s also right. If we’re going to clean out the worst of the worst from elected office, and admittedly, George Santos was pretty bad, there’s not much to defend when you look at the New Jersey Senator, whether it’s his alleged influence peddling with Egypt and now Qatar, or the seedier side of his personal sexual proclivities that have dogged him for a decade. But set all that aside. John Fetterman has absolutely been at his best when his focus is on the Israel-Hamas war. He sees the conflict with moral clarity, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone else in Congress on the Democratic side that has been more supportive without wavering than Fetterman.
On Tuesday, the International Criminal of Justice opened up a hearing filed by the government of South Africa into charges of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The ICJ has never been respected as anything other than a kangaroo court for despots and dictators by American conservatives, but lefty globalists revere the institution. John Fetterman is not one of those lefties.
Speaking at the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center in the nation’s capital, Fetterman didn’t just dismiss the farce at the Hague, he brought the receipts on who’s bringing the charges in the first place. And he did so in his trademark basketball shorts and hoodie.
He went there. He brought up the allegations of genocide taking place in South Africa against white farmers. This is a very controversial subject, and perhaps the latest and best report of the crime wave and whether there is a racial component to it is found in The Spectator. Geoff Hill writes:
Is a crime against humanity at risk of unfolding in South Africa? Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born billionaire who owns X (Twitter) and Tesla, fears that there might be. Earlier this year, he wrote that he’d heard of calls for ‘a genocide of white people’ in his former homeland. Musk isn’t alone in his concerns. Steve Hofmeyr, a South African singer with a cult following, thinks that the ‘g-word’ is an appropriate way to describe what is unfolding: ‘If you think that the slaughter of South African farmers is not genocide enough, ask them about their land, language, religion, education, universities, heritage, monuments, safety, dignity and the race-based regulations imposed upon them and their children’. Donald Trump voiced a similar concern when he was in the White House. In a tweet that caused a diplomatic bust-up between South Africa and the United States in 2018, Trump referred to the ‘large-scale killing of farmers’. The government in Pretoria labelled his claim ridiculous, but was Trump right about what is unfolding?
According to Genocide Watch’s Dr. Gregory Stanton, Hill writes, it’s probably not a genocide, yet, but there certainly are warning signs.
Based in Washington DC, Genocide Watch is the world’s early warning system. It was founded in 1999 by Dr Gregory Stanton, a professor of human-rights law, who says that ‘for all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination’. There are instead, ‘opportunistic crimes’, sometimes acts of revenge by workers who are owed wages or feel aggrieved with their employers. Or just attacks carried out by thugs out for money.
‘We have studied this for many years,’ Stanton said, ‘and I’ve done research on the ground in South Africa. The numbers show us that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts, and less likely to end up on a slab at the coroner’s office.’ Farmers he said, ‘are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide’.
…
In the past year, there have been attacks on trucks taking freight to the port city of Durban with mobs torching vehicles they say are driven by foreigners. Drivers are beaten and chased away, and the highways are closed for hours while police clear the mess.
Dr Stanton says this is a smouldering fuse. ‘In any country, one death is too many and we must not ignore the plight of white farmers. But there are worrying reports about xenophobia against black migrants. The first step towards a genocide happens when people are labelled as “the other”: different, dangerous and alien. China is doing it now with the Uyghur Muslims.’
Wikipedia’s entry for the South African Farm Attacks downplay it as conspiracy theories born out of Christian nationalism. So with all of these stances Fetterman has taken, becoming a bit of a darling of the right, or at least earning respect and applause, how has this hurt his standing with Pennsylvania Democrats? Josh Kraushaar at Jewish Insider reports not much.
John Fetterman’s favorability rating with PA Democrats:
76% favorable
7% unfavorableSocial media isn’t real life. https://t.co/hrnMD1H7of
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) January 10, 2024
What’s working for John Fetterman is exactly why his seatmate, Bob Casey, Jr., is in trouble. Fetterman takes a stand and doesn’t back down. Casey waits a very long time, sticks his finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing, then asks Chuck Schumer which way the wind is blowing, watches what Dave McCormick, his 2024 Republican challenger, is saying, and then reacts.
As for Fetterman, I’m pleased to admit when I’m wrong about someone. I could not believe what Pennsylvania was about to do in 2022, and eventually did, electing someone with a physical ailment that precluded him from being able to discharge the job he was seeking. We were worried that what votes Majority Leader Schumer didn’t force him to cast, his wife would. We were wrong. I still am confident on most policy issues, I disagree with Fetterman strongly. But he is definitely capable of doing the job, and I am grateful to have found agreement on many important issues thus far.