John Fetterman

Who ordered the mayor with extra forehead and extra two inches, two inches, extra two feet?

Only comes in an extra large.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who ordered the double XL mayor?

Who ordered the meat lover's mayor?

Oh my goodness.

The metaculous, we can only sort of like vaguely grasp at some of its dimensions.

However, it does seem to follow a similar rule as popes, where fat pope, thin pope, in this case, Fiorello LaGuardia, very impactful, very small man, very small man,

small of stature, but great of stature metaphorically.

Whereas now we have, not to steal your introduction, a man who is great of stature physically and very small of stature in every other sense.

Yeah.

So welcome to the No Gods No Mayors podcast, where your mayor is delivered in one hour and a half or less, or your money back.

But this is a free episode.

So tough titties.

Oh, yeah.

Your money back.

Yeah, your money is already.

If you check your account, it's already there.

Yeah.

Fastest refund system in the West.

I am your mayor for this episode, Matty Lepchanski.

I'm here with my co-mayors, November and Riley.

Hello.

Hello.

Hi, girls.

Hey.

I don't think, did I misspeak?

I told Riley before you got here in November that I'm going to start, instead of like really going at him, just kind of do it like half-assed.

Be like, oh, he's like, oh, I wanted to change my display name in the Zencaster.

And I was like, yeah, you know, if you really wanted to do that, I got easy.

I don't know.

He's way to do that.

And he's like, I kind of, my heart's not in it.

But I think if I start acting really depressed about it, he'll want to make me feel better.

If you sort of neg Riley into transitioning.

Yeah, be like, Riley, like, would it make you feel better if I started getting a stranded yell valorant?

That sounds like a beautiful idea and a very effective tactic to deploy against the most easily stressed man

I know.

He has his fingers on his temples right now.

Yeah, this is honestly, if you wanted to pick a way to micro-target me.

And I do.

If you wanted to do social contagion, but like sniper social contagion to me specifically, that would be the best way to do it is be like, oh, it would really help me out.

Just to be like, you are getting, you know, a bad grade in social interaction and you're making me feel bad by not transitioning.

And the way in which you are kind of like obliging and get a good grade in this conversation is to transition.

That's right.

For the last 12,000 years or so of human civilization, we've been trying a sort of mass approach with the social contagion, but we're thinking now we hit specific vectors.

Maximum redesigned for impact.

Guiding in an intercept on Riley's position.

There's, of course, the transgender conclave that happens every year where you vote to reaffirm keeping the same flag every time.

Yes.

Every time Matty and I are defeated.

We are in a conclave-like voting block that gets washed every time.

Every time I do my bit about how the flag looks like a band-aid floating in a public swimming pool.

Yeah.

And I do my bit about how it looks like it's an alternate history novel where the toddlers won World War II.

Yes.

And every time we've overruled, and so we go on saluting old Sky and Bacon.

And the other thing that I guess you've all decided at the Transgender Conclave is to adopt a more sort of less of a war of position and more of a war of maneuver where you identify where social contagion is now no longer about drawing a big line and then trying to advance it.

It's now about taking key hills and making sure that you have the freedom to patrol and control sort of the overlooks of certain areas by starting

really enjoyable businesses

with CISP.

Also, this is traditional Scrunch is this as well, I think.

Josh, yeah.

Matty and I brought in a big easel with a big blown-up enlargement photo of you in order to demonstrate this.

We had a sand table as well.

It was very, it was very cool.

Yeah, I've been advocating for a sort of a modern urban warfare approach, but it's yet to be adopted.

Well, I mean, because there's this theory of decisive battle that still remains influential, you know.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I mean, look, it's

the real worry is at some point that like you'll just want to sort of switch back to a war of position, but you'll have kind of forgotten how to do it and you just end up sending a bunch of unsupported tanks into cities, firing estradiol at people.

You're calling me that.

But without infantry support, there we go.

Jesus.

Okay.

Anyways, speaking of unsupported.

Speaking of unsupported tanks, before we start this episode.

Wait, sorry.

One more thing.

One more thing.

One more thing.

You had my face on the sand table.

And when I got my

quarter FFS?

My quarter FFS.

Huge for us, to be clear.

Yeah.

That was represented by just moving some

pink and blue blocks on the sand table up my face.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

We refer to this as the salient.

Yeah, I was thinking about this, like we're all in the control room from Return of the Jedi with Mon Mothma, and you got the corner of the vest and everyone's cheering, you know.

Anyways, so before we start this episode, I want to speak very quickly about oafs.

Oofs.

We're going to hear a lot about oafs today.

I'm just assuming.

We need to first credential ourselves.

I mean, I can say openly, I am a person of oaf experience.

Yes, I was an oaf for much of my life.

I have stood up too quickly in a restaurant when my date came in and knocked an entire bottle of wine off the table and onto the floor where it shattered.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I was, I, I, uh, in a former life, was like six foot three and 300 pounds, and I lived that oaf life for a long time.

And I just want to note that I'm sensitive to the oaf community.

So keep in mind when we talk about this man, oafs of the world.

I see you.

I hear you.

You are valid.

This This is an oaf-centered episode.

Yeah.

Also, to be clear,

I want to also say oaths are not necessarily large of fat.

They're not fat people.

Not at all.

I mean, to be clear,

I had some of my most oafish experiences, some of my most seminal oaf experiences at a point when I weighed no more than 90 pounds.

I've spent a long, a long time sort of...

dropping things, bumping into stuff.

Yeah, building a sort of Rue Goldberg table in your basement to hold all your wine.

Deploying the special oaf limits break, which is to trip over something and then to look back in mock disbelief as if to go, what the hell was that?

Who put that there?

Guys, guys, literally this past Saturday, like two days ago, I was playing softball and I grounded the ball just in front of home plate.

And I started to go to try to run out the throw to first base.

And I straight up just tripped and did a somersault in front of everybody.

I got a big thing on my elbow from it.

I am still kind of about that oaf life, I'll say.

I had a number of oaf moments.

I will say after two different live shows for two different podcasts on like multiple sort of like

separated occasions, I have attempted to leave London after a successful live show, got into a taxi and slammed my forehead directly onto the lintel of the passenger door.

This has happened to me twice in my life.

It really hurt both times, but it made me much funnier each time.

That's why the podcasts keep getting better.

Yeah.

Having to learn that it's called a lintel because I keep hitting my head on it.

No one knows what that's called.

If you go and try to explain to someone,

I didn't move my head down far enough because I thought the cab was taller than it was, and I contacted the side of the cab in a kind of head-butt maneuver.

And then I fell down and everyone saw me do it.

And then I started crying.

You know,

you need to kind of contextualize that.

And it's helpful if you have the vocabulary to do that.

I think I might just be slightly clumsy.

I think I might not be an oaf.

Yeah, I don't think I'd call you an oath, Riley.

I don't know.

I think you can only self-define as an oaf, right?

I think oaf is a, is a question of identity as well as experience.

And I think that no one can tell you whether or not you're an oaf.

You have to know.

Do you think of yourself wearing a barrel?

Yeah, I've got like a sort of like piece of like parrot head art in my house with a big, like, like a parrot flying in a beach and just says, oaf is a state of mind.

All right.

We got to start.

We got to start this episode.

This ophisode.

So we're doing today John Fetterman.

Oh, yeah.

I forgot.

Oh, that big piece of shit.

Yes.

Yes.

The big piece of shit, John Fetterman, you know, we know a lot about what he's been up to lately, but I wanted to talk about his, the rest of his life before he was really super duper public.

Anyways, so he's born in 1969 to Carl and Susan Fedderman, who were both 19 years old at the time.

You know, coupled with what we know about his rise to prominence and certainly his like aesthetic affect, you might think this meant a certain thing about his upbringing that he was like, you know, born to two 19-year-olds.

Very, very like working class, right?

Like this is his thing since.

Yeah.

Untrue, baby.

His parents were still white boomers.

So naturally, his father very quickly became a partner at an insurance firm.

And John grew up in an affluent suburb of York, Pennsylvania, which is called Springettesbury in true Pennsylvania fashion.

They've called the town that.

They used to let you do this if you were white.

Just be like,

I am 19 years old.

I've had a child with another 19-year-old.

Please give me not just a job, but a comfortable sort of like madmen.

uh suburban upper middle class existence whenever someone i think you don't hear this advice so much because most of the people giving it out just kind of hate anybody who would ever ask them for it.

But the old, oh, just walk, you'll walk around giving your CV out and eventually you'll be president of

Wells Fargo or whatever.

You know, work your way up from janitor to president.

That's who this is about.

Yes.

Because you could go in to Wells Fargo.

and sort of like walk up to the boss of Wells Fargo at the time.

And he would go, well, I see that you're white, which is something that, of course, I'm very fond of being a massive racist.

And so

I shouldn't have given that so cleanly, separably as a thing in my own voice.

I should have done a Wells Fargo CEO voice.

Unfortunately, I'm locked in this version of my accent from having been talking in it all weekend.

I'll I'll do my version of the Wells Fargo account.

Yes, please give me a voice and

ahem.

Ahem.

No, we're not going to have any additional charges.

Oh, fuck.

Sorry.

I tried to put on the accent and it just became the thing that they miss sell.

Sorry, everybody.

Doing this sort of Tom Hanks, Colonel Tom Parker.

Like, I see that you're white.

He's white.

Now I see that you're a white man here at now.

This here Wales Fargo cannot interest you in an account with no fees that we will disclose to you, but we will charge you hundreds of dollars every month.

Oh,

now I didn't mean to disclose that to you.

However, can I trust you to open this account?

Very specific beef.

Yeah.

Also important to note that when Tom Hanks is doing the colonel, he is not really a southerner so much as he's doing what I call Dutch waddo.

Anyways, his father was and is, and I think this is crucial for his pathology, a staunch Republican.

Of course, of course.

Yeah.

So, which I think kind of comes up.

Anyways, he Fetterman enrolls in Albright College, which is in Reading, Pennsylvania, which is where his father went.

He graduates in 1991.

He gets an MBA from UConn in 93.

All fairly standard, because this is the kind of thing, this was the shift, right, that happened is you stopped being able to go to Colonel Tom Parker of Wells Fargo

first in order to get that meeting.

Yo, what?

You had to become credentialed first.

We don't want no kind of Coleman silk human stain situation.

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties.

Please stand by.

Hey, everybody, we're back.

Sorry.

I actually had a literal oaf moment.

There it is.

Again, I had an oath moment and I karate chopped my microphone and then my phone started trying to record my voice.

So I'm just trying to...

explain myself.

Did I tell you what you did?

You did the rare reverse Fonzie where you hit a piece of technology and it made it work worse.

Is that rare?

I think that's true of a lot of pieces of technology.

The common reverse Fonzie.

In fact, the Fonzie is the more rare of the two.

Yes, yes.

I would say it's named that because it's unusual to hit a machine in a way that makes it work better rather than worse.

You had the very common occurrence of hitting a machine, then it stopped working.

That doesn't need a name.

What's happening was I hit the machine and it stopped working because I'm an oaf.

Anyways, so he goes to MBA.

He goes to UKI, gets an MBA in 1993.

From 93 to 95, he works as an insurance underwriter for Chubb, which is a real company.

Chubb with two B's.

I know Chubb, and I laugh at the name Chubb every time I see a Chub lock.

Sometimes I will, well, this is Chubb, the insurance underwriter.

Surely the same.

There can't be two Chubs.

It's the same.

It's the same people.

I think there's multiple Chubs.

There might be two B's in Chubb, but you can't tell me that there's two Chubs in the world.

No, it's the same company.

Yeah.

Three series.

Yeah.

Well, in the same way that like Lloyds of London does like shipping insurance, but in a way that like extends to like vast implications of the financial market.

Chubb do both padlocks and insurance.

It's like how Kawasaki both makes a saxophone and the ski dude.

So like, for example, that was like if he

is the kind of insurance company as well that employs professional private security forces because they also do kidnap, ransom, extortion, which means that like

when you say do kidnap, ransom, extortion.

That was the serial killer in the bang.

Yeah,

in taken, Liam Neeson is talking to a bunch of guys on a chub team.

Yeah.

Chubb Team Six.

Yeah, he's talking to Chubb Team Six.

Yeah, no, like they might not get wet work guys to go kick down the doors and like, you know, bring you back, but they will, they do have security consultants who will like go deliver the ransom

for you.

It's sort of in the same way that Pinkerton also is that now as well.

And they put out that great album.

Yeah, of course.

When you need to shoot all four members of the Pinkerton wet work team at the same time.

Yeah, and I'm putting on tired of sex.

Anyways,

Fetterman, he claims his political awakening was in his early 20s and a good friend of his died in a car crash, which caused him to volunteer for the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program because he wanted to do something good with his life.

Which is nominative determinism because to be clear, John Fetterman is a physically large man in the sense that he is nine and a half feet tall or something like that.

And he's an only child.

So, of course, he has to become a big brother somehow.

So he gets matched with an eight-year-old in New Haven called Nikki Santana, who had lost his father to AIDS, who was about to lose his mother as well.

This is the story he repeats often on his, on his rise to prominence, that he felt like he,

quote, won the random lottery and kids like Nikki hadn't, which seems pretty admirable to me.

Sure.

Like, you know, and like, you know, people, when he was running for Congress the first time or for the Senate the first time, people looked into this and they found the kid and he was like in his 30s and he was working in a nonprofit in New Haven.

And he was like, yeah, this guy was great.

He invested in my future and helped me become a better person.

Like we had this mission together.

Like, he really seemed to actually help this kid out.

And it did get him sort of thinking about politics.

John, at this point in his life, is on like a do-gooder streak of some sort.

He quits Chubb and he joins up with AmeriCorps

in Pittsburgh in 95.

He helps some students get their GEDs in Pittsburgh.

And then he goes to Harvard's Kennedy School and graduates there in 99 with a master's of public policy.

It's sort of castle thunder as I hear the Kennedy School of Government.

Can you get the fucking Night on Bald Mountain sting?

I genuinely,

I tell this story fairly often because not many interesting things happened to me.

But when I was a kid,

we had

equivalent of a careers fair for different universities where they were kind of talent scout.

And we had one guy representing all of the American universities.

And I got a pamphlet for the Kennedy School of Government, Castle Thunder.

And I was not hugely politically advanced.

I mean, I was in Amnesty International and stuff at the time.

But holding this, it felt like one of the more evil objects that I've had in my possession.

Yeah, like he handed it to you and a bat flew out of his coat as he did it.

It's like he handed it to you.

You looked down.

You looked up.

He was gone.

The stand was gone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why is it wet?

Yeah.

And you saw the eye of Sauron looking back at you like it was the palantir.

How come this pamphlet is rattling against its chains and is chublocked?

It's got the fucking

mouth from Evil Dead on the

pamphlet.

Oh, man.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I guess Miskatonic University does have a pretty good public policy school.

It's just,

I really like.

I'm studying studying foreign affairs at Miscatana University.

Big, big, beautiful color photograph of the buildings at the Kennedy School of Government, which has a nice pediment with, in Latin, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

You translated out.

The motto is, see what fucking happens.

Or back and to the left.

There are two interpretations.

Anyways, I think it's interesting when we talk about John Fetterman as like a big, dumb oaf.

He has two master's degrees, which is so funny to me.

But the thing is, oaf-ness isn't necessarily correlated with credentialed education at all either.

But you look at John Fetterman and where you're like, this guy's got two master's degrees?

He does?

I mean, I don't have an undergraduate degree yet.

And John Fetterman is, John Fetterman clears me in educational credentials.

Yep.

And that's why he's in the Senate and you're not.

That's right.

That's the only reason.

That's the only reason.

I could be Sarah McBride right now I could be like um actually

I use she her pronouns if that's okay that's only if that's okay with you my my my preferred pronouns uh-huh are she and her but

I'm here to work so whatever is okay with you now excuse me I have to go to the men's room yeah I think you'd make a good senator from Pennsylvania

probably get probably get a lot of Philly people voting for you I think yeah maybe you know yeah let's amend Let's amend the Constitution so that non-resident aliens can be senator from Pennsylvania.

Yeah, sure.

Why not?

Yeah.

Remember Cal A 2026 and it says under it, um, go birds, I guess, question mark.

Um, so

in 2001, go birds, go Browns, go Steelers, go all of them.

Browns?

Cleveland?

It's Cleveland.

Cleveland.

That's in Ohio.

Ohio, yes.

Yeah.

Look, I'm not trying to be senator.

The campaign song is Fly Eagles Fly, but as sung by someone who has never heard the melody, only seen the lyrics.

Fly Eagles.

Yes, please.

Fly Eagles Fly.

It's like a church where you're just kind of, you don't know the hymn and you just kind of mumble, you know.

In 2001, he heads up an out-of-school youth program similar to what he was doing in Pittsburgh, which is preparing high school dropouts for GED testing.

And this is in a city called Braddock, Pennsylvania.

So, about Braddock.

Braddock was a mill town that sprang up with a ton of others along the Monongahela River after Carnegie set up his first mill in the 1870s.

You know, steel, steel, steel times.

And then, and then Rust Times, Rust Belt Times.

And then Rust, yeah, Steel Times, Rust Times.

My new, my new book.

In 1920, this Braddock had a population of about 21,000.

And a century later, it was 2,100.

And

they sent into this

do-gooding oath to say you could learn a lot from an oath.

Yeah.

And they did.

He was just sent there, like a kind of like a village priest.

Yeah.

I mean, he says that when he gets there, about 90% of the housing stock is in the landfill or empty lots.

He also,

in the early 2000s, a city manager stole like 200 grand from the town, which doesn't sound like that much, but they only have 2,100 people and everybody's poor.

Yeah.

So in the post-war boom times in western Pennsylvania, many of the white families got away from the mills and into like wealthy Pittsburgh suburbs.

So redlining also kept the black population away from the post-war prosperity.

And many of the black residents in the area ended up in a public housing complex near the mill in Braddock in the 50s, basically living adjacent.

Suddenly, Colonel Tom Wells Fargo doesn't sound very fun anymore.

No.

Basically,

this huge resident population in Braddock now living basically adjacent to a big steel furnace.

So great for everybody's health

in the 50s and onward braddock gets a reputation as a place you can uh sort of indulge uh heroin secret gambling dens things of this nature yeah it's a little like um

uh a little like uh vernon early days vernon a little bit

they call it pennsylvania's vernon no nobody has ever called it that i'm the first person to call it that yeah uh things get even worse uh when the mills begin to close in the 80s and that's also when crack shows up yeah it says on the front of the Kennedy School of Government, crazy how that happened on its own.

Yeah, we've uncovered,

we just dusted off the pediment of the Kennedy School of Government and uncovered some more words carved in there.

Blowing dust off the Kennedy School of Government pediment.

Yeah, doing like an MIT prank where in the middle of the night,

you just come out and chisel on the cracker epidemic happened out of nowhere to the front of the Kennedy School of Government.

U.S.

Steel still has two blast furnaces in the area, but it is not a huge employer.

Fetterman works at the youth program for a couple of years, but he moves to Braddock proper in 2004.

And in 2005, he runs for mayor, which is the preview of this show, if you were paying attention to the previous 30 episodes.

He says later he did not expect.

Yeah, yeah.

He says later he didn't expect to win, but he was trying to call more attention.

to the violence affecting the young people of the town.

It is a three-way Democratic primary and he wins by a single vote.

This is the monkey's paw curling, right?

Like never run for mayor because the mayoralty, as we know from the Metaculous, has a kind of power of its own, right?

It shifts things.

And so you can go from being this kind of like seemingly perfectly, you know, reasonable do-gooder

to the oath that we know and despise now.

Yeah.

From good oath to evil oaf by a span of one vote.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah it's like uh the mayoralty is almost like sort of grasping in your hands a pamphlet for the harvard kennedy center

so the winner the kennedy centers

that's that's also a very deep state thing but in a different way now that's the kind of the yeah yeah that's the gay deep state or it was until the the purges yeah that he wins over two like lifetime residents of the town and it's basically credited to the fact that he's got like an army of young men that he helped get geds in the town and they're all out there knocking on doors for him he has he has an army of

little brothers then.

Yeah.

So again, this is, I know I'm always drawing connections with other mayors.

He's like James Michael Curley.

He went and he got everyone GEDs.

Yeah.

And now they put on their Fetterman top hats, which because he's an oath, the top pops off of like a soup can.

And then

they went around knocking on doors for him.

Yeah.

And

created the situation where now he's inflicted on the entire world.

Yeah.

You know, I'm reading here from a Penn Live article when he was running for Congress in 2015.

You know,

a longtime resident of the town, her name is Phyllis Greathouse Brown.

The first time she saw him, she goes, I knew with these kids, it was black and white kids.

He wasn't a skinhead.

I'm being honest.

You know, it's, you know, I'm also sharing a little anecdote here from that.

That same woman, I think it's kind of illuminating for where he was at.

early in his tenure.

Although

some of her family members haven't taken to Fetterman, a cousin ran against him in 2013.

Greathouse Brown became one of his strongest supporters.

Fetterman's compassion and drive remind Greathouse Brown of her father, who worked several jobs and helped out extended family whenever they ran into financial trouble.

She now volunteers at the free store, a no-charge thrift store right out of a shipping container on Braddock Avenue.

You know, she's sort of like, oh, there's a bit where she talks about she got cleaned off alcohol and crack.

uh another woman sorry got got cleaned off alcohol and crack eight years ago the six-year-old fetterman helped her get a job the six-year-old says sorry fetterman helped helped her get a job as a crossing guard, periodically checked to see how he could help.

One day he drove up with a refurbished bicycle she could use to get to work.

I was standing there and he said, Dee Dee, this is for you.

She recalls, they gave me a second chance.

They believed in me, but I didn't believe in myself.

This is sort of a spiritual fable as well of

how that kind of desire to help people can also be twisted by and into ambition.

Yeah.

If you find that you do all of these good works and what you have is then a kind of body of young people who feel very indebted to you personally that you can get to do things for you, then I think that's a sort of a hard thing to then put down again.

Yeah, it's like if Fetterman wanted to carry on this vocation, but without ultimately turning into what he became, even like what he became kind of as mayor as well, not just as Senator Sec, right?

If he wanted to continue this vocation, he should have just like made being kind a hobby because

just be just wanting to do good things for people is very different from having a sort of thorough political vision and sense of justice.

Yes.

And I mean, this is also a part of ofness, too.

I submit that ofatude is inherently a, like by its nature, a tragic thing.

There is a tragedy to

ofary.

And that's where we're going with this.

The tragedy of the oaf.

Tale is old as time.

The oafs lament.

The oafs lament.

So the Braddock Free Store, by the way, that I referred to, was founded in 2012 by Fetterman's wife, Giselle, who is a former undocumented immigrant and a lady that seems all told, still kind of cool.

They have the most bizarre meet cute I've ever read about in my life.

I'm reading here from...

Yeah, she worked at the post office and you came in to keep licking stamps in front of her.

I'm reading from a website called the New American Economy, who profiled her.

In 2007, 2007, when she was in her mid-20s, Brazilian immigrant Giselle Fetterman read an article about Braddock, Pennsylvania.

I wrote a letter and the mayor, John Carl Fetterman, wrote back.

She says, her initial fascination with Braddock was sparked by a magazine article she read about the town.

She learned that a lot of steel in the U.S.

came from Braddock and from other nearby towns and that some local steel was used to build the Brooklyn Bridge.

The mayor invited her to visit and one year later, they were married.

This is, I mean, this is charming to me.

Like she- It's charming, but also what a bizarre letter to write.

It's like hearing about a town and being like, that sounds pretty cool.

I'll write the mayor.

Again, it's

like all of these, these very nice things, like curiosity about, you know, I want to find out about the world around me.

I want to like take a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge and think, where did that steel come from?

Let me, let me, let me write about this.

And then the next thing you know, you are trapped in a speeding car with God's perfect imbecile who is busy watching IDF kill cam videos on his phone in one hand and fumbling a big gulf in the other

yeah

sliding diagonally across eight lanes of freeway

and you're thinking what did i do to get into this and the answer is nothing you did something that was kind of interesting once yeah yeah

look if we could ever do like kind of low stakes time travel to fix history what if you could do worse than traveling back to that part of the Brooklyn Bridge and then just answering all of Giselle's questions about it so that she didn't feel a need to like

follow up with with the mayor of Braddock.

That's not my intercept.

My intercept is to find the one person who was going to vote for John Fetterman to be mayor of Braddock the first time and keep that person at home.

Just like start vamping and doing like doing a vaudeville action to entertain.

Just

tip in a straw voter torling.

Wouldn't you rather go to one of Braddock's incredible illegal gambling dens with me?

What's your game?

I left all my furniture in Pittsburgh.

I need you to drive me over there to help me pick it up.

And it'll take the whole day and it has to be today.

I'm so sorry.

I desperately need your help.

I have a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain.

It's only one boat.

I have to get it across the Mononga Halo right now.

I spilled this enormous bag of rice and I needed to know exactly how many grains were in it.

So how is he as mayor besides being a sort of a helpful man about about town?

So he's doing this like a lot of very like, yeah, fairy tale stuff.

He like lives in a church basement and then in a shipping container and then a car dealership.

He's getting an urban farm going with grants from like the Heinz Corporation.

Gun crime did actually reduce significantly on his watch.

There's even a five-year stretch with no murders at all.

Every murder that happens while he is mayor, he gets a tattoo of the date on his watch.

This is a weird thing to do.

This is a weird thing to do.

Let me underline that right now.

That's

weird.

The mayor has two bodies, they say.

One for all the tattoos.

If you don't know where things were going, up until this point, you'd have been like, this seems like a sort of oddball, but well-meaning and sort of fine mayor.

The sort of mayor that might just start buying Wild West memorabilia.

If we compare someone like Sarah Palin in Wasilla or even someone like Naebukele, right?

Yeah.

Against, you know, our beloved mayor of Squim,

this is a really like, you need to have listened to previous episodes to get this one.

Being mayor of a poor town specifically seems to have its own set of temptations, whether that's sort of ostentatious wealth, like I am going to have the nicest pickup truck or something deeper and in its own way darker,

like this.

Yeah.

So I guess I have this later in the notes, but crucially, at this point, he is making $150 a month, I think, as the mayor.

And he is being largely supported by his family.

Just, I mean,

crazy to have to bring your own mayor supplies to City Hall.

Well, it means that now that like so many mayors, mayoralties are internships, it means that either you just need a rich family to be mayor or you have to do what Francis Suarez did and work 12 gig economy jobs.

Yeah.

With quit Emmanuel.

Yeah.

So anyways, he's like, he also, there's like, they were going to destroy the, they destroyed the hospital in Braddock, which was the biggest employer in town.

He goes into the building.

He refuses to leave.

He gets arrested.

Pretty cool.

You know, that's not to say he was without his critics during his time in Braddock.

He used to feud constantly with the borough council president, Jesse Brown.

I'm reading here from, I think, the Penn Live article.

Yeah.

From Brown's perspective, Federman often acted unilaterally in realizing his vision.

In one of their most public battles, Brown asked the town's code enforcement officer to cite Federman for a permit violation at a property owned by his nonprofit.

A judge later dismissed the citation because the officer could not prove anyone was occupying the building.

Yeah, he was occupying the hospital.

Yeah, he does what he wants, and that he does what he wants to do, and that's a problem, says Brown, who says that Fetterman was also receiving credit for a lot of work that began years before he arrived.

That doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, so, you know, a lot of longtime residents are also saying that Fetterman is like reshaping the town to his vision with mostly new, mostly white residents, business owners.

eventually displacing the existing mostly black residents.

Fetterman, yeah, is being kept afloat by this family money.

And he's doing this thing where he is maybe just kind of doing whatever he wants with his foundation and going around the town council.

All of these things you say to me, I imagine a big anthropomorphic Kennedy school of government going, this is my son in whom I am well pleased, you know, like, because this is, this is so like on the nose for a lot of this stuff, especially the gentrification.

Yeah.

He's, he, you know, he, he was never, he never lied about this.

He said, my family helps keep our heads above water and public and stuff.

He also says he never sought out all this.

He starts getting written up a lot because he's like offering like $1 artist lofts and stuff to people.

He says he's never sought out the media attention.

He's also made a point to reject any offer that lacks a clear path to helping the community.

Amid the flurry of press attention, including a Rollstone profile, a TED talk, and interviews on the Colbert Rapport.

He's received over the last decade dozens of offers to turn the story of the tattooed mayor into a reality show.

He turns all those down.

The tattooed mayor sounds like a Barnum exhibit.

I actually, I think that they should have made him a real housewife.

Like they should have just put him on one of the real housewives shows.

Not even like make a new real housewife shows.

Just have him be a character on real housewives of like Salt Lake City.

He's got to commute to Salt Lake City.

Yeah.

He's got to commute to Salt Lake City for it.

Yeah.

I mean, none of those ladies live in Salt Lake City either.

It's fine.

They're all living in like Airbnbs.

So, you know, contrast all that, what he says about the help or whatever, with a $1 million investment made in the town by the Levi's Corporation in in 2010, which is where he came to my attention with an ad campaign in 2010.

Fetterman helps orchestrate this ad campaign.

The ads are from ad giant Whedon and Kennedy, which you might remember as like the quirky ad firm from the 2010s.

So you might need to help me out here because

I haven't lived in North America

since like 2010.

You're not keeping up with that genes.

I might need you to help me a little bit with what you mean by the quirky ads.

Okay, so like, they're the, well, they're like the ones that like, you know, you'd see an ad and just be like a lot of like random humor in it like those old spice ads where a guy is a centaur or something oh yeah yeah yeah okay and they're also if you've watched portlandia um it is the building with the it's the ad agency with the nest in the building that people would go meet in sometimes okay so it's like it's it's it's big it's big money is behind it

Big, annoying money.

It's the reason why so many things came to be called Reddit.

Yes.

Yeah.

So there's an NPR article I am reading from here.

The most obvious criticism of the Levi's campaign is one Fetterman swats away quickly.

The genes are not made in America anymore.

Everyone agrees that we'd love to have these jeans produced here in America, he says.

All of us participate in buying the lowest priced goods.

I never wanted to get involved in solving all the ills of globalization.

We just wanted to showcase the community, create the community center, and do it in a way that is dignified.

There are local critics with more nuanced beefs, however.

Resident and filmmaker Tony Buba was born in Braddock and is Tony Buba.

B-U-B-A.

I might be pronouncing it it wrong.

Tony Buba.

And his Tony Buba.

Yeah, Tony.

Tony Booba is what I call my doctor.

Tony Buba, Tony Buba, the baseline of the brass band.

Because 89-year-old mother still sees shouts.

Fuck.

I never knew there were that many Finn people in Braddock until I watched those spots.

Tony Kiki went to jail in Montreal for bid-ringing alongside Tony and Urso.

Thank you.

Quote: I never knew there were that many thin people in Braddock until I watched those spots or that many people with six-pack ads.

You don't see anyone 300 pounds and wearing a pair of Levi's jeans walking across the screen.

Oh, don't worry.

If you want 300 pounds Braddock representation, this man is about to make your entire life.

This is, again, the kind of the monkey's paw, right?

Yeah.

And the, and the ads are all like, it's just like, it's time to work, America.

And it's just like these like beautiful shots of wheat fields and like people running in jeans.

And like, it's like very like that sort of like post-financial crisis like let's repopulate the rust belt uh with with white artists or whatever please come here uh like do like be an urban yeah explorer colonizer whatever you want to call it like my my my understanding was around this time about 25 of the american economy was based on jeans running like running around in jeans in a cornfield

you know you you got your job as a jeans runner and then it was its own sort of like little bubble yeah i was doing it part-time trying to get my career off the ground.

So, oh, urban pioneers.

Sorry.

Yes, which is what one Braddock native artist, Latoya Ruby Frazier, took extreme issue with.

Oh, God, was this the ad with the reading of Pioneers, oh, pioneers?

I believe so.

Of course it was.

Yes.

Or a very similar one.

It's the same kind of era of Levi's.

Yes.

Yeah.

So this one artist who's a, from Braddock, mounted an entire series of work criticizing the campaign and Fetterman, including a long video where she donned expensive Levi's jeans and a trucker jacket and rubbed herself all over the sidewalk outside of Levi's Soho store in Manhattan until they frayed and ripped.

She's asking, like, who is moving to town and for what?

Like, artists could get $1 lofts, but the Monongahela was still one of the most polluted waterways in the country.

The city had cut its bus routes down, and the hospital was gone.

Like, what does he make?

Who is what's his vision for the town, right?

Like, he's getting famous.

He's like running around giving everybody bicycles.

Like, what's he actually doing?

This is astute.

This is, uh, I mean, first of all, this lady sounds like she rules, but second of all, to

realize,

admittedly from direct personal observation, but this early in what becomes a kind of national story that there is a real darkness in John Fasserman.

Yeah.

Also, you know, if the uh, there's this, so there's this thing that we haven't really discussed on this show yet, but this is like there's a writing of um of someone we know about this concept, the city beautiful or the city.

The city authentic, the city authentic.

This is like John, John, which we're just to briefly describe the theory of it.

I think we're going to probably talk about some city authentic stuff more directly before we won.

We'll talk about it ideally with the author.

This is David Banks, who is on Iron Weeds, the podcast.

Great book.

But I think it's worth bringing it up now that it's like what Federman's vision for Braddock is not to make it better for the people who live there, but to almost like create an ersatz Brooklyn to raise property values.

Essentially, what if I just took this and put some medicine bulbs in and someone like and we made this like decaying warehouse that's like sinking into the toxic river into live work artist lofts, that'll solve all of our problems because we'll all get rich from ad campaigns.

Yeah.

Well,

your sort of prototypical example of the city authentic is you have.

like an entertainment space or something that's named after the industrial space that it used to be and has some shit like that on the walls.

So if you have an old steel mill, you call it the old steel mill and you have a steel mill mill-themed mock tail or something.

I mean, this was Harrisburg, too.

The same shit happened, but a little more,

you know, more seriously.

Oh, I mean, it shows up everywhere.

Glasgow has tons of it.

Yeah.

Black residents of the town also wondered if a non-white mayor would be getting all this attention and would be able to dress that way, which is a great question.

Fetterman's attire also irks.

Yeah, have we talked about how he dresses?

Because I think many of the listeners know, but if you don't,

John Fetterman Fetterman has a kind of object attachment thing, like a bound weapon, right?

In the same way that Tim Paul

has the hat that's surgically grafted to his head.

He's got a plus two beanie.

Yeah, the plus two beanie.

If I take the whole thing off, will you die?

No, John Fetterman.

Which would be very painful.

You're a bald guy.

Are you?

There we go.

That's a little dramatic reading.

Sorry.

John Fetterman has the

surject grafted

big basketball shorts and a big hoodie.

Big hoodie.

Yes.

So

the Brown, the borough council president, was also irked by the way he dressed.

And he goes, I hope he takes those shorts.

He later said, I hope he takes those shorts off if he goes to Washington.

I hope he dresses a little better than he's dressing now.

No, no, just leave that sentence right there.

Yeah.

How does the gift of prophecy feel?

Hey, J.

Hey, John, nice basketball shorts.

I wish you'd take him off.

You know what I mean?

I hope he goes to Washington wearing an XXXL hoodie and nothing else.

Yeah.

Which is he wearing an XXXL hoodie that he has to sort of be pulling down?

He's winning the pooing the way around

the camera.

Yeah, like the egg moment when I was a kid when I had t-shirts that were slightly too long on me and I used to pull them down and think they were a dress.

Yeah.

That kind of thing.

Yeah.

Oh shit.

I would do that all the time.

Yeah.

I just, you know, sometimes you just remember stuff.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That's weird.

I wonder if I should do anything about that.

Probably not.

I don't know.

I haven't done anything about it yet.

So I'm waiting for my friend Riley to start.

Riley, you do it.

And then depending on how that seems, maybe I'll do it.

Yeah, there we go.

Cool.

So anyways, he goes on as mayor for a while.

He wins re-election easily a bunch of times.

In 2013, here's a little article, ABC News locally.

Braddock Mayer detains Jogger after hearing possible gunshots.

Those were just footfalls.

Yeah.

Armed with a shotgun, Braddock Mayor John Fetterman followed and confronted a man after hearing what he thought to be gunfire in the streets last weekend.

Fetterman told ABC News reporter Bob Mayo, don't comment, that he hurried to get his young son inside his home when he heard about a dozen gunshots that sounded like they came from an assault rifle around 4 p.m.

Saturday on Parker Avenue.

Fetterman said he saw a man take off on foot, wearing a face mask and goggles.

He thought the person might be associated with a gunfire.

So he called 911, got into his truck, and pursued.

I didn't know if it was a rampage.

I didn't know if it was a drive-by.

I didn't understand.

No one could know what was going on at that point, other than a large number of shots were fired from what sounded like a high-powered rifle, said Federman.

So I made a decision as a parent and as a mayor to intervene.

I made it.

First responders could get there.

Yeah, I'm putting you under mayor's arrest.

Executive privilege at the mayoral level.

I have a story that I won't tell on this episode, but which is central to the Pete Butajej episode that I will one day write when the Mayor Taculus tells me to.

And when we get to that, I want you to remind me of this because they are very thematically close.

Yeah, there's Mayor Pete chased a guy down on his own bicycle, blowing a kazoo at him.

Mayor Pete did a kind of liberal analogy to this.

It's very strange.

I can't wait.

Like he was on a tandem bicycle with his husband, which, in fairness, you have to say, is a loving relationship.

God, I hate these funny.

You got to say it.

You got to say it.

That was pretty good.

So, anyways, he chases this guy around with a fucking shotgun and he goes, and he says, I did remove a weapon from my car, but I did not point it at him.

In fact, I didn't even have a round chamber to the safety off.

Oh, okay.

Thanks, John.

Yeah, which is easy to know.

You'd be like, hey, there's no round chamber to that gun.

I'm in no danger.

And I mean, he self-deputized.

And,

you know,

it's such a strange thing to do, but even strange is to do that explicitly under the auspices of your mayoralty to be like, because I was elected mayor of this town, it's not just my, my, my sort of like privilege, but it's also my responsibility to chase my constituents around with a shotgun.

No, only if I think that maybe they're suspicious.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The guy that they, the one they were chasing, the police showed up.

They couldn't find any weapons on him.

He, the guy named Chris Miares, said that he also thought he heard gunfire, but it was probably kids shooting off bottle rockets.

The mayor described the situation as confusing and scary.

Well, won't be the last time you experience those emotions, John.

Again, I think it's always a great policy if you are kind of a person who is easily startled by mysterious occurrences to have

a loaded firearm ready to go?

I think so.

I think if you're a person who is like jumpy and reactive and easily angered and also confused,

your goal should be to accumulate more power.

That's right.

Uh-huh.

So

he's not been charged with wrongdoing.

He says, I believe I did the right thing, but I may have broken the law during the course of it.

You know, I'm certainly not above the law, but what I did, I did in a split second out of concern as a father and a mayor.

Again, I'm seeing the Cunnedty School of Public Policy, the

Balkan Intervention Wing.

I'm dusting off the pediment there.

What I did as a father and a mayor.

Yeah.

Anyways, so that happened.

What's to do, my friends, once the Levi's trucks have gone and you fix the city by building an urban garden or whatever question mark, the city council hates you.

You've pulled a shotgun on a resident.

You simply go onward and upward.

What you've done is you you have quote unquote fixed Braddock by

building a single shipping container.

You have turned the city of Braddock from a like very deprived town into a rocket booster for yourself.

Yeah.

And in so doing, have like

presumably also made it more difficult for the people who live there by making it pretty much obvious that your plan is to replace them with higher higher-earning, largely white people

who migrate to the city.

Migrants in Aqua.

Yes, yes.

You're going to fix Braddock not by making the life better of the people who live there, but by replacing it with people for whom, I don't know, the American state finds it easier to care for.

Yeah,

an obvious lesson here about personalities for anyone to be like, if you have a kind of charismatic person who does not have a kind of clear political tendency or allegiance or one that they seem to kind of waver about, then they're not taking you with them upwards.

Right.

That bicycle is just to get around town.

That bicycle can't go all the way to Washington, D.C.

with him.

So in 2015, you know, it's like he treats Braddock like it's an individual.

Like it's an individual he's helping.

It's someone, it's like, oh, I'm going to go like fix this crossing guard's life and buy them a bicycle and all that good stuff.

He's like, okay, well, I'm going to fix Braddock.

I'm going to fix Braddock by sort of copy-pasting a bunch of other things that are sort of in the zeitgeist of how to do urban renewal, quote unquote, in the Rust Belt, which you get all over like upstate New York as well.

And what it mostly does is raise property values and drive people further out who already lived there.

How demeaning to be a guy's starter city?

I was going to say Braddock is like the wife from the first third of a biopic.

You know, like just fully like, you never believed in me.

I'm out of here.

In In 2015, he runs for Senate.

He manages 20% of the primary vote despite

not really having any endorsements from anybody, but he loses it to someone who had a huge war chest and an Obama endorsement named Katie McGuinty, who she loses to Pat Toomey anyways, who's a Republican.

In 2017, he announces he's running for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania.

The incumbent is embeddled with some mistreatment allegations from staffers and also state troopers.

I don't know how you mistreat a state trooper, but that's the story.

Well, I mean, ask Andrew Cuomo.

It seems like just it's it, you get into any government.

Ask Sarah Palin.

Yeah, exactly.

You get into any kind of governor's office, and really, you know, that's a parallel podcast, no governors, no mares, because that's its own separate, different kind of neurosis from mayoralty.

We can license that out and get a cut.

I think so.

I would love to, I would, if you, if you're interested in making no governors, no mayors, we will, we will happily lend you our impremature.

Um, but so

maybe, maybe let's leave ourselves governors for 2027.

But so, uh, because,

yeah, we transitioned the podcast to no governors, no mess.

Because there are a bunch of state troopers around.

And if you're Andrew Cuomo or whoever else, you're like, well, I'm going to sexually harass someone.

I'm Italian.

It just eventually...

Just by law of averages, one of those people will be a state trooper.

Can you materially oppress a cop?

Well, no, but you can definitely sexually harass one.

Yeah.

That's not meant to be like an empowering thing, to be clear.

Don't do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Going for a cop's service penis.

Thank you.

No.

You can't just grab the service penis.

They're specially designed so you have to like pop the thing back.

No, it's I told you it's not a chastity cage.

It actually prevents my service penis from being an active retention system.

Oh, my God.

So he gets the lieutenant governor primary win.

He ends up as lieutenant governor.

The first thing you notice is they gave cops a bunch of those like push-button chastity cages that led to a bunch of them like coming on their own legs.

That's a safari-land joke for anyone who's really, really up on like holster politics.

You can see a video of an ATF agent giving a talk about gun safety to kids and then shooting himself in the leg.

It's an incredible statement.

It's beautiful.

The paperwork that you got to fill out with a negligent discharge like that.

So the first thing he does, he goes to every Pennsylvania county and he makes a report on legalizing marijuana.

He flies a pride flag and a marijuana leaf flag from his office window.

With the same flag?

Okay.

Do you think, do you think the International Stoners Conclave is also voting on the weed flag every year?

I mean, it's, yeah.

It would have been a very John Fetterman move to be like, I'm going to add stoners to the pride flag and then create a new constituency.

The weed conclave.

Yeah.

And I'm an omnibus bill in the state senate.

says that he cannot do that with the flags, but he does it anyways because you don't tell Johnny what to do.

He's a rebel.

And I mean, that's how he pitched himself in Rolling Stone.

It's how he pitched himself to Stephen Colbert.

He's not like, he's not partisan.

He just wants to be a trick.

He's a firebrand.

Also, that's like why he gets the Bernie Sanders endorsement because he kind of, he kind of looks like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, Bernie Sanders endorses him for a lieutenant governor.

So what else does he do?

Not much.

Here's an article from the AP in 2022.

Fetterman records show light schedule.

In his campaign for a crucial U.S.

Senate seat, Democrat John Fetterman takes credit for reinventing Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor's office, transforming it from a political pit stop into a bully pulpit from which he's advanced progressive causes.

Records from Fetterman's four terms in office, however, four years in office, however, offer a different portrait of his time in the $179,000 a year elected job.

They show Fetterman typically kept a light work schedule and was often absent from state business, including presiding over the state senate, which is one of his chief duties, according to an associated press review of his calendars and records.

His office schedule was blank, one-third of all workdays.

The day he did work was often only four to five hours.

He was only at half of all sessions in 2020 and only a third in 2021 of the Senate.

That's pretty cool, but it also foreshadows something that we know is going to happen to him later, right?

John Fetterman is not a show up to the office every day kind of mayor.

No.

Or looks such kind of guy.

I know.

Work sucks.

I know.

He left me roses by the stairs.

I guess you have to.

John Fetterman left me roses by the stairs.

He broke into my house to do it, and I'm worried he has a firearm.

So

one thing I don't know, and I wonder if it's even possible to know, is it sucks?

Because I do know that.

Yeah,

I do know that.

One thing I don't know if it's possible to know is from what is on the public record about John Fetterman at this point is all of the personality traits.

that are now very much public knowledge, like his volatility, his personal, quite extreme volatility.

yeah how much of the how much of the seeds of that were already there like how much of this is like personality yeah

just ingrained in him yeah it's an interestingly like like embodied or sort of like mind-body problem

for for the oath yeah i can kind of answer that a little bit where it seems like his relationship with Like, you know, he doesn't drop to work at the lieutenant governor's office.

He

like he like doesn't go to city council meetings as mayor of Braddock.

He like never goes because the council doesn't like him because he keeps going around them to do stuff with his charity instead of like, they're pretty gridlocked, apparently, the city council.

And he just like, we'll be like, well, my charity will just build the urban farm then.

So the council doesn't like him.

So he just doesn't go to the meetings and doesn't have a relationship with the town.

So it seems like he's sort of like, in as much as he has a vision for what he wants to do, he just wants to do it and is kind of grumpy to anyone who doesn't like it.

Now, you wonder, yeah, we'll get to the other stuff in a second, but it's the sort of thing where it's like, you know, was Phineas Gage an asshole before the railroad spike went through his head?

Yeah.

A little bit, but then the railroad spike went through his head and it got rid of the part that was filtering the part of him that was an asshole.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm wondering here.

Yeah, that's my, my, I can't, I don't know him personally.

I can't psychoanalyze this guy.

But my best guess is it seems like he was kind of a prick and then became a huge prick.

Because he became a disinhibited prick.

Yeah.

They took the prick inhibitor off of him.

So one good thing he did do when he was lieutenant governor was he oversaw a really good amount of commutations and pardons for incarcerated people in Pennsylvania.

He threatened running for AG against Josh Shapiro unless he pardoned more people.

I would have seen that

autopsy report that Shapiro hushed up about 15 billion times.

The one with all the knife wounds.

Yeah, the stab myself 12 times in the back as a suicide.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

He doesn't have a lot of grease, so that's funny.

Anyways, he tangles with Chump.

With Chump, that's what I call it.

Got him.

He tangles with a guy named Donald Trump, who apparently used to be the first one.

He tangles with Donald Trump, actually.

Donald Trump, who was

dangerous Donald Trump.

He tangles with Dangerous Donald about election fraud stuff very publicly in 2020, which kind of raises his profile again.

In 2021, he enters the Senate race for 2022.

He wins a Democratic primary in a landslide, despite basically no major endorsements.

But I guess it's also because he's been building himself up as a national brand for the previous 12 years.

Yeah.

And like

the Democratic Party is kind of like, we don't care about this guy.

It's also the story of the incredible flimsiness of the Obama machine, where you had the opportunity for

like a generation of appointments and endorsements,

if not little Obamas out there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And just squandering that absolutely.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

So he

wins the primary, but right before he has a stroke and his wife Giselle is to give the victory speech because he's in the hospital.

He still beats Dr.

Mehmet Oz by a decent art margin after essentially pinning down that he's just some guy from New Jersey and not even does not even live in Pennsylvania.

He's like flying like

messages to him at the Jersey Shore

in Pennsylvania being like, enjoy the Jersey Shore, Dr.

Oz.

Like, it's very.

It's fun.

It's a fun.

Yeah, it's fun.

He gets like snooky to like endorse Dr.

Oz.

It's funny.

It's pretty good.

And Dr.

Oz would have been a weirder senator.

I think so.

Would we say weirder?

Is he in the government now?

He must be.

I'm not sure.

I'm not current on what Dr.

Oz is doing is the thing.

Yeah.

I like the idea of

the administrator of the centers for fucking Medicaid and Medicare.

I want to kill myself, I think.

I got to stop saying that on air.

I'm not going to kill myself.

I'm going to throw myself a big parade.

Hell is empty and all the devils are employed by the federal government.

And it says that on the Kennedy School of Government, weirdly.

It's a very, very heavily ornamented building.

It looks like the Sagrada Familia.

It's like...

I was going to say it looks like the Tosh Mahal, where it's like the archway.

It's like they can't actually depict anything at the Harvard School.

So it's actually all text.

Or on the outside of the the building is the decoration, but it's all mottos.

Yeah, it's a repeating geometric thing that seems to evoke the image of JFK's head being blown apart.

But it's just stuff like...

You can't portray JFK.

You have to portray him as like a flame.

Anyways.

So we're now into like the national news zone.

So there's not like a ton left I want to cover really, but we're all familiar with his senatorial career.

And I'm here to ask you, yeah, where does the mayoral soul lie?

Is he behaving municipally or has something happened to him?

No,

I think this is still mayor spirit, right?

And I think he was, he was elected in order to take the idiosyncrasy of being a mayor to Congress, right?

Interesting.

He kept that through the lieutenant governorship.

Yeah.

Because he barely did any lieutenant governor things, not that there are really things to do.

He kept being the thing that a mayor is in part, which is a big showman and a kind of salesman, sort of a pitch man for the thing, for the city, for the Commonwealth, and then on the sort of on the national stage again, and just sort of like trying to do things unilaterally and being a big personality and being very sort of,

you know, confrontational.

And to me, in my head, he is an overgrown mayor.

He is a mayor who has escaped containment.

The city hall is sort of built to hold these personalities, right?

And then eventually sometimes you see one of them like lumbering down towards the village below and you're like, oh, God.

The wall's been breached.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

He still has a lot of trouble communicating post-stroke.

And in February 23, he is hospitalized again for lightheadedness and he works and lives at a Walter Reed hospital for a couple of months.

So it is really...

for a little yeah there i got some stuff here from the that new york magazine profile if we'd like to chat about the one everyone read, which is devastating.

Yes, I would love to talk about that because I've still been thinking about it.

Yeah.

So, okay, here we go.

Since winning election in 2022, he has lost his closest advisors, including three of his top spokespeople, his legislative director and the former chief of staff, Adam Gentleson, who is also the main story on this, the main source on the story.

Crazy because that guy was like glazing his boss on Twitter every single time.

It would tell you that.

He was also like,

you would mention.

Yeah, like your boss is supporting, enthusiastically supporting a genocide, and you would get like a sort of an um sweetie.

Well, you know, this is what it's like, actually wielding electoral power.

Finally, at some point, this guy shows him too many like dead Palestinian videos on his phone.

By the way, that's that's a thing that I heard about Federman myself personally is him watching like combat footage from Ukraine and and uh and like Gaza just on his phone obsessively.

And that isn't a detail that i i saw make it into the new york article uh i so i don't know if that's supportable john fetterman please do not sue me but it sounds credible to me i'll say that yeah um just one of the most black pilling experiences you can have on the internet to just watch like kind of gore videos you know like yeah and early in february 2023 after federman had been sworn in members of the senate gathered at the library of congress for a caucus retreat fetterman fresh off a hard-fought victory in the cycles marquee race, should have been riding high, only he wasn't.

A staffer recalled getting a text from a person at the retreat asking if their boss was okay.

Fetterman was sitting at a table by himself, slowly sipping a Coke and refusing to talk to anyone.

Okay, well, let's not go crazy here.

Sometimes

later that day, another staffer had heard an alarming report from a journalist.

Federman had just walked obliviously into the road and was nearly struck by a car.

And at the at the aforementioned Walter Reed's day, he's basically not, he's supposed to be on this like strict medication regimen and he's supposed to get regular blood checks.

And his staffers are basically saying anonymously in New York Mac that he's not doing any of it.

And then apparently in September 2023, Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney team up for the show, Our Respects to the Senate Act, aka the Shorts Act.

It requires male senators to wear a coat, tie, and slacks.

whenever they were on the Senate floor, and it passes by unanimous consent.

I think Mitt Romney should have stuck a rider in that bill that you also have to wear the Magic Mormon underwear.

It's interesting, interesting kind of like food chain dynamics to get humiliated by Mitt Romney, a man who has himself been humiliated by Trump.

Yeah.

Outwardly Fetterman played it cooled, offering his official statement as a photograph of Piatric Evan James smiling sheepishly, but behind the scenes, he stewed.

He was absolutely irate, said a former staffer.

And that's what soured him on the Democratic caucus.

A few weeks after that was October 6, 2023.

And we all know what he has been like since then.

And I mean, he had always been a Zionist, to be clear.

He had said that.

And I mean, a lot of the endorsements and a lot of the kind of more progressive excitement about it was premised on ignoring that and being like, oh, well, you know, he's got to say what he's got to say to get elected in Pennsylvania, or you have to accept some, you know, some weird quirks sometimes in your politicians, but he's going to do more good than, you know, the other guy.

But no, he was, he was always like this.

Yeah.

And is now much more so.

Yeah.

But I mean, in this article, too, it's saying that like Giselle is like in the office, like getting in arguments with him.

And she's yelling, they're bombing refugee camps.

How can you support this?

And he says to her, it's all propaganda.

Later, she like pulled the staffer aside and she was like, what's going on here?

Like, can you like...

I'd love some language to like separate myself from this.

And then she denied this to New York Magazine that this happened.

But genuinely, I feel so bad for Giselle Fasserman because

I mean, like, I saw two diverging takes on this on Twitter, right?

Um, and I didn't actually get into it with anyone, but the takes that I saw were essentially,

you know, this is uh

why, why would she not just leave this terrifying, powerful man, right?

Uh, doesn't she have the agency to do that?

And it's like at one point, he literally crashes a car with her in the passenger seat.

Yeah, like

I'd like to see you escape the oaf's castle alone.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean,

this is a man with a massive reach, you know.

You have to solve his riddle.

You got to get out from under his reach.

To be fair, the riddle is pretty easy.

Yeah, it's like I have a chicken

and a bonus, and I need to move it across the river.

There's only just the chicken, though.

Nothing else.

What walks on four legs in the morning, four legs in the afternoon, four legs at night?

The answer is doll.

The thing is, if you are just a little bit more...

He doesn't know the answer.

And I'm not saying this to laugh at you.

Genuinely.

You have to finesse a way to do this in a way that he doesn't kill the entire family and then himself.

This being one of the classic white boy activities.

Now, now that white boys have been moved on from the given a job at Wells Fargo automatically stage to the murder-suicide phase of white supremacy.

Yeah, especially white boy with a head injury.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

You know,

the genocide in Gaza also gets Federen back on X the the Everything app, which he has largely been personally off of.

Posting is so bad for you.

Posting is even worse for you with a brain injury.

Yeah, and he just starts posting again.

I have to mention again, I have slammed my head into two taxicab doors

and I post all the time.

Uh-huh.

No, but if you, if you slam your head into stuff on purpose, then it makes you post worse.

But if you slam your head into stuff by accident, it makes you post better.

So I would just like to say for the record, in terms of

my commitment to the OAF community is about

four years ago, I had surgery and I had a seizure on the operating table.

And it was very scary.

And it was during lockdown.

So like my wife could not be there.

So they like called her and she had to come, get me.

She was like waiting at home, like a burrow away.

And she's in the cab.

She finally gets her takes her like an hour.

But on the cab over, she's texting our friend who's had a seizure also and is like, what does Maddie need?

Like, what, what will she need like when I get there?

And our friend was like, whatever you do, don't let her post.

Get her phone away.

And my wife gets there.

And of course, I have already posted on Twitter, had a seizure LOL.

Let's go.

So critical support to John Fetterman posting, obviously.

Yeah, of course.

Seizure femme, who up?

This bloodthirsty maniac.

Yeah.

So she, you know, she's all, Giselle is also saying.

on speaker phone to Fetterman, apparently yelling, who did I marry?

Where is the man I married?

In group texts, including senior staff for March 2024, staffers are using terms like manic to describe his behavior.

You know, he's saying, quote, unhidden shit, according to one text, and spending all this time on social media.

He's spiraling.

He's doom scrolling.

He's essentially on Twitter all day now.

One of the things that's so weird about any of the like things where someone presses him in public is not just that he says things that are sort of like strange and offensive and genocidal, but also that he genuinely seems like he is, he might like snap, like he might lose control of himself at that moment.

It's, it's,

it's, it's frightening.

He's a frightening man.

Like I

to that, like, yeah, Jendelson writes a letter in May 2024 to the doctor, worried about the recovery.

Jendelson decided it would be best to lay everything out there.

I wanted to do what I could think of to try and help him, he said.

That's why I sent the letter.

He also said he worried that Fetterman could end up inadvertently hurting somebody else.

He engages in risky behavior, he wrote in the letter.

He drives recklessly.

He FaceTimes FaceTimes, texts, and reads entire news articles while driving.

And I don't mean while stopped at a light or something.

He reads and FaceTimes while driving at high speeds.

Less than a month later, Federman caught a red-a-flight back from Los Angeles after taping an episode of Bill Maher's show.

The staff urged him to have someone pick him up from the airport and drive him home, but he refused.

After 8 a.m., according to a police report, Fetterman was traveling at well over the 70 mile per hour speed limit on I-70.

when he smashed his Chevy Traverse into the back of a 62-year-old woman's Impala, totaling both cars.

Giselle had had been in the back seat.

She suffered a pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures.

Federman calling from the side of the road told a staffer that he had fallen asleep at the wheel and handed the phone to a police officer.

It's a miracle no one died, the officer said.

I have a radical position here, which is I don't think this guy should be a senator.

I think if you can't drive a car because of like a cognitive issue.

Yes.

Perhaps you should not like, and again, like I don't, I'm not saying anyone who has a stroke should not be a senator anymore.

anymore uh it is a brain injury is a thing that is normal to have but like this guy clearly is losing his mind a little bit and he's not taking care of himself and he's it's becoming scary it is it is it is frightening it's it's also one of the worst possible things for him himself as well yeah like for his own safety

i yeah and you know we're running a little long here so i just want to say yeah when ben terrorist who's the guy who wrote the profile interviewed federman His entire office is covered in those Israeli propaganda, like kidnapped posters,

which they're all over the streets in America.

I don't know if you see them, but yeah, they're everywhere.

It's already a thing here, but like Israel at this point has directly or indirectly killed a decent chunk of those people.

Yes, of course.

Those people have been, quote, kidnapped who a lot of them are just like New Jerseyans who volunteered for the IDF and got taken as prisoners.

Anyways,

what the staffers say is they've witnessed ups and oh, sorry, he's also not wearing any shoes, crucially, at his office.

Great.

What the staffers say, they've witnessed ups and downs that can be associated with a kind of relapse.

They worry the medication that you're on is not just for depression, but for more serious drugs.

You're not on.

That would be a problem.

Is there truth to that?

He says, I don't have any comment on that.

I'm going to go off record, go off record, go off record.

I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his precious.

Jesus Christ, you put, you, you, you go off record and then you functionally put a journalist from New York Magazine on the spike lead double dolly shot out of your office because whatever you have said is so traumatically weird.

Yeah.

Five minutes later, the door opened.

I was ushered back in.

The office felt different now, quiet and tense.

Fetterman was still in the same chair, but slumped into himself like a deflated parade float.

Oh, that's a lead jack.

His shoes were on now, and he avoided looking at me.

Deflated parade float is how I want to see him credited in like every Chiron and stuff from now on.

Yeah.

I tried to move the conversation to Trump's tariffs and other issues before leaving, but it was plainly clear that his mind was elsewhere.

His voice was low, he barely bothered to look up, his sentences were clipped.

I feel like there's been a kind of a tone shift here, I said, trying to catch his eye.

Can you tell me what you're feeling, what you're thinking?

For the first time since I'd returned to his office, he looked right at me.

No, everything's great, he said, Deadpan.

Everything's great.

I don't know what you're referencing.

Put that around the great seal of the United States for year 2025.

Yeah, the Falcon is being heard just fine, everybody.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Gear status narrow.

Yeah.

Hey, maybe the Falcon here or the Falcon are a little bit better if you'd stop with all the questions.

And also, I think it's worth saying as well, while all of this is happening and he's no longer like directly pumping money into Braddock from his charity.

Yeah.

Like a lot of those businesses that he brought in just closed.

Oh, of course.

Like none of this was sustainable.

None of this was sustainable.

Like, there's like the restaurants that he would, you know, like be like, hey, come open this.

Like, is it you, like, minor celebrity chef?

Come open a restaurant.

The restaurant Superior Motors, which is a classic city authentic thing to do.

It's like, yeah, it's, it's gone.

Like, the brew pub that he encouraged to the town is open half the time.

Part of the promise of that is, I'm going to stay nationally famous and I'm going to come and eat here all the time.

And people are going to see me there.

And then, you know, and then he leaves for Harrisburg and then and then DC and it just none of this happens I think the thing that I think makes this the the oaths tragedy right is also the second coming right but it's it's

the best lack all conviction and the the worst are full of passionate intensity is true within the two parts of John Fetterman you know like I if you believe that he meant any of this stuff in the first place then that he has any kind of like better angels to his nature those are like

not active, right?

Because it's being completely driven by all of the worst parts of his personality, which are just out of control.

And that's horrifying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really kind of a downer episode of comedy podcast.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Hey, why don't we, we could go back to like the trans conclave stuff from the beginning, you know, with like the flags.

That's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

Oh, so the other big event of trans conclave is we announced the list of approved new trans girl names.

And then the approved list of like trans men names as well.

There's a whole non-binary bracket that we don't get into.

I'm going big on like Aiden this year.

Yeah, I was going to say Noah out, Aiden in, Violet out, Truck in.

Yeah.

Also,

it's really crazy that

the person who was elected

like trans pope this year, much like in the film Conclave, turns out that

they took the wrong hormone.

They were actually not intercepted.

Yeah, I was going to say

they're doing the thing where they check under the gown to make sure you're trans.

And they're all like, there's no girl dick under here.

Something's wrong.

If only there was something to do about that.

Sorry.

Anyways, what do you think should be on the flag, Riley?

Oh, the trans flag?

Yeah.

What would you put on that?

You can't give me a design.

What do you think?

When you get in, what will you do?

How about this?

It would be the snake from the Gadsden flag.

Uh-huh.

And underneath it would just be written, everything's fine.

Whatever Fetterman said at the end of the

interview with Jethroson there.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't worry about it.

Everything's fine.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

How about that one?

Uh-huh.

Pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Pretty good flag.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So next year at the Conclave, we'll get that going.

Thank you.

I mean, you'll be there.

We'll start selling that as a t-shirt, possibly.

It'd be pretty easy to mock on.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

we need to do the mayoral sash t-shirt yeah i think that's just just a double pack of the sash and the everything's going to be fine glad uh gadson flags the gladston flagston flag yeah yeah was there was the ski dude there the ski was the ski dude there was how about how about that that would that would also be on the trans flag

was the ski dude there yeah it's like the bear on the california republic flag like it's it's really makes it a bitch to draw but you've got to have him though You got it.

That bear sucks to draw so bad because it doesn't look like a proper bear.

It's a really fucked up looking.

You can go and hit that bear.

He's in the California State Museum in Sacramento.

That's a real, that's based on a real bear?

Based on a real named bear?

Based on a true bear?

Yeah, it's based on a real bear.

Like one of the last California grizzlies, which are now extinct.

It's why it looks a little fucked up is because it's a bad drawing of a different kind of bear that no longer exists

and whose taxidermied remains you can go and see in Sacramento.

It's one of the three things you can see in Sacramento.

You've got that, you've got the old Western kind of like railroad barrens town bit, and you have a bridge painted in the most hideous color of yellow I've ever seen in my life.

Hey, you can also see the big light that they light up when the Sacramento Kings win a game.

And the California Railroad Museum, which is okay, it sounds like there's a lot of, it sounds like there's a lot of there there.

Have they ever had any interesting mayors right in?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Probably Leland Stanford was mayor of Sacramento.

Oh, I fucking hope not.

One day I'll, we'll have to do the sound of three women all opening up the mayors of Sacramento Wikipedia page at once.

Hey.

Okay.

I'm going to call it.

We got wrong.

We did some comedy again.

Yeah.

We did some, we did some yucks for you at the end after the sort of portrait of a man who ultimately, while he might have ended, had sort of one good quality, the moment he stepped into any kind of public life at all, that one quality was sort of magnified and twisted by ambition even at a local level.

Yeah, I would say the real villain of this episode is society.

Yeah.

I think the real villain is the clot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's also possible.

Anyways, this was a free episode.

Consider $5 a month gets you an extra episode every two weeks.

on the mayoral benevolent feed uh just five bucks this was over an hour and a half so you do get your money back for this this one, though.

Not if you pay us, but just for the existence of this one.

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Okay.

And we'll see you next week on