Tbh I think it’s both things. I think he was a bit of a quisling before, but I also think his stroke turned that up to 11.

This shit always happens. There's almost always enough Democrats willing to flip sides to fuck our lives up and yet still people freak out when you're skeptical of the next mediocre white nepo candidate who had a nazi tattoo.

Dude, it was him against Dr. Oz. At the time, anything was better than a celeb snake oil salesman who lives in New Jersey. I still think Fetterman is a better pick than Oz or McCormick, but I am disappointed by his voting record.

He was a fake Democrat before his stroke

Then it was a con long enough to get his wife and every other friend, staffer, and family member who has spoken publicly about it...

Like, that's what makes brain damage so dangerous: the subject doesn't realize they've changed.

He rationalizes away his prior opinions and it sounds like he was never progressive in the first place, he most likely doesn't think he was.

It's not like brain damage draws a line with a sudden change, it makes the person forget who they used to be. They view every memory thru the lens of the present, especially in Fettermans case where the damage is localized to frontal lobe.

I'm not defending him and this a million times worse than what you thought, but that's why we need to understand it, we're all one railroad spike to the forehead away from the same thing....

He was a fake Democrat before his stroke. What he shows is how easily people are duped by a person that says what they want to hear.

No he's a real Democrat. He's in the party. This is what Democrats are like.

Look at his voting record before vs after in the Senate. He has the stroke before he was even sworn in, but mostly voted along party lines in 2023 and 2024. His only real deviation, going back to his campaign, was that he was pro-fracking.

Anyone cane go ahead and look up his voting record, but it's incredibly tedious to try to figure out what a vote actually means, how It aligns with the rest of the DNC (which is not necessarily what I would call "progressive), and how to feel about it. Everyone really SHOULD do this on their own, but for the lazy here is a website that at least claims to be progressive and tries to evaluate how members of Congress have voted over time.

2023: 200/207 votes were progressive 2024: 210/230 2025: 454/594 2026: 30/33 so far

You can find other websites that show a similar trend, and this matches my own personal observations as a Pennsylvania. Part of what got Fetterman elected in the first place was distancing himself from a tarnished DNC, and he was mostly doing a good job for his first year or so. In either later 2024 or 2025 something changed.

Someone got to him, and I could only speculate who. I doubt he's in the Epstein files because he was not important enough for Epstein to care about until years after Epstein died. Could be AIPAC. Could be that oil companies had him in their pocket the whole time. Could be something else. But it's certainly not correct to say that PA voters should have seen this coming.

See, the odd thing is, I've had the unique privilege of having many chances to interact with people who have brain damage (from drugs, injuries, or other health problems).

This is anecdotal, so don't take it uncritically, but I've found that the number of people who stayed emotionally and ideologically the same before/after is honestly pretty consistent.

The thing with brain damage is it tends to erode the things we've learned, and leaves the things that are buried down the furthest. The few who were violent and hateful, having spoken with their family, were often that way before the accident or before the brain damage set in. They were just more subtle or more controlled.

Most people were frightened, confused, and seeking help and reassurance from anyone who could offer it. Fundamentally, they were good people, before and after. Some of them may have grown more gullible, and social isolation does strange things to normal people. Bedbound people who only had Fox news for company tended to have it the worst.

I can't speak for John Fetterman. Or Kevin Sorbo. Or any other famous public figure who turned into a raging fascist after they had their brains scrambled by unfathomably bad luck. But in my experience, they were either lukewarm about human rights before, or just keeping their bigotry to themselves out of politeness.

I thought he admitted that he regrets even running in the first place?

A very, very good reason to have term limits.