John Fetterman: Another Spoiled Trustfunder with A Schtick

John Fetterman: Another Spoiled Trustfunder with A Schtick

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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John Fetterman is a total phony, a Harvard trained trust-funder born out of the insurance industry whose schtick is having been a powerless mayor of dying town.

John Fetterman is an intriguing character until you learn who he really is. He’s our Lieutenant Governor in Pennsylvania right now and also the Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate. He’s flooded with campaign money from uber-rich elites who want nothing more than to put the common man under their thumbs. Ironically, but intentionally, he has orchestrated his political rise using the schtick of being an edgy street-fighting advocate for the very same blue-collar folks.

The truth is that John Fetterman is pulling a classic con. He’s no friend of the common man, no friend of freedom and no friend of Pennsylvania. No, he’s just another trust-funder burdened by guilt at having done so undeservedly well and aiming to make his own mark without giving anything up. Moreover, he’s doing it the time-honored trust-funder way; by attacking everything that made his success possible.

The John Fetterman schtick is one of rejection, an “occupy” sort of image, complete with a a rebel hoodie, strange tattoos, strange beard, shaved head and everything else intended to turn his bulky frame into a marketable asset. His ads proclaim he only got into politics to “save his town” of Braddock, Pennsylvania where he served as mayor from 2006 to 2019. They also say he “rebuilt the town.”

It’s all key to cultivating his blue-collar image. But, John Fetterman did not rebuild or save Braddock. Moreover, being mayor in a Pennsylvania town of less than 2,000 people is akin to being the local Rotary Club Sergeant at Arms. That’s because Pennsylvania Borough mayors are powerless to do anything but marry people, provide oversight of tiny police departments and break very rare Borough Council tie votes.

No, John Fetterman simply used Braddock Borough to attract attention to himself as its colorful mayor, a meaningless job he initially won by one provisional ballot vote. He did nothing to rebuild Braddock, in fact. Four years after he was elected mayor it had 1,086 housing units, only 823 of which were occupied. A decade later and only one year after he left office, the numbers had dropped to 1,011 and 777, respectively, meaning Fetterman presided over one demolition after another with no real rebuilding whatsoever. Braddock merely continued shrinking. This decline is, naturally, further reflected in population trends. The following population graph illustrates:

Yes, the population of Braddock declined by another 28% or roughly 700 people over the course of John Fetterman’s experience as mayor. That experience was essentially one fiasco after another as he did little or nothing to oversee the police, according to borough Council members who were none too happy with his antics. He also “didn’t attend Council meetings.” with any regularity, it appears, and even passed off his limited police oversight responsibilities to the police chief.

Meanwhile, this is what happened with the crime rate (per 100,000 persons) during John Fetterman’s playtime as mayor of Braddock. Murders and other violent crime went down for a time but then rose again:

John Fetterman fans like to suggest crime came under control while he was mayor, but the facts tell a quite different story, as the chart indicates. Perhaps he should have actually supervised the police, as Borough Council had hoped he would do.

Members of the Borough Council attempted, in fact, to have John Fetterman removed and arrested in 2009 “after he criticized a political opponent while delivering his mayoral report.” Here’s a small sampling of other incidents involving him, all of which appear to have been part of his bad boy schtick:

• Fetterman purchased two homes several years ago. He said “he purchased the homes outright with plans to give them to two young people who had been involved in the Out-of-School Youth Program he started after they rented the homes for three years. But one of the men, Riyaad Partlow, was shot and killed. The other left town.” Court records as of May, 2009 showed John Fetterman “owe[d] thousands of dollars in taxes to North Braddock, Allegheny County and the Woodland Hills School District on [the] two properties. He said he [was] in the process of trying to sell the houses for back taxes.”
• Pittsburgh police arrested John Fetterman in 2010 after he refused to leave the U.S. Steel Tower, in Pittsburgh. He was holding a sign asking the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to open an urgent care center in Braddock. “A police officer found Mr. Fetterman on the plaza adjacent to building’s entrance and told him he was on private property and had to leave. [He] refused to move his protest to the sidewalk and was placed under arrest … Save Our Community Hospitals, a group that rallied against the closure of UPMC Braddock, released a statement…supporting Mr. Fetterman for taking a stand but chastising him for not doing so earlier … Unfortunately, [his] concern about the lack of emergency care in Braddock comes too late. The UPMC Braddock Hospital building is being demolished … We are not clear why Mr. Fetterman waited until now to undertake civil disobedience to draw attention to the lack of emergency care in Braddock.”
• “Armed with a shotgun, Braddock Mayor John Fetterman followed and confronted [an African American] man after hearing what he thought to be gunfire in the streets last weekend … Fetterman said he confronted the man in North Braddock [a separate community adjacent to one where he was mayor]  in the area near the railroad trestle. He said he had a 20-gauge shotgun in his vehicle, and he brandished it when he caught up to the person and ordered him to stop, not knowing if the person was armed. The man they caught up with was Chris Miyares, who was checked for weapons and let go when officers didn’t find any. Miyares gave Mayo his account of the situation, saying he was jogging near Ben Fairelss School when he heard a car horn behind him. North Braddock’s police chief said his officers reported the incident was over when they arrived, but Miyares told Mayo that wasn’t the case … ‘I mean, there’s a mayor with a shotgun, and six other cops surrounding me. What else can I do but (put my hands up)?’ said Miyares … ‘He’s trying to make it like it’s OK. I mean, he’s trying to justify what he did. I mean, you’re the mayor of Braddock in North Braddock with a shotgun.’”

More bizarre even than these incidents, though, are some of the positions John Fetterman has taken:

1. He says his top priority is ending life in prison without the possibility of parole for convicted criminals.
2. He has called fracking an “environmental abomination” and, although he’s now trying to back away from that position for political reasons, he says he wants to work toward a “de facto moratorium because the transition is going to be toward green and renewable energy.” He has, therefore, not really changed his position at all, of course.
3. He wants no restrictions at any time on abortion, but supports repealing capital punishment which he says is an “inhumane, antiquated, expensive, and flawed system of punishment.”
4. He wants to expand Obamacare into “Medicare for all” despite the fact Medicare is due to run out of money in four years.
5. He wants all drug use to be decriminalized.
6. He wants to implement a wealth tax.
7. He would vote to abolish the Senate filibuster to give extremist Democrats like himself completely unconstrained power.
8. He has vowed to “crack down on corporations ‘charging us record high prices for gas and groceries’ by ‘prosecuting the executives of these huge corporations, including the big oil companies and meatpacking companies who are artificially driving up prices, gouging consumers at the pump and at the grocery store.’”
9. He claims Critical Race Theory is “just not an issue” and those who say it is are engaged in “divisive dog whistling.“
10. He pushed for COVID lockdowns and attacked what he called “renegade counties,” suggesting they caused COVID-19 outbreaks by violating those Wolf lockdowns but left Pennsylvania for a family vacation in New Jersey in the midst of them. “He also said school closures, which have caused learning and behavioral setbacks for school kids, were “an absolute necessity” in the fight against the virus.
11. He takes a hard line against school vouchers that would provide choices for poor children who live in places such as Braddock, but sends his own kids to Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, the 11th rated private school in Pennsylvania, where tuition runs as much as $34,250 per year.
12. He supports sanctuary cities for people in the country saying “Any Democrat that doesn’t agree with this policy is pandering to xenophobia. Sanctuary cities ensure the safety and well-being of everybody,” Fetterman said about Philadelphia’s sanctuary city status.
13. He has supported Philadelphia’s extremist, Soros-financed District Attorney, Larry Krasner, who has been an utter disaster in prosecuting crime in the opinion of both Democrats and Republicans.
14. He loves Bernie Sanders and would be a Bernie Bro in the Senate.
15. He applauded Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline. Those of you readers who are trade union members; do not deceived. This man is not for you! He’s for your opponents and the green grifters who want to profit off your job loss!

John Fetterman, in other words, is a pure across-the-board radical. Worse, and undoubtedly the reason he is so extreme, is that he is a classic trust-funder. His father built an insurance empire and sent him to Harvard. Other than a short stint working for Daddy, and his job as Lieutenant Governor, he’s never had a real job, depending on what may well have been tax-free income from his parents and favors from his sister to feed his family and do his schtick.

Fetterman attacks his opponent for having multiple homes but the latter earned the money to acquire those assets. John Fetterman’s home was given him by his sister. He’s never earned anything the old-fashioned way. He has been a self-promoter from the very beginning and the schtick he uses to do so is a hoodie, a bunch of attention-getting tattoos and a weird boldness he knows will sell with every lefty media outfit out there. The phony Fetterman schtick shields him from the fact he’s was a meaningless official in a tiny town living off inherited wealth so he could con everyone out of a Senate seat.

John Fetterman, to summarize, has never rebuilt anything and is no friend of anyone but himself. He’s a dangerous extremist who, with Bernie Sanders at his side, would replicate the House’s Squad in the Senate. He would continue to ally himself with the Heinz Endowments (yes, they funded him, too, through an entity he created called Braddock Redux) to destroy natural gas and oil, suppress our freedom and help turn Pennsylvania into the equivalent of a Third World country. He’s dangerous in the extreme and must to be defeated. Don’t buy the schtick; this man is a chameleon through and through.

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