JOHN "TULSI" FETTERMAN GOES CONSPIRACY-ADJACENT, WHICH IS INEVITABLE WHEN YOU EMBRACE GOP MESSAGING

What happened to John Fetterman? He's not the only Democrat who continues to be a strong supporter of Israel, although his attacks on the protesters have been unusually relentless, and he's embraced the cockamamie idea of making Mitt Romney the president of Harvard. Fetterman isn't the only Democrat who frets about the border, though he's probably the only one who's said that Democrats are partly to blame for the fact that a tough immigration bill failed to pass this year. (Everyone else knows that Republicans didn't want it to pass because they want to keep running on border fears.)

Fetterman hasn't rejected the Democratic Party -- yet -- but he uses the same language about progressivism that ex-Democrats inevitably use in reference to the party:

Sen. John Fetterman once boasted about being a progressive. Now he doesn’t recognize them anymore.

“It’s not so much that I left the title, the title left me,” said Fetterman, 54, who ... once vowed that “Progressive values” were the heart of his political identity.

Although Fetterman now says, "I really just feel much more comfortable just being a Democrat," it seems only a matter of time before we get a book like this from Fetterman:

Are plutocrats grooming Fetterman to replace the retiring Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as the roadblocks to liberal change, in the event that President Biden is reelected and Democrats hold the Senate with 50 senators? (You might argue that Fetterman is still a Bernie Sanders-style progressive -- Fetterman endorsed Sanders during the 2016 primaries -- but remember that Sinema used to be a member of the Green Party. People change, especially when fat checks are waved at them.)

Or maybe Fetterman is just trying to be an independent and eclectic thinker, a guy who calls 'em as he sees 'em. That's possible -- but if so, it puts him in the company of some shady characters.

Here's Fetterman giving a thumbs-up to Ron DeSantis:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/zZLYf8t5lI

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 2, 2024

Fetterman's follow-up tweet got the response it deserved:

SHINY MACHINE SCARY lmao

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@ygalanter.bsky.social) May 3, 2024 at 8:56 PM

That was in addition to the community note:

btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat pic.twitter.com/4GZIt4SnNN

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 3, 2024

When Governor DeSantis signed this bill, he didn't just denounce lab-grown meat:

In a nationwide first, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has outlawed the sale and distribution of lab-grown meat in his state, claiming a ban will prevent “the global elite” from “forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects.”

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a statement following the legislation’s signing Wednesday.

Right-wingers are obsessed with the idea that "the global elite" wants to force ordinary citizens to eat insects. This belief is connected to the right-wing idea that the World Economic Forum is all-powerful. And yes, it's true that the WEF has promoted the idea of insect-eating -- here's a 2018 post titled "Good Grub: Why We Might Be Eating Insects Soon," and here are a few follow-ups:

But the WEF can't actually force anyone to eat insects. Some right-wingers know this, but they also know that the rank-and-file Republican voters love to think of themselves as the victims of massive conspiracies concocted by all-powerful supervillains. They believe they'll someday have to eat bugs at gunpoint -- unless they resist.

So far, resistance mostly comes in meme form:

But now the conspiracy theory has been embraced by the governor of the third most populous state in the Union.

If you repeatedly endorse Republican messaging, inevitably you'll be endorsing the crackpottery of crazy conspiratorialists. But maybe John Fetterman is okay with that now.