The depressing truth about the media and John Fetterman

When Whoopi Goldberg announced on The View that Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania would appear on the show to discuss why he voted to end the government shutdown, one audience member shouted “Boo!” It was just one audience member, on The View, on a Monday morning. But the liberal mind loves performative booing.

Fetterman appeared on the show today via split screen from Washington, DC, wearing his signature black hoodie. The man won’t dress up for any occasion, and we must admire him for that. View host Alyssa Farah Griffin, the token Republican on the panel, said:

You were critical of this shutdown from the outset, saying it never should have happened, never should have come to this, even at times criticizing your own party. So I want to ask you why did you ultimately decide to support this agreement? And where do you stand on the growing number of Democrats who are calling for leader Schumer to step down in light of the shutdown deal?

That was a good question, though Fetterman wisely avoided the Schumer pile-on. “I effectively kind of led the charge that it’s wrong to shut our government down and then enough of us realized that that’s just too risky and that’s too much chaotic,” he said. “When you’re confronting mass, MASS chaos, you know, I don’t think you should respond with more chaos or fight with more chaos. It’s like, no, we need to be the party of order and logic.”

Fetterman said he felt like the shutdown was hurting more people than it was helping, which is why he’s one of the eight Democrats who pulled the plug. It was time to stop playing with people’s lives just to own Trump. “And now I refuse to weaponize the SNAP benefit for 42 million Americans,” he said, “you know, that rely on feeding themselves and their family, or making flying in America, you know, less safe, or I refuse not to pay our military and all of the unions attached to all of this and people.”

To me, a man who has now been forced to watch The View twice in two weeks, this was the most newsworthy of Fetterman’s comments, but not the most notable. Though the shutdown is in the news, Fetterman has a book to promote, Unfettered, which is mostly about his struggles with depression. Today’s New York Times review calls the book “dour and mournful.” Fetterman dedicates it to “anyone with depression.” In it, he writes, “I didn’t deserve anything except loneliness and sadness and isolation.”

The View showed the book’s cover, but Fetterman used this platform to not talk about himself too much. Instead, he mentioned, on Veterans Day, how 17 veterans take their own lives daily. He begged us to think about them on this, a day that many of us get off from work.

As he writes in the book, “a defining quality of depression, the building blocks of which I had probably struggled with ever since I was a kid. My parents were 19 when I was conceived, and I have always felt it was because of me that my parents were unable to follow their own dreams. When your self-image is negative, as mine was growing up, you gravitate toward shame. You gravitate toward feeling unwanted.” That feels familiar to anyone who’s ever even suffered a mild case of the blues, much less crippling depression.

The View was very kind to the Senator, who clearly suffers from mental illness. He had to be hospitalized after he defeated Dr. Oz for the US Senate seat because he couldn’t deal with the criticism. You can’t, on the other hand, attribute kindness to the New York Times. In her review, Jennfier Szalai criticizes Fetterman for not sufficiently denouncing Israel or ICE. The book is out there, and all criticism is fair game. But sometimes, the last thing someone suffers from melancholy wants to hear, even a prominent Democratic senator who often sides with a Republican President, is a performative “Boo!” It’s a truly depressing situation.