Pennsylvania senatorial candidate John Fetterman looks like a Halloween version of Satan or Peter Boyle’s Frankenstein monster. Bigfoot and Lurch are other names that have been applied to him. Calling people names like this may seem cruel, because Fetterman’s stand on the issues is monstrous, I’m willing to give the name-callers a pass.    

At six foot eight, Fetterman once weighed in at over 400 pounds. His manner of dress — Dickies and oversized hooded sweatshirts — matches that of thugs and the addicted homeless at K and A. 

Fetterman’s tattoos are also legendary, so much so that if the Democratic Party were merely a fashion runway, the Senate candidate would be one more contestant in an ever expanding Fellini circus of freaks and fetishists. 

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One need only consider Biden appointees like Sam Brinton, the crossdressing dog-on-a-leash rubber mask fetishist Assistant Secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste, and Demetre Daskalakis, the pentagram-tattooed physician who is the nation’s first monkeypox czar. Among this group, Fetterman would fit like a glove.  

As for the so called blue-collar fans of Fetterman — the people in western Pennsylvania you wouldn’t think would be fans of sanctuary cities and shipping busloads of illegal migrants into the American heartland — who have been photographed with the candidate downing brews in country bars with deer heads on the wall, I have to ask: How were these poor saps brainwashed by Democrat operatives to love this far-left activist lieutenant governor? 

My educated guess is that it is because Fetterman is rabid about legalizing weed. 

A recent poll has 60 percent of Pennsylvanians in support of legalized weed. In 2006, that support was a miserly 22 percent. The decline of Western civilization is on a roll!  

Consider the multiple photographs of Big Lurch brandishing flags that read, “Don’t Tread on Weed.” Outside his office in the Capitol building Fetterman even flies a giant marijuana flag. It fits, considering all those years spent living off his parents while working as the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and making $150 a month (he was 46 years old before he began supporting himself): somewhere in that big head of Fetterman’s lurks the mentality of a fourteen-year old boy. 

One photograph shows Fetterman walking across a Pennsylvania Capitol building balcony that’s draped with a weed flag. The balcony happens to resemble the papal balcony in St. Peter’s Square, so the overall impression is that Fetterman has become the pope of cannabis. 

Fetterman is so gung ho about weed that he spent two years trying to get President Biden to legalize it before Labor Day. Obviously that didn’t happen. When Fetterman calls for the legalization of weed, he’s not talking about the relatively harmless weed that was around the time of Woodstock but about today’s weed with a THC content as high as 60 percent or more.

A recent article in Tablet — “How Weed Became the New OxyContin” — notes this drastic change:

“In the era of legalized weed, the drug you think of as ‘cannabis’ can hardly be called marijuana at all. The kinds of cannabis products that are sold online and at dispensaries contain no actual plant matter. They’re made by putting pulverized marijuana into a tube and running butane, propane, ethanol, or carbon dioxide through it, which separates the THC from the rest of the plant. The end product is a wax that can be 70 percent to 80 percent THC. That wax can then be put in a vacuum oven and further concentrated into oils that are as much as 95 percent or even 99 percent THC. Known as ‘dabs’, this is what people put in their vape pens, and in states like California and Colorado it’s totally legal and easily available to children.”

Fetterman has embraced the type of failed policies that have made the once great city of Philadelphia into a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken dystopia. Now he wants to champion those policies in Washington, D.C.

After Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012, eighteen other states followed suit. Colorado saw billions of dollars flow into the state to form a thriving industry of what Tablet called a “smokable, edible, and drinkable cannabis-based products.” Since that time marijuana has been transformed into something unrecognizable to anyone who grew up when it was not legal. 

“Addiction medicine doctors and relatives of addicts say it has become a hardcore drug, like cocaine or methamphetamines. Chronic use leads to the same outcomes commonly associated with those harder substances: overdose, psychosis, suicidality. And yet it’s been marketed as a kind of elixir and sold like candy for grown-ups.”

Fetterman seems blissfully unaware of these facts, but what can you expect from a man who is also on the wrong side of legislation on nearly every sociocultural issue.

“Sanctuary cities make everyone safe,” Fetterman likes to say. As for Larry Krasner-style criminal justice reform, in October 2020 he stated that he would like to empty prisons by over 30 percent, insisting that such a change would not affect crime. 

The Washington Examiner put it bluntly when it stated that if Fetterman were elected to the Senate he would turn the United States into Philadelphia.

“Throughout his time in politics, Fetterman has embraced the type of failed policies that have made the once great city of Philadelphia into a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken dystopia. Now he wants to champion those policies in Washington, D.C. These radical left-wing policies that have devastated cities throughout the country will do nothing but turn the United States into Philadelphia.”

On his campaign website, Fetterman uses the latest Democrat slogan: “Our democracy is in serious danger,” and goes on to list the most serious threats facing the country.

1. Voter suppression legislation
2. Election denial
3. The events of January 6
4. The importance of pushing weed legislation to the national level

Fetterman is also big on immigration reform, a Democrat code word for open borders and migrant-filled buses cramming the nation’s highways. 

When he became lieutenant governor, he refused to live in the Lieutenant Governor’s mansion. This won him points with virtue-signaling Dems while enabling him to gain media attention, something at which the pretend populist excels. 

On September 11th at an abortion rally, Fetterman unfurled a banner that read, “Fetterwoman,” What was unusual about the incident was the fact that he had to look at the banner before announcing to the audience what it said. 

Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire attributed Fetterman’s inability to remember what the banner stated to the effects of a stroke Fetterman suffered in May. In a number of speeches throughout the state, Fetterman has caused some alarm with his scrambled word salads and long pauses, which point to less than a full recovery since May. 

Fetterman has been reluctant to agree to a series of public debates with Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, proof that he’s aware that he will not come across well on stage or TV. Fetterman has agreed to only one debate with Oz, and that debate is scheduled for late October, just days before the election and weeks after the start of mail-in balloting in the state.

While practical questions related to Fetterman’s stroke must be addressed, it is the Senate candidate’s views on law and order that are most distressing. 

According to the Washington Examiner, Fetterman recommended to Gov. Tom Wolf that thirteen people convicted of murder should have their prison terms commuted.

Fetterman also recommended that the state’s Board of Pardons consider merit-based clemency for second-degree murderers. 

Perhaps Uncle Fester or Lurch or whatever else you want to call him, is just stoned on high-level THC and just doesn’t know any better. 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, Frontpage Magazine and the Philadelphia Irish Edition. He is the author of fifteen books, including ”Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” “Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest” will be published later this year.