Why in the World Was John Fetterman Dining With Steve Bannon?
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman was spotted Monday night chatting with Steve Bannon, according to Politico Playbook.
Fetterman, who has displayed his own dramatic rightward shift, was reportedly dining at a top MAGA hangout near Capitol Hill with Breitbart's Matthew Boyle, when the conservative news site's old director wandered up and spoke to the pair for roughly 20 minutes.
Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, and directed the site to publish patently pugnacious rhetoric and conspiracy theories cooked up by far-right activists and white supremacists. In 2016, Bannon stepped down to join Trump's presidential campaign as its CEO, and went on to mastermind the authoritarian MAGA movement.
Fetterman broke with his party yet again on Monday to condemn the anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles. 'I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that. This is anarchy and true chaos,' he wrote in a post on X.
'My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement,' he added.
Bannon has a slightly different view of the unrest in Los Angeles, which has been spurred on by Donald Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard, and now the Marines. 'We're in the Third World War,' he said in an interview published on Monday. 'And it's a battlefield that's everywhere, including in downtown Los Angeles.'
Last month, a damning report said that some of Fetterman's staff were concerned about his increasingly erratic behavior, and Republican lawmakers flocked to support the Democratic senator with whom they'd inexplicably come to agree.
Fetterman was one of the more than two dozen Democrats to support the Laken Riley Act, which would, among other things, allow the government to detain undocumented immigrants accused of committing nonviolent crimes.
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