r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/Viperlite 10h ago edited 2h ago

John Fetterman. Went from being the new hope for PA democrats to a wacko turncoat, post stroke.

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u/minker920 9h ago

Fetterman proves that it takes brain damage to go right wing.

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u/Pans_Labradoodle 4h ago

Fetterman was always a piece of shit, people just didn’t want to see it.

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u/MilkChocolate21 3h ago

Nope. He was always a racist POS. And people warned about it but people found his bad fashion choices to be proof he was progressive. He was a racist.

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u/Downvoterofall 2h ago

It tickles me how much Reddit makes fun of him for his clothes now that they don’t like him. When he was viewed as the progressive people would rabidly defend him saying “he’s sticking it to the man”.

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u/MilkChocolate21 1h ago

It's funny bc he was just a slovenly privileged guy from a privileged background.

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u/TikiTakaTime 7h ago

Maybe he was always right wing but the brain damage affected his ability to disguise it cause I find it hard to believe that any person can make that drastic of a turn without it already being in them already

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u/tanstaafl90 7h ago

The science says it's a loss of the part of the brain that controls emotional regulation, most notably empathy that is harmed and/or lost completely by stroke. Years of research make the same conclusion repeatedly. How much an individual changes depends on the severity of the stroke. Trying to understand they why and how is an ongoing process. He has all of the classic signs and those closest to him have all commented about how different he is.

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u/Annath0901 1h ago

The science says it's a loss of the part of the brain that controls emotional regulation, most notably empathy that is harmed and/or lost completely by stroke.

Yeah, no. You didn't read that, or you completely misunderstood what you read.

Stokes can happen in any part of the brain, so saying "the part of the brain that controls emotional regulation, most notably empathy that is harmed and/or lost completely by stroke" is nonsensical.

It's like saying "the part of the house that floods is the bathroom when there's a clog". When actually, any room with plumbing can flood depending on where the clog is located.

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u/tanstaafl90 1m ago

The comment was about the change in a specific individual, which has those signs I list post stroke. Of course septate parts of the brain are impacted differently if they are damaged. You misunderstood it was a specific type and region being discussed, not a generalized occurrence.

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u/chef-nom-nom 4h ago

PA here. I met him twice before his illness. Looking back at both times when my wife and I asked him about his stance on fracking and gas extraction here, I believe his brain injuries just removed his filter. He was always bullshitting his supporters. He just can't put the mask back on anymore.

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u/Nauin 5h ago

Yeah pretty sure there's evidence that he and his wife were always assholes, I just don't have the time to track it down right now.

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u/MilkChocolate21 3h ago

He was racist before his stroke. Why do white people always pretend he wasn't 🙄

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u/zoeypayne 2h ago

You're not being fair to people who have had strokes.

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u/BroMan001 8h ago

He really wasn’t great before that either. A great example of the similarities between the democrats and republicans

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u/Foolsgil 6h ago

Yeah people choose to ignore that time he racially profiled a man.

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u/neverthelessidissent 9h ago

I loved him and was proud to support him. He's the fucking worst.

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u/BaronGalactic 1h ago

I hate what Fetterman has become, but I'll always contend that electing him was better than electing Dr. Oz.

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u/Viperlite 33m ago

Oprah Winfrey wouldn’t even endorse Dr. Oz, instead electing to endorse Fetterman in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race — even after Dr Oz came to prominence as a regular guest on her show for five seasons in the early 2000s.

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u/SecretBaker8 8h ago

I remember reading about him in rolling stone and how he tattooed the dates of people that town lost on his arm to remember. How he turned his government given house to the community for its pool. His wife is a proud immigrant firefighter.

But he has changed since the stroke and it's a true shame.

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u/Snowbank_Lake 3h ago

Isn't it interesting how Republicans only worry about someone's age and mental fitness when it's Biden?

7

u/pikebot 6h ago

I mean this was the guy whose contribution to BLM was 'holding a random black guy at gunpoint for absolutely no fucking reason'. The Bernie wing of the party decided to ignore all that because they got snookered by a vaguely working-class aesthetic. He hasn't changed much except in affect.

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u/rutherfraud1876 6h ago

The "Bernie wing" mostly went for Kenyatta in 2018.

The real moral of that race is no matter where you are on the political spectrum, trust the endorsements of organizations - or even political figures you respect - more than your own gut.

If you look at the list of endorsements in that primary on Wikipedia (well-cited), Fetterman has a very short list, especially compared to his dominant vote share.

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u/TheBSQ 1h ago

Kenyatta got 10% in the primary vs Fetterman’s 59%.

So either the “Bernie Wing” is a very small group of little consequence in PA Dem primary elections, or there’s a bit of revisionist history about who voted for who. 

I do know there were some very vocal Leftists who preferred Kenyatta who were very opposed to Fetterman & talked about the gun incident all the time, but at least my notion of the “Bernie Wing” is of a group that’s bigger & broader than that subset of the more hardcore leftists within the broader Progressive movement. 

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u/MilkChocolate21 3h ago

He was always a racist. People just didn't care because it was towards Black people.

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u/crappilydesigned 6h ago

I love how you people try to blame his stroke to cope. If you took 2 seconds to look into who he was you would know he was always this way and his actions were completely predictable.

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u/Bay1Bri 3h ago

Many such cases of populists not living up to the hype they generate.

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u/h0sti1e17 5h ago

Anyone who didn’t see it before hand, should have. The evidence was there but it was waved off due to the D next to his name. Often the hatred for the other side blinds us to the flaws of our guy.

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u/Extreme-Afternoon-12 8h ago

And yet to the libertarians he’s a hero still.

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u/GloopyHole 1h ago

Every American male with that beard where it just covers your chin is a cunt.