Just when you thought Dr. Mehmet Oz had lost the war against Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, this week, the erstwhile TV star found a new arsenal at his disposal.
On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Ursula Perano, politics reporter at The Daily Beast, discuss the latest in the Pennsylvania Senate race.
“Dr. Oz is just full of them [blunders],” Perano says. “I objectively think that there’s a decent chance his campaign staff, like somebody in the operation, hates him. It's just such a uniquely run campaign. He’s had so many blunders.”
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Those blunders include being trolled over an April video where the celebrity doctor walked through the vegetable aisle of a grocery store and complained over the costs of building a “crudité.” Oz also said he was shopping at “Wegners,” seemingly mistaking the names of two supermarket chains—Wegmans and Redner’s. Then there was the controversy over how many houses the celebrity doctor owns. Was it two, or 10?
However this week, Dr. Oz appears to have struck gold, after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s editorial board published an editorial highlighting concerns over Fetterman’s refusal to debate the TV celebrity, citing the Democratic Senate candidate’s recovery from a May stroke.
“This has been something that Oz has really been digging into, the fact that Fetterman hasn’t been willing to debate,” Perano said.
“He showed up with Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who is the outgoing Pennsylvania senator that is retiring, making a point of it,” Perano says. “The Pittsburgh Post basically echoed that, saying if [Fetterman] genuinely can’t stand on the stage for a debate because of these recovery issues, there are legitimate questions to be had about whether he can be an effective senator. And so I will say that Oz has flopped on so many things this cycle, but he is sort of having a little bit of a moment where it seems like he’s refining his message here on Fetterman’s health and the looming concerns about that—and that it is striking a bit more with the mainstream.”
Also on the podcast, Philip Bump, national correspondent for The Washington Post, explains how he became the guy to go through all of the 2020 election fraud claims, eventually debunking each of them one by one.
“I come to it through math,” he says. “I am a guy who just sort of pays a lot of attention to math and numbers. And a lot of the claims that came at the outset were math-based, right? It was, ‘There couldn’t have been possibly this number of votes that were cast in Wisconsin on election night,’ yada yada. Well, actually, of course it could because you look at Milwaukee, and Milwaukee’s got a lot of voters in it. So there was a lot of math to this, and what we’ve seen over the course of the past 22 months or so has been a lot of efforts to try and use statistics and math to prove that something happened, even if there’s no actual proof for evidence of fraud itself.”
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, Sommer talks about the confusing mess that was far-right political commentator and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’ supposed arrest by the FBI last month.
Despite footage that purportedly showed McInnes being taken away, neither the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. nor New York, where his show is based, nor the NYPD, said it was involved when approached by The Daily Beast. Then, alt-right internet personality and “comedian” Owen Benjamin allegedly texted McInnes to ask if he was OK. McInnes allegedly replied: “No, it’s a prank.”
Sommer says the idea that McInnes would think it was a big lark to fake his arrest has started to wear on some of his allies.
“So Owen says, ‘Look, guys, I talked to Gavin, it’s all fake.’ And then Gavin texts him and says, ‘You spilled the beans, we are done.’
“I think the idea of ‘spilling the beans’—these guys doing their little far-right paramilitary operations but talking like little kids—I found it a little evocative,” says Sommer.
“This growing feud… I fear that we may be seeing a fissure here, that we may soon see a fight.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
