Twenty days out from the general election, Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina took Democrats and the media to task for trying to sweep an incident, in which Democrat U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman held an innocent black jogger at gunpoint, under the rug.
"I can't even believe it," Scott said during a town hall hosted by Sean Hannity in York, Pennsylvania, that was broadcast on Fox News Channel. "A person puts a shotgun in a man's chest — an innocent man," Scott noted. "Imagine it being a white Republican putting a shotgun in the chest of a black man," Scott pondered to knowing scoffs from the live audience. It doesn't take much of an imagination to picture how Democrats and the mainstream media would have covered the situation differently than they have John Fetterman — who has said he believes he "did the right thing."
Not for nothing, Democrats at least for a while pretended to care about Fetterman's 2013 incident that saw the then-mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, hold a black jogger at gunpoint, later telling police he'd heard gunshots and saw the jogger, well, jogging and decided to apprehend the unarmed man. In the Democrat primary for U.S. Senate, Fetterman's opponents excoriated him for his actions — evidently hearing what he thought was a crime and then stopping a black jogger believing him to be involved. Would Fetterman have held a white jogger at gunpoint after hearing gunshots? We'll never know.
But once Fetterman won the primary — while recovering from a stroke that significantly affected the Democrat nominee to the point he was absent from the campaign trail for weeks on end — Democrats shut up about the supposedly vitally important issue of Fetterman's actions in 2013. Then, they cared more about what vegetables prepared on a tray are called than the absurd behavior of their candidate. Anything to win a Senate seat, regardless of their nominee's past wrongs.
"Can you imagine the media frenzy around that issue?" Scott continued, asking his audience to think about what the response would have been if a white Republican — instead of white Democrat John Fetterman — had held an innocent black man at gunpoint. "Can you imagine having a president who says nothing on that?" Scott continued.
Tim Scott torches the Democrat-media coverup of that time John Fetterman pulled a shotgun on an unarmed black man:
— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) October 20, 2022
“Imagine it being a white Republican…Can you imagine having a president who says nothing on that? The national media? Silent. The vice president? Silent. Why?” pic.twitter.com/MXLeTIHUMd
"The national media, silent. The vice president, silent. Why?" Scott asked. "Because they care more about the issue than the people living in impoverished areas where I come from," he said. "Think about the single mothers trapped in their houses at night praying for daylight so they can go outside because they're afraid of the crime driving throughout this nation," Scott added. "We need a commonsense conservative from Pennsylvania to bring home the majority," he said of Mehmet Oz's candidacy.
As Townhall reported previously, outside Republican groups have hit the airwaves in the Keystone State to remind Pennsylvania voters of how Fetterman, in his own words "may have" broken the law when he held the black jogger at gunpoint. That ad was one "black Democrats worried that the GOP would target voters with," in part because it broke the Democrat-media blackout of the story aimed at protecting Fetterman at the cost of their alleged commitment to justice.
The latest RealClearPolitics polling average has Fetterman leading Oz by just 2.4 percent — with the most recent poll in their average showing a tie — as Oz picks up most of the momentum in the final weeks of the midterm election cycle.