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Bad Takes, Episode 11: John Fetterman’s stroke threatens Matt and Laura’s friendship

Laura and Matt can’t agree on whether the left is right to roll its eyes at a captioning scandal.





After a stroke, Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania needs captions to hold a conversation. Matthew Yglesias sees this as a neutral statement of fact and sympathizes with lefty Twitter for lashing out at how NBC promoted a recent interview with the Senate hopeful. Laura McGann disagrees. She wants opinion writers, like Matt, to be better — to stop insulting voters who have legitimate questions, like how a stroke affects the brain. Where the two agree is on why unorthodox candidates, like celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz, running against Fetterman in Pennsylvania, or Herschel Walker, a former football star running in Georgia, win in our polarized age.

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