Things got wild during a Wednesday, May 1 hearing in the Senate Budget Committee. Then, during a hearing about the fossil fuel industry, Louisiana’s gem of a senator, Sen. John Kennedy, tore into Dr. Geoffrey Supran, a professor, over a post on X about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin that the professor retweeted, one that referred to Sen. Manchin as a “sick f***.”
As background, the “sick f***” incident occurred at Harvard’s Kennedy School in March. Then, Sen. Manchin was approached by climate protesters who were yelling at him about a pipeline in West Virginia. In the video that emerged of the incident, a young man yelled, “Joe Manchin! You sold our futures and you’ve gotten rich doing it. You sick fuck!”
Sen. Manchin, as the video shows, then stood up and squared off with the heckler, but security stepped in and said, “I got it,” shoving the protester to the ground. A group of additional protesters remained, however, and Sen. Manchin addressed them, saying, “Y’all want to sit down somewhere so we can talk?”
The weren’t receptive. One yelled back, “I’m not going to sit down! You’ve received more funding from fossil fuels than any other senator.” Another protester, a woman, added, “You’ve made millions. You’ve made millions out of your position. You drive a Maserati.” Yet another chimed in, yelling, “The Mountain Valley Pipeline goes right through West Virginia, which are your constituents.” And still another said, “Do you think people support this pipeline? The people don’t support it.”
Manchin, responding, tried to point out that the pipeline should be supported, but was cut off by protesters who kept yelling vague generalities about the pipeline endangering their futures. Sen. Manchin quickly tired of the matter and said, “We’ll get back on track here, guys,” at which point the protesters linked their arms and left.
The “Climate Defiance” account on X posted about the incident, saying, “BREAKING: we just called Joe Manchin a sick fuck. We humiliated him in front of a herd of Harvard elites. He squared up. We held firm. Barbaric murderer, hideous fiend, he torches humanity and laughs.”
Watch it here:
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It was to that incident that Sen. Kennedy referred, as Dr. Geoffrey Supran had retweeted the post from the Climate Defiance account, in which the protester could be seen yelling at Sen. Kennedy and calling him a “sick f***.”
Dr. Supran, addressing the retweet, said, “May I clarify one final point…These are not my tweets. These are retweets.” Sen. Kennedy, firing back, said, “Oh, you often retweet stuff you don’t support. Is that what you’re telling me, doc?”
Dr. Supran then accused Sen. Kennedy of “character assassination,” snapping, “I did not say that I do not support this. I simply did not tweet it, which as you were alleging. I’d like to make very clear that this is form of character assassination is characteristic of propaganda techniques-” Sen. Kennedy thundered, hilariously, “You retweeted it, didn’t you!? Are you going to call me a sick fuck?!”
Watch the hilarious back-and-forth here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video