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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Look On My Graham Platner Longpost, Ye Mighty, And Despair

A few months ago, the only thing I knew about Graham Platner was the Nazi tattoo controversy. I don't remember exactly why I did this, but I think it was because I kept seeing posts about him and then went and actually looked into what he was.

Graham Platner is a former military man. He did three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. I think in Iraq, he was a machine gun section leader and in Afghanistan, he was a rifle team leader. His Iraq tours were with the Marines, and the Afghanistan tour was with the National Guard. He then took up oyster farming. In July 2025, "labor groups" contacted him and got him started on a Senate campaign.

Labor groups connected him to the Fight Agency, whose consultants have gained attention for their work with New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as well as U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.

Yes, the same group that helped that Zohran Mamdani and that Bernie Sanders. Despite this, he attempts to resist labels:

“I think it’s silly that thinking people deserve health care, that makes you some kind of lefty. But I do think those working-class policies are necessary. That’s what we need to do to make this country work for working people.”

You can tell he's a pretty far left populist. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders himself, he joins the fervor against billionaires:

“We do not live in a system that is broken — we live in a system that is functioning exactly as it’s intended,” Platner said in his speech Monday. “We live in a system that has been built by the political class to enrich and support billionaires on the backs of working people.” He said he wants to see Americans “reap the profits of our hard work.”

(From the same link: It is disturbing to see The Rolling Stone use communist rhetoric without complaint: "eager to use his voice to talk about the class war." Takes it for granted that there even is a class war. Legacy news media is so far gone...)

He's been featured on Pod Save America and on Hasan Piker's own show! As such, he is, or was, a darling on reddit. He makes moves for all the things they want: called Gaza a genocide, demanded healthcare for everyone, supports abolishing ICE, anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ+. On the other hand, he is similar to Bernie Sanders in that he apparently takes a "strengthen the border" approach. And he differs from other Democrat politicians in that he does not support assault weapons bans, though he does support red flag laws.

However, things have gone a bit haywire for his campaign. Most of the controversy I have seen about him stems from his "skull-and-crossbones" tattoo, apparently imagery associated with Nazis. This has turned off many of his further left voters, along with his willing military service in wars of aggression that oppressed people of the Global South.

However, I found out that his reddit post history has leaked, and you can search through them all here. I think these are quite enlightening, so I'm going to share a bunch of them. He apologized for some of these remarks, but the ones he was mainly apologizing for were in the 2010s, where he said his tour had just recently ended and he had a dark outlook on life.

June 5, 2019, commenting on this video:

This video never gets old. Dumb motherfucker didn’t deserve to live. At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt. Poor marksmanship on the Taliban’s part is the only reason this mouthbreather made it home, he managed to make every possible shit decision possible when it comes to small unit combat.

(Veterans: How justifiable do you think these comments were? Couple people I know think this is excessively gleeful, another thinks they're quite justified for anyone who had to rescue him from the situation he put himself into.)

April 10, 2021 and April 12, 2021, on All Cops Being Bastards:

Cops are fucking jokes.

Bastards. Cops are bastards.

All of them, in fact.

Every small town is “shocked” when its cops do the thing that cops do everywhere else. It’s almost as if there is a problem that extends deep into the profession as a whole....like, into the system itself.

Hmmm...there’s a word for this...

October 21, 2020, unjustified shootings and War on Crime's disparate impact:

Hmmm....it’s like this thing started in the late 1960’s that effected black Americans more than any others. Something about drugs? Like...maybe a war about them?

This racist motherfucker even identifies the timeframe, but can’t make the leap. “Blacks do crime because they bad at being dads, cops gotta shoot ‘em!”

June 3, 2020, outrage that cops refuse to bend the knee for Black Lives:

...Things went well until the demonstration asked the police chief to take a knee with them in respect for what has been happening. He refused, citing “we are on the clock and not allowed to display opinions”. This is clearly not true, as police across Maine and the country have done that exact thing with protesters.

Naturally, this pissed people off. Hell, it pissed ME off. Literally the simplest possible gesture to appease the crowd, you don’t even have to say anything. Take a knee for 10 seconds, the crowd would have cheered and clapped and felt like they were part of the same community as the cops. Such a basically simple act that could have kept the positive nature of the demonstration going.

But no. Just tight lipped thin blue line trash. After that, people started to get angry. There was no violence or anything of the like, but the whole feeling of the demonstration changed, and people did not go home happy.

...With everything that’s going on, you’d think a small town police chief could take 10 seconds for an act that says “hey, we also think murdering unarmed people is bad”. And he couldn’t even do that. It’s disappointing.

January 17, 2021, gun owning psychedelics taking socialist (I'm guessing this vocation is where the "labor groups" found this guy):

Absolutely. I’m a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days. After the war, I’ve pretty much stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got me there in the first place, and am a firm believer that the best thing a person can do is help their neighbors and live a loving life.

Still got the guns though, I don’t trust the fascists to act politely.

Side note: This guy posted very frequently on /r/SocialistRA; the two following posts are from there.

July 21, 2020, grief at Michael Brooks' death:

He was a huge part of my politics moving further left and revolutionary.

I’m feeling a serious sense of loss right now, I’m not even sure what to say.

I’m just so thankful for his intellect and knowledge, we are stronger because of him but have lost something with his passing.

June 16, 2020, giving legal advice from the perspective of a rioter (I thought this was in reference to Rittenhouse, but it's a different video)

Hoo boy...yeah, that guy isn’t gonna get charged, and if he is, certainly not convicted. Like it or not, he was walking away and was pursued, struck with a skateboard, and then tackled before discharging his weapon. While he may have set the whole situation in motion, that video fits almost all the requirements for defensive gun use.

These assholes wake up in the morning hoping today is the day they get to put down an “Antifa looter”. Don’t give them the legal justification to fulfill their fucked up fantasies.

May 15, 2018, defending Marx from /r/Firearms users:

What does that have to do with Marxism? Marxists tend to be pretty supportive of firearms ownership. Kind of hard to have a revolution without them.

Nov 1, 2021, clarifying for /r/antiwork, in response to the sentiment "when you are older, you'll be more conservative":

37. I got older and became a communist.

And, the last one I will note: Jan 29, 2021, identifying himself as a Diamond Hands guy buying GameStop stock in a fruitless protest against capitalist hedge funds:

I generally don’t fuck with individual stocks or high risk investment, but I bought one share the moment RH opened it back up, and will hold it into the dirt or 🚀🚀🚀🌙.

Fuck em, I’m here for blood.

I have posted these just to make it clear that no matter what this guy says, no matter how he labels himself or if he denies his past reddit comments: This guy's a Marxist. If he says he isn't a Marxist, that's because he's trying to get votes from people who hate Marxists, and to give plausible deniability to fellow travelers.

I have seen some people say that Maine is a purple, or slightly-blue state. If it elects this guy to the Senate, then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the state is quite a bit more left than that. Republicans call this guy "Maine's Mamdani", which seems to be accurate. Even more sadly, if this guy wins, he'll displace the only elected Republican representative in the Northeast. Sad.

Someone downthread linked the 2024 Democratic Campaign autopsy. It recommended that the party should appeal more to middle class voters. I sincerely hope that Graham Platner and Zohran Mamdani are not the way they do that, but I suspect that it will be.

I liked Jeff Maurer's take on Platner. The Dems are heavily pushing him because, unlike so many of their candidates, he comes off as an ordinary man of the people. He's a tough guy (a veteran), an oyster farmer, and he curses a lot. His working-class credibility make it easy to overlook certain flaws which would sink a more milquetoast candidate. All bolded text is in the passage below is my emphasis:

On the one hand, this doesn’t surprise me: Brawny dudes with the politics of a Portlandia character don’t come along every day. On the other hand, I’m surprised because the left just went through this with John Fetterman. Fetterman, of course, is now persona non-grata on the progressive left due to his strong backing of Israel and occasional support for Trump (he was the only Democrat who voted to confirm Pam Bondi). He sits alongside J.K. Rowling and Bari Weiss in the Pantheon of People Hated By the Progressive Left. Is nobody on the progressive left thinking that there might be a chance that if elected, Platner might go the Fetterman route?

Platner’s Reddit posts — some of which are as recent as 2021 — do not reflect uniformly left-wing views. Yes, he called himself a “communist” and an “ANTIFA supersoldier”, but he also mocked gay people and took a casual attitude towards sexual assault... Combined with the whole Nazi unpleasantness, these posts might cause one to wonder how deep Platner’s progressive convictions run...

And Fetterman, of course, is far from the only person to start out on the populist left and end up right-of-center... Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are journalists who made the switch. Tulsi Gabbard went from endorsing Bernie to being part of the Trump administration in just four short years, which makes you wonder if she was a centrist for 20 minutes as she rocketed from one end of the political spectrum to the other.

...the populist tough-guy schtick is a shallow narrative that appeals to people with shallow political beliefs, so we shouldn’t be surprised when those beliefs change.

Platner has showed a decades-long interest in being an anti-establishment edgelord but only a recent interest in progressive politics. Which isn’t too surprising — a lot of people who like the “high-testosterone progressive badass” persona really only like the “high-testosterone badass” part. As of four years ago, Platner’s politics were a mix of left and right, and now they’re hard left, but who can say where they’ll be in another four years? Nobody. But some people like Platner’s vibes and have decided that’s good enough.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if, in the next ten years, Platner jumps ship and joins the GOP.

The little lefty media exposure I've had of this guy was generally positive. If a small /r/socialism thread offering lukewarm critiques is all one has in the pocket to demonstrate that the far left does not like him... eh, that's pretty weak sauce. Those folks are generally not fans of electoral politics anyway. Sneeringly holding out for the revolution.

That being said, why shouldn't the Democrats elect guys like Mamdani if that's what the voters want? I don't see the republicans offer any relevant or salient opposition to that development.

I did not post that to say that "the far left" didn't like him. I said that many do not like him for that, which is completely true, there are comments sections with bickering about it basically most of the time he comes up. I doubt it's enough to make too much of a difference. To me, it illustrates the circular firing squad, ideological purity over victory. I think they broadly think he's a step in the right direction. Some of them say he's center left, as usual.

I remember finding a subreddit of leftists in India who said the exact same thing about Mamdani, that he was barely left at all, and one of them replied "America isn't ready for a true socialist yet, he'd be assassinated before he took office".

It’s pretty weak but I’ve noticed it’s a pattern many of them follow. It’s why they respond with hysteria and outrage rather than logic most of the time. And to be honest, it works a lot of the time even when it shouldn’t. Many people have folded on the promise to assert their political identities and they renounce their identities under pressure of the groups that harass them. That’s why Trump was initially a “surprise” and likewise the same could be said about Mamdani in certain respects.

He sounds like... A Redditor. Of the stupidpol variety, but nothing too exceptional (didn't look through his profile--I wonder if he was on stupidpol). I think you're treating mood affiliation rhetoric as actual ideology. In terms of how he'd actually vote, it wouldn't be dissimilar to any other Democrat who would run in a Senate primary would vote; to the extent he didn't, it'd just be on votes that either had no chance of passing or no chance of failing, as a dispensation granted him by leadership.

It's really just an aesthetic choice: slimeball in a suit vs erratic disordered rebel. I'm sure neither is what is actually optimal, but the latter wins over the former. A large group of Democrats are enraged at the status quo (say what you will about their prescriptions for moving away from the status quo, but the sentiment is genuine) and will be thrilled by the aesthetics he brings, and the ones who actually are happy with things but want to be the ones running the country will fall in line.

Redditor was my impression too, believe it or not. But you're underselling how radical the typical redditor is these days, and I feel like I've heard "oh, this doesn't actually matter, nothing to see here" about a thousand times by now.

I didn't see anything from /r/stupidpol. Wikipedia said

he declined to call himself a socialist and described his political involvement before his campaign as "organizing around mostly local economic justice issues or social justice issues".

but that was after his account was discovered, and probably just lip service. Beyond talking about colonialist history, I doubt there's too much idpol in there.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the subreddits he posted all of his 2014 comments in. You'll see that he browsed a very wide variety of subreddits, posted in some of the dumbest front page ones sometimes, and had a lot of masculine interests. I think most of it is in /r/Maine, /r/Military, and /r/USMC.

Maine USMC Military liberalgunowners QualityTacticalGear SocialistRA politics WarCollege CombatFootage HistoryPorn Infantry pics leftistveterans guns syriancivilwar history IAmA WarshipPorn PropagandaPorn redneckrevolt WTF todayilearned u_Hardtokillfitness (likely just the one post mocking it) Ayahuasca aww worldbuilding NFA CredibleDefense ar15 ak47 videos funny esist kurdistan space AskReddit worldnews MilitaryStories AdviceAnimals UkrainianConflict Fitness afghanistan gaming wikipedia movies

you're underselling how radical the typical redditor is these days

Perhaps; I spend as little time on it as possible (and am pretty sure I have a shadowban anyway, for unclear reasons).

In lieu of a Redditor, how about a poster from rDrama running as a Democrat in Michigan?

Kind of reminds me of the fashion controversy back in the 20th century over whether or not Hugo Boss was a racist, due to his fashion design choices for the Nazis uniforms. Although he was a member of the Nazi Party, he joined two years before Hitler even came to power; and that mostly for purely business reasons to secure government contracts. After everything came to light about who the Nazis really were and what they did, they expressed all the regret in the world over their decision.

I dunno, you're making this guy sound kinda cool.

Posts consisting of "look what this guy said one time!" are still pretty lame, though, so I want to drag it in a different direction.

What kind of candidate should the Democrats run if they want to appeal more to middle class voters?

Can't run anybody too slimy, of course. No association with Harris or Biden or Clinton. Ex-CEOs are probably out, as is anyone who might get called a "coastal elite." Complete novices with fresh-out-of-college social opinions, probably no good either. The centrists want some sort of serious, competent type who promises to fix broken shit without breaking everything else in the process.

I would have naively thought this guy threaded the needle. Combat and leadership experience. Political outsider. Reasonably well-off, but in the only landowning position which has somehow escaped the stink of class envy. Minimal social-justice baggage. Perhaps even passes the "would I have a beer with him?" test.

You're disqualifying him because he's a socialist; that's rather under-specified. He is engaging in the national pastime of bitching about those richer than oneself. I think you'll find it's quite popular across the political spectrum.

The Democrats should run someone who makes voters feel superior and good about themselves, who promises great things, whether they are possible or not. For bonus points, that someone should also give the Democrats a target to direct their hate at and someone to blame when they don't get the great things.

Yeah I mean far left extremists having a fair shot of winning the most rural state in the nation is just a typical Thursday, right? What else is the Democratic Party supposed to do to appeal to middle America except radicalize further into hating the basis the country is founded on and alternate between lying about being radical and giving it a nice bipartisan face or doubling down on it? The centrists want someone who fixes broken stuff, so they vote in someone who wants to uproot the whole damn thing?

That's not exceptional to you? Radical spiraling is just what everyone should expect, move along, nothing to see here? You make it sound like if you just read a single FCfromSSC post to anyone in America, they'd just accept it at face value as truthful and bat their eyes at you expecting you to get on with your actual point.

He is cool. I think it's funny that he is still in the running after posts of him saying "retard" or disrespecting black people leaked, but it is pretty odd that 3 terms after everyone made fun of conservatives calling Obama a socialist, there are actual socialists running, and the most offensive thing about that is some tattoo he got without thinking too much about it and then got it covered up after learning what it meant.

At this point, if Democrats are willing to acknowledge that they really do want a central national authority to have as much control over all of our resources as they can practically give it, I think this guy and Mamdani are the perfect candidates.

The crux is whether middle class voters are well represented among those who are willing to acknowledge this.

How are you going to make this post and not mention the funniest one?

I still have to jerk off every time I sit in a portashitter….that blue water smell conditioned me

That one's honestly kind of humanizing for the nepo nazi, but it's legitimately fucking hilarious.

Yes, it's funny. It's a testament to his service, I think. Dedicated jerkoff portapotties checks out when you're on tour.

I kind of have to respect such a dedicated hater, but... what is this post but a very long boo-outgroup? I mean, technically it's "Boo Graham Platner," but more generally it's "Boo leftists, Boo Democrats, Boo anyone who votes for Graham Platner." What are you offering here other than "Here is a list of all the things he said that I hate/think are mockworthy"?

If you want to start a thread about why a particular politician sucks, we would like it to have more content than just "He's on the other team."

I'll second that I consider it informative, even it clearly is quite negative. Lots of people know little about him, and so far I also had the impression that he is purple-ish. It's important to know that he is more in the Che Guevara tradition of tough socialist.

If it was about an already established politician & known incidents and texts, then I'd agree with you.

Idk, if he ends up getting elected, everything I know about him will be thanks to this post. Mamdani came out of nowhere from where I'm sitting, and it looks like Platner is going to win the Democrat primary.

If you want to post a rebuttal or contrary perspective that would be welcome and helpful.

I'm not interested in posting a rebuttal or contrary perspective. I'm not even saying the OP is wrong about Platner. I know almost nothing about him except what was posted here.

You asked OP "what are you offering here" so I volunteered what I got out of it.

As I said, I didn't know anything about this guy besides the Nazi tattoo for a long time. I'm not that plugged into the right wing ecosystem and I hadn't heard much of this guy. In the face of him denying any labels, especially any socialist labels, I thought that identifying what he actually believed, what he supported in 2020, was a useful venture. I also had a conversation with a guy considering voting for this guy that didn't think "socialist" as a label meant anything, so I wanted to collate evidence that it did mean something. I hadn't really considered I would run into the "boo outgroup" rule in doing so, but it seems to check out. Sorry.

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