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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.
Yes, the same group that helped that Zohran Mamdani and that Bernie Sanders. Despite this, he attempts to resist labels:
You can tell he's a pretty far left populist. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders himself, he joins the fervor against billionaires:
(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:
(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:
October 21, 2020, unjustified shootings and War on Crime's disparate impact:
June 3, 2020, outrage that cops refuse to bend the knee for Black Lives:
January 17, 2021, gun owning psychedelics taking socialist (I'm guessing this vocation is where the "labor groups" found this guy):
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:
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)
May 15, 2018, defending Marx from /r/Firearms users:
Nov 1, 2021, clarifying for /r/antiwork, in response to the sentiment "when you are older, you'll be more conservative":
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 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.
If someone actually believed the sort of hysterical anti-Republican "they're fascists and they'll never let us have a fair election again" rhetoric common on reddit, then this is the only sensible view. He's wrong in a bigger sense, but starting from his premises this is the only correct conclusion. It's the "they're fascists, they're running concentration camps, every cop is bad, and you must disarm so only those wicked cops have guns" people who are silly.
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The tattoo should be immediately disqualifying if he had any idea of the meaning, and honestly bad enough that I personally wouldn't take the risk that he might have known. A disgusting thing to put on your body.
Issue is that well, I don't really know if he had any knowledge of it. The average person's knowledge of the Holocaust is basically just: Hitler, Anne Frank, swatiska, Auschwitz. Apparently a lot of people don't even know the last one.
To some degree this is a failure of education, but I also think it's just a failure of people and memory. I just think of the amount of people in my area I know who did that typical complaint "they never teached us how to do real life stuff like taxes" when we do actually teach it in our local school system, I had a tax prep class in high school and I remember one in freshman year teaching us basic interview skills. They just don't remember it, either because they're forgetful or because they just didn't really care about school to begin with so never bothered learning.
The little bit the average person knows about WW2 seems appalling, until you realize it's significantly more than they know about any other war. How many people off the streets can accurately answer both the opposing leaders during the civil war? Way less than you'd hope. How many even realize there was a Korean war? Even WW1 has very little knowledge about it.
So it's perfectly understandable that him and his soldier buddies go get tattoos and pick out what they just thought was a cool skull without second thought. Even if he wanted to do a nazi symbol, there's a good chance he wouldn't have known what it is when picking it out during service to begin with. Apparently he would go with his shirt off pretty often too, from what I've heard this includes in front of Jewish relatives? He's either extremely bold and confident no one else would recognize it, or he genuinely didn't know. There have been some anonymous accusations in smaller media that he was aware beforehand, but so long as they remain purely anonymous it doesn't hold much weight.
And I think that's part of why his defense worked so well. Nobody else actually recognized it either, so "I didn't know" sounds believable. Even the campaign manager who stepped down afterwards didn't seem to recognize it beforehand considering he was apparently a lifelong friend as well. Nobody did. Of course not, people don't even know what Auschwitz is.
As for the rest of his behavior and posts, I don't really get the scandals too much. I don't think he should be a senator, let's make that clear. But people are acting like the rural working veteran populist saying a bunch of dumb edgy shit online is some sort of surprise. Like really? That's exactly the type of trash I expect from such a persona.
Anyone old enough to remember M * A * S * H knew about the Korean War.
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Even with knowledge, I find it questionable simply for the timeframe. If he got the tattoo at 18, he’s had it for 20+ years, and it’s not very likely that he has the exact same beliefs that he had at 18-20 years old. People change and tats are permanent more or less. If he thinks nobody will recognize the tat, he might not bother, but it doesn’t mean he’s a current Nazi, it might plausibility mean he was one, but most people have cringe tendencies at 18.
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The hysteria around this is entirely predictable. The 'upper classes', or the people pretending to be upper class, really do not like the lower classes. But they do often talk in favor of representation and class mobility in theory. Well, here you have that representation personified in Platner. But as we see in practice, that representation is low class coded, of course! So 'upper class' folks instinctively, balk and sneer. 'How could he? I would never!'
Lets just face the music. The German army was cool. The SS were cool. The uniforms, runes, equipment, it's all aesthetically cool. Especially to young men who have little or no reason to otherize Germans.
To that extent there's no reason for a marine grunt to not get a cool tattoo. Cool people don't care about the opinion of some hysteric jews that see another shoah in everything. Or maybe it's the opposite, and that's kind of what gives the aesthetic an edge. After all, Satanism wouldn't mean much if it wasn't for hysterical concerned Christian mothers.
That being said, the entire news cycle around this is just political propaganda. There is no reality to this, and no controversy. Just an emotional whirlpool kept going through mass media soundbites generated entirely to push a narrative through any means available. The safest bet would be that Platner is getting negative press from more than one angle due to his ongoing political campaign and pro-Palestinian rhetoric.
But lets hash this out. If the idea is that a secret nazi is running on a Dem ticket in Maine to launch another holocaust then we can say that. If that is not the case, what is the argument other than class sneering?
Even if Platner was a nazi, is the contention that he is one now? If not, is the contention that if anyone at any point was a nazi, they are invalid in the future?
If he wasn't a nazi but knowingly got a nazi tattoo, is that invalidating? If so, why?
It's silly theater. None of the questions are explored or answered. It's just a platform for interested parties to performatively huff and puff.
I'm all for accepting that people can change, but if it's a choice between a person who has shown they are capable of being a Nazi and a person who hasn't done that, well it's a pretty big disadvantage.
At the very least it's a sign of bad judgement and stupidity to keep a known nazi tattoo on you when running for a political office. But more generally it is something that raises an eyebrow and if you have another similar candidate who doesn't raise that eyebrow, why not go with them?
That's one reason why opposition research and ads are typically not launched until the later parts of a campaign, you don't want the other party to have time to switch candidates with less baggage.
Would Platner have won if there was a Platner like without a Nazi tattoo? Who knows, but it is way less likely at least. There wasn't really much time for starting another campaign like his and the Dem mainstream answer was yet another dinosaur (who barely even tried to begin with) so Platner won, hopefully despite the eyebrow raising potential.
The problem is the Dems don't have similar candidates. If he wins, he'll represent a significant portion of the total testosterone level on the Dem Senate bench.
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What's the functional difference between being a nazi and being a zionist? Or is this just a metric dependent on what is further outside the Overton Window?
Outside of that you're not offering anything concrete here that relates to the tattoo that rises above class sneering. To that extent you answer your own question. A peachy clean political candidate that looks like they were cooked up in a lab is the exact aesthetic someone like Platner counters.
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Why doesn't he just get the tattoo removed? Hesitancy to do that is the thing that should be disqualifying. Now that he certainly DOES know.
Any man should at least bristle at the thought of being crybullied into making such a change, especially after so long. Even in this circumstance with this symbol.
I know almost nothing about this guy or the circumstances around the tattoo, but this sort of attitude is definitely something I would respect about him if, indeed, that was part of the thinking that went into not removing the tattoo. It's the same reason why I respect people like Chris Pratt or Jeremy Renner (despite not particularly caring for their acting chops), for standing firm with their Christianity/conservatism despite the way Hollywood tends to treat people of such beliefs (they seem to be smart enough self-marketers not to make a big deal about it like, say, Rachel Zegler did with her views on that whole Israel-Palestine ordeal, though). That kind of firmness against complaints about shit that doesn't matter is something deserving of respect regardless of the actual contents.
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He actually did get it covered up shortly after the controversy broke.
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CNN: Graham Platner’s claims that he didn’t know tattoo was Nazi-linked undercut by new evidence
I find the position he implicitly expressed in his Reddit comments, that Nazi symbols are a cultural tradition in the military with no particular ideological meaning, to be much more believable than his public claims. Because Nazism is the most taboo ideology in western society, Nazi symbols are likewise taboo, which means they are cool and edgy and costly ingroup signaling, which means they become cultural traditions among certain groups like criminals and soldiers that some people get regardless of ideology. The appeal is especially strong when combined with the Nazis being a militaristic group associated with the most famous historical war. As he alludes to in the second comment, the Nazi SS symbol was particularly heavily used by the Marine Corps Scout Snipers, with Wikipedia claiming its usage dates back to the 1980s and continued to some degree after being banned in 2012, but similar dynamics cause people to get other Nazi symbols as tattoos on a less organized scale. Sure. However I don't think this is an argument that most of his political allies would normally be sympathetic to.
That also sounds like a decently likely explanation! I've definitely seen that a lot of modern Nazism/communism/etc extremisms tend to come from wanting to be edgy or extremist or cool first as their motivation, and the actual idealogy is just backfilled in.
It's like the adult equivalent of a child saying poopy or other childish "swears" over and over again as their mom scolds them for it.
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See also: the
stars and barsConfederate battle flag being considered anything other than ultra-racism these days, as opposed to when I was younger and I knew plenty of people (including progressives) who didn’t mind it being on the General Lee.That's the Confederate battle flag. The Stars and Bars is a different flag and I expect a majority of progressives wouldn't recognize it out of context.
Whoops, quite right!
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Having to run cover for Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct made the Democrats, at least temporarily, more moderate on the issue of sexual harassment. With any luck, this will make the Democrats more moderate on Cancel Culture, at least for edgelord Nazi related stuff.
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Because it's all friend/enemy, or who/whom, or whichever phrasing you prefer.
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He definitely knew. People have come forward with stories of him bragging about it. His political director resigned over it.
I'm supposed to believe all women, sure, but... who? Who came forward, and are their stories believable?
The articles do not name names, which might well be for the safety of the people involved. Make of that what you will.
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Essentially, at various times, political parties face a perceived deficit of certain character archetypes.
On the left, this is most frequently a “tough white guy deficit”.
On the right, this is most frequently a “hot girl deficit” (or really, ‘young woman deficit’).
This is to some extent the product of specific neuroses. Radical socialists have a revolutionary ideology that they know implicitly requires probably at least the threat of violence to implement, which is difficult when everyone’s ’future job on the anarchist commune’ is yoga instructor, poet, or therapist. On the right, there is a sensitivity to the sausage party accusation, the gay / incel accusation, and the fact that it’s hard to get young men to show up to something without hot girls. Say what you will about the DSA students for gaza meetup at your liberal arts college, it really will be mostly (biological) women. Any young conservative or right wing group, by contrast, might be the only organisation on a 70% female campus other than the esports club to have an almost or entirely male membership. The right has also in previous generations done this for ‘based’ black/gay men, although their power has lessened somewhat as the movement genuinely diversifies along with the country.
These deficits allow unscrupulous or enterprising grifters to carve out niches they couldn’t otherwise sustain in their demographic’s “preferred” political faction or indeed in any case in the non-political world. An attractive 30 year old woman probably isn’t going to be some big social media influencer celebrity, and pretty women who support the Democratic Party include almost any famous actress, model, social media personality etc. On the right though, people have succeeded in this grift.
Similarly, there are a million big muscular tattooed white veterans on the right shilling their own supplement brand, drop shipped gear, podcast, black rifle coffee-esque operation. They span the spectrum from evangelical neocons to dissident rightists, the market is saturated regardless. On the left, though, the buff big man hustle is limited to an effete Turk and some gay men, neither of which really satisfies the demand.
As opposed to "famously hot" lefty women?
What a fantasy to tell yourself.
Hot people tend to be against equity and equal distribution and in favor of traditional "conservative" beauty standards.
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See also L. Neil Smith's novels where he pretends there were a significant number of female Libertarians. "Mary Ross-Byrd"?? Come on!!
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Think it’s cope to say the right lacks hot girls. We’ve got Miami and all the sorority girls as reliable voters. And the middle of the road hotties who vote Dem swap to GOP once they’re pregnant. Females vote Dem more but it’s fairly even with the hotter ones and we don’t one the tatted up chicks.
Are “all the sorority girls” reliable GOP voters?
I bet a big chunk of sorority girls are overrepresented as GOP voters, give or take 5 years, compared to the rest of their demographic. A majority of sorority girls are in traditional Panhellenic greek culture, not the Not That Kind of Sorority I'm sure you find at NYU or USC. I wouldn't discount greek life as one of the few institutional signals young women get exposed to that it's okay or even socially beneficial to enjoy traditional things.
Say you go to public school in Austin, TX your whole life. Your family might be culturally conservative or even Christian churchgoers, but rushing at Texas A&M might be the first time your peers value things like tradition and encourage you to invest in institutional values. You learn about the importance of doing the things the way they've been done. Exposing young women to a traditional institution is probably an important avenue for conservatives to reach status conscious, conformist women. I don't think that should be underestimated, although planning an electoral future on SEC rush TikToks probably goes too far.
Having interacted with actual sorority girls in the last decade, even in my flyover midwest state school, yeah no. I wouldn't call them dyed in the wool progressives but thinking they are reliable GOP votes is equally fantastical. Obviously we didn't do a lot of political talking but my recollection is that most of them had normie feminist politics, with a splash of family oriented-ness and occasionally some cultural christianity
Right, but that's just default preferences of college aged women.
A major Republican coup given the political moment. They are more likely to get married and more likely to have children. I wouldn't expect them to care about politics much even when they decide to vote X years out of school, but statistically speaking that's a Republican pipeline. A pipeline confounded by things like also being more likely to be attractive, but it's my intuition versus your anecdata.
I mean maybe if Republicans gave up on Abortion, Gay Rights/Marriage/LGB, and Donald Trump, then yeah. But I wouldn't hold my breath. And if you think marriage and children is a conservative pipeline, then I have a bridge to sell you in the Sahara. I know more Prog-Commies with kids or trying for kids than I know conservative men with kids. Turns out that conservative male politics outside of a religious community makes you unmarriageable to most normie women.
Square this fact with the Republican modal beliefs on women and tell me how they converge in the slightest.
There is a gulf in voting preference between unmarried women and married women. Unmarried women are almost +50 D, married women are majority R. Looking at the stats from Pew it appears that getting married and having kids transforms a significant portion of women into Republicans. I get the opposite could be happening in that those women who already leaned R seek out marriage and children. But the first possible causal claim is defensible. Not some "selling you a bridge" obviously wrong idea.
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Gay rights won and the problem with winning is you give people permission to move on. Abortion is dying for much the same reason. There's a way to go, but it doesn't seem as relevant as weapon for firing up the base as it was 10 years ago. The LGB(T) rights were unfortunately (genuinely, I consider it unfortunate) hitched to an engine that burned out and ultimately damaged the image of the people its advocates claimed to represent. People tired of it.
I don't think there are that many prog-commies in traditional sorority life. Maybe I'm wrong. I know a lot more progressives with kids than conservatives, too. Unless we expand the definition of conservative to not-progressive, in which case I know about the same, but this says more about my social circle than anything else. I live in a place where there's a lot more progressives than conservatives.
For marriage, I offer you this gallup article or this chart you can find inside it. As for children, you can go look up of TFR and partisanship how you'd prefer, but I think this article is takes a good at look at both:
My first claim was weak. I wrote, "sorority girls are overrepresented as GOP voters, give or take 5 years, compared to the rest of their demographic." It wouldn't take much to validate my weak claim, so let's see if there's some evidence for it.
Young women in sororities, who identify as much more liberal than men identify as conservative, are more likely to vote GOP sometime in the future compared to women at your local prog-commie drum circle. They are in proximity to indicators that correlate with being more likely to vote GOP. Whether sororities are Republican voter generators, or one last bastion on campus for slightly more conservative men and women to congregate in socially desirable clubs I leave up to you. I'd call it important either way, for as long as the undergrad experience exists. Again, status conscious, conformist women in clubs with peers are more likely to be a little more conservative, more likely to get married, more likely to have kids-- these things matter. Today, the liberal young lady reigns supreme, but when the dust has settled and the white, liberal TFR comes to pay it'll be children of other women filling houses of debauchery. At a time where conservative cachet among the demographic is at an all time low, it might matter now more than ever. It doesn't mean Charlie Kirk is popular in a a given greek house.
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Yes, what the GOP has is a single woman deficit, married women vote about like their husbands. But you kinda knew that’s what 2rafa meant, didn’t you? The based ewhore got her followers by seeming sexually available, up until she had a kid with Elon musk.
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Left and right are not always the best words to describe these populations. Many voter groups have ideosyncrytic beliefs that can fit with both the far left and far right. No party is socially right wing, economically left wing and isolationist, but voters increasingly are. Due to the economic fallout of the Iran war economic matters are very salient right now, which would benefit a guy like Platner, particularily in a state like Maine with a less religious population.
The typical swing voter probably has a negative view of both parties, war, immigration, crime and billionaires, yet somehow political strategist keep envisioning them as a love child between Hillary Clinton and Liz Cheney.
I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement. There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.
The categories become much more relevant and legible if you accept the Milton and David Friedman model of Left and Right as being about collective vs individual responsibility and agency.
It’s not a psyop; politics wasn’t and isn’t one-dimensional.
The political compass has its own issues, but it illustrates this one nicely. Economic collectivism, social conservatism. Distinctly lacking in the egalitarian, enlightenment ideals underpinning the Western Overton window.
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If National Socialism was ever a "fundamentally left-wing movement" then nobody told Hitler's contemporaries. The right found him sympathetic and the non-communist left didn't.
Only because of the Nazi-Soviet pact. A number of Communists went from being loud and proud anti-fascists to pacifists when Soviet policy changed, and straight back to being anti-fascist after Barbarossa.
The lineage is messy, but "leftist movement that walked back some important bits" is a reasonable ballpark description. Their formal party platform reads like a "What if Bernie Sanders was a really self-hating Jew" skit. "Non-communist left" is still usually quite communist-sympathetic, and the German conservatives seemed to think they were making a deal with a lesser devil against the greater.
Personally, I like the simplicity of the /politicalcompassmemes solution: Call them auth-center and let the comments section slapfight it out.
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I think fascism really can't be summed up as anything other than Third Position. Intellectually it inherits from both the then right and the left. It combines the 'lets remake society based on my rational principles (charitable) / my ideology (uncharitable)' of the left, which the right hates, in the service of many institutions and cultural mores, such as natural hierarchy and nationalism, that the left hates. The fascists typically allied a lot more with traditional conservatives than the left in the interwar period. At the same time, they allied with the left on occasion such as working with Communists to bring down the Weimar Coalition. They were a very different ideology and both democratic conservatives and continental authoritarian conservatives had a lot of negative things to say about Fascists.
Anglo American conservatism didn't really have anything to do with Fascists. Unlike their continental counterparts, they never made any alliances with then nor did they have much ideological shared lineage. There was some admiration from the then progressives in the US for Fascism and even Nazism, but there also was admiration for Stalin as well. Many American technocrats thought the Communists and Fascists were technocracy done right, until it became obvious they were failed experiments. To be honest, both the Anglosphere left and right are so far removed from Fascism and Nazism that I don't think any comparison or contrast is useful. It's like comparing Democrats or Republicans to the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia or the Taliban; they are just so different there isn't much to say.
These are all excellent points, but I want to push back a bit against fascism being "a Third Position" at least in the Anglo-American context.
As you yourself acknowledged, Anglo-American conservatism never really had anything to do with the Fascists. But this often obscured either through willful misrepresentation, (IE using "Fascism" as a generic label for anything leftists don't like regardless of content) or through conflation of vocabulary. People today see the word "Corporatism" and immediately think Wall Street, when the reality is that what men like Mussolini, Mosley, and Eco described as "Corporatism" or "Corporazioni" was a very different beast from the typical Anglo-American understanding of the word which is more about being beholden to corporate interests. and at the end of the day Fascism remains rooted in the same Marxian critique of Capitalism in particular and Western Civilization more generally as Communism.
I just find it deeply ironic that the same people who'll label anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a Nazi have chosen a self-described revolutionary socialist with an SS tattoo to be their guy.
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Seems wrong. The right sometimes talks about individual responsibility and agency, but they are right there complaining about opioids, OnlyFans, and FanDuel as if people don't actually have agency.
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I hate pearl clutching on the lefties side, but I also hate it on mine. He is troll and edgelord or maybe a bit stupid and fanatic. But so far nothing disqualifying. I would take X of him instead of the squad.
He is ultimately a Bernie Bro, and even a Marxist like him is less harmful in a lot of ways compared to a standard progressive, especially since he doesn't seem like the type to read theory or even particularly care about the condemnations of other socialists. But I really think that the resurgence of socialism in plain sight should be concerning to everyone, all the same.
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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:
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if, in the next ten years, Platner jumps ship and joins the GOP.
I would be surprised, too.
Trump has a monopoly on GOP-aligned populism, and he’s shown no interest in a big tent. Getting in on his movement requires kissing the ring.
Sure, but he'll be out of office in two years and probably dead in less than ten.
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I would be surprised.
The left/right split in the US is increasingly about identitarianism and collectivism vs individualism. Some like David Friedman would argue that it always has been about this. Plattner seems to be solidly in the identitarian/collectivist camp, contrast this with folks like Fetterman and Gabbard who consistently backed the Democrats' economic policies but always seemed a bit uncomfortable with the id-pol stuff.
As I said above, the right is not about individualism. Just a different collectivism.
The right is genuinely much more willing to evaluate people as individuals or members of small groups while the left is much more willing to generalize. Treating people as individuals doesn’t necessarily correspond to granting unlimited freedom.
The "right" often speaks the language of individualism, especially around markets, speech, guns, taxation, and personal responsibility. But for other topics like nation, religion, family, sexuality, immigration, crime, and cultural loyalty, its pretty damn collectivist. Realistically the "right" is multiple divergent camps, some are individualist, others are far more collectivist. Do you really want to tell me that the average HBD believers, Alt right, and dissident rightists are in any form individualists?
Yes. Allowing for collectivism in your framework is not the same thing as "not being individualist in any form", though with how extreme the demands for individualism are (at least as far as a certain group of people is concerned), I understand the distinction might be too subtle to notice.
No need to get snarky. Pretend for a moment that I am very good at noticing. Consider that the modal alt-rightist wants all the progressive gibs but for white people, thats pretty collectivist by any definition
Anytime a political creed starts with "and this [group of people by an attribute] needs to have xyz done to them or given to them", then boom you are in the collectivist category. Pretty easy boundary line.
EDIT: I remembered a couple more examples: Dread Jim is part of the right, he and similar birds of the feather are pro-men/anti-women collectivists. They wants spoils and policy benefits that benefit men as a class and hurt women as a class. We have several people here on the motte that are in this camp. This is right-wing. Classic collectivism.
We have our resident joo-posters/neo-nazis, again would be classified as rightwing. They are clearly anti-jewish/Pro-white collectivists. They in particularly want gibs towards white people much like the progs do.
Yes, I agree, but I don't think they're so collectivist that they've purged any trace of individualism from their worldview, which I think would be necessary to confidently answer a question like "Do you really want to tell me that the average HBD believers, Alt right, and dissident rightists are in any form individualists?" in the negative.
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HBD is a belief about an is, not an ought. It says nothing about collectivism vs individualism and in actual practical use is almost always used to counter a collective guilt blood libel.
We must witnessing very different applications if you think the average HBD poster is making comments about African-Americans being more violent and lower IQ on an individual level. And not by definition on a collective level. There's a fig leaf towards it being an distribution and obviously not every individual. Followed up by here's my 10 step plan to reshape society so that AAs collectively have reduced social impact, freedom, rights, and political power.
Only in the most theoretical autistic form. If the belief is that certain populations underperform along ethnic lines and have increases in certain undesirable traits. The follow on is almost always policy actions to reshape society around that theory. That's an "ought" not an "is"
HBD itself is a term mostly used by us autistic online types. Your standard vulgar racist doesn't reach for academic sounding terms to justify their views.
Again in actual practice is used to argue against theories of disparate impact which are very collectivist. "reshape society" is impossibly vague.
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Can you give an example? Most I've seen is people arguing to remove the special privileges that were given to them, and therefore to actually equalize social impact, freed, rights, and political power.
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The right's collectivism treats people as individuals when assigning blame, but that's as far as it goes. They tell you what to do and them blame you if you don't do it right.
That is quite literally what a belief in individual responsibility and agency entails. If you fuck up you don't get to blame it on "society" or some "structural -ism", your fuck ups are on you.
That's only half of individualism, though. Assigning everyone a role and holding them responsible for fulfilling is still collectivist.
This feels like hyperbole. Communist China assigns everyone a role, not the right in the US of A. But if it's just a premise, ok.
This is completely unobjectionable.
Only in the broadest sense of the term. Hierarchies exist and are natural; everyone has a boss.
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No it is not.
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Possibly more assumed than real, or at least in my 'farm labourer/navvy on building site' family background, there weren't any Modernist architects:
I have no opinion on his politics, and all the screaming about "Fascist Nazi!" due to his tattoo left me rather more than less sympathetic to him (young guy joins army, serves overseas, does usual dumb young drunk squaddie shit like getting bad-ass skull and bones tattoo, oh dear turns out he should have studied the history and cultural symbolism of such images in that society because eighteen years later he will be quizzed on why didn't you realise this was the Nazi Death's Head you Nazi?)
He reminds me in a way of Fetterman, who I do dislike based on his public image, but if elected I imagine he'll just be the usual idiot and not the second coming of Hitler/Stalin (delete as applicable).
He also went to an expensive private school and had Daddy give him money to buy his house. There's a funny bit there where after being caught lying about not getting support like that, he admitted that his dad did "loan" him the money, but it was ok because it was purportedly a higher interest rate than the VA would have charged him.
Which, honestly, is kind of believable. That's about the level of financial literacy I'd expect from a caviar communist.
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My understanding is that he got the tattoo in Croatia. Nazi tattoo parlors are illegal there. He went to an illegal parlor that apparently had a lot of Nazi shit that you’d recognize. So at best it was highly questionable.
There's nothing at all in his post history that suggests he would be sympathetic to Nazi ideology in any regard. Why would he do that, do you think? I've heard others say it was from Croatia, so I'm guessing he said it in some podcast or appearance, but I feel like there are a lot of things we're assuming about this. How respected is that law, for one thing? Was he sober enough to even parse the other imagery in the shop? Or did the shop even have that other imagery? Where'd he hear about the shop from, one of his friends whom he respected? I don't even like tattoos, but there's a lot of unknowns, and it's couched by sympathetic factors like he was young and that there is a very pervasive culture of getting tons of tattoos on basically a whim in the military.
Sure I highly doubt he is a literal Nazi. I do think he was edgy for the sake of being edgy.
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Aside from the general left-authoritarianism and the anti-Israel stuff.
But the actual point here is, since when does that matter? Rules for Radicals #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." Every Democrat who doesn't denounce Plattner (and all of his supporters) as a Nazi, which he is by their own standards for the last 10+ years, themselves deserves to be called a Nazi.
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So, to get more evidence for the claim that he was a mix of left and right...
Feb 20, 2018, posting on a thread attacking a politician liked by the NRA, in /r/BlueMidTerm2018:
Apr 30, 2016, in /r/politics:
Dec 31, 2015:
And finally, a life story posted May 31, 2011. Lot of stuff in here, but I will highlight one thing to emphasize my point:
I think this guy has been pretty consistently what he says he is right now. Maybe with more swearing 15 years ago, more gay jokes. But even on the gay jokes... this was posted on Oct 23, 2013:
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It seems a lot more likely that this guy departs from the democrats party line in predictable actual Marxist ways than by becoming a secret Republican.
I don't think he's a crypto-conservative, but I do think he might undergo an ideological shift over the following years.
Per Plattner himself, growing up and getting older didn't make him more conservative, it made him a communist.
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I did see a fair few comments fearful that he would be the next Fetterman. For me, that seems somewhat baseless.
Part of why I shared so many comments was to show that he's been what I would call quite leftist for longer than 4 years. He was calling cops bastards in 2020, talking about having moved further left at the time of an influential leftist's death, many comments talking about the dangers of fascism. Sure, he mocked gay people, he spoke coarsely on other subjects, but he seems to hold genuine belief on these other subjects. I could chalk up the offensive comments to just being a high T rough stuff type guy who participated in two wars. But keeping guns to keep the fascists in check, being an instructor in a Socialist rifle club, saying he tells people not to thank him for his service... Fetterman was never that far left, was he? What beliefs was the Substack author referring to when saying "mix of right and left"? As Platner would tell you himself, Marx was never about surrendering guns, so in his case, that's not indicative of a right wing belief to me. Securing the border could be, which he has professed support for. I think he was talking about more government support for veterans? That's not usually a leftist talking point, but he's a veteran appealing to moderates. I fail to see how he's been anything but hard left for probably at least 8 years now.
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I often wonder about this framing. Did Fetterman, Taibbi, and Greenwald really "make the switch", or did the American left move left faster than they could keep up?
In 2006 I was a solid Democrat. I wasn't at the extreme end of the party, politically, but my views fit comfortably inside the envelope of party orthodoxy. I feel well represented by guys like Jim Webb and Howard Dean. Since then, I haven't really moved rightward - hell, I may have even shifted left on topics of corporate regulation and tax law. Nonetheless, most political scales would say that I'm not a Democrat anymore. Somewhere around 2015 they started increasing the number of things you had to believe to be a Democrat, and at this point the list is so large and incoherent that I just can't do it anymore.
I can't speak for Fetterman's policy stances in general, but it's indisputably true that he used to support a two-state solution in Israel but no longer does.
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Greenwald is still on the left (though dissident), he's just also gone full Hamas.
For whatever reason I thought it was the other way - that he'd been basically run out of his own publication, The Intercept, for being too sympathetic to Israel.
Sadly, I'm not sure these two statements are necessarily at odds in 2026.
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Read any of his recent Substack posts. His seething hatred for Israel is on full display.
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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".
Bulworth memories.
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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
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
My initial reaction is surprise that NonCredibleDefense is not included. My follow-on reaction is "yeah, no, okay, that makes sense he wouldn't hang around there".
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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?
Dramanaut vs SRDines for control of the left. Much more fun than DSA vs Justice Democrat infighting, and less fatties.
CAN THE SRDines! Reddit war now!
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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.
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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.
I think the number one thing Democrats need to prioritize for that is making sure whatever selection process they follow doesn't hinge on aesthetics, but rather on specific policies. If there's any focus on aesthetics, it should specifically be about that candidate's open and perhaps even disrespectful disavowal of existing policies and the people who supported such policies and the ideologies from which those policies came.
(Perhaps we could go even one more meta layer up and say that the candidate should be selected for based on her willingness to disavow the process by which the Democratic party selected those people and ideologies as well, but that's probably too indirect and low impact).
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I question the assertion that they are trying to appeal to middle class voters rather than the terminally online.
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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.
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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.
If he didrespected black people he'd get more votes in Maine. Socialism for lily white Maine, free from corpotard oligarch techbros, of the people for the people.... jewhating... nazi tattoos... waaaaiiiiitaminute.
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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.
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How are you going to make this post and not mention the funniest one?
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.
truly Americans are men beyond comprehension. I couldn't stay hard while overhearing guys outside the can talk about their thunder shits or piss smells, let alone replicate what I heard from US personnel telling me about dudes just casually jacking it openly in the barracks and then sharing the flashlight with the next dude without washing. The worst version of eskimo kiss available.
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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 feel like the fact that we are talking about a specific person and specific things they have said should obviate the "outgroup" portion of the "boo outgroup" rule. @seething_spendcel isn't booing Democrats, he's booing a specific person who happens to be a Democrat.
I'd go farther than that: he's not just a specific person, he's a specific current leading candidate for the US Senate. This isn't a nutpicking look at a particular jerk who happens to be a Democrat; he's a particular jerk who was trouncing his primary opposition so hard they dropped out and who is now leading in all the general election polls. It's good to have lists of hateable and mockworthy things said by leading candidates for some of the most powerful positions in the country! Those are factual content; they are not "just "He's on the other team."" Is it is possible that some of the underlying selection process here was actually just "He's on the other team"? I certainly can't deny that there are leading candidates and even already-elected federal officials of the Republican party who have also said lots of hateable and mockworthy things. The solution should be to list and hate and mock both groups' leaders gross misstatements, not neither group's. Folks of every ideology can join in on that process in general, and even on many of the same targets in particular! Platner first became famous for triggering a "Are We the Baddies" LARP, and there really are lots of unbiased and pro-liberal and pro-leftist and even pro-Democratic-Party reasons to worry about him.
I think the point is that no work was done to show what makes the listed statements "hateable and mockworthy" other than the fact that they're ideological positions from the other team. If this is factual content then it's trivial - "left-wing politician has left-wing opinions" is peak dog-bites-man. And if it's meant to be polemical, then actual work needs to be done to show why OP disagrees with Platner on the validity of ACAB or marxism - otherwise, listing left-wing talking points as if their wrongness was self-evident is textbook consensus-building.
Picture a left-wing poster angrily listing everything a Republican candidate has said that proves he is pro-life, anti-LGBT, pro-border-control, pro-guns, anti-cancel-culture - just collating the quotes without further commentary, but with a distinct sense that OP is inviting everyone else to point and laugh and sneer with them. Wouldn't this clearly warrant mod action? How is it different from what we have here, just with the political valence switched?
If that Republican candidate was denying that he was conservative at all, or if he was part of a new crop of conservatives running for office, that might be worth documenting. As I said, I didn't know much about this candidate, but the recent controversies led to me actually looking up what he was. He's a popular candidate with a lot of grassroots support and he shies away from actually being called the name, and as far as I can tell, a lot of people didn't know much about him either, and certainly not that he's further left than he represents himself. Near the end, I tied it into what I think is a trend for the Democratic Party, that it's going to go even further left with candidates like this one and like Zohran Mamdani. If it's trivial to assume Democratic Party candidates are going to be ACAB, well, sorry. I happen to think that's noteworthy.
To be clear, I was attempting to elaborate on how I understood the modding action, not necessarily saying that I personally thought your post was over the line. For myself, I don't really think it's boo-outgroup precisely, and I think the factual purpose is reasonable enough even if I don't find the positions espoused very surprising. At most, I think there was some implicit consensus-building, which is a subtler sin than base boo-outgroup. But I do see where the mods were coming from.
Well, I think your opening post would have benefited from an attempt to elaborate on why you think so and why. For my money, ACAB is/was a major social justice meme, and Blue-aligned politicians can be relied upon to endorse all ascendant social justice memes for the cameras. The degree to which they personally believe all the shibboleths, and the extent to which this would affect their policies once in office - now that's a very different question. But when it comes to statements, yeah, I think "Democrat endorsed one of the things which you'd be mildly cancelled for not having in your Twitter bio a few years ago" is fork-found-in-kitchen.
(Of course, the separate point that Platner equivocates on whether he's a full-throated Democrat, and therefore it's significant to show that when push comes to shove he's made statements in support of 99% of the stock progressive platform, remains valid. But that's a completely different argument from whether he's particularly left-wing by the standards of avowedly Blue politicians.)
I've been repeatedly and regularly told that Wokeness in general and the BLM/Abolish Police memes in particular are dead, dead, dead since at least the 2024 election. How can they be dead, and also a major political candidate repeating them is too normal to comment on?
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Admittedly my post was heavier on consensus building, namely because I think Marxism is one of the most destructive forces on the planet and discovering this guy was like "oh look, here's another one of 'em, and he's denying it, the same as the rest." I will try to do better on the next top post, whatever it is, if there is another one.
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I don't really know where the line is. Writing up everything David Gerard did on Wikipedia is "boo outgroup" if you think what he did on Wikipedia is bad.
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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.
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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.
In fairness to Mamdani, as much as a progressive wanker he may be, he really really really does seem to love New York and knows how to talk the talk to seem like a real fucking human being. New Yorkers are fine with rich people, Bloomberg was mayor after all, but you gotta be a real human being. Newsoms skinsuit looks like it boils his lizard scales every time he puts it on and Adams went full KARABOGA for whatever reason. A dweeby Indian nerd who shittalks Trey Young and doesnt seem to have Hochuls hand deep up his ass (at the time) gets lots of likability.
Mamdani could never be a New Yorker. He’s not even an American.
Ah yes, New York City, famous for its nigh-nonexistent immigrant population.
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naturalized Americans don't count as Americans?
I happen to believe that we're the MOST American!
I do agree that naturalized citizens would actually have to do their civic test and therefore already out-qualify many if not most non-naturalized citizens in that aspect. I am interested in what /u/Opt-out counts as "an American" though cause it's starting to sound awfully like "what kind of American are you?"
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No. He’s not American. Don’t make the but it’s the law. He will never be one of us. A piece of paper doesn’t make you an American.
hmmm, what counts then?
It’s like porn you know it when you see it. Culturally and genetically assimilated individuals.
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He largely got elected by non-natives and women
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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.
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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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