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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.
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".
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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.
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