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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15117 thread views

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.

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.

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.

Greenwald is still on the left (though dissident), he's just also gone full Hamas.

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.

Read any of his recent Substack posts. His seething hatred for Israel is on full display.

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