@seething_spendcel comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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seething_spendcel 9d ago

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.

Context

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. seething_spendcel 9d ago

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.

seething_spendcel FtttG 8d ago

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:

I am always surprised at the rabid rhetoric that gets thrown around by Democrats when it comes to the gun issue. I vote Democrat almost always, fall pretty far to the left on the political spectrum, but since I grew up in a rural area and am a soldier by trade, I own firearms and have a responsible relationship with them. In the last few days I have been accused of being party to the murder of children, a tangential supporter of the NRA (an organization that disgusts me), and an all around terrible person.

These accusations don't bug me, since I'm a rational guy and understand that people are emotional over the issue, but it certainly isn't going to win anyone over. But I do believe the party (especially its more urbanized base) has a real problem with this discussion, and until they fix it will continue to lose rural areas they might otherwise easily win.

Apr 30, 2016, in /r/politics:

As a rabidly anti-Hillary guy, it's pisses me off that what you just stated needs to be said. The woman has many faults, but this Byrd shit is ridiculous and doesn't hold up to 10 seconds worth of scrutiny.

Dec 31, 2015:

I'm 31, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, have worked since getting out of the service, happily pay my taxes understanding that it benefits society as a whole and therefore me as well. I'm supporting Bernie because I feel sacrifices must be made to build a better society and a heavier tax burden is worth it (not to mention that simple reform can help pay for these policies).

In other words: Fuck your condescending comment, you fucking asshat.

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 was raised in New England in a pretty liberal and progressive family. My mother is a bit of a hippie, and my father is a very bright guy who never bought in to the bullshit that accompanies sending young men off to war. He became a teacher during Vietnam to avoid the draft, and imbued in me a sense of cynicism when it comes to why wars are fought. However, for as long as I can remember I wanted to be a professional soldier. For many years I have tried to come up with an explanation as to why, but have always drawn a blank. It was simply what I was destined to do.

As a kid, I just liked playing war. When I got a little older, into high school, I became a voracious reader of all things combat related, and developed a much deeper need to experience war for myself. Oddly, I was also pretty politically active, which led to my protesting the Iraq war before it kicked off (I found myself fighting in Fallujah within 2 years. The irony.) That mixture of political awareness and the deep seated drive to experience war to its fullest brought me to steps of a Marine Corps recruiting office.

I was accepted into a pretty decent east coast university after high school, and both my parents really wanted me to attend. Knowing, but not fully understanding, my need to put on a uniform they tried to get me to go to school first and then take a commission. Instead I deferred a year and went backpacking around Europe and North Africa, attempting to "find myself". After 6 months, I still felt as devoid of adventure as I had when I left, so I returned to the states. During my time abroad, I had continued my research as to how I was going to get myself to war. I bounced between the Army, for the Ranger regiment, and even flirted with the idea of running off the France to join the Legion. But the more I read, the more I felt the Marine Corps was the place for me. Although known as knuckle dragging brainwashed murderers, the history of the Marine Corps instead represented a service that was known for its outside the box thinking as well as its aggression. Men like "Hard-head" Hanneken, Smedley Butler, and "Brute" Krulak were much more the warrior intellectuals that I wanted to be. The Marine Corps history was full of small bush fire wars, quite similar to what I saw as our near martial future, in which the Corps had acquitted itself admirably. On top of all this, the Marine Corps also has one hell of a reputation as a hardcore fighting force. If I was going to fight, I was going to do it with the best.

I also wanted to fight soon. Taking a commission would have required a degree, and almost 2 years of training, and I was making this decision winter of 2003-2004 when Iraq was just beginning to look like the intense insurgency it was to become. I had been waiting for my war since I was about 8, and I sure as hell wasn't going to miss it because of school. Also, in all my reading I had always identified more with the enlisted men, living the hard life in the mud and the the gore with shitty pay and few breaks. To me, it almost seemed as becoming an officer was copping out, avoiding the misery. Officers are also generally not the ones who go through the door first, and that's who I wanted to be. So in February 2004 I walked in to a Marine Corps recruiting office. I told the recruiter I wanted 2 things, the infantry and to be in Iraq within the year. Now, I know now that only one of those was a viable request, but the recruiter told me he couldn't do alot, but he was pretty damned sure he could get me those. Sure enough, he wasn't wrong. I shipped to Parris Island on March 1, 2004, became a Machinegunner (0331) over the summer at SOI and reported in to 3rd Battalion 8th Marines that fall. I deployed on my first tour in January of 2005 to Fallujah. I saw intense combat there and in Ramadi the following year, and finished off my 4 years in the Corps with a sea deployment to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf. I left the Corps after making Sergeant in 4 years to attend school for International Affairs and language. I am still enlisted, but now in the Army and deployed to Afghanistan. I love this job more than I ever thought I would, and my time in the Marine Corps was exactly what I had hoped it would be. I fought hard with tough men, and did the best I could to help the people living in the war ravaged country that surrounded us. It shaped me into the soldier I am today.

I realize this isn't the standard "I went to war and now I'm broken and angry and depressed" story, but it is mine and it is true. But I do not want you to take is as some kind of cheerleading to join the Marines. You had better really want it, or you should look elsewhere. I know many men who did not have the same experience as me, good men who simply responded to fighting, killing, and losing friends differently. So you'd better be damned certain this is what you want to do, because if it isn't you will regret it a hell of alot.

Some people here have advised you to be an officer because it's an easier life and the pay is better. If that is what you want, fuck off and stay a civilian. Shitty officers come from the mass of spoiled kids who want to play they game without the misery. Frankly, I would recommend enlisting first and then seeing if it is actually something you want to make a career out of. If it is, get out, go to school as a civilian, and then take a commission upon graduation. Save your possible future Marines/Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors from your shitty selfish leadership, which it will be if those are your reasons for commissioning.

Good luck, I hope my long rambling helps you in some way. Just remember, if it is something you really want, well, fucking go for it.

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:

You, Sir, sound like an awesomely masculine gay dude I would love to pound beers and clean guns with. Which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for most straight guys.

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