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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.
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.
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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