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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 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.
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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