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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 kind of have to respect such a dedicated hater, but... what is this post but a very long boo-outgroup? I mean, technically it's "Boo Graham Platner," but more generally it's "Boo leftists, Boo Democrats, Boo anyone who votes for Graham Platner." What are you offering here other than "Here is a list of all the things he said that I hate/think are mockworthy"?
If you want to start a thread about why a particular politician sucks, we would like it to have more content than just "He's on the other team."
I feel like the fact that we are talking about a specific person and specific things they have said should obviate the "outgroup" portion of the "boo outgroup" rule. @seething_spendcel isn't booing Democrats, he's booing a specific person who happens to be a Democrat.
I'd go farther than that: he's not just a specific person, he's a specific current leading candidate for the US Senate. This isn't a nutpicking look at a particular jerk who happens to be a Democrat; he's a particular jerk who was trouncing his primary opposition so hard they dropped out and who is now leading in all the general election polls. It's good to have lists of hateable and mockworthy things said by leading candidates for some of the most powerful positions in the country! Those are factual content; they are not "just "He's on the other team."" Is it is possible that some of the underlying selection process here was actually just "He's on the other team"? I certainly can't deny that there are leading candidates and even already-elected federal officials of the Republican party who have also said lots of hateable and mockworthy things. The solution should be to list and hate and mock both groups' leaders gross misstatements, not neither group's. Folks of every ideology can join in on that process in general, and even on many of the same targets in particular! Platner first became famous for triggering a "Are We the Baddies" LARP, and there really are lots of unbiased and pro-liberal and pro-leftist and even pro-Democratic-Party reasons to worry about him.
I think the point is that no work was done to show what makes the listed statements "hateable and mockworthy" other than the fact that they're ideological positions from the other team. If this is factual content then it's trivial - "left-wing politician has left-wing opinions" is peak dog-bites-man. And if it's meant to be polemical, then actual work needs to be done to show why OP disagrees with Platner on the validity of ACAB or marxism - otherwise, listing left-wing talking points as if their wrongness was self-evident is textbook consensus-building.
Picture a left-wing poster angrily listing everything a Republican candidate has said that proves he is pro-life, anti-LGBT, pro-border-control, pro-guns, anti-cancel-culture - just collating the quotes without further commentary, but with a distinct sense that OP is inviting everyone else to point and laugh and sneer with them. Wouldn't this clearly warrant mod action? How is it different from what we have here, just with the political valence switched?
If that Republican candidate was denying that he was conservative at all, or if he was part of a new crop of conservatives running for office, that might be worth documenting. As I said, I didn't know much about this candidate, but the recent controversies led to me actually looking up what he was. He's a popular candidate with a lot of grassroots support and he shies away from actually being called the name, and as far as I can tell, a lot of people didn't know much about him either, and certainly not that he's further left than he represents himself. Near the end, I tied it into what I think is a trend for the Democratic Party, that it's going to go even further left with candidates like this one and like Zohran Mamdani. If it's trivial to assume Democratic Party candidates are going to be ACAB, well, sorry. I happen to think that's noteworthy.
To be clear, I was attempting to elaborate on how I understood the modding action, not necessarily saying that I personally thought your post was over the line. For myself, I don't really think it's boo-outgroup precisely, and I think the factual purpose is reasonable enough even if I don't find the positions espoused very surprising. At most, I think there was some implicit consensus-building, which is a subtler sin than base boo-outgroup. But I do see where the mods were coming from.
Well, I think your opening post would have benefited from an attempt to elaborate on why you think so and why. For my money, ACAB is/was a major social justice meme, and Blue-aligned politicians can be relied upon to endorse all ascendant social justice memes for the cameras. The degree to which they personally believe all the shibboleths, and the extent to which this would affect their policies once in office - now that's a very different question. But when it comes to statements, yeah, I think "Democrat endorsed one of the things which you'd be mildly cancelled for not having in your Twitter bio a few years ago" is fork-found-in-kitchen.
(Of course, the separate point that Platner equivocates on whether he's a full-throated Democrat, and therefore it's significant to show that when push comes to shove he's made statements in support of 99% of the stock progressive platform, remains valid. But that's a completely different argument from whether he's particularly left-wing by the standards of avowedly Blue politicians.)
I've been repeatedly and regularly told that Wokeness in general and the BLM/Abolish Police memes in particular are dead, dead, dead since at least the 2024 election. How can they be dead, and also a major political candidate repeating them is too normal to comment on?
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Admittedly my post was heavier on consensus building, namely because I think Marxism is one of the most destructive forces on the planet and discovering this guy was like "oh look, here's another one of 'em, and he's denying it, the same as the rest." I will try to do better on the next top post, whatever it is, if there is another one.
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