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Notes -
Oooh, I have thoughts about this.
So, I'm roughly the same age as this guy. My grandfather was pushing me to join the military out of high school, and one of the reasons I never even considered it was because I'd absorbed nice, modern, genteel, Atlantic Democrat memes like "People who join the army are the bottom 10% of their class who just want to murder sandni**gers".
Sorry, vets.
I say this because Graham Platner struck me as actually fitting that description. Well-off prep school kid from New England joins the Marines in 2004? That's weird. Copilot data about military members from each state doesn't even bother to list Maine. Other estimates put the total Marines from the state in the low hundreds. "Well-off prep school kid from New England joins the Marines" is possibly literal one-in-a-million rarity. Maybe if the kid was a die-hard patriot, but even at 18 he was already a leftist anti-war protestor.
So it struck me that Platner might actually be the kind of guy who signed up just to kill people.
And then it turns out that he posted on /marines that he joined up because he wanted to kill people and had a hell of an excellent experience.
So now I'm thinking he's an old school style of communist. Less "soy vegan latte" and more "Soviet leader who won an internal power struggle by just killing the opposition".
I don't think the American system will give him much of an opportunity to indulge, but it's funny that he's probably a better mark for the "worried about fascism" people than anyone they've ever called a fascist.
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