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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13767 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Slow news week. The current thing is still Graham Platner.

NYT: Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior

That's right, the New York Times hunted down as many of Platner's ex-girlfriends as they could to dig up dirt on this guy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire article is irrelevant high school-tier personal gossip, but gee there sure is a lot of irrelevent personal gossip. The one anecdote with teeth comes from a woman active in Republican politics.

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

There are a lot of ways one could interpret those paragraphs.

He had what she described as a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.

It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.

“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”

“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she said.

Ladies, never ask your man what he would do to a home invader. Unless you're into that.

This article confirms my earlier suspicion that Platner is getting the kind of hostile media coverage usually reserved for Republicans. The elephant in the room is that this is because Platner likes Nazi imagery (it is beyond serious dispute at this point that he knew for years it was a totenkopf) and dislikes the state of Israel. I am 90% sure that both of the authors are Jewish. It feels icky to break out the calipers for this (though I am not basing my assessment solely on their names and faces. I was able to find old articles linking them to synagogues), but I really do think it is relevant.

It’s probably all real because it sounds bad but not that bad. If it were fake, it would be a brave woman coming forward with the story of how he raped her brutally over a glass table at the mall during a college party, but I can’t remember when it happened and none of my friends remember anything about it.

On the contrary, since it's coming from a Republican political operative it seems immensely sus that he's being accused of something that doesn't quite rise to the level of criminality sufficient to justify discovery but is more than sufficient (if true) to torpedo a Senate campaign. It's the perfect level of accusation if you don't actually want to have to back up anything you're claiming in court.

According to the woman herself she has plenty of corroborating evidence that the New York Times simply decided not to use:

https://x.com/lyndseyfifield/status/2062808679829704815?s=46

Moreover, what of the other women?

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