I’d been staying away from covering the Platner story…
No, not that one.
…outside of the LinkSwarms because pretty much everyone was covering the story. But now that commie scumbag Nazi tattoo guy is multiple rape accusations commie scumbag Nazi tattoo guy, Democrats are shocked, shocked that he’s a scumbag.
In Platner’s version of events, he only found out that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol after hearing that opposition researchers were looking into it, at some unspecified date before the October 20 Pod Save America podcast. And then, two days later, he announced he had gotten another tattoo to cover it up. He insists Lyndsey Fifield is lying when she says that years earlier, he had called it “my Totenkopf.” He insists his former political director was lying when she said he had told her he had a “problematic” tattoo in the summer of last year.
Here’s the part that stuck with me: If you had found that you had accidentally gotten a tattoo of the Nazi regime over your heart, how many traffic laws would you break getting to a place to get it removed? Or would you just grab a steak knife and try to cut it off immediately?
A man who doesn’t think getting a symbol of the SS concentration camp guards tattooed over his heart is that big of a deal, and just a routine snafu . . . is not as opposed to Naziism as he wants everyone to think.
Every couple of weeks, we would find out that some other part of Platner’s carefully crafted initial image was poppycock. His whole campaign was built on his working-class image, but he attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut. The only customer of his oyster business was his mother’s restaurant. He bought his house with a $200,000 loan from his father, not with “support from the VA” as he had claimed. On the campaign trail, Platner kept insisting that Susan Collins had sent him to Iraq, but she voted to authorize military force in 2002 and he enlisted in 2004 and volunteered for three tours over eight years.
And then the post-tattoo scandals piled up. He blamed his choice of tattoo on the culture of the U.S. military. His Reddit comments about rape victims and black people would have gotten any other figure instantly canceled a few years ago. He called himself a communist, in the long-ago era of . . . 2021.
He’d been sexting with lots of women on Kik, but he insisted none of them were underage. Fifield described how Platner “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.”
After each disturbing revelation, other Democrats and media interviewers would ask Platner if there were any other skeletons in his closet, any other unpleasant chapters from his past the public ought to know about. Every time, Platner said he had no other dark secrets.
Democrats lined up to endorse him.
Anybody with eyes could see that this guy, at minimum, had been a world-class creep.
Snip.
We’ve seen Democrats circle the wagons around scandal-plagued figures before. But usually, those figures had done a thing or two to inspire or “earn” that reflexive loyalty and shameless excuse-making.
Platner’s growing list of unsavory accusations kept getting longer, and . . . he had just shown up a few months ago. He was just some guy who had just arrived on the scene. He had never run anything; his harbormaster job was, in his own words, a “very, very part-time job.” (The town actually left the position vacant from February 2022 to April 2023.) He hadn’t helped get any bills passed, he hadn’t led the fight for any particular cause. He was just some guy who ranted about how “Senator Collins is bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu,” claimed John Fetterman was a “stooge for AIPAC,” and who accused Israel of committing genocide. Platner didn’t have a lot to say on foreign policy, but he sure made clear that he believed that Israel was evil and controlled Washington. Something of an odd strategy if you want to dispel suspicions that you ever had any youthful dalliances with neo-Naziism.
The term “gaslighting” gets thrown around way too frequently in our political culture; sometimes it’s effectively used as a synonym for lying. But this . . . this felt like an unprecedented, large-scale gaslighting effort. A lot of the mainstream media coverage of Platner felt like a weird, coordinated effort to convince the people of Maine that the scuzziest guy the Democratic Party could find was as solid and reliable as the Brawny Paper Towel Man.
Jon Favreau, one of the Pod Save America hosts, told his followers at the end of April, “Graham Platner isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown and is always trying to do better. I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real-life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces.” I refer you to My Cousin Vinny.
On Monday night, Favreau was singing a dramatically different tune. “Platner needs to drop out ASAP — these are awful, credible allegations. Said on the pod after the (also credible) June NYT story that his biggest problem going forward would be credibility. It’s now abundantly clear that he just hasn’t been honest about his past and can’t be trusted as a candidate for office.”
Why did people trust Platner, Favreau? Because you told them he was a good and decent man!
This morning, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg concedes she was completely fooled by the hype around Platner:
Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.
I do not say this lightly: If Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.
Despite Chinese marching band quantities of red flags, Democrats lined up like good little drones to do the Will of the Party and endorse Platner. Scott Jennings:
All of the things that have been stated, it was all out in the public and people like Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tim Walz, the Bulwark, Pod Save America, all these people came together to overlook it all, to explain it all, to rationalize it all.”
“He was vetted. People knew all these things and a whole bunch of Democrats in Maine showed up and voted for him anyway. And a bunch of donors from around the country sent him money anyway.”
“I agree with Alyssa’s question. What changed? Why are you bailing on Graham Platner now?!”
“You already signed off on Nazi tattoo, a self-described communist, somebody who’s had rape fantasies, somebody who has been on a social media platform known as a playground for predators.”
“And on and on and on and on and on.”
“And the difference between this accuser and the previous one is simply this, she’s a liberal. It’s okay, I guess, for Democrats that their candidate’s assault conservatives.”
“But he broke into someone’s house. And apparently, according to her, raped her. And because her politics are correct, they can now believe it.”
“All of this whole thing is disgusting. But to say that they hadn’t vetted him, or that they didn’t know about all this is totally false.”
Of course, this isn’t the first scumbag Democrats embraced. Remember Bill Clinton’s endless “Bimbo Erruptions” couldn’t derail his nomination, just like serious sex offense allegations by Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey couldn’t derail his presidency, nor did the eventual Monica Lewisnky revelations. Prior to Bill Clinton, a President cheating on his wife with an intern in the White House, lying about it to the American public, then getting caught lying about, would not have been considered a survivable scandal. The press was outraged that Clinton had made a fool of them…but not so outraged that they demanded his resignation. After all, he was a Democrat.
More recently, another Democrat the Party assured us was a fine, upstanding citizen was in the news again. Remember would-be Florida governor Andrew “gay meth orgy” Gillum? Well, he was just arrested in Alabama for…wait for it…meth.
Andrew Gillum, the former Florida Democratic rising star and 2018 nominee for governor, was arrested in Alabama last week on possession of methamphetamine and other drug charges, according to police.
Gillum was arrested just before 11 p.m. on July 2 by local police officers in Daphne, Ala. He is accused of having the drugs in his car on U.S. Highway 98 and Walmart Drive, near a Walmart in the Gulf Coast city west of Mobile, Ala., and east of the Florida Panhandle, according to records from the Daphne Police Department.
According to the arrest report obtained by PEOPLE, Gillum allegedly possessed three grams of methamphetamine, eight “pre-rolled marijuana joints,” a bong, three pipes and other drug paraphernalia.
From narrowly missing his chance at the Florida Governor’s Mansion to getting high in an Walmart parking lot in Daphne, Alabama is quite a fall. Nor is Daphne that close to Tallahassee, where Gillum was once mayor, being a good three and a half hours down I-10, so it’s a mystery what he was doing there. Cheaper male prostitutes?
Do Democrats only nominate scumbags because they can’t find any decent men to run for office, or does being a Democrat politician inevitably make you a scumbag?
By the way, Joe Rogan thinks Hunter Biden is going to run for President, and could well snag the Democratic nomination in 2028, given their radical charisma deficit…
Tags: 2018 Election, 2026 Election, 2028 Presidential Race, Alabama, Andrew Gillum, Bernie Sanders, corrupt scumbags, Crime, Democrats, drugs, Elizabeth Warren, Florida, Graham Platner, Hunter Biden, Jim Geraghty, Jon Favreau (politician), Maine, marijuana, meth, Michelle Goldberg, National Review, National Socialism, Pod Save America, rape, Ro Khanna, Scott Jennings, sex offender, Susan Collins, Tim Walz, Walmart
Forget Platner, but remember all those who endorsed him. Never trust a word they say.