Today 04:40 AM
(This post was last modified: Today 04:51 AM by C C.)
Deleted posts show Maine Senate hopeful’s raw views on politics, war and police: "Graham Platner, a Marine veteran turned oyster farmer who is now a rising Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, once called himself a 'communist,' dismissed 'all' police as bastards, and said rural White Americans 'actually are' racist and stupid, according to deleted social media posts reviewed by CNN’s KFile.
Graham Platner: Before running for office, Platner described himself on Reddit as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was "pretty radically left" and a "vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist" (in 2017) [...] In a December 2025 interview with The New Yorker, he declined to call himself a socialist and described his political involvement before his campaign as "organizing around mostly local economic justice issues or social justice issues"."
generic populism: "The ordinary people struggling against a privileged elite who ignore their interests." For that placeholder, plug in either right-wing or left-wing preferences for who the establishment bastards are. For Marx, it was the exploitative bourgeoisie and their capitalist oppression of the labor class.
The Guardian: Platner’s populist brand of politics grew, in part, out of his experience in the military. [...] One of Graham Platner’s high school yearbooks shows him babyfaced with a buzzcut, holding a sign proclaiming, in part: “Free Palestine.” The image is accompanied by a superlative his classmates bestowed upon him: “Most Likely to Start a Revolution.”
Of course, as aforementioned, Platner actually condemned the "bigoted" proles (the rural ones, anyway) years earlier, so in that respect, he's like yet another Neo-Marxist who has traded the proletariat in for marginalized population groups. Yet there's still that classic Marxist resonance in his southpaw populism. But bouncing back and forth between two conflicting sub-orientations is just a natural part of the game.New York Times piece: But Platner’s antifa-inflected online history cuts against the idea that he would knowingly sport a Nazi tattoo. [...] as part of security clearances, he’d had his tattoos screened multiple times for associations with gangs or hate groups. Much of his extended family is Jewish, and he said he’s taken off his shirt in front of them without a second thought. He seemed to be struggling to reconcile who he understands himself to be - “someone who holds, I would say, deeply antifascist ideology” - with the media portrayal of a man who would blithely display a fascist symbol.
Even with respect to the sexting accusations, Democrats are standing up for him...Jill Filipovic: "The Graham Platner story is landing because it confirms a bunch of his critics’ prior concerns: unvetted, history of poor decision-making, the kind of light misogyny that tends to go along with male bad decision-making. Those are all problems! But it’s worth asking if they’re problems that should be disqualifying for a senate seat and I think the answer to that is no." --May 31, 2026
