Graham Platner is the best thing to happen to bloggers since Jussie Smollett. He's an SNL skit waiting to happen, if only SNL hadn't been captured by the left.
So yesterday we learned that Graham Platner is not a secret Nazi but he is a liar who claimed he only just figured out his tattoo was a Nazi symbol this week. Unfortunately, some former acquaintances said he'd admitted to knowing what it was a decade ago.
...according to a person who socialized with Platner when he was living in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, Platner had specifically acknowledged that the tattoo was a Totenkopf, the “death’s head” symbol adopted by an infamous Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps in World War II.
“He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” the former acquaintance told Jewish Insider recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue. “He said it in a cutesy little way.”
But the hits keep coming. Today, the Advocate is reporting that Platner is now apologizing for his anti-gay remarks on social media. I'm turning some of the R-rated language here into PG-13 but you can see it all at this link.
In an interview on Wednesday afternoon with The Advocate, Graham Platner, a 41-year-old Marine and Army veteran running in Maine’s Democratic primary, seeking to become the nominee to challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, confirmed that he authored a series of Reddit comments that include homophobic slurs, anti-LGBTQ+ jokes, and sexually explicit stories denigrating gay men...
In March 2018, he recounted in explicit detail what he described as a “gay off” between Marines and British sailors in Bahrain: “Pull into Bahrain in ’07 on a MEU, a Royal Navy submarine happens to be in port at the same time. … Before we even realize what’s going on, the other weird bastard just leans down and licks the damn thing from the bottom...all the way up to the top... Stands up, looks dead at us and yells ‘BEAT THAT!’ … I proudly withdrew our team on the grounds that one cannot play gay chicken if one is actually gay.”...
And in June 2021, Platner posted about military “pranks,” writing, “I like how our gay antics make him so uncomfortable he hates us. I’m doubling down on gay chicken next time in honor of this Air Force p***y.”
All of the posts came years after Platner left the Army in 2012.
Platner once again claimed that he's a new man these days and those long ago quotes from 2021 don't represent his views anymore.
“I think there is a place for [looking back], to a point,” Platner said. “But if we are going to just litigate every comment somebody makes on the internet, we will never have a politics that functions. I think the important part is, is there a believable story of change?”
While the Platner apology tour marches onward, it does seem as if his ability to stay in the race is looking more doubtful than it was a few days ago. The Nazy tattoo really has clarified this for some people on the left. You know it's really bad when all of the ladies on the left refuse to even try to defend it.
If you're a far left progressive but you've lost Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, you're probably cooked. That's not because their voices are so important but precisely because they are so average. If they are walking away from Graham Platner, so are a lot of other Democrats at this point.
For his part, Plater remains defiant.
Speaking at a town hall following days of negative revelations about his online posts and a tattoo that resembled Nazi imagery, Graham Platner was defiant.
“The amount of money and time it takes to dig through somebody’s entire past who has not lived a very public life is extensive and yet they are willing to expend those resources,” Platner told the audience in Ogunquit, Maine, on Wednesday evening.
“They are not trying to organize people. They are trying to destroy my life,” he pushed back.
He is also shaking up his campaign to try to get past all of this. He's also sending NDAs to his staff:
Amid fallout from Platner’s controversial years-old social media posts, his campaign began sending non-disclosure agreements to staffers last week, according to his former top political director, Genevieve McDonald, who said she declined to sign one.
"The campaign offered me $15,000 to sign a NDA,” McDonald told POLITICO in an interview. “I did not accept the offer. I certainly could have used the money. I quit my job to work on Platner’s campaign, believing it was something different than it is.”...
“Either they didn’t thoroughly vet him or they didn’t think the things they found would be a problem,” McDonald said in an interview. “Either way, that was a poor calculus. You cannot say things like rural Mainers are ‘racist’ and ‘stupid’ or you’re a radicalized communist at 37, play them off as ‘you were a young man’ and remain a serious contender against Susan Collins. This was four years ago.”
A Platner campaign representative called McDonald a “disgruntled former employee” to the Bangor Daily News, before voiding her NDA offer.
Never a good sign when you have to muzzle your own staff. In any case, it sounds like he's not going to be shamed out of the race so this is really up to Democratic voters. Will most of them side with the View's hosts and decide Platner has gone too far or will they decide to back him regardless. As is still the case in the Virginia AG race, it's probably too close to call at the moment.
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