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'The Establishment Is Spooked': Poll Shows Platner With Big Lead Over Mills in Maine Democratic Primary
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Discussion point: Graham Platner has some very questionable aspects to their backstory.
I say this as both an unabashed leftist, and a veteran. I was downloading MP3's of Democracy Now! and discussing Zinn with my section chief in 2003.
I propose the following material for review:
Don Lemon and Wajahat on the matter of Portner
Humanist report on Portner
TYT on Platner
Breaking points on Platner
I say this as someone who has met with Platner and as part of an organization I volunteer with, we endorsed Platner about 5 days before this came out. I've been on the endorsements committee, and we've never previously had to rescind an endorsement.
I'm interested in what you, Lemmy, have to say on this matter.
Im pretty wary... i think hes probably got a bit of authoritarian streak and probably got this tat when he was young and dumb and in the military which leans right. I also think people change and he has changed. I think he's taken a hard left on the economy and class consciousness.
But is his authoritarian streak gone? His reddit comments show that at the time of posting he had little sympathy for sexual assault victims and was at the very least kinda weird about black people. Hes also very pro gun, which I dont find to be an inherent issue and I even agree the left needs to be more prepared and armed, but when lined up with other problematic views it stresses me out. And I dont realllly trust all of his hand waving around the tattoo and reddit comments.
But maybe should we embrance that hes a bit of a bulldog in an era when the left is so toothless? Also its almost impossible to do worse than Susan Collins lol.
I think we have to be very careful who we vote for these days. All candidates and parties are leaning into dishonesty and misdirection even more than usual, as they can see it being so very successful in the recent past, and they will continue to use it and push the boundaries on how much and how blatant manipulations they can get away with. What they say and what they actually do are trending in very divergent directions.
On the other hand, when we start looking for non-establishment candidates who haven't been vetted and groomed for most of their professional lives, we need to understand that many of them, being actual humans, are going to have been wrong and stupid in the past, as we all are sometimes, and some of those things may be forgivable and some may not. In the age of social media, this is almost guaranteed to happen. The internet always remembers, and oppo research is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
One of the things I think we need to remember in this case is that some humans are still genuine creatures of thoughts and feelings and emotions that don't always immediately lead us to a good place, and that people can and should improve and change and grow throughout their lives as their experiences do. If I was going to be judged on the political ideology I supported when I was an idiotic 15 year old no one would ever take me seriously ever again. But that might be a mistake. Because I like to think that I've grown quite a bit since then. I've read Plato's Republic, understood most of it, and agreed with some of it. I consume a lot of information from a wide variety of sources, some of that information is not so good and sometimes it leads me astray. I'll take responsibility for those mistakes, and I'll genuinely try to do better. And I think other people should be given at least the opportunity to own their mistakes too. Instead of immediately dismissing somebody that said some bad shit once upon a time, go to the next step and ask them what they think about it now. Then ask them why they changed their mind, which is the much more important part I think.
Granted, some people are just predators and opportunists, and will say whatever they think their current audience wants to hear, including what you want to hear. Distinguishing these types of the people from the people who have genuinely changed is not easy and I don't have an easy answer for how to do it. I'm wrong most of the time when I try too. I don't pretend to be a good judge of character.
I'm preaching this point of view in the hopes that other people, who are perhaps better judges of character than I am, can find some way to identify the difference themselves. Because we desperately need to find a way to put some genuine people in leadership roles. Our current system of democracy clearly isn't doing it. For this moment in history, I think we need a philosopher-king.
I think I agree strongly with this. The dude has MUCH explaining to do, but he deserves the oppurtunity to do so. When I've seen him speak publically, he's a once in a lifetime speaker. But dude did get nazi tattoo. Dude did work for blackwater. Those are extraordinary things, which he also hasn't denied or deflected.
And extraordinary things require extraordinary explanation. I don't think these are deal breakers, but surely a period of explanation and reflection is warranted.
The four tours and Blackwater employment made him a Nazi before his tattoos did 😮💨
Four tours, as a veteran, like.. I'm not excusing it, but some of the most anti-fascist people I know did multiple tours. I saw the writing on the wall and didn't re-enlist but everyone's situation and place that they are is different.
Of the people who have done several orders of magnitude more work to stop fascism, real, physical, on the ground work, all of them are military service members who saw active duty. One did two tours, and was at Falluja, and another had his humvee blown up from underneath him when command told his company to go drive a road they knew for a fact had IED's. One went on to be a DJ (actually he might do lighting idk), the other became a nurse and worked directly with Dr. Faucci at the CDC. Both were raised extremely conservative, and because they were given an opportunity to become a person they actually wanted to be, they changed.
Yeah I basically agree with you here about your comrades based on the information you have given me, but the thing is you're implicitly conditioning your judgement of your comrades on their behavior after their K tours, I was implicitly (and now explicitly) conditioning my judgement about Platner on his four tours and Blackwater employment plus his behavior after that. Like I know people can change, IMO that is the thesis of my worldview, but Platner has not provided sufficient evidence that he has changed for the better. Furthermore, someone doing K > 1 tours is not just an ordinary evil thing, it's an incredibly evil thing, so forgive me if it takes a lot lot lot of good to be done before I start to consider their debt to humanity paid off.
And thats totally fair.
From someone with absolutely no horse in this race I feel this is looking a gift horse in the mouth. No matter how bad he turns out to be (which, yeah, I don't think I'm convinced he'll be a principled anti-imperialist in office), he's not going to outdo establishment democrats by much. The way American democracy is going it's worth the bet, I think.
For this race, I agree. The worst he can be is a Fetterman... Who sucks but is still better than fucking Dr. Oz.
But be careful with this line of thinking. It's very similar to how the right ended up voting for Trump. It's actually how a lot of really awful governments gained power. "Anything different" than the current catastrophe does not inherently mean better.
My point was more that you lose if you get anything to the right of an outspoken progressive, and given the speed of Trump's consolidation of power the amount of loss is essentially unchanged. Therefore, better on someone who might realistically be an outspoken progressive is the optimal move. It's kind of like "you can get bitch slapped, or you can toss a coin and you either get bitch slapped extra hard or get a cookie." The damage is being done either way, so you might as well bet on the cookie.
I dunno. I feel like a few countries made a similar bet (but to a higher extreme) during the Arab spring and it went extra bad. It's important to be careful about who and what you're trying to replace an authoritarian system with.
Follow the money. Maybe he's a shill and maybe not, but at this point I'd be very surprised if the oligarchy relied solely on voter appeal to get their candidate in office. If the usual suspects start running the usual "he's a communist" campaign then I'd say it's pretty safe they don't support him.
They running that at the same time they saying he's a secret nazi
I think Platner isn't as skilled at avoiding establishment Democrat smear campaigns as Mamdani is.
either a Nazi or a dumbass, neither make a good candidate imo.
The guy knew what his tattoo was
https://newrepublic.com/post/202083/graham-platner-knew-nazi-tattoo
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/24/politics/graham-platner-nazi-tattoo-evidence-kfile-invs
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt until I actually saw the tattoo on his chest. That isn't some generic skull artwork, that is literally the totenkopf. Even the swastika has more ambiguity than this does. There is no way the dude went that long without knowing what it was and had more than plenty of time to remove the tattoo before making a push for the senate. If he wants to regret the decision and make amends thats great but he gets to start with his local council or some other low level political office and work his way up. Only by doing that can he prove that symbol does not reflect his worldview
I suppose that depends where you are from. In the US almost no average person could tell you what the totenkoph is. Let alone ID it. Everyone could ID a swastika. Though not tell the difference between Sanskrit or Nazi.
I had to look it up to remind myself even. I'm most familiar with it as a piece of iconography the neo folk group Death In June has used several times.
I mean I could not have told you that it was a white nationalist symbol. It just looked like a cartoon skull to me.
So I saw this being put out by a (former) Republican turned Democrat consultant on a podcast yesterday. It smacks of the kind of gatekeeping that has kept establishment Democrats in control of the party but losing elections for decades.
I understand why we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but we're not talking about another Al Franken here. This guy has/had a literal Nazi tattoo and that takes a lot more effort to erase from the sum of actions that equals a person