The dude has literally dozens of easily discoverable quote-bites of him excitedly expressing how much he loves killing, can’t get enough of it, wants to get back to doing it asap. How does he pass any smell test at all for anybody who is nominally on the left? I just don’t get it, I feel like he should be seen as so rotten that touching him would taint you (looking at popular youtubers and twitch personalities).
1.) Do you have links to these quotes? Not that it will change point 2, but worth seeing the full context of what you are referring to exactly.
2.) I have heard from him directly explaining his sketchy past quotes on reddit about being damaged mentally when he came back from the middle east and didn’t get better until he rediscovered community, began working with his local ecosystem and going to therapy. Of course he could be lying and saying what needs to be said, but there is literally no way to know that, given he has no actual political background to go on. So people desperate for actual political change are willing to take a gamble on him and take him at his word, since the policies and platform he is running on are what people have been wanting for a long time. It’s the same reason some nobody named Zohran Mamdani is now a highly popular mayor of NYC, despite his demonization by the entire establishment as a radical Muslim socialist who will destroy the city.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/05/graham-platner-maine-senate-collins-00677731
https://nypost.com/2026/04/06/us-news/anti-war-candidate-graham-platner-once-defended-urinating-on-dead-taliban-called-war-the-most-enjoyable-experience/
https://www.pressherald.com/2025/12/18/how-graham-platners-complicated-past-shapes-his-run-for-u-s-senate/
These are just a few I found in 10 minutes of looking.
The thing to me is, present day Platner contradicts everything that past-day Platner had said. By his account, everything he’s ever said or done was just “fucking around”. He claims he didn’t know what the Totenkompf was, when until he decided to run for Senate, war was HIS JAM, and he’s highly knowledgeable about it. This all stinks to me of an operator that, at the very least, isn’t trustworthy, all other factors be damned.
Again though, he has explained his mental state at the time of making those statements. There is no way to prove one way or another whether he is telling the truth, but looking at his arc, saying he was supporting Bernie in 2016, starting shellfish farming and community organizing, it does look like he made a real change. Of course that is what an “operator”, as you put it, would look like, but the general logic of it does seem to at least be consistent. You are welcome to be skeptical, but you are not everyone, and clearly others are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I guess time will tell.
I’m gonna keep posting this on every thread about Platner, but my issue is that people like him who say they have changed or people who are explicitly seeking forgiveness for past actions always try to jump the line. Like a former KKK member shouldn’t be putting themselves up to head the anti-racist action coalition before spending a decade working to repair their damage to the community. Even if they want to help do the opposite of what they used to do, community trust needs to be built back over a long period of time and ideally with the people actually harmed.
There is no reason he needs to be the candidate over someone similar to him in views. He should be in the background helping someone else get elected who doesn’t have his issues and he should have the self-awareness to see why his past makes him a problematic pick.
You’re not wrong. When the whole totenkompf thing happened, I looked into the other candidates in the race, and there are absolutely candidates that could fill his shoes. However, politically, they are even more non-viable than he is, just given the momentum he already has in terms of endorsements from people like bernie sanders and the whole infrastructure he has built up. It’s not as easy as just transferring all that momentum to another candidate, so people are willing to overlook his past in hopes that he is genuine. It’s not an ideal situation, by any means, but it does speak to the current political atmosphere, where progressive politics are so appealing that even problematic candidates are cracking through the noise.
Platner is 41, and he had a military career from age 19 to 34. That involves reaffirming the military 3 times. ⅔ of his time and all of his formative experiences as an adult are in the military. He joined Erik Prince’s cabal over 10 years after it became one of the most scandalous companies in the world, and after being part of the Bernie campaign.
People who “saw how bad it was and how much damage it does it the world” quit after just 1 tour. I differ from most Hexbears here in that I can forgive someone who got out in their early 20s after the mandatory 4 years and then put as much distance as possible between themselves and the institution. I’ve had 2 roommates like that.
His pivot after the military was not to a proletarian job, but directly to being a 3-person business owner, who by his own admission would be deeply in the red if it weren’t for veterans’ benefits. His career path is troop to worse troop to petty bourgeois to political candidate. It’s as suspicious as can be. The only times he’s worked for someone else were part-time as a bartender in DC while in college on the GI bill. This is not someone who knows what it is like to be exploited year after year, to live paycheck to paycheck, to be barely getting by under the boot of capitalism.
The null hypothesis here is that he is grifting, using progressive talking points to advance his career.
I’m not going to lose sleep over it because 70% of the Senate is worse, in politics or in deed. But I wouldn’t trust him one iota.
I don’t follow the logic that going from “petty bourgeois” to political candidate is “suspicious”. Suspicious would be going to some political consulting company with murky ties or to some private security contracting firm. Instead, the shellfish farming endeavor signals a marking point in his career and a potential turning point in his world view.
Now your highlighting of his length and frequency of service is valid, and concerning. All anyone can do though, is hope that he has had a real change of heart. There will be no way to tell until he gets into office. If he gets into office and totally flips on everything he campaigned on, it would be one of the biggest political betrayals ever, even more so than someone like Fetterman since there is at least some potential medical explanation there.
People don’t just change everything about themselves on a dime in their late 30s. In a person’s 20s they might take 3 years to have a substantial transformation.
In his campaign he is literally just saying shit. There’s an opening to the left of the Democratic center and he’s leveraging it. There’s nothing to betray besides very shallow words; he’s not a part of any organization and has no political history beyond volunteering for the campaign that had the largest ever number of volunteers. To any longtime and sincere observer of politics, this looks like opportunism. He is oriented towards the interests of the military and of business owners. Even AOC and Bernie are far to the left of him.
Depending on low-wage employment for a living for several years, or some equivalent experience of subordination, is what gives you class consciousness in a country full of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Having a high-tipped position for a few seasons, or taking over a 3-employee business, does not suffice to align you with the interests of the American working class.
I don’t live in Maine. If I did, I would support someone else’s primary campaign. If Platner won, I’d hold my nose and vote for him over Collins, but not expect anything.
Your fixation on working class cred is really bizarre. I generally agree with everything else you’re saying though.
No wonder about that, I’m a socialist.
I may be a weird kind of anarchist who wants to do a cultural revolution around an emergent class of people who escape debt and wage slavery by forming cooperatives around housing and work and collective defense.
But I am still a socialist through and through: I see the world through the lens of class; I know that people’s habits and loyalties are mostly a function of what their direct material interests are and what they’re personally accustomed to; I lend more credence to what people do rather than what they say.
And Platner’s record is as a chauvinistic war criminal who happens to have said some progressive things in the past few years. As a US senator he will serve MIC interests, small business interests, probably national-bourgeois interests, while being pro-LGBT+, pro-universal healthcare, possibly pro-union, and possibly less interventionist in foreign policy.
I’m a socialist as well, but I don’t see how you can conclusively and definitely say that you know how he is going to vote on every issue. That is why its strange to me. You seem to think that his past entirely dictates his world view, and that people cannot change their world view over time. That being a small business owner who is reliant on the teat of the government to function is not enough for you to take his claims of change seriously.
All I am saying is that you don’t know, and neither do I. We will both find out, but to claim that you know solely based on his career path (which is far closer to working class compared to a lot of other politicians out there), is odd to me. Time will tell.
I’m still skeptical, but I appreciate the other perspective.