Graham Platner’s brain-dead baloney is the REAL – Latest News
Set apart, for a second, that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner spent years with a Nazi SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest.
Set apart that he blamed sexual assault victims for his or her predicament, or that he known as rural white Americans silly racists, or that he advocated political violence, or that he mocked a wounded Purple Heart recipient, or that he joked about the Virgin Mary being a “skank,” or that he joined a hookup web site whereas married.
Who amongst us is a saint, after all?
The more attention-grabbing query is why Democrats have proven such loyalty to him.
After listening to a lot about Platner’s everyman appeal, I went down a rabbit gap, watching his speeches and listening to his interviews.
Virtually each one of them is filled with brain-numbing platitudes and freshman-level socialist sloganeering.
His rhetoric makes former Vice President Kamala Harris sound weighty by comparability.
“They think this is a race about the performative politics everyone is used to,” Platner instructed a crowd not too long ago. “What they don’t understand is that this is a race about us.”
This variety of banality, and there’s a lot of it, calls to thoughts Lt. Frank Drebin attempting to win over the love of his life in “The Naked Gun” by telling her, “Maybe the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans. But this is our hill, and these are our beans.”
The late thinker Daniel Dennett known as phrases like this “deepities” — phrases that create the impression of ethical and emotional weight whereas offering no precise insight.
Obviously, most politicians visitors in deepities to some extent.
Platner, nonetheless, can spew inane class-war clichés for an hour with out wandering anyplace close to a deeper thought.
That’s as a result of Platner is the embodiment of performative left-wing populism.
His cosplay working-man candidacy was created by Faiz Shakir and Ben Wikler, two Ivy League-educated former Bernie Sanders staffers.
“Part of the thesis here is that people don’t want candidates who are grown in a vat,” Wikler not too long ago mentioned.
“They want people who are real human beings. And they want people who do not look and sound like the people who have been leading this country off a cliff the last century.”
In different phrases, Platner is not a compelling natural candidate: He is a man who can play a half.
Democrats have misplaced working-class voters to Republican populists, so that they’ve develop into enamored with the concept of working somebody who carries the aesthetic qualities of one.
That’s my thesis, Ben.“If we want folks that are representing us from the working class, they’re not necessarily going to have a groomed and perfect political record,” a Maine voter not too long ago instructed Fox News, repeating a common Democratic speaking level.
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But is the progressive impression of working-class “folks” actually that they get Nazi tattoos, fantasize about rape and homicide, and cheat on their wives?
Because that looks as if an insulting stereotype.
Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner talking in Blue Hill after successful the Democratic major on June 9, 2026. Photo by CJ Gunther/Getty Images
As James Kirchick notes, people used to say Donald Trump “was a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”
Graham Platner, Kirchick says, “is a rich person’s idea of a poor person.”
Weirdly, Platner’s many controversies might have obscured his political radicalism.
Wikler and different Bernie acolytes needs to be trustworthy and decry not merely the previous century, however the previous 250 years, as a result of progressives detest the constitutional order.
You can hear it in Platner’s look on a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist’s podcast — “longtime fan,” the Maine Senate candidate says — the place he derides the American “system” and depicts the United States, the wealthiest nation on the planet, as a hellhole.
Now, Platner might nicely win Maine.
Maybe class resentment and Marxism actually are our future.
But his politics — not solely “taking back” what was allegedly stolen by the wealthy, but additionally supporting all the cultural quackery the woke left has inflicted on the nation — are far more intently aligned with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with the average working-class American.
Even if Platner had been a member of the proletariat, would that be enough?
Millions of working-class Americans efficiently navigate the world with out being sleazeballs.
It could be useful to deliver their views and experiences to Washington.
Platner, born into privilege, is not going to.
He purchased his home with help from his rich father and VA incapacity advantages.
His oyster-farming business appears to have been created after he determined to run for Senate; no matter the case, it seems its solely actual buyer is his rich mom’s restaurant.
And that is nice: There’s nothing flawed with counting on household.
There’s nothing flawed with being wealthy.
There is one thing flawed with mischaracterizing your life to mislead voters.
David Harsanyi is a senior author at the Washington Examiner. X: @davidharsanyi
