Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar

Last month, I talked about “cointelpro,” the secret US government plan to infiltrate leftist groups in order to discredit and disrupt them. I specifically brought it up in reference to the Trump administration’s recent open admission that the FBI and other intelligence services should focus their efforts on countering individuals and groups who display what they consider “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Recently, I’ve seen a number of people who think they’ve already identified the first secret fascist agent trying to pass as a progressive: Graham Platner, the ex-Marine who is currently running to secure the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Maine, hoping to unseat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.

Platner got a lot of positive press amongst progressives earlier this year when he launched his campaign, thanks to his very direct criticisms of the current state of the Democratic party, of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, and the oligarchy, as well as his direct support of Medicare for All and LGBTQ rights.

Platner is, of course, not without his opponents: not just Susan Collins and the Republicans, but also the other Democrats hoping to run against her, like Janet Mills, the current governor of Maine. His political opponents attacked Platner first by releasing his Reddit account history from a few years ago. This was originally reported by CNN, who transcribed posts like him calling cops bastards, saying that white Maine residents were stupid and racist, and lamenting that the wars he fought in (Iraq and Afghanistan) were pointless. 

I’ll be honest, my initial reaction to this report was…okay? There were definitely some problematic things in there: I don’t think it’s helpful to refer to rural people as dumb and racist as a whole, he uses the “R” word quite often, and he also said that women should take better precautions to avoid being raped. But Platner apologized to CNN directly and also in this video.

It seemed that most of his fanbase accepted that as a heartfelt apology representing real growth, and they moved on from it. For about…um, a week? Because the next thing the opposition dropped was a photo of Platner without his shirt on, clearly showing a large totenkopf tattoo. If you’ve ever seen any photos or videos of Nazis, particularly the SS, you’ve seen this very particular “death’s head” displayed prominently on their uniforms. Like the swastika, the totenkopf had previously been used in other contexts, but like the swastika, once the Nazis co-opted it, it became a Nazi symbol. Even if you’ve never seen any photos or movies with Nazis in them, you’ve probably seen it in a very famous meme.

Unlike the Reddit comments, which could be explained away as the edgy ranting of a young man who has since grown up, a large Nazi tattoo is a bit more, um, problematic. Especially when Platner revealed that he still had the tattoo, 18 entire years after he first got it. On his chest. The Nazi tattoo.

I say that I find it problematic when someone has a prominent Nazi tattoo old enough to vote, but it definitely seemed that I am in the minority on that opinion, at least amongst other white progressives with large platforms online. The first apology for this tattoo I saw, before any apology from Platner, was from Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report, someone I personally liked though I did (mildly) criticize her recently for spreading an unfounded conspiracy theory about the assassination of JFK. Vigeland wrote on Twitter, “How many people get tattoos that they thought looked cool, but didn’t understand the meaning of? How many vets took mercenary work for a period because the US doesn’t support them? How many young men have shitposted online? Do we want an authentic working-class party or not?”

Hey, I thought we all agreed that it was wrong to imply the working class is stupid and racist?

Now, I’ve known a few people who got tattoos that they thought looked cool but didn’t understand the meaning of. There are entire albums of people with tattoos in languages they don’t understand, for instance. I’m not sure how many veterans take on mercenary work, but in that case Vigeland is referring to Platner’s stint working for Constellis, formerly and more famously known as Blackwater, in Afghanistan after doing one tour there and three in Iraq. I can say that it’s strange to handwave the idea of an adult man joining a mercenary group just ten years after they very famously committed a massacre because, I don’t know, even his own mother refused to employ him as a dishwasher in the restaurant she owned. I guess his dad didn’t need a secretary at his law firm. Whomst among us, truly?

Vigeland was hardly alone, as I saw other commentators I follow like Ryan Grimm, Krystal Ball, and Francesca Fiorentini jump in to defend Platner. Meanwhile, it seemed like a lot of leftists I follow who did NOT have large platforms were saying, “Uh, what the fuck?”

Platner, for his part, never bothered to apologize. Instead, he simply explained that he got the tattoo with his fellow Marines while they were drunk, to celebrate being machine gunners in Falujah and Ramadi. 

He says that for eighteen years, nobody ever said anything! Not the military who screened him before his next tour, not anyone at any of the places he took his shirt off at, not the former acquaintance who told Jewish Insider that Platner said “Oh, this is my Totenkopf” in “a cutesy way,” and certainly not any of the people on this Reddit thread in r/CombatFootage, in which a user posts a photo with the headline “Battle-weary SS,” a commenter asks how you can tell they’re SS, someone replies “The totenkopf on the dude first on the left is a good clue,” triggering a discussion of whether or not it’s “cringe” for US military to wear skulls, to which Graham Platner responds, “When I was in Ramadi in ‘06 as a Marine grunt, the SEAL platoon we worked closely with for the deployment all had the Punisher skull spray painted on their armor carriers. There’s no question it’s far more prevalent on all the dumbass Grunt Style and Nine Line shirts these days, but the teams definitely adopted it for a while.”

Oh, also no one pointed it out in this Reddit thread from 2020, in which a user posted a photo of a Vegas cop with a Nazi “SS” tattoo, which Platner defends by saying they have no idea what they’re talking about because he assumes the man had been in the military as a sniper, where it was normal to get that Nazi tattoo as a keepsake. Hm. I wonder if…no, no, he said he had no idea his was a Nazi tattoo. It’s probably not relevant.

This is the point in the timeline when I started seeing some leftists online argue that Platner is a government plant for Cointelpro 2: he’s obviously a secret fascist who is only pretending to be a progressive so that he can win this election and then hand the Senate back to MAGA, or else somehow delegitimize the left, OR maybe this very infighting was the purpose in and of itself. And that’s the point where I had to log off, spend a weekend with my dog, foraging for mussels and exploring tide pools during a historically low king tide, before coming home and making this very video.

Everything up until now has been reported facts, so here is where I offer my opinion as a leftist and disinformation debunker. No, Graham Platner is not a secret Nazi government plant on a mission to disrupt the Left. As I said in my video on cointelpro, research shows that cointelpro wasn’t actually very successful because Leftists tend to be smart and rightwing government goons tend to have no idea how to blend in. And as “problematic” as Platner’s Reddit history is, it goes back many years and DOES show a lot of left-leaning opinions. I guarantee you that no one in 2018 was paying an oyster farming ex-Marine to post vaguely lefty things on Reddit in between posts asking why Black people don’t tip, in preparation for a Senate run in 2025.

I also do not think Platner is a “secret Nazi” at all. No, I do not think it’s “normal” for white men to go through a Nazi phase, as a lot of people tried to tell me on social media. What I DO think is normal, unfortunately, is for privileged white men to volunteer to join the military to have an adventure and kill brown people, get drunk and get a tattoo without caring what it may mean besides “I kill people,” and when they find out that it is in fact a Nazi tattoo, they don’t really care. That’s it, that’s how deep it is. They don’t care. They don’t think they’ll ever face consequences–not for the imperialism, the violence, the racism, the misogyny, and no, not even the Nazi tattoo because they know there will always be another white man in those Reddit comments explaining that it’s not a big deal and we just don’t understand what it’s like to be in the military.

I don’t live in Maine, so I don’t get to vote on whether or not Graham Platner or anyone else represents that state in the midterms. But I do still get to offer my opinion, and it is this: the Left should reject Platner, not because he’s a secret CIA plant, not because he’s a secret Nazi, but because in my opinion he’s a very obvious idiot and a liar who makes the Left look like shit.

Part of Platner’s excuse for not knowing his Nazi tattoo was a Nazi tattoo is because the military vetted him, but in this Reddit post from 2019, Graham Platner himself says that he tried to do a fourth tour in the Marines because he was “bored” after college, but ran into trouble because of a forearm tattoo he got that hadn’t been grandfathered in when the Marines instituted new rules in 2007 (the same year he got his Nazi tattoo). So he switched to the Army, where “they didn’t give a shit about tattoos.” So, is he lying now when he says the Army vetted his tattoo or was he lying in 2019 when he posted on Reddit that the Army did not “give a shit about tattoos?” Either way, he’s a liar, but I can’t see any reason for him to have lied in a random Reddit post six years ago.

When Ryan Grimm asked Platner about how he responds to people who have trouble squaring his seeming progressive stance with his time with Blackwater (19 min), here’s how he responds.

That’s just a lie. As I mentioned earlier, Platner worked for Constellis, which is Blackwater. If you go to the Constellis Wikipedia, the page says “Blackwater.” That’s because, yes, they restructured and changed their name shortly after their first massacre. Erik Prince, the guy with the “warlord fantasy” as Platner says, resigned as CEO but stayed on as Chairman of the Board. The new company did not “go away” in 2012. They merged with other mercenary groups under the umbrella of “Constellis,” which is what it was called when Platner joined. In 2015, reporters discovered that Constellis mercenaries had been hired by the United Arab Emirates to kill the Houthis in their ongoing battles in Yemen, as described in this Guardian article that, much to Platner’s chagrin, refers to the contractor as “Blackwater.” As of 2016, outlets were still referring to the mercenaries as “Blackwater” when Yemeni forces managed to hit a Saudi-led base with a missile, killing an American general and “200 Sudanese Blackwater mercenaries.” I’m sure Platner sent them a strongly worded letter to edit their copy to read “Constellis.”

It is wildly dishonest to respond to that question with “Duh, I never worked for Blackwater, idiots.” The honest way to answer it is to explain why you joined Constellis, what you did for them, and how you feel about it now. To do otherwise makes you seem like a shady ass lying little bitch.

The honest way to explain why you have a Nazi tattoo on your chest is to admit that you didn’t think it was a big deal until your opposition was going to use it to sink your campaign, not to pretend that you spent 18 years never noticing that the giant tattoo on your chest looks exactly like the emblem on the hats of the bad guys in 40% of TV shows and movies. And for fuck’s sake, apologize! 

By lying like this on so many issues, Graham Platner looks like an idiot, and he encouraged prominent Leftists to apologize FOR him, which makes them into utter hypocrites. They weren’t saying “wow what a dumb tattoo, he should apologize and remove or cover it up.” They were saying “it’s fine, stop being so weird about Nazi tattoos.” Literally! I used to watch the Majority Report every day, right up until this episode (1:30). Okay, so knowing something is Nazi imagery is a red flag but tattooing Nazi iconography on your chest and leaving it for 18 years isn’t? Cool, cool. That’s embarrassing enough but what I really want to highlight is what Sam says a minute later: so you agree? You agree that Graham Platner is probably lying about not knowing he had a Nazi tattoo?  Sam comes to the same conclusion I did but he doesn’t go the extra mile, hell the extra 12 inches, to wonder what it means to support a politician who lies that easily about a NAZI TATTOO. He KNEW he had a Nazi tattoo but knew he would face no consequences for it, and then LIED ABOUT IT when he finally did. That’s your guy?

And I’m sorry, I know it’s unfair, but yeah, the Right can be hypocrites and their base doesn’t give a shit. But the Left does give a shit. I give a shit. I honestly can only roll my eyes now when these people I used to respect call out Republicans like Pete Hegseth for having fascist-looking tattoos, or even Elon Musk for Sieg Heiling. You have to decide: does it mean something or doesn’t it? Is it just a shitpost or isn’t it?

I know that it’s particularly tough because progressives are so beaten down by the Democratic party. They block our candidates, and deep pockets like AIPAC fund their rivals and, yes, do research and release damaging information to the public. It’s so, so difficult to find politicians who have the financing to win AND who support platforms like Medicare for All and, crucially, ending the Palestinian genocide. But I just do not think that this is how we win. Because look at the best possible scenario for these “pobody’s nerfect” Leftists: Platner wins the primary and goes up against the Republican incumbent. Now AIPAC gets to throw all their money at Collins, and do you know what the message is going to be? It’s this nice moderate lady against an ex-mercenary who had a NAZI TATTOO ON HIS CHEST FOR 18 YEARS. Oh, he’s against Israel? Of course he is, he had a NAZI TATTOO. It damages the Palestinian cause to elevate this man, when one of the most convincing arguments Israel has is that all of the people who oppose them do so because of antisemitism. Look at Candace Owens. Look at Nick Fuentes. And now, look even to the latest progressive darling, Graham Platner, a man who proudly took his shirt off in public to show his Nazi tattoo for 18 years until it became politically detrimental, at which point he hastily covered it up from some artist who can’t even draw a fucking circle, let alone one big enough to actually cover up the totenkopf.

Again: do I think Platner is a secret Nazi? An anti-semite? I don’t know! But I do know that he’s a walking PR disaster and platforming him removes prominent leftists’ ability to rightfully call out antisemitic dog whistles, and outright fascist bullhorns, on the Right, at a time when those things are only getting worse, and making life much more dangerous not just for Jews but, just like during the Holocaust, for all marginalized people. The election is an entire year away. If Platner actually cared about advancing progressive policies and ending the genocide, he would take all of his funding and hand it over to someone just as committed to pushing the Democrats left but who hasn’t branded themselves with anything representing an actual genocide, or my god at least someone who can apologize if they did. That’s where the bar is. The bar is in hell and we’re still hitting our heads on it. 

Also, would it hurt to ask for someone with a week or two of experience in politics? Seriously, I guess this is just life now but I really miss the days when you had to at least spend some time on the school board or the city council before you ran for the fucking US Senate.

Okay, I had to get all that out of my system. Here’s my cute dog and the tide pools.