For the first few months of his U.S. Senate campaign, Graham Platner looked like just the kind of candidate that many Democrats say they want right now. The party has been bleeding working-class men for decades, including in the two elections it lost to Donald Trump. Donors are desperately searching for a “Joe Rogan of the left” who will help liberals reach disaffected, internet-poisoned men in their 20s and 30s. Platner seemed like he could help the party reach those men, and others who feel disappointed, disillusioned, or left out in the current political and economic landscape. He served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine and Army infantryman; now he’s a 41-year-old oysterman living in Sullivan, Maine. His voice is a gravelly baritone, which he uses to vent frustrations about how working people are being swindled.
After announcing his candidacy in August, Platner was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and received praise (and at least one donation) from other senators. He won the backing of three labor unions, filled town halls, and raised millions of dollars from small donors in his effort to defeat Republican incumbent Susan Collins.
Last week, though, CNN released a report revealing Platner’s Reddit history under the username “P-Hustle.” In 2021, he referred to himself as “a communist,” and said that all cops are bastards. Other news outlets soon found additional posts: Platner suggested in 2018 that semiautomatic rifles are necessary to “fight fascism,” and in various posts from 2013, made insensitive remarks about sexual assault and asked, “Why don’t black people tip?” Then, on Monday, to get ahead of opposition research, Platner’s campaign released a video showing that he had a tattoo on his chest resembling the “Totenkopf” skull associated with the Nazis—a connection that Platner said he wasn’t aware of when he got the tattoo in 2007, and that he only recently learned about. “I am not,” he said, “a secret Nazi.” By Wednesday morning, he’d gotten the tattoo covered up by a Celtic knot with a dog motif.
I’m not a political reporter, but I live in Maine, so I took special interest in this story. I spoke with Platner about his past, first in a roughly 90-minute-long video call on Sunday, and then in a shorter phone conversation on Tuesday, after the tattoo story broke. In our initial interview, he seemed eager to explain his old Reddit posts, some of which he said he regrets, some of which he said he wanted to contextualize, and some of which he did not apologize for. “I am still angry at the government,” he said. “And I’m very, very angry at the political establishment that, honestly, sent me to fight in these goddamn wars. And it’s still the same political establishment. Many of the people that I’m kind of up against at the moment are the people who voted to send me to Iraq in the first place.” Some of Platner’s allies, including Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, have said that they view the timing of the release of the Reddit posts as a strategic move from the Washington establishment to keep Platner out.
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Platner has received extensive criticism for the revelations. The podcaster and writer Wajahat Ali wrote, “It’s time to drop Platner.” The Wall Street Journal published an editorial with the headline, “Oops, I’ve Had a Nazi Tattoo for 18 Years.” Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, denounced Platner’s tattoo, along with his refusal to take donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which Schwartz said “plays into familiar, harmful tropes that Jews or organizations like AIPAC control the government.” Jordan Wood, another candidate in the Maine race, said, “Graham Platner’s Reddit comments and Nazi SS Totenkopf tattoo are disqualifying and not who we are as Mainers or as Democrats.” Republican incumbent Susan Collins, said last week that she was “appalled” by what he had written online. “These were not comments that he made when he was in high school,” she said. “These are comments that he has made quite recently.”
But for now, at least, the Democratic party is not calling on Platner to step down. Ken Martin, the head of the DNC, said that Platner’s online comments were “hurtful” but not “disqualifying,” and that the choice is up to primary voters. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who is neutral in the race, said, “Everyone has a right to grow and grow out of their stupidity.” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said, “Graham has made a lot of mistakes in his life. He’s had a very long journey to the place where he is today, but he’s owned those mistakes, owned up to them, and he’s evolved.” Khanna called the tattoo “horrendous,” but said: “Do we want our political governing class to be like the classmates I had at Yale Law School, some of them who dreamed of being president of the United States from the age of twelve?” He continued, “Or do we want normal people also having a chance at these offices?” Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said, “He went through a dark period. He’s not the only one in America who has gone through a dark period.” He continued, “I’m confident that he’s going to run a great campaign and that he’s going to win.” A poll released yesterday, conducted as the news about Platner’s past was breaking, found him leading his Democratic primary opponent Maine governor Janet Mills by 34 points.
Democrats’ apparent willingness to stick with Platner may be an acknowledgment that the question of which behavior is disqualifying to voters is more uncertain now than it used to be. Where is the line on internet speech and basic decency, for example, when the White House conducts politics by meme, and the governor of California’s X account has resorted to open trolling? Where is the line on tattoos when the head of the Defense Department has tattoos associated with the Crusades, and the head of the National Counterterrorism Center has the word Panzer—the infamous Nazi tank—inked on his arm?
Whatever the reasons for it, the support for Platner feels like a departure from a time, not too long ago, when a controversy like this might well have sunk a politician, especially an upstart—and especially a Democrat. (Since at least the #MeToo movement, some Democrats have groused about how their party is quicker to force out otherwise-qualified candidates over perceived transgressions than MAGA Republicans, who seem to view disqualifying behaviors as badges of honor.) Platner’s candidacy looks like a test—of how “big tent” the Democrats want to be, and how willing its voters are to accept baggage, from social media and beyond, that less polished candidates can carry.
In our first conversation, Platner told me about the environment he was coming out of in the early 2010s, and how it affected the way he used to speak and think online. “Violence and aggression are seen as virtues,” he said, describing the world he was in as an infantryman. “Everything is crude and offensive.” Platner seemed to struggle to find the right words to explain why the Marines’ social norms are this way. “It’s such a—and I don’t want to—” he faltered. Then he said: “It’s because we kill people.” Dark humor, irony, and inappropriate comments, he told me, are coping strategies. “How do you get through watching your friends get blown to fucking pieces?” Platner said. “How do you get through watching the aftermath of a bomb dropped on a house that was actually full of civilians? How do you do any of that shit in a healthy way?” In his case, he didn’t. He told me that as he looks back on his internet history from the period, he sees a person who was lost, lashing out, and sometimes posting inflammatory comments simply to offend others.
“Everything just went sideways,” is how Platner described the time in his life when he began posting online heavily. It was 2012, and he was in his late 20s and living in Washington, D.C., where, he said, civilian life and a GI Bill stint at the George Washington University didn’t agree with him. Platner said he couldn’t shake the shadow of his last deployment. “I wanted to be a soldier since I was 2. It’s all I ever wanted,” he told me. But if anything remained of that childhood dream, Platner’s last tour had thoroughly disabused him of it. “I spent a year in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2010 and ’11,” he said. “I partook in, and personally witnessed, an immense amount of violence.”
He told me that these experiences left him feeling “unmoored,” “wildly isolated,” and “full of rage” back in the real world. “I was angry at the country for making me go do this,” he said. “I was angry at the military for not figuring out how to do it right. I was angry at civilians who didn’t understand at all what I had just been through.” Primed by military culture to believe that “PTSD is for the weak”; left hanging, he said, by an understaffed and overburdened Veterans Affairs office; and with nowhere else to put his anger, Platner stewed in it. And like many aggrieved men, he turned to posting online.
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When we spoke, he did not back away from everything he wrote on Reddit: His question about racial differences in tipping was, he insisted, a genuine question, informed by his experiences as a bartender. He disavowed other comments, though. I asked him about the 2013 entry in which he asked, in a thread about rape-prevention underwear, whether people should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?” His face reddened and he told me, “I read that post and I was like, I’m fucking embarassed.” In another post from 2013, he downplayed the possibility that the military was covering up sexual-assault allegations. “The way that we used to talk and look at the world,” he said, referring to the culture of the Marines and Army, “is deeply fucked up.” He told me that he never viewed sexual assault as acceptable, but he said that he used to be skeptical of its pervasiveness. Platner offered the questionable explanation that he had served in a time before women were allowed in the infantry, so “I didn’t have any context so I was willing to make stupid jokes about it.”
Platner told me that his experience as an older, nontraditional university student helped him start viewing things differently. “I got exposed to a lot of people,” he said. He continued, “I met a lot of women who, at some point in their life, had been sexually assaulted.” This evolution appears to be backed up by his Reddit history. In a 2017 post, Platner criticized the members of the Facebook group Marines United who were caught posting nude photos of female service members. He called the posters “losers who hid behind a computer and ‘camaraderie’ to justify their hatred of women” and said, “Nail these fucks to the wall.”
I came away from my initial conversation with Platner largely convinced by the story he told about his Reddit posts—lots of guys end up in dark places online, and Platner did seem to have moved beyond that period of his life. Then the tattoo news broke. The way Platner explained it to a co-host of Pod Save America is that he got the tattoo in Croatia when he was young, drunk, and on shore leave. He said he and his soldier friends picked the design because they “thought it looked cool.”
The story of how he got the tattoo seemed plausible enough to me. But did Platner, a self-described student of history, really never figure out what it meant? According to a Jewish Insider article, he did: An anonymous source said that in 2012, Platner referred to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf.” Platner’s former political director, who resigned after the Reddit comments came to light, did not buy his story either. “Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff,” she posted on social media. “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”
When I spoke with Platner on Tuesday, he reiterated his claim that he didn’t know what the tattoo meant when he got it in 2007. He told me that in the nearly two decades since, he hadn’t encountered anyone who saw it as a Nazi symbol until three weeks ago, when someone asked him about it. When I asked him about the Jewish Insider piece, he said, “It’s an anonymous source”; when I asked if it was true that knew his tattoo was a Nazi skull, he said, “The answer is no.” He told me that after he got the tattoo, he had two full-body screenings for tattoos as a requirement for government work, including screening for “hate” tattoos, in both the Army and as part of his State Department work, and that the skull was not flagged either time. He told me that members of his family are Jewish, and that he has had his shirt off around them many times without anyone objecting to the tattoo. “Eighteen years,” he said. “It’s never come up.”
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Really? How could Platner go so long without noticing the resemblance between his tattoo and the Nazi symbol? At the same time, the idea that Platner might have knowingly had a Nazi tattoo is hard to square with comments I found in the P-Hustle Reddit archive, which I was able to access through a website that preserves deleted posts. Over the years, P-Hustle expressed enthusiasm for the civil-rights movement; railed against homophobia, anti-Muslim hatred, anti-immigration sentiment; and criticized the militarization of the police. The archive also includes posts that praise American GIs for killing Franz Ziereis, a Nazi SS leader at the Mauthausen concentration camp (“Fuck him. And good on the GI’s who murdered him”); lambaste “the rampant anti-Semitism that was the cornerstone of Nazi rhetoric”; and commend the television series Band of Brothers because “it’s all about killing Nazis.” The first of these posts came in 2012, the same time period when the anonymous source said that Platner knew about his Nazi tattoo.
I reached out to an acquaintance who saw combat overseas around the same time that Platner did. I asked if Platner’s story about not knowing the tattoo resembled a Nazi skull passed the smell test for him. “This sounds totally believable,” the acquaintance texted me. “‘It looks cool, more skulls,’ is like 99% of military logos.” He added: “This guy just sounds like a 23 year old dumbass, i.e. normal.” On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that a Marine who served with Platner, whom the campaign put the reporter in touch with, got a similar tattoo with him and corroborated his story: The Marine said they got the tattoos while intoxicated, to commemorate a deployment after many of their friends were killed or injured. In the Marine’s telling, they liked the image because it was more unique than the other skulls.
When I talked to Platner about the Reddit posts, a pattern emerged: His most troubling messages seemed to come after he spent time overseas. The posts about sexual assault, for example, came in 2013, following his 2010–11 Afghanistan deployment and 2012 departure from the Army. Platner’s last spell in a combat zone was as a contractor working on the ambassador’s security detail in 2018. He described it as maybe his most disillusioning. He found the juxtaposition between the luxurious calm of embassy life and the reality of the war going on in the country beyond disturbing. “I’m watching people go into a swimming pool and eating,” he told me. “There are people out there, right now, fighting this fucking war. There are Afghans out there right now, getting their houses bombed and burned out. And you people are here, just fucking swimming?” He left after six months with a shoulder injury.
Some posts from the final phase of his Reddit years, stretching from 2018 to 2021, Platner insisted to me were ironic—or, as he put it, “me talking shit on the internet.” He was adamant that his post referring to himself as a communist was a joke. “If you fight for anything for working people in this country, they’re going to call you a communist,” he said. “They called Hillary Clinton a communist.” Platner said that his comment agreeing that cops were bastards after George Floyd’s murder was not serious either. “I was in the Marine Corps and the Army, and I was a private-security contractor for the State Department. Many of my friends are cops,” he said. “These are guys I fought in the war with.”
Platner repudiated his 2018 comments about political violence. In one such post, he wrote that Americans can’t expect to “fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.” He told me that now, he doesn’t believe violence works. “I lived the life of violence,” he said, “and it didn’t get me anywhere. It only got me disillusioned and angry.” I asked him if he could see why the sentiment he expressed on Reddit might concern voters, rightly disturbed by Charlie Kirk’s recent assassination and rising political violence. He said that of course he could.
His position on guns hasn’t changed, however. I asked Platner, a firearms instructor and competitive pistol shooter, if he agreed with the interpretation of the Second Amendment—popular in the NRA and among Republican congressmen—which holds that the right to bear arms is primarily about the prevention of government tyranny. His answer was unequivocal: “Yes.”
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Platner told me he doesn’t remember consciously deciding to stop posting on Reddit. As he fell in love with the woman who became his wife and got more embedded in his local community—he sits on Sullivan’s planning board and serves as the town harbormaster—Platner gradually stopped feeling the internet’s pull. “Being an asshole doesn’t make your life easier,” he told me. It’s his message for men who find themselves in the kind of headspace, and online space, that he was in. “It doesn’t make people like you. It’s certainly not going to make women like you. It’s certainly not gonna make your neighbors like you. And in some ways, you got a choice.” His last post was in 2021. According to a Politico article, the old posts were removed three months ago; Platner told me that he doesn’t remember when, precisely, he deleted his archive but said it had not been recently. “I didn’t delete it with any of this in mind,” he said, referring to the recent controversy. “I knew that I’d said some dumb shit over the years.”
This “dumb shit” is continuing to haunt Platner’s campaign. The Advocate pointed out on Wednesday that Platner posted a homophobic slur in a 2018 post, and used “gay” as a punchline in 2020. (Platner called these comments “indefensible.”) These posts add to the contradictions that defined Platner’s Reddit presence. In a 2012 comment critiquing the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, for example, P-Hustle wrote: “Who fallen soldiers chose to love is their business, and the services should recognize that whether they be male or female, gay or straight.” Another comment from a 2018 thread responding to the struggles of a gay Marine reads: “Just know this: I can’t imagine how much it must suck not being able to share who you are with the people who are supposed to be your comrades.”
Since Donald Trump’s reelection victory in November, many in and around the Democratic Party have seemed to recognize that change is in order. A widespread theory holds that candidates with a tougher image may help the party win back disaffected voters. “‘Weak, Woke, and Whiny’ No More,” was the headline on an August New York Times opinion piece about the “national security moms” seeking office, including Abigail Spanberger, an ex-CIA case officer running for governor of Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill, a Naval Academy grad and former helicopter pilot running for governor of New Jersey. Spanberger and Sherrill are impressive, with their elite educations, graduate degrees, and political experience. But candidates whose edges are not so smooth may be able to reach beyond the suburbs and into rural towns.
Fielding candidates who have not spent years preparing for a life in politics is almost certain to come with questions about past behavior. The questions that Platner’s candidacy poses are not easy ones, and, candidly, I don’t know exactly what to think of his explanations for his past. I do come to this story, however, having been raised by a combat veteran and knowing that the psychological aftershocks of war can linger. I believe that we owe those who have served particular grace.
I also have a sense of relative risk—the stakes for democracy if Democrats can’t win are dire. As a registered voter in Maine, I’ll need to make a decision about how to vote in this election. I know that still more information could emerge that might change my views about Platner. I also completely understand why someone couldn’t stomach voting for him after this. But for now, based on the information currently available, this is where I land: If the way for the Democrats to win is with Platner, I’m willing to look past the ugly Reddit posts and the tattoo.
