Graham Platner’s Problems Show Us How Ethics in Politics Are Not Fair and Balanced
Democrats can't raise ethics issues with Republican candidates, but the opposite is true for Democratic candidates
Last night, a flawed Democratic candidate easily won an important battleground primary to earn a chance to end septugenarean Republican Susan Collins’ 30-year(!) term as a U.S. Senator in Maine.
For some reason, his primary competition was Governor Janet Mills, another septuagenarian (78 years old), who had been Maine’s governor. Don’t these people ever retire?
Maine’s a nice state. Lots of lakes. Take a boat ride or something with the grandkids, Janet. But no. She thought she should run against the other septuagenarian in an ultimate battle of the septuagenarians to try to… oh, never mind. It’s too ridiculous to ponder.
And then, up steps a hardened former U.S. Marine, Graham Platner, with enough warts on his resume that you have to wonder if he’ll even show up sober to his Senate seat on the first day if he wins. Or, worse, will he pinch some lady’s ass?
And then, then(!), Mills removed any real opportunity for Maine’s women to say, “No” to Platner by suspending her campaign when it looked like Platner was becoming too hot to handle.
So, last night, even though Mills was on the ballot, Platner easily won.
But this is not a hit piece on Graham Platner. If anything, it’s sympatico. But I sure am curious what the women here think, and look forward to comments after they finish reading this.
The unfair advantage
What I want to talk about here instead is the unfair advantage Republicans have in all elections. It’s one we don’t hear about often, because it’s not like we want to say, “I really want to run a scandal-plagued candidate for office without all the hassle and controversy.”
The Graham Platner kerfuffle is a case study of this long-standing advantage Republicans have had over Democrats in U.S. elections since Trump entered politics. To put it as simply as possible: Republicans get to scandal, and Democrats do not.
Platner gained attention for a dynamic candidacy as a politically progressive former U.S. Marine who saw significant combat duty. He played the part of a Marine, too, in almost every way you can think of, including a past with unsavory online statements, pride in peeing on dead Taliban soldiers, and a lot of other Marine-type stuff.
And here’s the problem: If he were a Republican, none of it would matter.
Republicans have proven they’ll vote for an adjudicated rapist and an accused child rapist as president.
Republican voters have shown they don’t care about scandals at the lower ranks of government, either.
Worse, the mainstream media only cares about ethics when a Democrat is involved. Democrats are held to a higher standard than Republicans for reasons nobody has convincingly established.
When former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz was allegedly caught with his knickers down on a play date with a seventeen-year-old in 2020, Republican voters yawned and cheered him on by re-electing him to the U.S. House of Representatives. Twice. In 2022 and in 2024. These were not close elections.
The media mentioned the scandal in a few headlines, then moved on to Trump’s latest messaging or rage speech.
After the 2024 election, it got a little hot in the Republican child molestation kitchen, so Gaetz resigned from the 119th Congress almost before it began. He moved on to become a regular commentator on One America News Network, where he enjoys a devoted following.
Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas who doubles as a Texas Taliban crime lord, is a perfect symbol of Republican voter indifference toward crime, grift, and salacious sexcapades.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Wife Reveals "Recent Discoveries"
This is the story about a very religious political couple in a very religious state named Texas, which is famous for stripping away the rights of women and urging its citizens to send each other to prison for attempting to preserve one’s bodily autonomy.
Paxton voters seem to reward him with increasingly plum electoral victories with every crime he commits or scandal he creates.
Republicans plant operatives and play dirty tricks to increase the scandal level on every single Democratic foible. Meanwhile, Republicans enjoy full immunity from the voting public on the most heinous of crimes, including child sex trafficking, which all 53 Republican U.S. Senators enable by refusing to challenge Trump’s salacious past.
The concept of a Democratic dirty trick is ludicrous because mainstream media barely covers real corruption or scandals by Republicans.
Not even the Trump/Epstein child trafficking empire, which everyone outside of Antarctica knows about, moved the media or voters. Even when the mainstream press does cover a Republican scandal, Republican voters ignore it to such a degree that most of them will get nasty with you if you try to bring it up. There are never consequences at the polling place for Republican malfeasance.
The Epstein files, where Trump’s name appears anywhere between 5,363 and more than a million times, depending on redaction levels and who is viewing them, were not discovered after the 2024 elections. They’ve been around for a long time. So have the accusations that Donald Trump is a child rapist.
The predator-in-chief has long worn his proclivities on his sleeves. When word broke in October 2016 that videos recorded him flirting with young girls, the nation yawned:
In a December 1992 wire brief in the Chicago Tribune, Trump is described as having spotted a youth choir singing Christmas carols at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. He asked two girls how old they were. When they said they were 14, Trump, then 46, replied, “Wow! Just think — in a couple of years, I’ll be dating you.”
On Wednesday, CBS News reported a similar scenario involving a 10-year-old girl around the same time, when Trump was between his first and second marriages.
In footage from the archives of CBS-owned “Entertainment Tonight,” Trump asks the child if she is planning to ride the escalator at Trump Tower. After she says yes, Trump turns to cameras taping a Christmas special for the show and says, “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”
~ Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2016
There was a cackling Hillary to defeat, after all, and nothing mattered more.
But don’t we have to talk about those Platner accusations anyway?
Sure. But only if we start at the beginning of his story.
Platner established his credentials as a conflicted soul early in his adult life. Despite being an anti-war protester, he joined the Marines when he was 19, after being kicked out of a protest against the looming Iraq war.
That was the first sign that he was a complex cat, but hardly the last. Why, it’s fair to wonder, did he sign up with the Marines if he was against the Iraq War? Platner says serving in the military was something he’d wanted since boyhood:
I wanted to be a soldier since I was about 2. I was singing “The Marines’ Hymn.” I was 4 or 5 when I first memorized it. I don’t know why that is. But I always had an attraction to service, and also adventure. In our society, we sell militarism and war in this very romantic fashion about adventure and excitement.
Then — and you can probably understand this, too — there is this weird attraction when everyone tells you that the only way you could ever experience it is to be there. That it’s so unique that you could never get it unless you had seen it. I grew up reading military history books, and I was into Civil War re-enacting. In high school I became pretty critical of certain elements of American foreign policy. Certainly when the war in Iraq was kicking off, I was like, This seems like a deeply stupid idea.
~ New York Times gift link: Interview with Graham Platner
In another interview, he said, “I might have read too much Hemingway.”
The TL;DR version of all this: “I like to fight.”
Yeah, you and every other Marine I’ve known, Graham. It’s okay to admit it.
This taste for rowdiness is part of his appeal to many Democrats tired of reacting to every Republican insult by tipping over on the back of their heels. When the mainstream media writes hit pieces on him, they’re also writing hit pieces on those who are drawn to him. This is not a small number of people these days. How many of us wouldn’t like a chance to pop a Republican in the mouth?
Platner’s complexity is also part of the appeal. Everything you need to know about Platner starts and ends with the fact that he’s a Marine at heart, for better and, often, for worse. Talk to almost any Marine, and they’ll tell you stories about fighting. Fighting with other Marines. Fighting with Navy personnel. Fighting with their own mothers.
They. Like. To. Fight.
Among male Marines, there probably isn’t one who hasn’t uttered a misogynistic phrase in his life. This isn’t okay. It’s very bad. It’s part of America’s rape culture. It’s a disease infecting America’s very marrow.And the world’s, if we’re honest.
But the solution isn’t found in evaluating men who have crawled out of Marine barracks filled with huge institutional problems. The solution is to drag a few Marine generals in front of Congress and force them to make cultural changes to their forces. Maybe having a guy who’s the face of it will help us get there? I have no idea. But “maybe” can sometimes work as an answer.
Does the pathology of the uglier side of Marine culture excuse certain behaviors? Not my call, because the most serious stuff Platner is accused of is unproven hearsay. But the bottom line is that Maine voters have known details of Platner’s life since the beginning of his campaign. He talks about his past in his rallies. Nobody who has voiced support for him should be shocked that he’s rough around the edges.
One of the things he has talked about recently is how war damaged his soul [Source: NY Times gift link]:
In 2005, my vehicle got hit by an I.E.D. outside a place called Karma, north of Fallujah. It was myself and my best friend that were in the back of the truck. Another Marine was driving. And we drove over an I.E.D. and blew the truck up. We all got knocked unconscious.
I come to and the whole front of the truck is ripped off. I thought we had engine trouble. I was all discombobulated. I ran around to the back of the truck, and there’s my friend. He’s alive, but a piece of shrapnel has come up under his helmet and ripped a lot of his head off.
I’m 20 and this guy’s my best friend. We went to infantry school together, we came to the fleet together, we were thick as thieves. I was a combat lifesaver, so I got this training. But they never told me what to do when you’re looking at brains. And I remember standing there being like, I don’t know what the [expletive] to do. This is my best friend and I’m supposed to save him, but I have no idea how to even do that. And then luckily this guy, Doc Huey, spectacular Navy corpsman, comes running up and starts immediately going to work and saves his life. And he survives. But I was, of course, distraught because he was my best friend and I’m a kid.
All this is happening, and there’s also a gunfight going on. So then I’ve got to go get in the gunfight for a while, and we get the vehicle back, we drop him off at the medical station, and then I’m in the back of the truck just cleaning the blood out, mopping it up, and I just remember there was a moment when they were like, Well, we’ve got to go back on patrol in three hours, and you’re just like, Yep. … So there was a hardening at that point for me. You don’t get to engage with this, because if you do, you’re going to be worthless, and you can’t be worthless out here.
I’m pretty sure that if I had experienced this at 20 years old, I’d have become a shitposter on Reddit like Platner did, too. Hell. A bad day on the couch will lead me to dark times.
About Platner’s “Nazi” tattoo
Platner’s troubles started early in the Democratic primary process when it was revealed he had a Topenkopf tattoo, which is verboten (forbidden) in Germany because of its association with the Nazi SS.
But the history of the tattoo is not quite what the mainstream media says it is. One of the first celebrities to wear the Totenkopf was Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who wore it at the front of his furry combat busby (aka, hat) during the First World War.
He wasn’t much of a Nazi, though, once World War II rolled into view. Instead, he remained a staunch supporter of the old German monarchy. He was a World War I war hero, so Nazi punk Hermann Göring hid him away as a Prussian state councillor instead of, you know, killing him.
Mackensen continued to show up at Berlin parties, though, wearing his uniform and his Totenkopf cap, while Nazis stared at him suspiciously in between quaffs of schnapps.1
See, that’s the thing about the Totenkopf and other symbols consisting of skulls and crossbones. It’s a war thing. Soldiers and warriors are asked to bludgeon and murder their fellow humans. They literally wear their mission on their sleeves, their chests, their hats.
The Totenkopf went through several variations throughout German and Prussian military history until it became the symbol of the most vicious national police force in modern history, the Nazi SS. (Stephen Miller says, “Hold my beer.”)
But until the revelation of Platner’s tattoo, I had never heard of the Totenkopf or its background. Had you? If you have, maybe you heard of this version of it, found on the sleeves of the United States Air Force’s 400th Missile Squadron (circa 1995 — 2005):
Or maybe this one, used by U.S. Navy Seals:
The Navy Seals version was inspired by a Marvel comic book antihero named the Punisher. What Platner will not tell you, and I don’t blame him, is that he probably doesn’t remember what his friends told him when they convinced him to get inked, because he was that drunk. For all we know, they said, “It’s the Punisher, dude! You know, Marvel Comics?”
To which Platner most likely replied with the clever retort common to drunk marines everywhere, “Blarghhh!”
If you fought in Iraq, you may have seen the Totenkopf grace one of the buildings cleared out by U.S. forces. Known as the Deuce Four Skull, it was slapped onto buildings to induce fear in the hearts of local insurgents:
One form of the Totenkopf symbol or another is used all over the planet by military and police forces. It’s not news when a drunk marine gets inked with one. Even the Calgary police use it in a “challenge coin.”
Platner has stated that he didn’t know about the Totenkopf’s SS history when he stumbled out of a bar one late night/early morning and into a tattoo shop in Croatia. It’s not unreasonable to think that half of the U.S. Marine force has one of these things tattooed somewhere on their person. The other half probably has something worse. Nearly all of them were probably quite drunk when they received them.
A better choice for a staggeringly drunk Marine wandering around in Croatia after midnight might have been this Grateful Dead version of the Totenkopf:
Now, let’s look at the Republican version of this issue, which is somehow not as important to the mainstream media.
When Pete Hegseth proudly displays his Jerusalem Cross ink, the right wing gushes because it’s a symbol adopted by far-right Christo-nationalists. This is expected. However, the mainstream media’s interest is next to zero.
If Platner wore something like this, the New York Times and other supposed mainstream media would be all over it.
What about Platner’s lady friends?
The New York Times recently published a hit piece on Platner (unlike my fair and balanced one!) that claimed Platner was a verbally abusive and violent-adjacent womanizer who drank too much.
Platner has referred to his drinking, too. He doesn’t try to hide it, but says it’s behind him.
The primary focus of the story was a former girlfriend named Lyndsey Fifield, who has since been outed as a Republican operative. She accused Platner of unsavory conduct unbecoming of a progressive, left-wing male.2
I’m usually first in line defending women against masculine bullshit. But the New York Times piece reads like a hit piece to me, with little basis in fact. Consider these three paragraphs:
Lyndsey Fifield, 40, a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our ‘weakness.’” Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.”
Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
Some of the women also raised questions about his trustworthiness. Mr. Platner’s insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield said. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.”
In all, the story describes three women, one of whom, Fifield, the Republican operative, says he became physical with her:
Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”
But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
In the New York Times story, Fifield admits to being in a dark place and drinking a lot, too, which should probably subject her version of the story to a little more scrutiny than the Times gave it. The other two women raised questions about his trustworthiness and/or concerns about his online posts. No mention is made of anything resembling physical assault.
So the New York Times went with this: Three women concerned about his Oorah personality, and one very loud headline in a New York Times special feature article:
Technically, I guess, “three” is “several.” The article continues:
Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.
In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that, describing Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.
This all looks like hearsay to me, even the positive stuff. His online comments, on sites like Reddit, read like any other midnight shitposter’s do.
Does anyone think that if Platner were a Republican, any of this would even make the back pages of the New York Times?
There are no assault charges. There are no charges that he hit anybody. He may have gotten weird once and locked someone in a closet; but, it sounds like they were both too drunk for that story to ever correctly form, so we’ll never get to the truth of it.
Platner has talked about his shitposting, too (previous NY Times gift link), admitting that it came from a dark place:
I stopped using the internet because I got happy. I sat on the internet for a number of years getting in fights, in the parlance of the times, shit-posting, trying to get a rise out of people, trying to get in arguments because it brought me some form of serotonin boost. Truthfully I was really, really isolated and alone. Very angry. A lot of the worst comments come from the years where I was at my absolute worst, which really is between 2012 and 2017, 2018. I was in a pretty dark place.
That dark place was fostered by a severe case of PTSD, which, as the prescient comedian George Carlin once reminded us, was once more honestly called “shell shock.” Platner authored more than 1800 Reddit posts, many of them offensive, while still loaded up on untreated shell shock stimuli.
They were the kinds of posts that would trigger many of us to hit the block button. And, he drank too much, all the way until at least 2018.
Is the dark place finally lit by recovery and what appears to be a happy marriage? Maine voters will need to decide in the general election. They’ll need to decide if he’s off the booze, too.
In a vacuum, purity tests are useful. Maine Democrats had a chance to visit their primary choices and ask, “Do we want a rough-edged blue-collar ex-Marine to represent the progressive wing of this party?” Enough people answered yes that his main competitor, Maine governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the Senate primary, leaving Platner and the relatively unknown David Costello as the remaining Democratic candidates.
Leave it to Democrats to begin the process of invoking purity tests after the ship has sailed.
This problem extends into the electoral process
Almost every Republican candidate has a core ethical issue by the simple act of supporting Trump. Such support should trigger an automatic slap in the face, since Trump is front and center of the Epstein files. But this support won’t be mentioned by the press aside from an aside.
In a normal world, any candidate expressing support for a serial sexual assaulter like Trump would be outed and condemned. The paradox of Republicans gaining an advantage in ethics, even though we know the majority of them are steeped in toxic sludge, extends to the electoral process itself.
Some of you may be familiar with Trump’s claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. What began as Trumpy shitposts became more than 50 court cases, all of which were tossed aside for lack of serious evidence. Republicans base their frequent attempts to curtail voting rights on a false narrative of election fraud, despite there being such a small amount of voter fraud that it’s statistically insignificant.
When Kamala Harris “lost” the 2024 election, polling researchers discovered numerous anomalies in voting patterns within the key swing states.
Mass voter fraud is hard to accomplish in a decentralized system like the one administering U.S. elections. Each county in the country has its own process for counting votes. Tinkering with voting machines in every county is almost impossible.
Some researchers claim that significant tinkering happened anyway. They point to bizarre patterns, such as those found in Rockland County in New York, where a complaint was filed in the New York State Supreme Court in December 2024 regarding the way the votes of a small community of Hasidic Jews were being counted. The dispute centered on a precinct referred to as Ramapo 35, where Trump received 552 votes while Harris received none.3
Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand received 331 votes in the same district. At the surface, it all seems very suspicious. As it turns out, however, aware that the precinct’s heavily Hasidic population takes its electoral marching orders from local rabbis, Gillibrand’s election team has traditionally worked the precinct hard. She’s built a loyal base, largely by mingling with the rabbis who issue voting instructions.
Note: The “This Will Hold” folks challenge this assertion. There are links at the end of this post to help you decide for yourself.
Eventually, the lawsuit was dismissed by a judge, but not before it triggered a larger conspiracy theory regarding the election that pointed all the way to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service. But if there was/is any meat to the theory, it doesn’t matter. That’s because Trump’s 50+ courtroom losses have turned the notion of election fraud into a joke. As a result, despite a set of impressive technical details in the most viral posts about irregularities in the 2024 elections, the story has been muted by the press and ignored by voters.
Democrats can’t easily claim fraud. Republicans spent so much time and effort pushing bizarre conspiracy theories that, unless a smoking gun the size of a city block is found, Democrats suspecting the same thing face a level of skepticism matched only by the depth of Trump’s malfeasance.
The stakes are high
Whatever Platner is, and the questions facing him are legitimate, the stakes are high. Democrats need to end Republican Susan Collins’ endless term as Maine senator to maintain the smoothest path to taking the Senate from the Republican sycophants who cheer on the Trump/Epstein crime wave like captive Catholic altar boys.
Susan Collins is one of those enablers. She has cast 10,000 Senate votes during her thirty years in the Senate. Among those votes:
Confirmation of all of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, including Brett Kavanaugh. This helped lead to Citizens United, the destruction of Roe v Wade, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
Yes to a vast majority of the Trump administration’s lower federal court nominees.
Yes to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and several other awful Cabinet officials (but she drew a line in the sand at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel).
Yes to last month’s $70 billion immigration enforcement package to increase funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with an emphasis on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), thus creating the largest national police force in the world, one devoted to street terror, concentration camps, and deportation, rather than crime.
Yes to Trump regime-backed legislation 95 percent of the time overall. She didn’t vote for the Big Brotherish-named “Big Beautiful Bill,” but did vote to pass it out of committee.
One of Collins’ Super PACs placed a major ad buy to begin on yesterday’s primary election, June 9. Here’s a look at what Platner can look forward to. Believe me, this is a gentle jab compared to the other hypocrisies Collins will throw his way:
Will the automated Republican advantage over ethics built on a foundation of hypocrisy work in the midterms? Or will voters finally see through it?
Stay tuned, I guess. A lot of this depends on you, if you’re an American voter.
Meanwhile, if you’re a woman, what would you do now if faced with a choice between Collins, an occasionally moderate but still horrifically enabling female senator, and a progressive ex-Marine with a possible mean streak, an obvious past of heavy drinking and nutty online posts, and who possibly thinks it’s a good idea to lock a woman in the closet if he is losing an argument?
Yeesh, is all I can say.
Notes
If you’re wondering, after all this, what type of politics Graham Platner embraces, suffice to say he’s been endorsed by Bernie Sanders. He definitely belongs in the Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez section of the Democratic tent. The chances of Platner becoming another Fetterman (a fear expressed by some Democrats) are almost zero, unless Platner, too, has a stroke.
Additional Sources
A gallery of Totenkopf usage:
Sources on possible electoral tampering:
She Won. They Didn’t Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.
How Leonard Leo’s 2021 sale of an electronics firm enabled tech giants to subvert the 2024 election.thiswillhold.substack.com
She Won. Or Did She? Analysis of New Viral “CIA Whistleblower” Revelations
Did NSA ‘authorize’ a forensic audit that found Harris won?michaeldsellers.substack.com
A deep dive into the Rockland County, NY, election results lawsuit
A lawsuit challenging the results of the 2024 general election in Rockland County, New York, fueled speculation about…www.snopes.com
Judge dismisses Rockland election results lawsuit seeking recount of 2024 results
State Supreme Court Judge Rachel Tanguay has dismissed a lawsuit filed by SMART Legislation that was seeking a hand…westchester.news12.com
Inspecting report on ex-CIA whistleblower who allegedly said NSA audit proved Harris won 2024…
A Substack article claimed Adam Zarnowski, a former CIA agent, was involved in an NSA audit of the 2024 election that…www.snopes.com
More info on Susan Collins’ voting record
Sen. Susan Collins
Legislative profile for Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME], the Senator from Mainewww.govtrack.us
More on Graham Platner:
Graham Platner isn’t going anywhere in Maine Senate race after latest controversy
Graham Platner is denying accusations of being physically rough with former girlfriends saying that report in The New…www.npr.org
This outlines Platner’s specific positions:
U.S. Senate — Democratic Primary | Voter Guide: 2026 Primary Election * Maine
From Maine Morning Star | Policy and Politics for the Pine Tree Statemainemorningstar.com
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_von_Mackensen
Paywall-free gift link: Times exclusive: Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior