This week’s latest political scandal centers around Graham Platner, a candidate for the Maine Senate seat long occupied by Susan Collins. Platner is endorsed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, for what are widely recognised as “populist” politics that include gun rights, housing affordability, and Medicare for All. This particular fracas is unusual in that it involves a Nazi tattoo but, in a twist, has many on the left defending a man who sported one on his chest for nearly 20 years, was recently found out with it, and proceeded to deny he knew it was a Nazi tattoo. The resulting controversy reveals a lot about the left’s enchantment with a particular model of masculinity, and the extent to which leftists are willing to jettison their avowed leftist politics for fear that they might lose yet another election.
The long and the short of it: Platner, a military veteran who served four overseas tours straight out of high school, was revealed to have made several controversial comments online, specifically on Reddit (the zombie graveyard of bad opinions that never disappear). To be fair to him, some of the comments labelled “controversial” are the sort that warm leftist hearts: he declared himself a communist, and said that “cops are opportunistic cowards.” But other posts include suggestions that women who feared being raped needed to “just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—-d up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to” and asking why “black people don’t tip.”
The Washington Post report on this matter was followed by a controversy over a tattoo on his chest, which turned out to be a Nazi symbol, and not just Nazi-adjacent, or a kinda-sorta-maybe-what-am-I-actually-seeing-here Nazi symbol, or the Hindu Swastika that routinely gets misread as a Nazi symbol, but an actual Totenkopf—the “Death’s Head” that was, famously, emblazoned on the hats of SS officers. Platner’s claim is that he got the tattoo in 2007 when he was on tour in Croatia, on a very drunken night with fellow Marines, and did not know about its connection to Nazism until just recently. But Jewish Insider has already refuted that story and shown that he has always known the specific name for the symbol, jokingly referring to it as “my Totenkopf” as far back as 2012.
More recently, the Advocate has reported that Platner used “homophobic language and rhetoric that mocked or demeaned LGBTQ+ people” and “appeared to use slurs casually in discussions unrelated to sexuality; in others, he explicitly framed gay people as the punch line.”
The examples given don’t indicate an explicit hatred for queer people—there is nothing, so far, to indicate that Platner would be a gay-basher or thinks LGBTQ people don’t deserve rights. They are more indicative of the unfortunately pervasive casual homophobia that infuses straight people’s everyday language, especially when they are surrounded mostly or entirely by other straight people, and Platner appears to be a fairly typical clueless jock-dude who probably also thinks that tattoos anywhere, of any kind, are a turn-on. (If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can even imagine his pickup lines at a bar: nearly all of them involve letting a woman know that he was in Iraq.) There’s a reason, a very unfiltered macho one, why he has that tattoo in exactly that location. Certainly, homophobic language can become a way to justify violence, or accompany it, but Platner seems less a homophobe and more of an asshole who can’t keep his stories straight. He has tried to brush off his homophobic and other problematic posts by claiming they were from some distant past when he was just a wee and silly lad, but many of these were in fact from 2021: when he was 37. Four years ago.
The posts don’t confirm that he is a raging homophobe, but they do indicate that he is an immature, juvenile straight man—in other words, a very typical straight man, the kind who never grow up and away from their high school bullying days when they called every kid they didn’t like a faggot. And they don’t grow up because they never have to.
Platner is beloved amongst a certain lefty crowd, led by the likes of Sanders. Given the state of the world, literally, literally anything could happen between now and June 2026, when he may be up against Collins, so who knows. He has covered up the offending tattoo, claiming that it is too difficult to get it completely removed in rural Maine where he lives: the result is extremely odd. AP News describes it delicately as a “Celtic knot and a dog-like creature,” but it really just looks like the creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, in that moment when the creature has just swallowed up the dogs and then transmutated into all of them in a bloody, horrible mess. And you can still see two tiny bits from the old tattoo poking out at the bottom, so it doesn’t seem like there was a great deal of effort put into the erasure.
There are lessons from this whole murky set of circumstances. The first is that Platner is getting the kind of second and third chances that no Black candidate could get. Sanders has jumped into the fray with a statement of support, saying that the ex-military man went through a very “dark” period of his life. He went on to point out that Platner “served four tours of duty with the United States military, he was in the middle of some heavy-duty combat. He was a machine gunner, he mowed down people, you know?[…] He went through some very difficult experiences in the military as a machine gunner seeing his friends killed, came out of the military, he will acknowledge[…] he had PTSD.” Imagine a Black military veteran with a similar story, similar tattoos, and, well, I assume none of us can—because only white men get to go on multiple tours of Iraq where they, to quote the leading lefty politician of our times, “mowed down people” and still somehow emerge as penitent heroes. Jamaal Bowman got more flak for his “accidental” use of a fire alarm, for instance.
It’s 2025: Can we just stop this?
The next question: who the hell was vetting this man? Was anyone? And if not, why not? Certainly, the fact that he killed many brown people will not dissuade Democrats from supporting him: they still venerate Obama, who loved boasting about his kills and drone warfare, there are other “troop” candidates like Amy McGrath, and we know that Pete Buttigieg simply left his job as mayor for seven whole months in order to accrue credit as a “veteran” of Afghanistan, making sure to have people take several shots of him walking around with an M4 rifle. Killing is macho, the American way.
And yet, we have to wonder about everything else that was ignored. How does an ex-military man get through any kind of process, with Democratic campaign directors and staff, where he does not get asked: “By the way, do you have any tattoos or internet presence we should know about? I mean, you are a millennial marine, hahaha.” The response to the affirmative should have been, “Oh, shit, oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, an actual Totenkopf? Okay, so, we have to get rid of that thing, and second, we need a back story in case it ever leaks. What’s that? You said what about women and rape? Oh, crap, okay, um. Black people don’t tip? Oh, fuck. Ah.” As it turns out, Platner’s first campaign manager has already stepped down, and he has a new one, Kevin Brown, in place (the changes are already mired in controversy).
The issue here is not that someone cannot be a military veteran and still run for office as a candidate who is resolutely against the U.S’s involvement in overseas wars, or be an otherwise impeccably progressive candidate, as Platner seems to be on many fronts. The whole point of understanding the deep harm caused by the U.S’s massive military machinery against the entire world is that it does not only cause death and destruction everywhere, but deeply damages those who join its forces. To have someone who effectively managed to escape the thrall of this global Death Machine, and to have them stand on a platform against it can be incredibly powerful. But is Platner quite the reconstructed veteran he presents himself when he also laughs at being called a progressive, or tells Politico “of course I’m not a socialist”?
Asked specifically about his comments on LGBTQ people, Platner said he no longer uses that language after developing friendships in D.C with gay men, but many of his homophobic comments are from long after he left the city, all the way up to 2021. He also talks about becoming friends with trans people after moving back to Maine in 2016 and “that really opened [his] eyes.” (To what is unclear.) But you don’t have to be friends with members of a group to know that you’re not supposed to use derogatory language about them, especially once you are past the age of, oh, say, 16, or no longer travelling around only with macho ex-military men. Racism, homophobia, and misogyny are not like expensive chocolate or cognac you enjoy in the privacy of your home, or when you think no one is looking, or in the company of your inner circle: you have to be resolutely against them all the time.
On Facebook, Faheem Haider, a Democratic party organizer in the South and an artist, is blunt about all of this: “I agree that policy preferences matter more than personal commitments or speech acts. That said, I’m not sure having a killer of brown people is the way to go. Platner isn’t a Wobbly [from the Industrial Workers of the World], he’s not any different than any run of the mill social democrat. His votes won’t vary muchly from any other Dem’s. He’s also not, like, the spearhead for the revolution, or what not. I think his ascendancy makes it clear that there’s space for social democrats to run for state wide office in the Northeast, and that’s a beautiful thing. Beyond that, I think my dude should sit his ass down.”
Haider raises a critical point in all this, that too many people might miss: that leftists and progressives tend to fall for the slightest sign of anything-but-the-right and immediately set about crowning someone the new lord and saviour. Those of us on the left who might raise concerns about candidates are often shouted down and accused of exercising “purity politics.” That’s a legitimate concern, often, and the left has a hard time discerning between compromise and surrender. But there is a difference between simply swatting down a candidate for some slight and perceived imperfection and wondering about what else might be ahead. Platner’s last campaign manager left on the grounds that his recently exposed posts make him vulnerable against an established politician like Susan Collins, but she is a campaign manager and her concern is with electability. We, on the left, have to think about people’s actual politics.
The fuzziness around the tattoo and the homophobic comments are not cause for concern because of what they might reveal about Platner’s politics, but because they might reveal the extent to which he genuinely does not think that attitudes towards some groups really matter until they are found out. Forgive me for dragging out this example, but I’m reminded of Watergate: it wasn’t the break-in that proved to be a problem, but the coverup itself. I am also reminded of John Fetterman, whom everyone lauded as the Great Hope for Progressives until, well, he wasn’t. (I would like it on record that I never trusted Fetterman—because I simply, automatically do not trust white, adult men who walk around in cargo shorts: my suspicions about Sam Bankman-Fried were also proven true.) Is it likely that Platner will turn out to be another Fetterman, given how explicitly he has stated his progressive principles? Maybe, maybe not.
Here is a point that will doubtless anger many, but it needs to be made: I suspect that a lot of leftists supporting Platner are also deeply enamoured of his macho personality. The left has a masculinity problem, in that most of its men are not the conventionally heroic type, and it tends to swoon when it sees an ex-military dude with muscles and tattoos turned ex-Blackwater operative turned oyster farmer. My suspicion—and, yes, this is an entirely unverifiable feeling—is that even the sight of his Nazi tattoo made more than a few tingle and return to the days when they cosplayed paramilitary troopers on Xbox. Is that unfair to the many principled leftists who support Platner?
Is it, though?
But to return to Haider’s point, Platner’s ascendancy indicates that people are not as suspicious of actual social democrats as we might like to think, and that there is still a world where we can imagine many more like him instead of pinning all our hopes on someone who has so far been a hopelessly bad bullshitter about something as simple as a tattoo and some truly bad Reddit discourse. A lot of the pushback against those of us raising our eyebrows about Platner is about telling us to shut up because, the logic goes OMG, we will never see another like him, he is literally our Christ. That pushback is symptomatic of everything that the left suffers from: a false and self-induced sense that we have a massive scarcity problem, and that our ideas will never be enough to draw people to the left. This is demonstrably not true, given recent surges against liberalism and the many millions willing to not only march in liberal groups but asking for better alternatives, many risking their very lives to protect strangers they will never know. Hell, please: witness Zohran Mamdani.
No one is perfect—your politician will always disappoint you—but how politicians address and work through their imperfections says a lot about them. It is baffling that Platner and his team never anticipated these controversies, and that may indicate either a deep arrogance or profound stupidity, or some combination of both. All of them could have been addressed early on, with a strong biographical statement that actually connected any possible past internet comments to the long path he has taken to turning his back on such terrible politics.
Platner will be fine: he’s the frontrunner in the Democratic primary, and that is still only in June 2026. Recent polls indicate that the controversies have not dulled his appeal. People care more about dog-killing than homophobic language, so unless there is video of him somewhere shooting puppies in Fallujah, his path to facing off against Susan Collins, the 72-year-old Republican barnacle and sitting Senator, looks clear. Even if he does not win, he will continue to be a star among leftists who will continue to shush the rest of us for daring to bring up any potential problems with him.
This article was previously published on www.yasminnair.com.
Yasmin Nair is an Editor at Large at Current Affairs currently working on a book, Strange Love: How to Kill Social Justice and Make It Work Again.
