Yeah, being distrustful of Platner is one thing, but a lot of the Platner discourse is being generated by doomer leftists who can’t wait to tear someone down. You can basically tell who has genuine concerns about Platners history and who gets off on complaining by whether or not they mention Andrea LaFlamme.
Woah buddy you want to make a bet Donald trump won’t be president in 3 years?
Yeah, I expect him to be dead in less than 2. He is looking pretty rough these days. Vance may try to fuck with the peaceful transfer of power, but I doubt it. He clearly doesn’t have the charisma or balls to be the face of a fascist regime.
I also doubt Platner is a Nazi and I’d say that, even if it turns out his rhetoric is hollow and fake, you’re better off gambling on him than centrists like Mills or Collins. But a lot of people disagree, and they’re gonna be up Maine’s ass about it until the election. It’s just one of the drawbacks of having a competitive Senate race.
OK, but you understand why people aren’t just worried about their own senate race, right? Donald Trump won’t be president in 2 to 4 years, and limiting the damage he does to our democracy in the meantime depends on what voters in a handful of states decide to do. The Senate is significantly more powerful than the House, and most of us will never vote in competitive Senate race.
I get it; I’m pretty fucking sick of Platner discourse as well. But what Maine and Texas decide is going to effect all of us for the next 6 years, and more crucially, it will determine whether or not Trump controls half of congress for the remainder of his term. It’s not reasonable (or accurate) to tell people, “butt out, this doesn’t concern you.”
Imagine if someone tried to have you murdered by a mob and this was the harshest criticism you could come up with.
Senators serve 6 year terms, and their terms are staggered so that only a third of them up for reelection during any given cycle, so there are only 33 (maybe 34) other elections to worry about right now. Factor in popular sitting senators who are unlikely to receive a primary or general challenge this year, and there are really only a handful of senate seats tor people to be concerned about. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Platner/Mills and Paxton/Talerico for the general elections, and the primary between Markey/Moulton (and I’m not sure if that has national attention or it’s just news to me because I live in Massachusetts).
YUP. I once had someone tell me that the educating people on Marxism was more important that voting, because giving more people an understanding of theory would bring about a post-capitalist society. Meaning, “actually, my internet arguments are very important.”
If you don’t believe in electoralism, fair enough. It’s certainly hasn’t been serving us well the last 40 years (and especially the last ten). But if you’re going to judge everyone that engages with the political process, then you better find something better to do: join a grocery co-op, organize a union, start a commune. If voting isn’t the answer, do something else. Something besides talking. (Anecdotally, I’ve found anarchists are more likely to do something community oriented, or at least risk getting their heads kicked in at a protest, than a lot of other leftists I’ve known).
Yeah, AOC’s record on Israel isn’t as good as Tlaib’s or Omar’s, but it’s still better than 95% of Democrats. Only an idiot or a liar would call her a Zionist because she didn’t vote for a symbolic amendment for a bill she voted against anyway.
Also, you’ll notice that the people who gleefully brand her a Zionist or a Neoliberal never have an alternative to tell you about. They’ll tell you why every promising progressive is actually an imperialist, or why the DSA are actually corporate shills, why no one is actually a real leftist, but they never have someone they actually want to get elected. They just want to say “no,” or at best, they demand, “next,” without doing any work to find that next person.
Well, we could start sending him some red meat gift baskets, but it might get a little pricey.
Fetterman has certainly been acting more erratic since his stroke, but he actually wasn’t as progressive as people wanted to believe. He was always a hard-core Israel supporter, and he once held a black jogger at gunpoint because he saw a black man running and assumed he committed a crime.
Also, there is nothing the voters can do to remove a sitting Senator. The only way for him to be removed is for two-thirds of the Senate to expel him, which isn’t going to happen. Depending on Pennsylvania’s laws, either the Governor would appoint a Senator until the next election, which the Republicans wouldn’t support because they like Fetterman fucking over the Democrats, or Pennsylvania would have to hold a special election, which the Democrats wouldn’t like because it would leave them short a vote for weeks (maybe months), and an unreliable vote is better than no vote. Either way, you’re not going to find 67 Senators willing to expel him.
You know, Fetterman has talked openly about his struggles with suicidal ideation. Just saying, with the right letter campaign, we might be able to solve this one.
In fairness to Newsweek, based on the sentence before this, I think they mean, “many in the party establishment,” not, “many people in general.”
She brings significant energy to the primary among younger voters, but some in the Democratic Party establishment believe her progressive policies could alienate swing voters in the general election. Many believe Harris lost in 2024…
The DHS statement said that during the arrest, Okeke “weaponized his vehicle” in an alleged attempt to hit ICE officers…
At this point, it irresponsible to report this without a qualifier like, “ICE has made this claim on multiple occasions, including the killing of Renée Good, but so far, none have been substantiated, and many were later contradicted by video evidence.”
Well, don’t count Collins out yet. She’s down in the polls, but she’s bounced back from that before. Still, Platner is much better positioned to beat her than Mills ever was, and his campaign has already weathered a huge storm.
I view Platner as a sort of political Pascal’s wager. Let’s say there’s a 10% chance of him being a secret Nazi or the next Fetterman. Hell, let’s say it’s 50%. The alternative was Mills, a centrist hand-picked by fascist collaborator Chuck Schumer, and Collins, a member of fhe fascist party. The loss of electing a secret fascist over a fascist collaborator or different fascist is minimal, while the gain of electing a genuine progressive is massive. You might as well make the bet that he’s genuine.
Yeah, agree on all points. Personally, I’ve been getting a little sick of the discourse on the left about Platner. A lot of people’s take has become, “fuck Platner, he’s a Nazi, he’s gonna be the next Fetterman,” and it doesn’t go any further than that. If you’re skeptical of Platner, fair enough, but then you have to articulate a better alternative. Do you think Mills would be safer? Is there another leftist to support? If you don’t have a better vision, that’s just doomerism, and at that point, you’re just doing the fascists’ work for them.
I can see a very intoxicated group of young marines in a foreign port making a poor decision and getting a cool looking tattoo together without really thinking what it means.
Yeah, I think this the most likely scenario, I just don’t believe it was never realized it was also a Nazi thing. There’s even a deleted Reddit thread where they’re discussing the totenkopf, and he comments on soldiers using the Punisher skull iconography without knowing where it comes from. There’s just no way he didn’t realize, at any point, that his tattoo was also a Nazi tattoo.
Agreed that it’s unlikely he’s a secret Nazi, but given the tattoo, we can’t rule it out entirely. I definitely think he’s not telling the entire truth about it, though.
The official story is that he got the tattoo in Croatia while he was a marine and he had no idea it was a Nazi tattoo until it came to light during the campaign, and I don’t buy that for a second. Maybe he got it because he was a far-right extremist in his 20s, maybe he got it having no idea what it was, but there’s no way he made it through 6 more years in the military and then the rest of his adult life without someone going, “Hey Graham, you know that’s a Nazi tattoo, right?”
And when I say, “some kind of Groyper,” I mean, generally, a far-right troll. Platner’s only a little older than me, and there were plenty of people getting pilled on 4chan when I was in my early 20s. I wouldn’t be surprised if Platner made some regrettable posts on /pol/ when he was younger, but if he did, I don’t think he believes them now.
I’m least worried about the Reddit comments. I think he addressed them well by going through them chronologically and showing, “yes, I said some shitty stuff between 2009-2013, but if you look at the last 5 years, I’m clearly saying the opposite of that. These are shitty views that I outgrew.”
The Nazi tattoo has not been well addressed, to my mind. I can believe that he didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol when he got it. I can’t believe that he didn’t find out, in 20 years of having it, that it was a Nazi tattoo. I think he might have been some sort of Groyper when he was younger, and while (like the things he said in Reddit) I think he outgrew that, I don’t think he wants to admit it.
That being said, Platner seems like a genuine progressive, but there is a small chance he is actually secret Nazi, while Mills is a centrist hand-picked by Schumer, who has spent the last two years capitulating to Nazis. Seems to me that there isn’t much difference between a Nazi and a Nazi collaborator, so you might as well gamble on Platner being genuine rather than hand Schumer and the collaborators another vote.
I don’t know what Stalin thought, but I do know that he was able to rule for so long because he was broadly popular throughout the Soviet Union. Also, Victor Orbàn clearly cared about public opinion, as did Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, and Alexander Lukashenko, to name a few.
You can’t control a country where the vast majority of people hate you. Even if the military remains loyal to you (and they won’t), if the majority of people are out in the streets protesting you instead of going to work, your economy will implode, and gunning everyone down won’t help. You need your opposition to be small enough that they seem like a trouble-making minority, while you remain popular enough that most people either support your violent suppression of dissent or at least don’t hate you enough to stick their own necks out.
If you’ve spent the last 8 months calling Platner supporters Nazi apologists, but you didn’t mention LaFlamme once, it’s time to admit that you just like internet fights. Platner is an extremely problematic candidate, but his platform proved that progressive-populism is more popular than centrism in purple states. Getting his voters to support a better progressive-populist in a state with rank-choice voting was not a heavy lift, provided you actually wanted to do that.