I see we’ve imported the British definition of “smear” from the Jeremy Corbyn fiasco - “smear” is when you accurately report something a leftist did or said regarding Jews.
I wonder why Platner was running in the social circles of Republican operatives so deeply that he was dating one, right up until the moment he got recruited as a Democratic candidate. Must be another one of those coincidences.
As has been pointed out, Platner is a rich kid who grew up in private schools and on Reddit, and is entirely likely to be aware of the kind of popular culture that the upper class consumes. His oyster business is a fake company whose income comes entirely from selling to members of his own family and is registered entirely as his wife’s. Remember, he’s 100% disabled according to the VA so he can’t admit to actually working on the oyster boat, nor can he claim the income since it would affect his benefit and tax situation. The setup to get free money from his rich parents is a convenient fiction for painting him as a “working class Mainer” when his actual job was hanging around a bar in DC part-time and collecting benefits. Like “I didn’t know it was a Nazi tattoo,” no one here actually believes Platner is a working oysterman, but it’s fun watching you degrade yourselves by being forced to pretend.
It’s entirely false. There’s nothing illegal or fraudulent about a vet with a 100% disability rating working unless they’ve specifically made the legal claim that they are unable to work.
So we’ve gone from “everyone knows that Mitchell and Webb sketch” to “Mitchell and Webb is the demesne of the aristocracy”.
So is it a fake job that only exists on paper or is it proof that he’s not a helpless cripple that can’t provide for himself and is defrauding the federal government by claiming otherwise? It can’t be both.
He dated her for a few months back in 2013, while he was a student.
Khan-Mullins pegs Platner’s net worth around $300,000, more than half of which is tied up in his home, which like other homes here has seen its value grow since COVID. The remainder of his reported wealth comprises the pension of his wife, Amy Gertner, and his oyster farming equipment
If that is “rich” then i am Daddy Warbucks.
We have debunked this several times- yes, you can work and have a 100% VA disability. And since this is your 41st post here, I know you have read those posts. This is false, completely false, and has been covered in this thread many times. Wiki
Wikipedia " Platner’s parents separated when he was six.["
Right, this bogus claim comes very close to “PTSD is a real disability”.
Sure it can, by republican reasoning, like Schrödinger’s Mexican, simultaneously being too lazy to work and living off benefits while stealing red blooded Americans jobs.
NY Times did a podcast interview with the reporters that did the Platner investigative article. Lyndsey Fifeld was interviewed by consent on tape, and after the article was published contradicted her interview and made new bigger claims.
At least in the small shit towns I grew up in, the “wealthy” elite lawyer family was a best upper rural middle class. It’s not hard to “look rich” if the average income is $25k per year and you’re pulling in $100k.
It’s really obvious to me what the situation is with Platner’s tattoo. He knew it was a Nazi symbol, and he got it because he thought it was badass. Not because he’s a Nazi, not because he is or ever was sympatico with Nazi beliefs. It’s because he thought it was badass, and the reason why he thought it was badass is because, like a lot of Nazi shit, it IS badass.
Everyone thinks Nazi shit is badass. They designed it to be badass. They knew what they were doing. They were masters of looking badass.
MOST people still would view that iconography as too taboo to commit to your skin. But Graham Platner, as a young, fairly dumb, boozed up, Enlisted, Combat Arms Marine, at that time in his life, decided that the badass nature of the Nazi symbology overrode the taboo nature.
The problem is that he can’t just SAY this even though it’s the fucking truth. Because people would clutch their pearls way too much and feign outrageSo he has to play this dumb game of acting like he didn’t know what it was.
No one else has publicly claimed that Platner knew that the symbol was used by the Nazis. In a statement to the Times, Platner “strongly” disputed Fifield’s account of what he knew about the tattoo. He has long claimed that he didn’t know its symbolism when he got it with his Marine buddies in Croatia in 2007. He noted that he had never hidden the tattoo. He frequently went bare chested in photos, including on his businesses’ social media account. He even serenaded his Jewish sister-in-law and her family shirtless at her and his brother’s wedding. He claims he and his friends picked the tattoo off the wall in a tattoo parlor because “marines and skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing.”
He was also screened for white supremacist tattoos and cleared to serve in the Army National Guard and with Department of Defense contractor Constellis in Afghanistan. He got the tattoo covered up within days of when the tattoo story first broke last October.
At the time, Marine veteran Phil Proschko, who got the same tattoo with Platner, forcefully denied that they were aware that the skull tattoo had been used by the S.S. Following the recent NY Times story, Phil Proschko once again dismissed Fifield’s claim that they knew about its Nazi symbolism. In an interview with Zeteo, Proschko said, “we did not purposely get hateful fucking shit… We just got matching skull-and-crossbone tattoos that we thought looked cool.” He added, “I too have PTSD. It changes your mental process. It’s something that is very difficult to work through, and he is somebody that has gone miles above anybody that’s even tried to better themselves. He’s not a fucking racist, he’s far from it.”
Proschko was clearly fed up with the media circus around his body art, telling Zeteo that he didn’t want to talk to anymore reporters.
“That was over 20 years ago,” he said. “We just got matching skull-and-crossbone tattoos that we thought looked cool in Croatia. Whatever happened after that, that’s everybody else’s fucking business.”
The person who claimed he “knew it was” is a MAGA Operative, who lied about several other things.
Platner got it because those Marines he was with were decorating a lot of stuff with a Skull and crossbones- which indeed is “badass”.
I think we can all agree that Platner and his drunken squadies on leave from a pretty nasty combat zone got a group tattoo because they thought it was badass. That’s all that is known. Anything else is projection or conjecture. YMMV
A net worth of 300K these days probably means having significant equity in a house and a vehicle or two. In many areas it wouldn’t cover owning them outright.
300K was rich when I was a kid, sixty or seventy years ago. It isn’t now. It’s more than a lot of people have, even if it’s all tied up in necessities of living; but it’s a long way from rich.
All the symbols depicted in the hate symbols database must be evaluated in the context in which they appear. Few symbols represent just one idea or are used exclusively by one group. For example, 100% is often used as an amount or an expression and it is also used by some white supremacists as shorthand for “100% white.” Similarly, other symbols in this database may be significant to people who are not extreme or racist. The descriptions here point out significant multiple meanings but may not be able to relay every possible meaning of a particular symbol.
Now then. The ADL article doesn’t address multiple contexts in which the specific SS Totenkopf may appear. However, their article on the SS bolts mentions something interesting:
The SS bolts are typically used as a symbol of white supremacy but there is one context in which this is not necessarily always so. Decades ago, some outlaw biker gangs appropriated several Nazi-related symbols, including the SS bolts, essentially as shock symbols or symbols of rebellion or non-conformity. Thus SS bolts in the context of the outlaw biker subculture does not necessarily denote actual adherence to white supremacy. However, because there are a number of racists and full-blown white supremacists within the outlaw biker subculture, sometimes it actually is used as a symbol of white supremacy. Often the intended use and meaning of the SS bolts in this context is quite ambiguous and difficult to determine.
I would think most people interpret this passage through their existing priors. For some, the “… does not necessarily denote actual adherence to white supremacy” carries most or all of the weight of this passage. For others, “[however] … sometimes it actually is used as a symbol of white supremacy” is the beginning and the end of the meaning of this passage.
Now Platner is not an outlaw biker. And his tattoo was not of the SS bolts. Nevertheless, it doesn’t require a mental stretch (for me, at least) to believe that Platner and some dumb-ass drunk young Marines picked out tattoos not especially caring in the moment about the iconography. I can even conceive (no evidence, granted) of kind of a “fuck it – it’s bad-ass and no one who matters will see it” running through their minds. Maybe they’d already seen other similar tattoos on fellow Marines (perhaps even those in authority) and knew they would pass whatever inspections would later take place.
How could they not know what a Totenkopf symbolized? Especially being into WWII – that SS Totenkopf was everywhere! Right? Well, I don’t know. I’m not the biggest WWII buff, but my father is and I’ve looked through a lot of his materials and collection of memorabilia. Now, his expertise is firearms of the Pacific Theater, but he’s got plenty of comprehensive books about both theaters that have been in the house since before I was born. I wouldn’t even be at all surprised if he actually has an actual metal SS Totenkopf, straight off an officer’s hat, in his collection.
Even with that background, I’d not have been able to identify Platner’s tattoo to an SS insignia before a few months ago. Given my own priors I’d be astonished if, back before Platner became a national name, as many as one in 10,000 American adults could look at that tattoo and go straight to “Nazi”. It could have been far fewer than that, especially among Platner’s age cohort circa the mid-2000s (early-to-mid 20s).
