I did not know that. I really think just too damn stubborn to do it until he thought of politiics.
I don’t know what the hell is going on with this guy, but I find it hard to believe it’s literally “he’s secretly a Nazi trying to sneak into the Senate as a stealth candidate”. First, because why wouldn’t such a person adopt relatively popular centrist policies in order to get elected, rather than Platner’s far-left ones? And secondly, wouldn’t such a person be self-aware enough to cover up his Nazi tattoos and not say nice things about Nazi podcasters? But I guess, based on available evidence, I can’t totally reject the hypothesis that he really is just that much of an idiot.
PS I think 78 is too old to think about running for President, but not a deal-breaker as a candidate to be one of 100 Senators. The system can run fine even with a few of them operating at diminished capacity.
Normal liberals and centrists abhor Nazis and won’t vote for one. Leftist “progressives” in the DSA are firmly in horseshoe territory and can be mobilized as a base in a primary by someone who wink-winks about “Zionist billionaires” while giving obvious bullshit reasons why he has a Nazi tattoo. He knows exactly who he’s marketing to and they’re loving it.
Getting a tattoo laser-removed so it looks like you never had a tattoo is expensive. But getting another tattoo to cover up a tattoo costs as much as, well, getting a tattoo.
And I think that he’s really just that clueless.
I’m not in Maine and I haven’t been exposed to much about the race. For some reason he’s been popping up on my feed the last few days. I’ve seen him mouth the right words and if I didn’t know anything else he would seem like a great candidate. I can’t get past the tattoo. It’s not some obscure symbol nobody remembers. I don’t believe him when he says he didn’t know.
I would still vote for him over Collins in the general. At least he’s saying the right things. Hopefully he’ll do the right things. It’s a sad state of affairs when it’s less likely for man with a Nazi tattoo to side with Nazis than the current Republican Party.
Republicans?
Actually, there’s also a smart possible explanation. It could be that he’s part of a right-wing plot to run a literal Nazi as a Democrat, so they can paint the whole party as Nazis, and win races on that all over the country.
But especially given the current Republicans, I think the stupid explanation is more likely.
I know she is considered moderate and occasionally votes against the party but Collins is still a Republican. If they were going to be that underhanded I would think they would do it where it would be a flip of the seat.
You’re looking at this as a linear scale from left to right with Nazis on the furthest possible far right, which would make it confusing indeed for somebody to champion supposedly Progressive policies while also being one. Reality is more complicated than this. Nazis aren’t opposed to expansive social programs or free healthcare; they just want to make sure that only the right people get that free healthcare.
That’s the beauty of it-- The lie only needs to work until the end of the election. If Platner manages to win, he can take off the mask and “change parties”.
That is, if it’s the smart explanation, not the stupid one.
If Ernst Röhm were alive today, and an American, it’s not inconcievable that he might run for office as a Democrat.
It all depends on how you frame it.
Obviously, for example, wealth redistribution is generally viewed as a left wing position, but consider what Chronos suggested earlier:
The other day a protest on San Francisco attracted those kinds of supporters; the mayor and event organizers, who aren’t antisemitic, shut that down; would Platner?
I get the concept but I don’t understand executing it in Maine where they have an incumbent Republican. The Trojan Horse would be needed more in a blue state.
If he’s a secret republican, then R wins the state. If they don’t do the ploy it would be collins against a D and the D might win. Works no matter the state.
Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, that’d have the bigger best-case payoff, but it’d mean that they’d have to find a Democratic senator that they could successfully primary even after Platner came out as a Nazi, which is much less likely. You need a primary opponent who’s weaker (or at least, perceived as such), which probably isn’t an incumbent.
There’s a segment of the “progressive” base so enamored with Platner statements like “I’m committed to ending this U.S.-funded genocide in Palestine”, that they’ll happily overlook his Nazi tattoo and playing footsie with neo-Nazi figures.
The DSA people are also not a group for whom the electoral success of the Democratic Party or stopping Susan Collins from enacting Trump’s agenda on pretty much any issue outside of Israel-related foreign policy are major priorities. The result of the general election being “the profoundly offputting far-leftist losing to the incumbent Republican and his supporters getting to blame the Jews for it” would be more than acceptable to them, certainly immensely preferable to the normal Democrat winning.
Nothing in this post is correct. It’s a shallow analysis dependent on stereotypes confidently asserted, not on facts.
The simplest explanation is almost always the correct explanation: this candidate is a dumb asshole who, while not explicitly antisemitic, sure harbors some unexamined antisemitic beliefs. Because he’s not out there explicitly Nick Fuentesing it up, other folks who want a strong left candidate in office are giving him the benefit of the doubt long past the point where he deserves it.
The left has a problem with purity tests, to be sure, but sometimes that gets overcorrected into not having a dumb asshole test.
It’s simply not a good practice to give a United States Senator a mulligan of “sure, he is a silly man got drunk and made poor choices and approvingly goes on white supremacist podcasts in the present day, but he was a real good soldier.” That’s the kind of break that you give to a plumber or a gardner, not a US Senator.
The primaries are for working this kind of shit out. It’s one thing to hold your nose and vote for a less-ideal candidate in the general, but if you don’t do that in the primary, then Dems are everything that the detractors say they are.
The fact that The Boy with the Nazi Tattoo doesn’t set off their purity test is incredibly telling.
Kamala Harris is a far right monster because she had Lis Cheney at one campaign event, but Platner is a real solid dude 