Even Without His Controversies, Graham Platner Is Just a Lightweight Extremist

Who among us is a saint, after all?

The more interesting question is why Democrats have shown such loyalty to him.

After hearing so much about Platner's everyman appeal, I went down a rabbit hole, watching his speeches and listening to his interviews. Virtually every one of them is crammed with brain-numbing platitudes and freshman-level socialist sloganeering. His rhetoric makes former Vice President Kamala Harris sound weighty by comparison.

"This is a race about performative politics they're used to," Platner told a crowd recently. "What they don't understand is that this is a race about us."

This kind of banality, and there is a lot of it, calls to mind Lt. Frank Drebin trying to win over the love of his life in "The Naked Gun" by telling her that "maybe the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans ... but this is our hill, and these are our beans."

The late philosopher Daniel Dennett called phrases like this "deepities" — words that create the impression of moral and emotional weight while offering no actual insight.

Obviously, most politicians traffic in deepities to some extent. Platner, however, can spew inane class-war cliches for an hour without wandering anywhere near a deeper thought.

That is because Platner is the embodiment of performative left-wing populism. His cosplay working-man candidacy was created by Faiz Shakir and Ben Wikler, two Ivy League-educated former Bernie Sanders staffers.

"Part of the thesis here is that people don't want candidates who are grown in a vat," Wikler recently said. "They want people who are real human beings. And they want people who do not look and sound like the people who have been leading this country off a cliff the last century."

In other words, Platner is not a compelling organic candidate. He is a man who can play a part. Democrats have lost working-class voters to Republican populists, so they have become enamored with the idea of running someone who carries the aesthetic qualities of one. That is my thesis.

"If we want folks that are representing us from the working class, they're not necessarily going to have a groomed and perfect political record," a Maine voter recently told Fox News, repeating a common talking point.

But is the progressive impression of working-class "folks" really that they get Nazi tattoos, fantasize about rape and murder, and cheat on their wives? Because that seems like an insulting stereotype.

As James Kirchick notes, people used to say Donald Trump "was a poor person's idea of a rich person." Platner, he says, "is a rich person's idea of a poor person."

Weirdly, Platner's many controversies may have obscured his political radicalism. Wikler and other Bernie acolytes should be honest and decry not merely the past century but the past 250 years, because progressives detest the constitutional order.

You can hear it in Platner's appearance on a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist's podcast — "longtime fan," the Maine Senate candidate says — where he derides the American "system" and depicts the United States, the wealthiest country on the planet, as a hellhole.

Now, Platner may well win Maine. Maybe class resentment and Marxism are our future. But his politics — not only "taking back" what was allegedly stolen by the rich but also supporting all the cultural quackery the woke Left has inflicted on the country — are far more closely aligned with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with the average working-class American.

Even if Platner were a member of the proletariat, would that be enough?

Millions of working-class Americans successfully navigate the world without being sleazeballs. It would be helpful to bring their perspectives and experiences to Washington. Platner, born into privilege, will not. He bought his house with help from his wealthy father and VA disability benefits. His oyster-farming business may have been created after he decided to run for Senate. Whatever the case, it appears his only real customer is his wealthy mother's restaurant.

And that is fine. There is nothing wrong with relying on family. There is nothing wrong with being rich. There is something wrong with mischaracterizing your life to mislead voters.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 06/08/26 Southern Poverty Law Center's REAL scam
• 06/01/26 Dems Are in No Position to Lecture Anyone About Candidates
• 05/25/26 Jeff Bezos Is Right About Capitalism, Wrong About Taxes
• 05/11/26 Why Stay in NATO if Europe Isn't Willing to Help Us?
• 05/01/26 Nazi Tattoo? Hamas Defender? No Problem, Says Chuck Schumer, a self-styled defender of Jewish interests
• 04/24/26 James Madison Saw Abigail Spanberger Coming
• 04/20/26 Hey, Socialists, We've Already Figured Out the Supermarket
• 04/16/26 Argentina Is Booming -- Capitalism Remains Undefeated
• 04/13/26Everyone Knows What the Dems' AIPAC Obsession Is Really About
• 03/27/26 Trump's Iran Deal Must Be Nothing Like Obama's
• 03/24/26 Class-War Economics Is Counterproductive and Un-American
• 03/20/26 Paul Ehrlich is dead. Regrettably, his legacy isn't
• 03/13/26 When 'Islamophobia' Becomes a License to Lie
• 03/06/26 Trump eradicates 47 years of feckless foreign policy
• 03/02/26 What Trump Should Tell the American People About Iran
• 02/20/26 Yes, Dems are crazy
• 02/20/26 Obama Is in No Position to Lecture Us About Decency
• 02/13/26 Shut Up and Ski
• 02/06/26 Don't Cry for The Washington Post, It Helped Destroy Media
• 01/30/26 Price Controls Won't Work Any Better for Republicans Than It Does Dems
• 01/16/26 The Left's Silence on Iran Is NOT Hypocrisy
• 12/26/25: For JD Vance, Free Speech Only Means His Friends Can't Be Criticized
• 12/12/25: The Left Doesn't Believe in the Constitutional Order
• 12/07/25: War Powers Are Dead
• 11/27/25: MTG Embodies the Inanity of Populism
• 11/14/25: Gaslighting Americans is latest Dem Disaster
• 11/11/25: Trump's Filibuster Nuke Would Hand Dems the Keys To Remake America
• 11/04/25: Let's Talk About the Real Genocide of Christians in Africa
• 10/16/25: Obamacare Is a Massive Failure. The GOP Shouldn't Bail It Out
• 10/10/25: Why Aren't 'Ceasefire Now!' Activists Celebrating Trump's Gaza Peace Deal?
• 09/12/25: Israel's Strike on Qatar Should Have Happened Years Ago
• 09/05/25: An Open Letter to My Esteemed Colleagues at the International Association of Genocide Scholars
• 08/29/25: The President Doesn't Get to Dictate How We Express Ourselves
• 08/22/25: Is Socialism as Popular as the Media Think?
• 08/15/25: Save the Little Sisters of the Poor!
• 08/08/25: RFK Jr.'s War on Vaccines and Public Health Continues
• 08/01/25: Europe's Recognition of 'Palestine' Is a Cynical Joke
• 07/18/25: Legacy Media Still Covering for Biden
• 06/27/25: Trump Learned the Lessons of Iraq
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• 05/30/25: Welcome to the Intifada, America
• 05/16/25: Scapegoating Biden Isn't Going to Solve the Dems' Problems
• 05/09/25: The Pulitzer Prizes Have Become a Sad Joke
• 05/05/25: How Do You Do, Fellow White People? Tim Walz Says Hello!
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• 09/20/24: Fact checked! Harris Is the Extremist
• 07/13/24: Explain Yourself, Kamala Harris!
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• 12/24/21:AOC's Grasp on American Governance Is a 'Farce'
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• 10/15/21: The Biden White House Will Pay for Playing Inflation Games
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• 09/02/21: Why Isn't Biden to Blame for COVID-19 Deaths?
• 08/06/21: Biden's Unprecedented Attack on the Constitution
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