Why Would You Run for Senate Before Knowing You Have a Nazi Tattoo?

Why Would You Run for Senate Before Knowing You Have a Nazi Tattoo?

There are some well-known posts that are etched into the culture because they manifest in the real-world time and time again (this whole year with a bevy of Bush-era Republicans has been one long “the worst person you know just made a great point” meme), and Milkshake Duck was ahead of its time. In our current era where being racist is synonymous with being cool for a significantly online portion of the male population, it has lost some salience as shamelessness has become en vogue, but everyone loving Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes, very commonly leads to people like me regretting to inform you that the duck is racist. Which brings us to Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who says he is not racist, but he does have a Nazi tattoo.

Platner is certainly the candidate of Splinter and Pod Save America and many other sects of the left who do not want to see 77-year-old Janet Mills carry the banner for the gerontocratic Democrats in their bid to try to take Susan Collins’ Maine Senate seat next year. This is a winnable race the Democrats must have if they want to overcome their long odds to win back the Senate, and candidate choice is paramount here. Prior to 24 hours ago, I would have written a hearty endorsement of the former Marine running an unapologetic “progressive populist” campaign. His positions are good.

But so were many of John Fetterman’s and look where that got us. He’s now the most reliable right-wing Democratic vote in the Senate. I will get to Platner’s defense of this tattoo he does have a familiar story for in the next paragraph, but before getting into anything about this relative unknown, it must be acknowledged that we lefties screwed up backing a guy who we thought was a lefty even though many in Pennsylvania warned us about things like the time he pulled a gun on a Black jogger he wrongly believed had been involved in a shooting nearby. Fetterman’s intensely pro-Israel positions beyond what most American Jews believe did not come out of nowhere either. Many of us on the left, myself included, fell in love with Fetterman’s everyman persona as our great white hope to crack the nut of how Americans tell pollsters time and time again they like our policies, but then recoil in majorities to the Cold War-era names of them (it’s almost like propaganda works or something).

The reason we know Graham Platner has a Nazi tattoo is because he leaked his own opposition file to Pod Save America, the podcast run by former Obama speechwriters and policymakers Jon Lovett, Jon Favreau (not the one you’re thinking of), Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, the latter of whom interviewed Platner. It’s worth breaking my MechaHitler ban and posting Platner’s response in full (seriously Bluesky how do you still have to travel to a different tab to watch videos?) to hear the full story of how he got a tattoo of what looks like the logo of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, an elite division of Germany’s Waffen-SS who was notorious for their brutality in WWII. This tattoo is not some small thing. Their personnel were taken from concentration camp guard units. This division was responsible for war crimes like the Le Paradis and Chasselay massacres. They are monsters of history. There’s video of his tattoo at his brother’s wedding where Platner has his shirt off while singing Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball to his sister-in-law.

You can tell by the amount of filibustering before getting to his explanation that he knows this is bad, and so does Pod Save America, who is clearly in the tank for him. I can excuse a drunken Marine getting a tattoo of something they don’t fully understand, because it’s probably happening right now as you read this. What is far more difficult to accept is having that tattoo for 19 years and not knowing about it. ‘I got drunk in Croatia and got this skull and bones tattoo I don’t know anything about and never followed up on’ is not a sentence that closes a loop. Any unknown tattoo you get in the Balkans demands a follow up as soon as you are sober! Has Platner ever opened a history book?

This should not be the end of his explanation for his Nazi tattoo, and yet it is. Pod Save America ensured that no one would ever mistake them for journalists as Vietor ended this section of the interview that amounted to a quick aside by saying “like Miley, you’ve got range,” and then said, “you’re a normal guy, you want to make the country a better place,” before moving on to asking Platner if he knew his epic Reddit posts would surface.

Based on what little I know about him right now, I don’t think Graham Platner is a secret Nazi, but I do wonder if he’s just kind of an idiot. “I didn’t know what I was talking about” said Platner in response to his Reddit posts that downplayed and trivialized sexual assault in the military. Those posts are surfacing in opposition research circles too because of him asking why Black people supposedly don’t tip, and calling himself a communist and saying other incendiary internet poster stuff (he said the one about Black people supposedly not tipping was an earnest question in earnest Reddit debate when he was a brand-new bartender–this is why internet literacy is paramount to any kind of coherent political coverage these days, as the Charlie Kirk murder and the shooting at an ICE facility are proving). The number of Reddit posts in the opposition file correspond to an average of about one every other day, so Platner does not come off as some horribly internet poisoned doofus who can discern every single online Nazi wink in every DHS post, just a guy who likes to poke around and troll online from time to time.

The problem is that Platner says it’s just “trying to get a rise out of people” when he calls himself a “communist” or when he called cops “bastards,” but he was a self-described genuine know-nothing when he was saying the best way to not get sexually assaulted was to not get black out drunk. To his credit, he says that this file of his Reddit posts does demonstrate growth on that front after talking to many women in the military “who all had a story,” and he disavows those previous actions of his too. There’s a lot of having to take Platner’s word for it in these explanations outside his Reddit posts evolving on sexual assault in the military, and ‘I am only now learning nearly one adult life later what my fist-sized Nazi tattoo means’ is frankly, not a good explanation. Janet Mills is not the kind of candidate the Democratic Party needs, and 24 hours ago, I would have said Platner clearly is–but this half-assed explanation actually tells a pretty convincing story on its own that Platner is not the candidate the party needs either.

He doesn’t have a good reason for why he still has the tattoo despite having plenty of time to investigate it ahead of a run for United States Senate, and he would very much like to dismiss this in a similar manner to J.D. Vance saying boys will be boys about the 40 year old men in leaked Republican Nazi chats proudly proclaiming themselves to be Nazis. Platner disavows Nazis and I don’t see any reason to disbelieve him now, but I have many more questions about him than I did before, all centered around his core competence and whether a guy who has called himself a communist and is disinterested in knowing where his Nazi tattoo came from has any genuinely held beliefs. It’s on Platner now to explain to the rest of us why we shouldn’t see the ghost of John Fetterman every time we look at him.

 
Join the discussion...