Why Would You Run for Senate Before Knowing You Have a Nazi Tattoo?
Screenshot via Pod Save America
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.