Graham Platner is Not a Nazi
A Crisis Dispatch
Graham Platner is not a Nazi. I have met Graham Platner. I have talked to Graham Platner. About his tattoo, in fact. And I have serious people in my life that think I am somehow brainwashed as to not see Platner as a Nazi. And I realize some of these people really believe what they’re saying, and they think I’m really deluded to not see that Platner is a Nazi and the object in my brain — this epistemic divide — is such a terrifying object, I don’t know what to do with it.
I say terrifying object because it is quite disturbing because it presents two theories of mind to be considered. One, that the people passionately posting online in replies to social media posts that Mr. Platner is a Nazi, and the hosts of The Fifth Column — which I engaged with last week — simply truly believe he’s a Nazi who is wink-wink-nudge-nudge disavowing it, in which case they’re insane. Or they’re smart, and they don’t care about the truth.
The truth is I oscillate between thinking one or the other.
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Let me tell you what I know about Graham Platner, and how I came to know it. Mr. Platner is the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Maine. He is running against Susan Collins. He is a Marine Corps veteran with three deployments. He is an oyster farmer. He is endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and now, after Janet Mills suspended her campaign last week, by Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats’ campaign apparatus. He is, by every available measure of his political commitments, a left-populist anti-fascist Democrat running on the proposition that working Mainers have been robbed by billionaires and the politicians who serve them.
He has a tattoo on his chest. He got it in 2007, in Split, Croatia, while on leave during his third Marine deployment, with a group of inebriated fellow Marines who walked into a tattoo parlor and chose a skull-and-crossbones design off the wall because skulls and crossbones are standard military iconography. The design resembles the Totenkopf — the death’s head — which has a long history in military symbolism, including Prussian hussars predating the Nazi period by more than a century, and which was also, infamously, the symbol of the SS-Totenkopfverbände that ran the concentration camps. The two histories coexist. The tattoo, depending on what you bring to looking at it, is either a soldier’s iconography or a Nazi’s. Mr. Platner’s account is that he chose it as the former and did not understand it as the latter. He has now had it covered.
I have spoken with Mr. Platner about this tattoo. I have looked him in the eye and asked him about it. I believe his telling. I believe him not because I am brainwashed and not because I am a partisan and not because I am willing to extend infinite charity to people I find politically convenient. I believe him because his entire political identity, his Reddit posting history, his explicit and repeated condemnations of Nazism and antisemitism and racism, his Jewish family members, his Passover seder, and his actual life as I have observed it are inconsistent with the proposition that he is a Nazi. The tattoo, on his chest, is a piece of evidence. The hundreds of thousands of words of his public political commitments, accumulated over years, are also evidence. Anyone who weights the tattoo more heavily than the words is doing so by choice, not by compulsion of the evidence.
I want to engage seriously with the hardest case against him, because the piece does not work if I do not. CNN’s KFile investigation produced Reddit posts from 2019 and 2020 in which Mr. Platner, using his longtime handle, defended Marine Scout Sniper culture against accusations that the SS-style lightning bolts and Totenkopf imagery used in some Sniper units were Nazi expressions. He argued the imagery was unit-cultural rather than ideological. He used the word Totenkopf knowingly in those threads. A former acquaintance told Jewish Insider that Mr. Platner had referred to his own tattoo as my Totenkopf more than a decade ago. His former campaign manager, Genevieve McDonald, said publicly that he knew the tattoo was antisemitic and should have covered it years before it became a campaign liability. He has been photographed at a Maine fair with Richard Ward, a far-right local activist who spreads neo-Nazi rhetoric, in what Mr. Platner describes as a brief encounter at a public event.
These are real pieces of evidence. I will not pretend they are not. The honest reading of them is something like this. Mr. Platner was a Marine Scout Sniper-adjacent veteran who came up inside a unit culture that included some genuinely dark insignia practices — the SS bolts, the skull imagery — that the Marines have never fully reckoned with. He knew the vocabulary. He knew what Totenkopf meant in military-historical terms. He defended his fellow Marines against accusations he thought were unfair, which is what Marines do for one another. He probably knew, by 2019, that the tattoo on his chest was specifically the SS variant of the skull-and-crossbones rather than the more general military one, and probably should have done something about it before he ran for office. The McDonald claim is the hardest piece, because it suggests he was warned and did not act on the warning. The simplest explanation that fits all the evidence is not that he is a secret Nazi. It is that he is a man who got a stupid drunk tattoo at twenty-two, came to understand later that it was more specifically loaded than he had thought, did not prioritize getting it removed because it was on his chest and not visible in daily life, and is now paying the political price for that lapse of foresight.
This is not the same thing as being a Nazi. It is not even close to the same thing. The man’s actual politics — left-populist, anti-billionaire, anti-fascist, pro-democracy, pro-labor, critical of Israeli state policy in ways that some Jewish organizations find threatening but that millions of American Jews share — are the politics of someone who is the opposite of a Nazi in every load-bearing sense the word can carry. The tattoo is a piece of personal history that has become a political weapon. The two things are not the same.
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So why is this discourse happening, and why is it happening with such force.
Look at who is funding the Platner is a Nazi discourse at scale. The Pine Tree Results PAC, a pro-Collins outfit that has launched a $2 million advertising campaign on the tattoo, is funded by Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Jim Davis of New Balance, and Paul Singer — the same Paul Singer whose hedge fund holds Suncor Energy as its second-largest position, the same Paul Singer who took Justice Alito on the undisclosed Alaska fishing trip, the same Paul Singer who is a major figure in the dark-money judicial-pipeline ecosystem I wrote about in The Industry’s Court. None of these donors live in Maine. They are not concerned about Maine. They are concerned about a left-populist Senate candidate who has explicitly named billionaires as the architects of American economic dispossession, and they are paying $2 million to make sure he is associated in voters’ minds with the worst political identity the twentieth century produced.
This is the move. The accusation of Nazism is being deployed as a factional weapon by the actual factions of capital that have the most to lose if Mr. Platner wins. The Fifth Column hosts, who I engaged with last week, are operating downstream of this. Whether they are insane or smart-and-indifferent-to-truth, they are doing the work the funded discourse needs done. They are providing the intellectual cover that makes the Schwarzman-Davis-Singer ad campaign legible as something other than billionaire panic.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying every person who has called Mr. Platner a Nazi is a paid operative or a witting tool of the funded discourse. Many of them are not. Many of them are people who saw the tattoo, recognized the SS resemblance, and reached the conclusion that anyone who would have such a tattoo on his body must be an antisemite. That is a reasonable starting inference. The problem is what happens when the additional evidence comes in — the man’s full political record, his explicit anti-fascism, his Jewish family, his repudiation of the symbol, his demonstrated willingness to engage with Jewish communities and Jewish concerns in his actual political life. At that point, sustaining the he is a Nazi conclusion requires actively discounting that evidence, and the active discounting is the move that requires explanation.
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This is where the terror comes back. Because the people I know who continue to insist he is a Nazi after the additional evidence is on the table are not, in most cases, paid operatives. They are, in many cases, people I love and respect. They are people whose moral seriousness I have observed in other contexts. They are people who would, in any other circumstance, weigh evidence carefully and update their priors. On this question, they do not. They have arrived at a conclusion and the conclusion has become resistant to evidence in a way I cannot model from inside any framework I share with them.
This is the epistemic divide. I do not know what to do with it. The two theories of mind I described at the opening — that they are insane, or that they are smart and indifferent to truth — are the two theories I can construct, and neither is satisfying. The first is unkind. The second is uncharitable. Neither captures what I think is actually happening, which is that the Platner is a Nazi conclusion is doing something for them, psychically and politically, that the available evidence cannot dislodge. The conclusion is serving a function. The function is more important than the evidence. Once a conclusion serves a function, evidence cannot reach it.
I have written across these pages, for many months, about what I take to be the central crisis of the American republic at this moment. The crisis is epistemic. The cognitive infrastructure that allows citizens to share a world, to deliberate together, to recognize one another as participants in a common project, has been corroded by industrial-scale disinformation, by the collapse of shared informational ecosystems, by the deliberate cultivation of factional reality. I have written about this at the level of the Trump movement, at the level of the captured Court, at the level of the Bitcoin-libertarian-crypto-fascist pipeline. I have written about it as a structural problem with structural causes.
What the Platner case has shown me is that the corrosion is not one-directional. It runs through circles I had thought were inoculated against it. Some of the people calling him a Nazi are people who in other contexts have been sharp and sober about exactly the kind of factional-reality manufacturing the Platner is a Nazi discourse exemplifies. They can see the move when it is being made by Trump partisans against immigrants. They cannot see the move when it is being made by their own faction against a left-populist Democrat whose politics happen to be more confrontational than the politics they are comfortable with. The blindness is real. It is not feigned. It is the blindness of a framework that cannot recognize itself as a framework.
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What is at stake in Maine is, in narrow political terms, a Senate seat. Susan Collins has held that seat for thirty years. She is the most consistently dishonest member of the Senate Republican caucus in my judgment — the senator who performs concern about Trump’s worst conduct and then votes for it, the senator who voted for Kavanaugh and then expressed surprise when Roe was overturned. Beating Collins is a load-bearing piece of any Democratic Senate majority for the rest of the decade. Mr. Platner, on the actual political question, is the candidate who has the energy and the working-class authenticity to do it. That is why Sanders endorsed him. That is why Warren endorsed him. That is why Schumer, after initially backing Mills, came around once Mills suspended her campaign. The political calculation is straightforward.
What is at stake in Maine in broader terms is whether the Democratic Party can run candidates whose biographies include lapses, and whose politics are more confrontational than the donor class would prefer, without those candidates being destroyed by the accusation of Nazism deployed as a factional weapon. If Mr. Platner is destroyed by this discourse, the lesson the Schwarzman-Davis-Singer coalition will take from the destruction is that the accusation works. They will run it again. They will run it against the next left-populist candidate, and the next, until the Democratic Party is purged of any candidate willing to name the billionaire class as the source of American economic dispossession. The accusation is not about Mr. Platner. It is about the ceiling on what kind of Democratic candidate is allowed to win.
I would urge anyone reading this who has been swept along by the Platner is a Nazi discourse to do the work of looking at the actual evidence. Read his Reddit history. Watch his interviews. Listen to the Pod Save America episode where he sat for the questions and answered them honestly, including the hard ones. Watch the Jon Stewart interview where Stewart, who is Jewish and who has spent thirty years calling out actual antisemitism in American politics, came away saying we may have buried the lead on this one. The evidence is available. The reading is not difficult. The conclusion is not the one the very obviously and very funded discourse seems to conspicuously want you to reach. The people who think I’m brainwashed by the mainstream media seem to have completely given up their basic cognitive faculties to a small group of nihilistic podcasters.
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The terror that I named at the opening of this piece — the terror at the epistemic divide — is the terror that the people I love may not be reachable by evidence on this question. That is what the divide is. It is not a disagreement about what the evidence shows. It is a disagreement about whether evidence is what matters. I cannot resolve that disagreement from inside this essay. I am not even sure it can be resolved.
What I can do is name the situation. Mr. Platner is clearly, by all accounts, not a Nazi. The evidence for this proposition is overwhelming and is available to anyone who is willing to weigh it. The discourse that has constructed the opposite conclusion is being driven by factional interests who have specific reasons to want this candidate destroyed. The people who have been swept along by that discourse are not, in most cases, acting in bad faith. They are acting from inside a framework that has become resistant to the evidence the framework would need to revise itself. The framework is the problem. The framework is what we have to find a way to talk about, because the framework is what is destroying our capacity to share a polity at all.
It does need to be said that some of these people are in the territory of being the kinds of people who think the Republican Party as currently constituted is the lesser-evil. Despite, you know, all the fascism going on there. These people are not serious people. They seem to be out to protect their money and status and they seem to be willing to say anything to protect it, while they exist in the same political coalition as Tucker Carlson.
They’ll say they hate Tucker Carlson, of course. But they also say they hate Trump, too. It always works like that with these people. Funny, that.
Mr. Platner is not a Nazi. Of that, I’m sure. I stake my name on that claim. And I am casting serious moral aspersions upon the motives of the commentariat that makes the counter to that claim. Because they must either very stupid or very evil. And that’s not very good.
Thank you SO much for doing the work and bringing this to the rest of us! Reposting NOW!!! 💕🇺🇸
I very much like where Graham Platner is politically. I hope he kicks Susan Collins ass.