Graham Platner has traversed a long and unlikely road to become the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Maine. Can he beat longtime GOP incumbent Susan Collins and live up to the promise of his firebrand populist campaign?
I’m sorry. But a liberal candidate that can appeal to white working class males is not going to have the social affectations of a gender studies major.
So what you’re saying is that American voters are actually much more interested in electing a toxic male with a Nazi tattoo who saw the horrors of war and then elected to go work as a mercenary for Blackwater than they are in voting for actual liberatory politics. And I agree with you. That’s why we have Donald Trump in office, and that’s why voting Blue No Matter Who won’t actually fix anything.
You’re just more concerned with style than substance. You care more about whether a candidate wears the right leftist tokens than actually advancing progressive policies. This person is running on a genuinely progressive platform, and you’re letting yourself get distracted with performative symbolism and irrelevant bullshit.
Not for nothing, but the Nazi Party adopted a progressive, worker-first, anti-capitalist, populist aesthetic to rise to power. It’s not enough to put up a web page that says “this is my platform, isn’t it great”. That’s aesthetics. He actually needs to DO something. And what he’s done is self-isolate as an oyster farmer and get involved in local politics around the economics of oyster farming. That’s it. He hasn’t done anything progressive. He just says progressive things. We’ve seen that before.
Do you know what sheepdogging is? It’s the use of an aesthetically anti-establishment candidate to attract the attention and energy of the disaffected, the alienated, and the oppositional for the explicit purpose of bringing that energy back into the fold of the mainstream power structure. That’s exactly what’s happening here. The Democrats don’t care if Collins or Platner win. They are super happy with the controversy because it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing - getting Democrats fighting about which Democrat to vote for instead of letting them become disaffected with the party and seek to actually challenge its power.
Platner’s a sheepdog. He may not know it himself, but that’s his role. It’s obvious he has no interest in class analysis. He’s a petite bourgeois liberal who wants to maintain the status quo that allows him to own and run a small luxury food farm. He’s basically Biden 50 years ago, or maybe Fetterman or Sinema. He’s never going to turn against the military. AOC campaigned on the same positions of not expanding the military and getting out of forever wars, and yet, she has voted to expand military spending at least twice. Not because she’s evil or because she was fooling us this whole time, but because that’s the reality of the US government and the Democrat party isn’t interested, as a party, in changing it. And the evidence is right there. Not only do your favored candidates constantly have to compromise with the actual power structure, the history of progressive politicians shows that they slide right every term. There’s no way to build a progressive bulwark voting in people one at a time over decades when you have things like Biden getting elected on his opposition to the Vietnam war only to then to architect the Crime Bill and unrelentingly support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Platner MIGHT actually have a spine for a couple terms and vote the way he said he would - most of the time, anyway. But even if he does it won’t matter in the short term because of the power structure of the US. But once he’s in, all the evidence says he’s just gonna keep sliding right, and voting in someone so obviously tainted by incredibly bad decision making is just a signal to EVERYONE in the Democrat party that we’ll eat shit as long they tell us it’s chocolate.
So anyone that isn’t performatively woke is a sheepdog. He’s been involved in activism and community organizing for years, but because of his race and economic background, you’re stereotyping him. Any white male that isn’t flamboyantly gay or metrosexual is a conservative. You’re just going off vibes, stereotyping people because of their race, economic origins, and military service. There’s absolutely zero evidence that he’s going to take the path of Fetterman, but you’re making racist and sexist stereotypes about him. Any white working class male is “toxic.”
You’re just a bigot. I never thought I would actually meet the hypothetical anti-white or anti-male bigot conservatives like to crow about, but I suppose like anything, search hard enough and you can find any kind of person.
And I’m not throwing around words like bigotry and stereotyping lightly. That is literally what you’re doing. You’re judging this man a traitor simply because the color of his skin, his sex, and because of the culture he was raised in. He talks like a white working class people, and you stereotype all white working class people as MAGA.
How about you cite some of his actual policy positions, instead of just engaging in hateful stereotyping?
I love how you literally cannot fathom the idea that it is a SUBSTANTIVE critique that the man joined the military, went out to kill brown people, re-enlisted, then joined a mercenary group to provide security details in that same theater, then came home and became a luxury food farmer and then while married sexted with a bunch of thirst trap TikTokers all while spending 20 years with a literal Tottenkopf tattooed on his chest that he proudly displayed for years.
As though what I am actually saying is “you can’t trust him. He’s white.” It would be comical if it wasn’t so sad that I share a country with you. Get it through your fake victim complex. This has nothing to do with him being white and everything to do with the fact that he has not done anything that would indicate he’s not a fucking jarhead who’s only concern about military adventurism is America First politics, where his anti-war stance is primarily economic (though he has specific ethical problems with specific wars).
Try not to make everything about your own insecurities.
I’m sorry. But a liberal candidate that can appeal to white working class males is not going to have the social affectations of a gender studies major.
So what you’re saying is that American voters are actually much more interested in electing a toxic male with a Nazi tattoo who saw the horrors of war and then elected to go work as a mercenary for Blackwater than they are in voting for actual liberatory politics. And I agree with you. That’s why we have Donald Trump in office, and that’s why voting Blue No Matter Who won’t actually fix anything.
You’re just more concerned with style than substance. You care more about whether a candidate wears the right leftist tokens than actually advancing progressive policies. This person is running on a genuinely progressive platform, and you’re letting yourself get distracted with performative symbolism and irrelevant bullshit.
Not for nothing, but the Nazi Party adopted a progressive, worker-first, anti-capitalist, populist aesthetic to rise to power. It’s not enough to put up a web page that says “this is my platform, isn’t it great”. That’s aesthetics. He actually needs to DO something. And what he’s done is self-isolate as an oyster farmer and get involved in local politics around the economics of oyster farming. That’s it. He hasn’t done anything progressive. He just says progressive things. We’ve seen that before.
Do you know what sheepdogging is? It’s the use of an aesthetically anti-establishment candidate to attract the attention and energy of the disaffected, the alienated, and the oppositional for the explicit purpose of bringing that energy back into the fold of the mainstream power structure. That’s exactly what’s happening here. The Democrats don’t care if Collins or Platner win. They are super happy with the controversy because it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing - getting Democrats fighting about which Democrat to vote for instead of letting them become disaffected with the party and seek to actually challenge its power.
Platner’s a sheepdog. He may not know it himself, but that’s his role. It’s obvious he has no interest in class analysis. He’s a petite bourgeois liberal who wants to maintain the status quo that allows him to own and run a small luxury food farm. He’s basically Biden 50 years ago, or maybe Fetterman or Sinema. He’s never going to turn against the military. AOC campaigned on the same positions of not expanding the military and getting out of forever wars, and yet, she has voted to expand military spending at least twice. Not because she’s evil or because she was fooling us this whole time, but because that’s the reality of the US government and the Democrat party isn’t interested, as a party, in changing it. And the evidence is right there. Not only do your favored candidates constantly have to compromise with the actual power structure, the history of progressive politicians shows that they slide right every term. There’s no way to build a progressive bulwark voting in people one at a time over decades when you have things like Biden getting elected on his opposition to the Vietnam war only to then to architect the Crime Bill and unrelentingly support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Platner MIGHT actually have a spine for a couple terms and vote the way he said he would - most of the time, anyway. But even if he does it won’t matter in the short term because of the power structure of the US. But once he’s in, all the evidence says he’s just gonna keep sliding right, and voting in someone so obviously tainted by incredibly bad decision making is just a signal to EVERYONE in the Democrat party that we’ll eat shit as long they tell us it’s chocolate.
So anyone that isn’t performatively woke is a sheepdog. He’s been involved in activism and community organizing for years, but because of his race and economic background, you’re stereotyping him. Any white male that isn’t flamboyantly gay or metrosexual is a conservative. You’re just going off vibes, stereotyping people because of their race, economic origins, and military service. There’s absolutely zero evidence that he’s going to take the path of Fetterman, but you’re making racist and sexist stereotypes about him. Any white working class male is “toxic.”
You’re just a bigot. I never thought I would actually meet the hypothetical anti-white or anti-male bigot conservatives like to crow about, but I suppose like anything, search hard enough and you can find any kind of person.
And I’m not throwing around words like bigotry and stereotyping lightly. That is literally what you’re doing. You’re judging this man a traitor simply because the color of his skin, his sex, and because of the culture he was raised in. He talks like a white working class people, and you stereotype all white working class people as MAGA.
How about you cite some of his actual policy positions, instead of just engaging in hateful stereotyping?
I love how you literally cannot fathom the idea that it is a SUBSTANTIVE critique that the man joined the military, went out to kill brown people, re-enlisted, then joined a mercenary group to provide security details in that same theater, then came home and became a luxury food farmer and then while married sexted with a bunch of thirst trap TikTokers all while spending 20 years with a literal Tottenkopf tattooed on his chest that he proudly displayed for years.
As though what I am actually saying is “you can’t trust him. He’s white.” It would be comical if it wasn’t so sad that I share a country with you. Get it through your fake victim complex. This has nothing to do with him being white and everything to do with the fact that he has not done anything that would indicate he’s not a fucking jarhead who’s only concern about military adventurism is America First politics, where his anti-war stance is primarily economic (though he has specific ethical problems with specific wars).
Try not to make everything about your own insecurities.