am*rican supremacists always focusing on his social media posts or the tattoo instead of the fact that he was an enthusiastic imperial jackboot, so enthusiastic that he not only joined the army for a tour in Afghanistan after three tours as a marine in Iraq, but then spent an additional tour as a mercenary
and it's for the same reason that it always is: am*ricans fundamentally do not see non-am*ricans as fully human
a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot's conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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El Chisme
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a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot's conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people
The funny thing is Graham Platner isn’t even from a poor or abusive background, he comes from a multi-millionaire petite bourgeois family and went to private schools.
I know that even if he was poor, doing what he did in the US military is still wrong, but it’s just funny seeing American “leftists” trying to use this argument of “if you’re poor, being a jackboot soldier of the American Reich is fine!” for someone as privileged as Platner.
I'll forgive someone who entered at 18 and then left as soon as they possibly could after seeing what is was like and have consistently avowed the military since. I've known a couple people like that. I'll not forgive people who in any way make that service a part of their identity, or who try and bring nuance to the situation. I've known many more people like this. This guy seems to be in the second camp.
The fact is 18 year-olds are dumb, fresh from a propaganda mill, and poor. The military preys on this, and I don't believe anyone is immune to manipulation.
America delenda est.
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I also live in Maine. Platner is an ideological violent person. I think what people miss with his SS tattoo is no, he’s not a Nazi. He’s the communist revolutionary type. The tattoo specifically pertains to Jewish extermination camps in WWII.
I want to die
Jesus Christ, what the FUCK does that even mean lol. The tattoo pertains to extermination camps because it's the SYMBOL OF THE SS GROUPS THAT GUARDED THEM what does this have to do with communism? The Amerikkkan mind truly is cooked.
That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t give a fuck about the mass murder of nonwhites”
when I read this while going through the thread it made me visibly cringe for a second.
Communist revolutionary == jewish extermination camps enjoyer????
what the truck does that mean? He's apparently 'a violent ideological communist' but has a tattoo about nazi things?? Is this horseshoe theory again..???
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When someone [the locals] is trying to kill you, you [the invader] get every opportunity to kill them right back.
How do you even begin to re-educate a person like this, is there even a point?
The people you are trying to kill for no reason are fighting back so you get to do whatever you want. Fucking disgusting, America should be glassed.
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This. I'll be honest, I kinda agree with their point about cherry-picking, the "Hasan shocks his dog" saga has shown us you can construe anything by cherry-picking from the massive fingerprints people leave online to build the narrative you want, and that the full picture is often gonna end up messy, because people are messy. Their picture of Platner as a contradictory, "politically incorrect", gun-loving "antifa soldier" isn't far from my perception of him, it explains how people can hold such wildly disparate views of him.
The article's biggest sin isn't that, it's that it doesn't interrogate his military service AT ALL and why it took Platner almost 20 years since his first deployment to realise that "Imperialist adventures" are bad and to stop "believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got [him] there in the first place". Hard to take any condemnations of war crimes on Reddit seriously when he kept going back to the war crimes machine or was actively in it.
Branko Marcetic basically handwaves it away, saying: see, he's changed his mind now, when his poor judgement will just make him "oppose all wars except the current one". Plus, his promise to not vote for "pointless wars" is meaningless anyway when the president can do whatever the fuck he wants.
I also don't get why Jacobin's addressing this to liberals. Do radlibs even read Jacobin, let alone regular libs?
You're right on the money. His service in Americas war machine and as a Merc, and his iffy (at best) stance on that which seems to mostly basically just be 'we shouldn't do Iraq again' is the biggest issue and never gets addressed.
But even if you want to focus on the tattoo, even ignoring his lie about not knowing what it meant (he posted about knowing what it meant on Reddit before running), it shows that A) he's a dipshit who thought it wouldn't come up or be used against him and B) despite talking about socialism he doesn't give a shit about solidarity or public service because keeping his edgy souvenir from his killing tours was more important than the fact that very obviously the people he claims to represent would be (rightly) concerned, offended, or threatened by the fact this guy sports Nazi ink.
As for Jacobin...
Basically all these radlib rags or news orgs go that way. I've even contributed to one or two in the past. There's a fundamental tension between trying to build a business - call it profit or call it circulation / market share / visibility - if you want to work in the same media circles and ecosystem as mainstream media. There are too many stances and arguments and uncomfortable facts that are just verboten. So if you want grow a subscriber base with libs or get your contributers on television news shows you have to moderate your content.
Even if you don't sell out your ideals completely, you're now in a situation where readers/viewers who you may have even helped radicalise move past you quickly and they don't need to moderate their views to get on television or whatever because they're just ordinary people. So the readers/viewers that are arguably your own success story are quickly to the left of you or at least more ideologically commited than you appear to be. And so they leave and you push harder for that liberal exposure and the process repeats and intensifies.
And that's even assuming you're actually moving people left successfully in the first place, rather than just failing and running towards the money.
This reminds me of several professors I had in college, one in particular. As a USAian from red country, they were the farthest left people I ever met, and I enjoyed having my beliefs challenged by them, but as quickly as I was helped past some ideological blinders by them, I came to see that they weren't interested in actual leftism in any way. I'm still not sure if it was because the topics were verboten, or if their actual opinions are just locked to the leftmost edge of the Overton window.
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A backpacker is traveling through Ireland when it starts to rain. He decides to wait out the storm in a nearby pub. The only other person at the bar is an older man staring at his drink. After a few moments of silence the man turns to the backpacker and says in a thick Irish accent:
"You see this bar? I built this bar with my own bare hands. I cut down every tree and made the lumber myself. I toiled away through the wind and cold, but do they call me McGreggor the bar builder? No."
He continued "Do you see that stone wall out there? I built that wall with my own bare hands. I found every stone and placed them just right through the rain and the mud, but do they call me McGreggor the wall builder? No."
"Do ya see that pier out there on the lake? I built that pier with my own bare hands, driving each piling deep into ground so that it would last a lifetime. Do they call me McGreggor the pier builder? No."
"But ya fuck one goat..."
This whole Graham Platner saga has been such a good litmus test for the western left. The Russia/ Ukraine war was already a good one for 3 years, but that one was harder to use for westerners. This one though? Clear cut war criminal with blatant Nazi symbolism tattooed on his chest running on a social fascist platform, and the best defence these radlibs have is “but he said he was a communist on Le Wholesome Reddit!!!”.
Even if you take them at their word (I don't and people shouldn't) then it's a spectacular failure that the supposed great white hope of the American left is a guy (and electoral team, and media boosters, and surrounding organisers) who are such dipshits / so totally out of touch that they though having an explicitly Nazi tattoo wouldn't be an issue with anyone on the left, never mind wouldn't provide an amazing attack line for everyone else.
Just pathetic even by their own reasoning.
He claimed himself to be a dedicated anti-fascist and did not „know“ that his tattoo is the second/third most widespread fascist tattoo there is.
Like come on, even if that was true, he shouldn’t be anywhere near an iota of authority.
Exactly. And neither should anybody daft enough to have not thought it would be an issue or to try this 'well actually' change the subject nonsense that the mainstream Dems do but better and with more clout and (lack of) conviction.
Exact opposite you say?
Graham Platner, my favorite far left revolutionary who joined 2 distinct terrorist organizations, did 5 terror tours of mass murder and valiantly defended torture camps while getting Nazi tattoos representing his actions!
All real leftists need to understand people like him as our allies and vote fascism to death!!
except it's 
in the outfit
nah dude, i think it's the massive fucking totenkopf on his chest and his history of being a mercenary war criminal that made me think that
Reddit should never be talked about in real life, nor should it be the source for any other document
It was an ironic tattoo and Blackwater tour...
He's been doing an incredible bit for the last 20 years.
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/platner-maine-senate-reddit-media
Jacobin harshly condemns cherry-picked comments.
---
CW: offensive language
They’ve seen a rolling series of bad headlines bedevil the populist candidate over unearthed years-old Reddit posts, which show him making offensive comments about women and African Americans, using “gay” and “removed” in derogatory ways, disparaging rural voters, and seemingly advocating political violence. And that was before the revelation of a SS Totenkopf tattoo forced him to publicly deny he was a “secret Nazi.”
---
I think one tenet of leftism is you should be as transparent as possible. It's kind of hilarious that Jacobin didn't make the comments public.
Jacobin obtained the full archive of posts under Platner’s Reddit username, P-Hustle, which numbers more than 1,800 comments from July 2009 to November 2021. The story is a lot more complicated than the public is being told.
I soon stopped reading. Jacobin shares their cherry-picked comments with gusto!
The story is a lot more complicated than the public is being told.
"We're waiting on orders from the DNC on how to spin this."
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Is this a deliberate deflection from the tattoo? Because we're definitely being lied to about Platner, and it's being done by his campaign when they pretend his tattoo looked "similar to" a Nazi symbol, a Nazi symbol which he had also supposedly never seen over the course of his whole time in the military or for a decade thereafter, just in that one parlor in Cambodia or whatever the story was, where naturally he didn't inquire about the provenance of the design and also none of the -- I assume -- dozens of people who had a chance to see it knew what it was either.
Not to mention that Platner is familiar with the history of US warfare to being able to name provincial ones he'd like to have fought in. Nobody that knows about Manifest Destiny wars to that extent is ignorant on WW2, and you can't learn about WW2 for more than a few minutes before seeing a Totenkopf because the nazis put it on everything
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R*ddit posts? This keeps getting worse.
I was mostly looking at recent interviews and military career.
I do think that what's being spread around is a right wing propaganda op. As always it doesn't make a left-wing critique invalidated by the fact that it is being projected and amplified by right-wing sources. At the same time, it should prompt one to pause and check their work to make sure the wires aren't too crossed. The left wing critique should not be driven by, and usually should be distinct from whatever is being pushed by a right wing op. In the case of the Platner situation, I think a rousing thumbs down for his unrepentant military background and imperialism is plenty fine and checks out just fine.
The right wing propaganda op from before the tattoo interview is more about how he isn't a real member of the working-class because his parents are architects and restaurateurs or something.
This is just true though, he was bourgeois long before he became a 20 year murderer
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Do left wingers ever do ops accusing right wingers of not being right wing enough?
Edit: left wingers meaning either libs or leftists in this context
No because the left wing doesn't exist and isn't capable of doing an op. The right (including the far-right) has billions in private resources as well as state institutions to do all kinds of ops, many are surely very advanced. Media itself is a right-wing op under capitalism.
Do left wingers ever do ops accusing right wingers of not being right wing enough?
I've occasionally done this as a comedy bit when I want to mess with right-wingers on places like reddit. I'll pretend to be "an American Patriot" (I'm neither) and declare that professional standing militaries are "inherently communist" because "they suckle at the teat of government using stolen tax dollars" and "hierarchical obedience is communism, real men say sir to no man, salutes are for sheep". I've started more than a few vicious infighting discussions among chuds, it's great fun.
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The last big left/lib electoral op I can think of was to help Trump win the primary in 2016 so Hillary can win the election.
(Edit: completely forgot about Russiagate)
Otherwise the plan is to continue to move rightwards to win over moderate fascists.
I guess outing Republicans as gay or otherwise nontrad happens quite regularly. Or that both Trump and Vance are married to migrants.
I guess the nontrad, not white nationalist enough angle is actually really common.
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This rag is not worthy of the name Jacobin
How about Yakub?
Yakubin 
lmao this one fits better
jackoff bin
He's not a right wing class collaborationist, he's a left wing one?
Edit: Yeah, basically
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/platner-maine-senate-reddit-media
As soon as I saw this I knew that hexbear is already dunking on it
Do not believe your lying eyes
https://lemmy.world/post/37958106
look see stop complaining about the tattoo and Blackwater history and desire to keep the bloated military budget and all these unrelated reddit comments
what do you mean it's the specific skull not the word people have issues with
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