Revisiting this article from Oct 2025 - You're Being Lied to About Graham Platner - a deep dive into his Reddit posts

[Nanjeanne]

So many times the Reddit comments that are shameful and which Platner has apologized for and discussed come up. And some people also have spent time saying that those comments are indicative of his total mindset and though they may have been from years past, the trajectory to where he is now is difficult to grasp. But Jacobin back in October did a thorough read and came up with a very different conclusion. It’s a long article but I hope it will be read. I am sure many won’t but for anyone that is interested in a fuller understanding, it’s a complex and fascinating read. 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

Reading through Platner’s many hundreds of anonymous comments, it’s hard to paint him as a secret white supremacist or far-right extremist of any kind. In fact, his posts more or less align with the persona he has presented to voters in the two months since he launched his campaign: a rough-around-the-edges military veteran and oyster farmer with a penchant for crude language and a passion for firearms and sustainable living who holds a variety of standard progressive views alongside some heterodox ones.

In post after post, Platner expressed disgust at both US troops’ mistreatment of Afghan civilians and Washington’s betrayal of their Afghan allies, whose resettlement in the United States he celebrated and felt should have been granted months earlier, with the security and immigration hurdles cleared once they were safely in the country. He bitterly criticized US atrocities during the war there and verbally smacked down users who apologized for soldiers accused of war crimes.

“Shooting innocent civilians for fun and stabbing wounded prisoners is simply disgusting and illegal activity that wouldn’t be condoned within a professional fighting unit,” he told one Donald Trump supporter seeming to excuse the actions of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy Seal accused of a litany of abuses in Afghanistan whom Trump pardoned in 2019. “So you can f*ck right off back to whatever disgusting little hole of cowardice and immaturity you crawled out of.”

When a Trump-loving GOP candidate said that African Americans commit more crime because they were raised in fatherless homes and that police only shoot a black person who “needs to be shot,” Platner called him a “racist motherf*cker.” When a fellow Hancock County resident defended the local sheriff for blocking an addiction recovery nonprofit from working with inmates because of its support for BLM, Platner told him, “F*ck off, racist.”

Needless to say, these are all deeply strange views for a white supremacist or fascist to express.

That’s because, as Platner made clear in dozens of comments over the span of years, he was not a right-winger. He was, rather, “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist,” as he explained in one 2020 thread, a two-time Bernie Sanders voter who had been “radicalized” by his years fighting foreign US wars, who liked folk singer Phil Ochs and left-wing media like the Michael Brooks Show, the Majority Report, and the Intercept, and who was both contemptuous of Trump and the threat he posed to American democracy, and alarmed at what he saw was an increasingly violent, armed far right that was emboldened by the president.

Lots more in the article that ends with this

But read in their totality, Platner’s posts paint a different picture of the candidate: someone who, far from a secret fascist, was openly and passionately opposed to fascism; who held a variety of typical progressive views even as he expressed himself in ways many liberals would regard as crass and offensive; who sympathizes with rural Americans despite being vehemently opposed to many of the candidates they vote for; and who was disillusioned with and radicalized against the system by US wars.

Platner, in other words, comes off as a flawed, complicated, and sometimes contradictory human being whose political views don’t always fit neatly into a box. In that, he resembles millions of Americans — including some of the exact voter demographics that American liberals say they want to win back, yet seemingly can’t help but vilify.

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/platner-maine-senate-reddit-media]