Graham Platner was, before this week, somewhere between the Democrats’ dream candidate and worst nightmare.
Platner, a millennial oyster farmer with far-left views, has become the prohibitive favorite in the one seat that the Democrats definitely feel they can pick up in the 2026 senatorial elections: Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins, RINO extraordinaire and perpetual target of a Democratic Party that always misses unseating her by that much, is the only truly vulnerable GOP incumbent if things go according to plan.
And that plan was to allow popular Democratic Gov. Janet Mills to unseat her. But questions about Mills’ age (78 when voters go to the ballot box next November) along with Platner’s popularity among the liberal donor set who believes the future of the party looks like Zohran Mamdani — someone progressive “who’ll fight,” which can safely be translated into non-politico speak as “a truculent radical with no sense of reality” — has disrupted that plan significantly.
The past week hasn’t been kind to Platner, however. Last Thursday, CNN decided to actually function as a journalistic institution for a change and went through Platner’s online past, which included Reddit posts in which he described himself as a “communist” who endorsed violence against what he described as “fascism.” We can determine who he thought were fascists by his opinions regarding police officers in those posts, in which he called them, “Bastards. Cops are bastards. All of them, in fact.”
🚨 WOW. It’s now been revealed that Democrat Maine Senate Candidate Graham Platner talked about having an “Antifa supersoldier” label on his armor in a deleted Reddit post.
Platner’s campaign didn’t answer whether he’d attended any events of Antifa—the now domestic terror group. pic.twitter.com/OUCaQjJBHP
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) October 21, 2025
His response to someone who said: “White people aren’t as racist or stupid as Trump thinks”? Platner: “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you they actually are.”
But he wants them to vote for him. Lovely. Furthermore, while a Marine vet, his Reddit remarks make John Kerry throwing his medals at the Capitol steps look practically like George Patton.
“My time in America’s imperial wars definitely radicalized me further, and I’m significantly more left today than I was back then. It is difficult to see all that horror, as well as all the grift and corruption, and not find the entire thing utterly bankrupt,” he wrote. “I did used to love America, or at least the idea of it. These days I’m pretty disgusted by it all.”
After what Democrats did to Hegseth, should Platner have to prove that his tattoo isn’t meant as a Nazi image?
And now, as Jewish Insider reported on Tuesday, he’s seeking “to preempt rumors circulating in recent weeks that a black skull-and-cross bones tattoo on his chest is a Nazi symbol.”
In a Monday appearance on the “Pod Save America” liberal podcast, Jewish Insider reported, “Platner, 41, confirmed the existence of the tattoo, seen in video he shared displaying his bare chest, but suggested that his opponents in the race have been spreading claims that the symbol is affiliated with Nazism, which he forcefully denied.”
Well, there are two problems here. The first is that this is being brushed off by the same media that insinuated that the Jerusalem cross tattoo Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has was a sign of right-wing Christian extremism. NBC News noted during his confirmation hearing that “the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups,” said the symbol was associated with the Christian Identity movement, which it defined “as an anti-Semitic, racist theology that asserts white people are favored by God.”
Now, as it was noted, this was embarrassingly wrong; one social media user noted that the same cross was so common you could view it on the floor of the National Cathedral during former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, which was happening concurrently with the controversy:
Elizabeth Warren will be furious when she finds out they put Jimmy Carter on Pete Hegseth’s tattoo. pic.twitter.com/qbtTGZR1ei
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) January 9, 2025
And, as it turns out, there’s a bit more of a problem with Platner’s body art:
🚨 Graham Platner, a far-left Democrat candidate running for U.S. Senate in Maine, has a NAZI tattoo on his chest
The skull and bones on his chest is called “Totenkopf” and it was used by Hitler’s SS pic.twitter.com/IpZaO0Fdi4
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 21, 2025
A recently surfaced video shows Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner with a chest tattoo of the SS Totenkopf, the skull-and-crossbones emblem used by Nazi “Death’s Head” units.
Platner has stated he got the tattoo while drunk as a young Marine on shore leave in… pic.twitter.com/euH926eTgA
— Maine State Press (@MaineStatePress) October 21, 2025
Especially when you consider Platner’s vehemently anti-Israel views, this becomes a problem. But, he told “Pod Save America” host Tommy Vietor, it wasn’t Nazi-inspired. Honest!
“I am not a secret Nazi. Actually, if you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and anti-Semitism and racism in general,” he said. “I would say a lifelong opponent.”
He added that he got the tattoo in 2007 while on time off with fellow Marines in Croatia, when he and other fellow “very inebriated” jarheads decided to get some ink.
“We chose a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall, because we were Marines, and skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing,” he explained.
“We got those tattoos, and then we all moved on with our lives.”
Jewish Insider said there was a bit more to the story, however:
But according to a person who socialized with Platner when he was living in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, Platner had specifically acknowledged that the tattoo was a Totenkopf, the “death’s head” symbol adopted by an infamous Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps in World War II.
“He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” the former acquaintance told Jewish Insider recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue. “He said it in a cutesy little way.”
The exchange occurred in 2012 at Tune Inn, a popular dive on Capitol Hill where Platner later worked as a bartender and was a frequent patron while he attended The George Washington University on the G.I. bill, according to the former acquaintance. He would often take his shirt off drinking with friends late at night at the bar, and on at least one occasion had stated he knew what the tattoo represented, the former acquaintance recalled.
Wow. An inebriate and an extremist. Just what they called Pete Hegseth! And yet, the progressives don’t seem to mind it too much.
The most popular comment on the “Pod Save America” clip, as of Wednesday morning: “If you are not accepting of imperfect allies, you’ll get perfect enemies. Let people learn from their mistakes.” Oh, now they’re okay with that kind of moral calculus.
So, did Graham Platner know he was getting a tattoo of a Nazi symbol? Actually, I’m theoretically inclined to believe his explanation: Probably not. My best guess is that — like the moron who gets a tattoo of Chinese characters that he believes spell out “great strength” but actually say “a fool and his money are soon parted” — an admittedly plastered man got a tattoo he thought looked cool and found out later that it had potential Nazi connotations.
But then again, my best guess — in fact, more than just a guess — is that the Democrats who smeared Hegseth knew full well that he didn’t get a “Christian Identity” tattoo, but a simple Christian symbol. They wanted to smear him, however, and they laundered it through a layer of SPLC nonsense.
So, fine: Given that Graham Platner is a far-left candidate associated with anti-Semitic causes who calls Israel “genocidal,” it’s high time that he prove, over and over again, that he didn’t knowingly get a Nazi tattoo. His dumb Reddit ramblings, now deleted, are hardly enough. We need for him to repeat it, over and over again, on the campaign trail, especially given that he’s the left’s darling. This is their playbook — and conservatives are going to use it to make every effort to take this man from the dream candidate column and place him firmly in the worst nightmare one. Live by the Nazi sword, die by the Nazi sword.
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