‘I Am Not a Secret Nazi’ Is the New ‘I Am Not a Witch’

In a sense I am late to the game on Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner. But in my defense, for once this was by design. Unlike too many of my media peers (I am thinking in particular of my excitable progressive friends), I was never persuaded to take the bait on Platner, currently challenging Republican Senator Susan Collins for her seat in Maine. Collins has a heck of a race on her hands for her final electoral campaign, but the threat to her always came from Governor Janet Mills, not from a papier-mâché progressive candidate.

I needed only to watch Platner’s launch video (which went viral among the liberal chatterati several months ago, like the clap passing through a San Jose polycule) to suspect there was something fugazi about him. A former Marine, a current oysterman, bearded, booted, and tatted, spouting progressive pieties but phrased in authentic “working class” branding? Be still my bleeding heart!

A star is born -- or was he? Call it “spidey-sense” or credit it to decades of experience in watching Young Unknowns flame out the moment they become Young Knowns, but something about the way Platner seemed lab-created to directly respond to the progressive left’s post-2024 anxieties about losing male and working-class voters suggested to me that he was the product of savvy marketing by disaffected media professionals. A Potemkin candidate, in other words, selected to play a role only because he mouthed the right phrases while conveniently looking the part of a Manly Man in an age of effeminized progressive politics.

An interview in late August with the New York Times, where Platner botched the most basic facts of the legislative process, only solidified my sense that he was both unready and unvetted. By the time of his inevitable late September New Yorker profile, I had already tuned out: More than a few little birdies had begun cheeping into my ear that Mills would be getting into the race, and I knew that would be the real game.

The moment she did last week, the oppo research file on Platner began to drop -- and oh how many shoes are now dropping. Why, it’s practically raining Timberlands at this point! First, Platner’s history as a Redditor emerged, in which our plainspoken working-class hero spoke a little too plainly about his true politics:

Graham Platner, a Marine veteran turned oyster farmer who is now a rising Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, once called himself a “communist,” dismissed “all” police as bastards, and said rural White Americans “actually are” racist and stupid, according to deleted social media posts reviewed by CNN’s KFile.

“I got older and became a Communist” said Platner, as part of a poasting history he deleted in August of this year, right before his campaign announcement. Believe it or not, I dismissed this story as well. “It will be a good day for his fundraising,” I figured, given that the sorts of people boosting Platner’s populist bid were already opposed to establishmentarian Democrats like Janet Mills. The revelation that Platner is every bit as splenetically progressive as his backers Bernie Sanders and David Hogg might hamper him in a general election, but the first task is to win an ideologically charged primary.

But you know what doesn’t typically play to an audience of committed progressives? Nazi chest tattoos, that’s what. Yes, it seems that progressive Maine’s great white hope has a few secrets hiding in his closet -- or more accurately, on his flesh.

The tattoo in question resembles the Totenkopf, or “death’s head” symbol, which was adopted by Hitler’s SS during the Nazi era and became particularly associated with the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the branch responsible for guarding concentration camps, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

When reached for comment, Platner said: “I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that” the tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol. He said he was “already planning to get this removed”.

The skull is in full view in video footage he shared with the media company, which shows him dancing in his underwear at his brother’s wedding, lip-syncing Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball in a performance for his sister-in-law.

We may be wired differently, but I laughed out loud at that last paragraph, and I hope you did as well. I now regret my earlier refusal to discuss Graham Platner: Mere rookie or not, this guy is genuine Carnival of Fools material. Who among us can honestly claim not to have gotten rip-ass drunk while abroad and then headed to a local tattoo parlor to sample their tourist country’s cultural peculiarities? (“I’m feeling tough tonight -- gimme a skull & crossbones, Croatian-style, right across my chest. NO RAGRETS!”)

My colleagues may disagree, but I’ve known a number of truly stupid people in my life, and I honestly find this semi-plausible as an excuse: I am not kidding when I say that the closest I ever came to getting inked was while out carousing with a gang of Serbs. (Advice for Americans: Never Slivovitz, not once.) Now maybe it wouldn’t have been a totenkopf -- I find it hard to believe a serviceman in Croatia wouldn’t have seen and understood that symbology everywhere -- but then again that’s why he’s a new inductee into the Carnival, and I just write about it.

So upon further reflection, I welcome Graham Platner to politics, and I now have half a mind to hope that he somehow muscles through this primary and defeats Governor Mills -- because I remember the fate of Christine O’Donnell, in a 2010 Delaware Senate race the Republican Party pointlessly frittered away amidst its own populist uprising against the party establishment.

Back in 2010 O’Donnell rose on the wave of last-minute endorsements by talk radio and Tea Party grandees to shock former Representative and Governor Mike Castle in the Republican primary -- and was clobbered by Chris Coons in the general election, a race Coons would have been otherwise guaranteed to lose. Immediately after she knocked off Castle, Democrats publicized her history of saying ridiculous things on camera during her prior career as a conservative “influencer,” including her confession as a panelist on Real Time with Bill Maher that she had practiced witchcraft in college.

O’Donnell’s legendarily hapless response to the oppo dump was “I’m Not a Witch, I’m You,” an advertisement so cringeworthy (and perfectly timed to hit the progressive media’s sweet spot) that it became the subject of autotuned parodies and Saturday Night Live gags. “I’m Not a Secret Nazi, I’m You” waits eagerly in the wings as a follow-up: That was more or less Platner’s exact quote when confronted about this latest controversy, and I think it would sound fantastic in song form.

My analogy is admittedly inexact, and not only because I am well aware that the mainstream media would never dare clown on a progressive like Platner the way they savaged a Tea Party naif like O’Donnell. On another level it is about the shared political trajectories of their states. In Delaware, Castle was the last of a breed of electable Republican moderates in an increasingly polarized blue state whose center of gravity leaned decisively to the professional-class left. Platner, however, is running ahead of Maine’s curve, which inevitably seems to be heading toward the same Democratic uniparty status. If Platner wins the primary, progressives believe that he still has a puncher’s chance in a 2026 general election to send Maine in a truly hard left direction for the foreseeable future.

They might be right. Even now Platner’s support has not cratered amongst his visible online advocates, simply because the progressive engine of the Democratic Party now drives toward an ideological goal broader than the flaws of any one individual candidate. Bernie Sanders mused that only those with several tours of duty under their belts can properly cast the first stone, a standard he notably failed to apply to Pete Hegseth.

I welcome this development. Let them fight! Win or lose -- and although I presume Mills is now the favorite in the Maine Democratic primary, stranger things have already happened in my lifetime than a Platner victory -- this is the sort of ideologically clarifying internal rumble the Democratic Party needs to have, so that voters are no longer deluded about what their national party ineluctably represents. All sides in our current hyper-ideological morass are dropping their pretenses to decency more quickly than adult film stars cast off their clothes, and here is yet another data point. I would have left it alone, but "sorry, I got drunk with Balkan Slavs in my youth and this Nazi tattoo was the inevitable result" was too hilarious an angle to pass up. Defend this, progressives.