Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner says his six months in Afghanistan in 2018 as a State Department security contractor revealed how America’s wars had become “a corporate money-grab.” He clarified he never worked for Erik Prince’s Blackwater but for a hedge-fund-owned successor that inherited its State Department contracts. “They used guys like me with these backgrounds to meet the contract requirements so they could pay us bare minimum and walk away with the balance.”
Platner said his job mostly involved driving for the U.S. ambassador’s security team. “We were barely leaving the Green Zone… All I did was lift weights and play video games. I got huge and I played a lot of Far Cry,” he said.
He quit after six months and went home to farm oysters.
You’re presenting a false dichotomy. There’s the distinct possibility he WAS a drunken idiot and no longer is.
I’ve got no skin in the game here, but to compare those options:
He quits working in the lucrative military industrial complex to become a fascist sleeper agent (because if he didn’t know in advance his reddit history wouldn’t make any sense). So he spends the better part of a decade making functionally anonamous reddit posts on lefty and socialist subs while oyster farming (presumably) to build credibility as a lefty… In Maine… but curiously he does so while not building any sort of real political capital or credibility. After 7 years the Democrats are weak, he activates with bonafides to flank the party from the left and emerge as a working class fighter. He decides not to get rid of the tattoo that could expose him to the public as a fascist (perhaps because he needs to secretly maintain his fascist bonafides).
He’s authentic, but as a young guy in the service, he gets shit faced and makes a terrible decision in a tattoo shop. Accepting this theory does require one to believe that Platner had not committed the first 10 pages of the ADL hate symbol database to memory.
Occams razor makes a pretty clear case here.
Still, I would be concerned about getting Fetterman’d if I were a Maine voter. Platner comes with some baggage and requires a good bit of faith. I also don’t think there are any clearly, better options for voters in Maine.