Social-Chauvinist Graham Platner Drops Out of Senate Race

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, withdrew from the race earlier this month after a former romantic partner accused him of rape, allegations which he has denied.

The collapse of his campaign marks the failure of the Democrat mafia’s latest attempt to manufacture an “outsider” candidate capable of restoring credibility to a party whose popularity has plunged to historic lows. The party’s heavy reliance on identity politics continues to make it vulnerable to such attacks.

Like Zohran Mamdani before him, Platner was elevated to absorb growing public discontent and channel it back into the Democratic Party.

Both candidates drew support by trafficking in genuine grievances among working people, including stagnant wages and US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Morris Katz and the multimillion-dollar political consulting operation, Fight Agency, backed both campaigns.

While Platner’s campaign became engulfed in various controversies even before the rape allegations, prominent figures on the so-called left rallied behind him. Politicians including Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, along with media personalities such as Hasan Piker, Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report, and Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, defended Platner throughout successive scandals, including scrutiny of his military career, his Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, and reports of inappropriate extramarital sexual text messages.

Responding to criticism, Grim argued that Democrats needed to welcome “normal people with some small skeletons in their closet.”

What were the “small skeletons” in Platner’s closet?

Platner’s record includes 3 tours as a US Marine carrying out aggression in Iraq, with deployment to Ramadi and Fallujah, where intense urban bombardments and the deployment of white phosphorus left up to 80% of local infrastructure in ruins, killing hundreds of civilians and triggering a decades-long crisis of severe birth defects. The US occupation of Fallujah was riddled with scandals involving sexual abuse against Iraqi civilians by US Army officers, including the gang rape of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the massacre of her entire family in March 2006.

Platner later dropped out of college, which was being funded by the GI Bill, to return to the military. This time he was deployed to Afghanistan. In 2018, he returned to Afghanistan as a mercenary for Blackwater’s successor, Constellis.

Platner himself described his motivations for joining the Marines in a now-deleted Reddit post, writing that he enlisted because he “wanted to have an adventure and kill some people.” In a later interview with The New Yorker, he described patrols near Abu Ghraib, the site of widespread documented torture by US forces during the Iraq War, stating that he “loved infantry combat” and compared it to a “high-stakes game.”

At its height, Abu Ghraib held over 8,000 prisoners of war, including suspected resistance fighters and Iraqi civilians with no ties to armed groups. The abuses documented at Abu Ghraib include various forms of torture such as electrocution; asphyxiation; pouring phosphoric acid on prisoners; the forced stripping and photographing of detainees; the sodomization of male detainees with broomsticks, truncheons, and other objects; and the gang rape of female detainees by US Army officers and other staff members.

Platner’s social-democratic supporters insisted that his record demonstrates personal transformation rather than alignment with US imperialism.

But far from expressing remorse for his actions, his campaign website expressed interest in strengthening the US military. He called for increasing military pay to address a “recruitment crisis,” portraying soldiers as “rank-and-file” workers earning poverty wages while contractors and bureaucrats collected “ungodly” salaries.

Platner’s garbled understanding of “anti-imperialism” and class was mirrored by his social-democrat supporters.

As The Worker previously wrote: “The strategy embraced for Platner is to frame the small business owner as ‘working class,’ not based on his relationship to production or class background, but on his demeanor and ‘rugged’ appearance. Class for the false left comes down to the vague criteria of identity politics and has little to do with material reality.”

Emma Vigeland dismissed criticism of his military background, stating, “I find this whole discourse on his background [in the military] to be pretty elitist.”

Platner is no more working class than he is an establishment outsider. His father donated more than $65,000 to federal Democratic candidates, while his mother hosted Democratic fundraisers and served as a delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Neither Platner’s long history of carrying out US imperialist aggression, his continued support for it, nor his engineered background were enough to fracture support. What finally did was the allegation of sexual violence against an American woman.

Hasan Piker, who had previously acknowledged that Platner likely committed “irredeemable” acts while serving in the military, continued supporting his candidacy. When the allegations of rape became public, he said the accusation is “completely irredeemable”, this time calling “curtains” on Platner’s campaign.

Democrat establishment figures followed, calling for his withdrawal. Ro Khanna stated, “sexual assault or violence against women is a red line.”

The identity politics and call-out culture so heavily encouraged by the Democratic mafia ultimately serve the party’s undoing. The Democratic mafia is in a deep crisis that it has dug itself in. One section is unable to distinguish itself from the Republican mafia, while its social-democrat wing plays a dangerous game trafficking in the interests of the masses; this can only backfire when they are inevitably unable to meet their campaign promises, or when their appeals to identity backfire.

Image: Graham Platner. Credit: Graham Platner for U.S. Senate.

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