The Maine Senate race and the collapse of standards

A stress test for a movement that once claimed moral clarity

image of Maine via Christian Harder

I’m sorry to write on politics again this week but we have to talk about the situation in Maine, as I talked to a friend yesterday who is my barometer of where the normies are at, and he hadn’t heard about it. It’s an almost unbelievable story.

First, some quick context. As a Jewish person who has watched with genuine horror as antisemitism has been laundered through podcasters and institutional leftism (students barricaded in rooms, campus mobs, Ivy League administrators dragged before Congress, Americans fed years of Middle Eastern propaganda repackaged as social justice), the Graham Platner situation is simply too clarifying to ignore. I wrote about the broader pattern in my story on the end of America’s Marxist era. Against that backdrop, what is happening now is not even really an outlier, and shows exactly where we’re at as a country.

For those who haven’t been following: Platner is the Maine Democrat running for Senate against Susan Collins. He’s a marine veteran and oyster farmer. Also the man who called the Virgin Mary a “skank,” described a Hamas attack on Israel as “a damn fine looking and successful raid,” and told raped women to “take some responsibility.” Oh, and he has a Nazi tattoo. Not something nebulous either, he has a Totenkopf: the insignia of the SS units that ran the Nazi death camps. This is the specific emblem of the executioners, the same badge worn by men who murdered millions.

His explanation is that he got blackout drunk in Croatia in 2007 and grabbed a random skull off a tattoo parlor wall. But a former acquaintance recalls Platner referring to it as “my Totenkopf” in a joking, cutesy way at a DC bar over a decade ago. CNN’s KFile found deleted Reddit posts where he discussed Totenkopf symbolism by name years before he claimed ignorance. As Jim Geraghty noted in National Review, it’s hard to square the “I had no idea” story with the fact that Platner is a self-described military history enthusiast, “a bit odd that a military history buff would look in the mirror for 18 years and never recognize the symbol of the SS, recognizable to anyone who’s watched any World War II movie.”

There are only 2 possible explanations: either he’s supportive of actual Nazis, or he’s someone who accidentally got a Nazi death camp tattoo, spent 20 years calling it by its German name, and somehow never Googled it. But here’s the thing, both should be disqualifying for the United States Senate (in fact, his degenerate behavior without the tattoo should be by itself).

Democrats have spent years turning “Nazi” into ambient noise. Elon Musk throws his arm out at a rally, the same gesture caught on camera from Obama, Clinton, and half of Congress, and the discourse machine runs it for months. As Geraghty put it in the same piece, the OK hand gesture was treated as a symbol of hate worthy of suspicion, while later an actual, factual SS tattoo is now “allegedly no reason for suspicion,” revealing that for many, “Nazi” has simply become a term for “someone I disagree with at the moment.” Notable how the most deranged and degenerate people succeeded in trivializing this term.

As covered in Marginally Compelling, prominent Democratic voices shockingly lined up to defend Platner: Matthew Yglesias called it a “non-specific” reflection on his character, while Jon Favreau dismissed critics as intellectually dishonest for raising concerns at all. Meanwhile, Tim Waltz is already campaigning with him and official Democrat party social media accounts are actively promoting him. The diagnosis in the piece linked above is correct: none of this support happened by reasoning from facts toward a conclusion. The conclusion of win the Maine Senate seat came first and every argument was built backwards from there.

meme from polimath

What’s actually unsettling here isn’t just Platner himself, it’s the stress test he represents, and how many people failed it. Every movement claims moral clarity when the cost is low. The real measure is whether that clarity survives contact with the real world in politics: power, elections, coalition maintenance. Groups that once spoke about antisemitism or even just basic morals in absolute terms have suddenly found room for nuance at the exact moment those standards became inconvenient to apply. The same people who insisted that symbols, rhetoric, and coded language always matter, now squint at one of the most explicit symbols imaginable. Then again these very same people think degenerate streamer Hasan Piker is “not the enemy” and suddenly Nick Fuentes is oddly promoting democrats, so perhaps all this is unsurprising.

While Democrats spend their energy rehabilitating Platner, American Jews are living through one of the most violent, hate-filled periods against their community in recent history. In 2025, a gunman shot two Israeli embassy staffers dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., shouting “Free Palestine” as security dragged him away. A firebombing at a Boulder vigil for Gaza hostages killed an 82-year-old woman. Someone torched the Pennsylvania governor’s residence during Passover because he’s Jewish. In New York City, Jews, which are 10 percent of the population, accounted for 57 percent of all hate crime victims in 2025, targeted more than every other group combined. 91% percent of American Jews now say they feel less safe in this country. Through all of it, the same institutional left that floods the zone when a conservative sneezes wrong has had remarkably little to say, for example, when a DSA faction publicly cheered the DC murders, the organization took nearly a week to issue a condemnation. That is the backdrop against which Democrats are asking Jewish Americans to trust their judgment on a Senate candidate with a Nazi death camp tattoo. The gaslighting is breathtaking.

If you don’t think this matters for you because you’re not Jewish, you’re wrong. Jews are a canary in the coal mine for the health of a civilization, with the woke right and woke left converging on blaming us for all problems and viewing our people as evil. Jews can do their fellow citizens a favor by identifying the sources of cultural poison before the toxicity turns fatal, since we’re generally attacked first, but eventually the grifters and degenerates will turn on you, too.

Democrats spent years saying they were the last serious people on antisemitism, and I’m constantly told it’s actually just a “far right” problem. But as someone who has lived through their version of “inclusivity” curdling into open institutional hostility toward Jewish people, I can tell you: they were not. The institutional support of Platner is an extraordinary example. It’s an odd time to be alive.