Progressive women embrace Maine’s Nazi-tattooed dude-bro Senate candidate

Despite his history, Graham Platner won 72 per cent of the Democratic Senate primary with strong backing from progressive women

Having spent the last two weeks vacationing in Maine, I had the dubious pleasure of cognitive proximity to the successful bloom of Graham Platner mania. Platner is the “dude-bro” Maine Democrats are putting their money on for the Senate midterm win. The alleged philandering, women-bullying, military-comrade insulting, AR-15-owning, F-word-spewing, fake working classpopulist with no political experience won 72 per cent of the vote.

Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon described Platner as “a bearded scumbag with a Nazi tattoo and a vanity oyster farm.” (Most, if not all, of his oysters go to his mom’s restaurant.) Stiles reminds us that Platner has also fantasized about raping burglars to show dominance (“not in a gay way,” you understand) and admitted to masturbating in porta-potties. There’s more, but I have other points to make and breakfast to keep down.

How to explain Platner’s political ascent from his personal swamp? Wrong question. How to explain the personal swamp fuelling Platner’s ascent? In large part, Platner won because progressive white women saw nothing to seriously object to.

A 2024 Gallup poll found that the partisan gap between American men and women has almost doubled in the past 25 years among 18-29-year-olds. These women are swelling the leftward voting trend among educated progressive white women of all ages. Polls show they are also “more likely to vote, care about political issues, and participate in social movements and protests” than their male peers — even though they tend to be less politically literate than them.

Platner’s unexpected popularity encouraged endorsements from female heavy hitters like Elizabeth Warren, who said in a video produced after revelations of past racist and misogynistic social media comments, that he was a “fighter” and the “real deal” who has “the grit to go against the grain.” So much for female oppression under the heavy hand of patriarchal scourges like the #MeToo (alleged) campus “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.”

It seems that achieving that elusive Democratic Senate majority, and the promise of a Trump impeachment it represents override the party’s previous feminist principles. In a cringe-inducing interview on CNN, Jodi Kantor, #MeToo reporter at the New York Times, got on her metaphorical hands and knees to scrub Platner’s muddy footprints from Maine’s clean, pine-scented living room rug: No, Kantor said, these are not “classic” #MeToo accusations against Platner that have come forward, contrasting these accusations against Trump’s, except, ok, for that “one allegation of crossing a line physically,” but normally, when Graham Platner acts creepy and coercive to women, it’s…it’s ..so they were “mostly made in the context of consensual relationships,” she fansplains. “And so, I think it speaks to the kind of confusion of the long post-#MeToo moment in which, like, gender-related accusations get bundled together. But they’re actually very different.”

Really “very different,” Jodi? Trump Derangement Syndrome makes even brainy, successful progressive women say and do things they may regret. Then there’s Platner’s Stepford Wife, Amy Gertner, who had herself flagged for his campaign staff her husband’s sexually explicit texts to several women on a private messaging app, recorded a video of herself defiantly standing by her man, because he’s “wonderful and dynamic and probably a genius” and “I admire the f— out of him.” Oh, very classy, Amy. Not.

The weathervane hypocrisy of left-wing women is astounding. One day it’s pink pussy hats that signify women’s labia to protest Donald Trump’s misogyny. Then the hats abruptly disappear under criticism from blacks and trans women for whom they represent “gender and race normativity.” They’ll never forgive Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for an allegation of sexual misconduct 36 years before his Senate hearing, but they’ll forgive Graham Platner for everything, because it’s all in the past, as one female Platner fan (holding a sign, “We are your Grahamily”) told a New York Post reporter at a rally.

No conservative woman I know ever once interpreted Trump’s lewd, famously taped Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” remark as a sign of “grit,” or that he was “the real deal.” Trump’s repulsive personality and character deficits were acknowledged for what they were, with heavy sighs, by all mainstream conservative commentators, but tolerated as unattractive baggage accompanying the only candidate perceived capable of disrupting the pathological cultural trends favoured by increasingly influential Democratic extremists.

As deeply feeling but lightly informed progressive women flex their political muscle, it’s fair to wonder if Platner is a one-off or a political bellwether. On a recent podcast, archetypal dude-bro Hunter Biden joked with Gavin Newsom that he’d be happy to be Newsom’s pick for vice-president in 2028. Was he really just kibitzing — or, stunned by Platner’s success — straw-polling progressive women?

National Post