It’s 3:58 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, and Graham Platner’s campaign is sending me shirtless photos. I’m about to drive an hour to Ogunquit, Maine to attend Platner’s first town hall since the surfacing of unsavory and offensive deleted Reddit posts kicked off a week of tumultuous headlines for the oyster farmer turned politician, the Bernie Sanders–anointed Democratic front-runner in the senate race to unseat Susan Collins. And in this case, sending half-naked photos to a journalist isn’t the latest scandal—it’s fact-checking backup.
In the two days since Platner’s campaign revealed that, for years, the candidate had a chest tattoo that starkly resembled a “Totenkopf” used in SS insignia and neo-Nazi iconography, the story has lived several online lives. By the time Platner spoke to me about it Wednesday morning, he had already gotten the tattoo covered with a Celtic knot and a dog. In a video posted that day to his campaign Instagram, Platner once again claimed that he only recently learned of the tattoo’s “stark resemblance to a symbol that is used by neo-Nazis,” and that “the idea that I’ve been going around with something like that utterly horrifies me.” The controversy puts a fine point on questions of “cancellation” and accountability that the left has been grappling with for years. In the comments, a tattoo artist and 2023 Acadia National Park artist in residence named Mischa Ylva Ostberg, who uses the pronouns they/them, took credit for the cover-up, writing, “People are capable of change, reflection, and growth. I know his character because he plays a vital role in my small community everyday.”
But in other corners of the internet, the cover-up spawned more controversy. On Bluesky and X, users debated whether the new tattoo might also have neo-Nazi connotations—white supremacists having coopted various runic symbols—and pointed out that a different tattoo, partially visible in an image of Platner from a local news interview, included the numbers 1919. Online sleuths wondered if this could be code for “SS,” S being the 19th letter of the alphabet—but Platner’s full tattoo, a photo of which his campaign shared with Vanity Fair and other outlets, tells a different story. The full picture shows a mountain overlaying crossed pick-axes with the letters TFC, an abbreviation for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s professional White Mountain trail crew (“Trail Fucking Crew”). The tattoo also includes two years: 2002 (when Platner worked the trails) and 1919 (the date the Mountain Club founded its first crew). Amid the tattoo turmoil, the Advocate ran a story looking back at more posts Platner wrote between 2016 and 2021, which “include homophobic slurs, anti-LGBTQ+ jokes, and sexually explicit stories denigrating gay men.” Platner apologized for the posts, calling them the “indefensible” product of having “talked a lot of shit on the internet,” and saying that he had testified earlier this year at a local school board meeting in defense of protection policy for LGBTQ+ students.
Around 600 people turned out for Platner’s town hall in Ogunquit, population 1,577; many of them traversed rainbow crosswalks on their way into the town’s Leavitt Theater. A torrential downpour gave way to a golden sunset. As the crowd filed into the 500-seat theater and its overflow areas, country musician Griffin William Sherry sang and played guitar, including a song called “We Will Fight”—which he said he’d written for his wife on June 25, 2022, the day after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Soon, Platner’s mother, restaurant owner and former DNC delegate Leslie Harlow, took the mic. It was her first time at one of Platner’s town halls. “Geez, Ma,” she joked, imagining her son’s response. “We’ve been doing this for a month. What?” She shared stories of Platner’s upbringing, including his parents’ dismay when he told them, following his high school graduation at the onset of the Iraq War, that he had enlisted. With visible emotion, she described how disappointed she was to see politicians fail to show up to Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps Base in North Carolina where families could visit servicepeople between deployments.
Keziah Weir
Source link