The Democratic Party has been sliding toward anti-Semitism for years, but it took a quantum jump today when Governor Janet Mills of Maine withdrew from the Senate race in that state. That means that Graham Platner, a political novice who was unknown a year ago, will be the Democrats’ nominee to run against Senator Susan Collins.
Platner describes himself as an “economic populist” and a follower of Bernie Sanders. He has also called himself a “communist” and has said that police officers are “bastards.” But he is best known as an anti-Semite. In 2014, he praised a Hamas attack on Israel on social media, and just a couple of months ago he shared a post by a notorious anti-Semitic podcaster named Stew Peters. (Per Google’s AI, Peters “has referred to Judaism as a ‘death cult’ and has called for the mass expulsion of Jewish people from the United States, referring to this as a new ‘final solution.'”)
Many voters may not be aware of those transgressions, but everyone knows about the SS death’s head tattooed on Platner’s chest. That put him in the spotlight as an anti-Semite; he claimed that he didn’t know what it meant, an assertion that was denied by his former campaign director, and he covered up the SS symbol with another tattoo. But I think it is fair to say that the Democratic voters who were prepared to sweep Platner to victory in the upcoming primary were well aware of the SS death’s head, and probably associated it, more than anything else, with Platner’s candidacy.
It was not many years ago when a candidate with zero political experience and a track record of overt anti-Semitism could not have been a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate in either party. But those days are gone. This year, it appears that the odor of anti-Semitism that surrounds Graham Platner was not just acceptable to Democratic voters, but may have been his chief appeal in an upstart campaign that defeated a two-term sitting governor.
