Scott notes below the latest fiasco in the candidacy of Graham Platner for the U.S. Senate. On paper, one would think that Platner is the worst candidate for any office ever to surface in either major party. A self-described Communist with a Nazi tattoo, a man with zero political experience and little success in business, a crude bully and misogynist with a twisted sexual history–how could Platner possibly have crushed sitting Governor Janet Mills, driving her out of the race for Maine’s Democratic Senate nomination? What made him so popular with his party’s base?
To be sure, Platner checks the left-wing box with his professed Communist leanings. You can’t get more left-wing than that. But I think the key to Platner’s success is his overt anti-Semitism. At the time he was pulling away from Mills, by far the best-known fact about Platner was his Nazi tattoo. Far from disqualifying him in the eyes of Democratic voters, the tattoo seems to have endeared him to them.
Along with his other manifestations of anti-Semitism: his sharing with approval a social media post by Stew Peters, described by Google’s AI as a “radio host and neo-Nazi influencer known for viciously antisemitic and Holocaust-denying commentary;” his constant assertions that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza; his obsessive attacks on AIPAC; and his Reddit posts where he approved of a 2014 Hamas attack on Israel. I think it is fair to say that, during the months when his Senate campaign took off, Graham Platner’s best-known characteristic was his hostility to the Jews.
It reminds me of when, a few years ago, Ilhan Omar came out with one anti-Semitic outburst after another. Friends from around the country would say to me, Surely her career is finished now. She will be defeated at the next election. Won’t she? I had to explain that Omar’s anti-Semitic views are popular in her heavily-Democratic district. And, as it proved, they were no obstacle to her re-election.
I think that anti-Semitism is no longer the obsession of an oddball fringe. Rather, it is close to the beating heart of the Democratic Party. At this point it may, in fact, be the defining ideology of the Democratic Party. Far from being a millstone around the neck of a nonentity like Graham Platner, it was the secret to his meteoric rise.
