No. of Recommendations: 7
Interesting read from Sebastian Junger, combat reporter and author of
The Perfect Storm. and other excellent books
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I JUST HAD BREAKFAST WITH GRAHAM PLATNER
Here is what you need to know.
Sebastian Junger
Jun 03, 2026
I recently had breakfast with Senate candidate Graham Platner at a slightly upscale restaurant by Union Square in New York City. Platner is running in his home state of Maine and said he was in town to meet funders; I live a couple of miles away in the Lower East Side. I was trying to get in a little workout – it was my only chance that day - so I ran there and arrived in a full sweat, to the dismay of the waiters. They seated me anyway and I shook Platner’s hand (meaty, solid, not aggressive) and greeted his two young staffers, who were in suits and mostly on their phones. Platner and I were the only people in the restaurant in sweatshirts and, in all likelihood, the only people who had been blown up in a war zone. When the waiter arrived, he was so well-dressed that I mistook him for a late staffer and almost stood up and shook his hand.
Platner is seen by some as the next great Democratic hope because - this might say it all about the party - he doesn’t scan “Democrat.” He did two horrifically violent combat tours in Iraq and then was in and out of college for almost a decade before finally becoming an oyster farmer in his home state of Maine. He’s not tall, but he has the solid physicality of a man who makes his living outdoors. For what it’s worth, Platner might be the only Democratic candidate or congressman I wouldn’t want to mess with, whereas the Republicans have at least half a dozen guys who could put me in a headlock. That shouldn’t matter except that, for many voters, it still might.
But Platner comes with complications. A few days after our interview, he was revealed to have exchanged sexual texts with multiple women before his campaign, a problem that he and his wife say they have sorted out through counseling. It will be up to voters to decide whether they can trust Platner’s judgment and discretion with this information in mind. And around twenty years ago, he got a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest that some say is uncomfortably close to a white supremacist symbol. Platner claims that he and several other Marines got the tattoo in Croatia because it looked “badass” and had no idea that some people might associate it with Nazis. (Croatia was a Nazi-allied country in World War Two, and it’s possible that Croat tattoo artists still use fascist-inspired templates for their skull-and-bones images.) I’ve spent a lot of time with American soldiers in combat, and the depraved menagerie that adorn most of their bodies can be bracing. Usually, I just wonder how they’re going to explain it to their mothers; now, one of them has to explain it to voters. Platner told The New York Times - which understandably drilled down on this - that his brother married a Jewish woman and that he went to the traditional wedding and even took his shirt off during a dance, revealing the tattoo. He claims he didn’t think twice about it and neither did anyone else.
Platner has also posted one-offs on Reddit about how Black customers tipped when he was a bartender and about homosexuality, though those comments were many years ago and stand in stark contrast to the political values that seem to have animated him his whole life. He has defended LGBTQ rights, denounced Israeli military action in Gaza and Lebanon, taken up the cause of working-class voters, jokingly called himself a communist and relentlessly excoriated Donald Trump. He also owns many guns, is a relentless advocate for Second Amendment rights, is staunchly opposed to American wars overseas and believes that the American political system is dangerously corrupt. Some of these contradictions can be explained by the online impulsivity of a young combat vet; some may represent a new kind of hybrid politics. Regardless, Platner seems to send the liberal mind spinning like a compass next to a magnet.
Platner and his aides ordered breakfast sandwiches, but he ignored his when it arrived because we had already fallen to talking. Platner said he wanted to meet me because he’d read all my books and his mother had brought him to the public library in Ellsworth, Maine to hear me speak when he was thirteen. (His parents divorced when he was six.) For my part, I was interested to meet someone who seemed to represent a new political creature: the working-man liberal. Platner has the low, hoarse voice of a former smoker and told me that Obama’s personal Marine detachment was supposedly charged with holding his cigarettes when he was in office. There were obvious similarities between us: I was a climber for tree companies before I became a war reporter – a chainsaw wound led me to the literary topic of dangerous jobs – and Platner talked about how physical work had helped settle him after the war and several false starts in civilian life. Platner’s father is a well-known lawyer in Maine and his grandfather was a famous architect; I’m the son of a physicist and the grandson of a well-known journalist. We both had professional careers available to us when we were young but declined them in favor of going to war and taking up manual work, and those choices benefited us in ways that we never could have foreseen. I was still climbing for tree companies when my first book, The Perfect Storm, was published, and the press made a big deal out of my supposedly working-class qualities. I was always quick to correct that narrative – I went to private schools and college when I was young – but that almost didn’t matter. Once journalists find the narrative they’re looking for, they’re usually reluctant to let it go.
Something similar seems to have happened to Platner, who is often seen as a working-class hero despite his family’s professional background. I know a few oyster farmers on Cape Cod, where I have lived, and oyster faming is considered one of the hardest jobs in the area, second only to lobstering. Oyster farmers must work the tides, which can see them on the mudflats at four in the morning when its ten degrees and snowing sideways. The oyster racks are made out of rebar and weigh sixty pounds; the oyster sacks weigh eighty. Both have to be picked up and moved regularly. Whatever Platner’s privilege - and it certainly pales next to, say, the Trump children - he chose an absolutely brutal way to make a living. And stuck with it. It’s not obvious to me why being forced into such a job by circumstance would give him more right to discuss working class concerns than choosing that work voluntarily.
That’s just optics, though. The heart and soul of what Platner had to say to me - and to voters - is that American politics are deeply corrupt, and that Democrats are often as bad as Republicans. He went on to say that the true division in this country isn’t between liberals and conservatives but between economic elites and everyone else. These elites, in his opinion, have fomented political divisions to stay in power because their main goal is economic monopoly; politics simply serve that purpose. If he wins office, he said, it would be in part because conservative working-class voters saw themselves in him and trusted him to represent their interests.
“I very much view myself as an economic populist,” he told in me in a later conversation. (A recording of our talk is available below.) “I really do think we need a politics that puts the material needs of working people first…People voted for Trump because they wanted him to drain the swamp and end foreign wars and focus on the needs of Americans instead of on the needs of foreign countries. And we’ve done the opposite of that.”
I told Platner that our conversation reminded me of H.L. Menken’s definition of democracy: “The theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” He laughed. “Here is my real point of contention with the liberal pundit class,” he said. “Which is that they celebrate the suffering of working people who were tricked into voting for someone that was going to fuck them over. You shouldn’t celebrate that, you should be horrified by it…you should have compassion and empathy. Those people were tricked, they were propagandized, they were lied to. We are all in many ways being exploited and manipulated by the elites. To sit around and say, Ha, ha, you get what you voted for - no, man. Those are people in pain. You don’t laugh at people in pain, you help them, for Christ’s sake.”
(This post is public so feel free to share)
It’s received wisdom that under-served working-class voters propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016, so I find it encouraging that working people in Maine seem to support Platner. I’m encouraged by that not because Platner is a Democrat or because he’s Graham Platner, but because I believe that a system where people cross party lines to vote their interests and values brings us one step closer to a true democracy. Is it possible that a candidate with left-wing social values could appeal to conservative workers with a message of economic reform that some say borders on socialism? Is it possible that the culture wars that have been exploited by both conservatives and liberals to consolidate power can be overcome by a category-defying candidate like Platner?
Yes – but apparently not if the New York Times has anything to say about it. In a series of negative articles and opinion pieces, the Times has come out swinging against someone who could flip the Senate for Democrats next November. Some of the criticism was about his tattoo, though opinion writer Michelle Goldberg mounted an excellent and clear-eyed defense of him, and Frank Bruni gave him a grudging endorsement as well. But much of the criticism, oddly, has been focused on his claims of being working class. In conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Platner said: “In this day and age, you are working class if you make your money from work and wages…I know it’s an expansive definition of ‘working class’, but I think you need to have an expansive definition when we have the most expansive margin of wealth inequality in the history of the country. In the state of Maine, almost everybody’s working class. Everybody works, everybody struggles. If the hospital closes and that really impacts you, you’re probably a working-class person.”
Another Times story titled, “Oysterman, Veteran, Prep-School Alum,” spent most of its column inches determining the exact degree of Platner’s economic privilege. At one point the article resorted – stooped, in my opinion – to noting that Platner’s parents helped pay for fertility treatments for him and his wife, who are trying to conceive. (I’ve been through those struggles, so I know how devastating and painful they are – in fact, that was the final thing Platner and I discussed at breakfast.) Another point of contention by The Times, which felt petty when I read it, was that Platner’s mother owns a restaurant and buys most of the oysters that her son harvests.
It’s worth noting that the lead writer on this piece, Lisa Lerer, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as well as Columbia Journalism School before spending over a decade in Washington, D.C. She is a fantastic reporter, but we’re not here to talk about journalism; we’re here to talk about left-wing double standards. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if Platner had received the same income as a paralegal at his father’s law firm, he would not have been financially dissected by The New York Times. I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that if Graham Platner – oysterman, veteran and alleged prep-school kid – weren’t advocating for broad revolt against America’s economic elite, both The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would have left him alone. But he’s the ultimate Democratic nightmare for the same reason he’s the ultimate Republican nightmare: A super articulate, well-read working man who speaks in full paragraphs, wears his pain on his sleeve (he broke down while discussing the Iraq war with Garcia-Navarro) has a house full of firearms and has openly espoused a government that puts working people first. He’s Bernie Sanders with two combat tours and an oyster grant.
And lest the Republicans feel left out, Platner has also declared himself to be a lifelong antifascist who keeps many weapons at home because, as he posted in 2018, “An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.” When questioned by The Times about that dubious statement, he answered, in part: “Well, to be fair, I was talking about it as a private citizen with no visibility, and mostly just talking about what I thought was a very clear historical reality. Again, historically, fascism has been beaten with armed resistance and conflict. [But] violence has absolutely no place. And I don’t think it moves us any closer to a better or freer society.”
The Republicans aren’t my problem because I’m not one, and they can sort out their own hypocrisy and contradictions. My concern is for Democrats and their tentpole newspaper, The New York Times. Graham Platner has a reputation as an “isolationist,” for example, who might allow Russia and China to run roughshod over the world, which is a matter of serious concern for me. And yet, the Times hardly bothered probing Platner’s policy positions, staying grimly focused on him as a supposed child of privilege. That choice says little about Platner and quite a lot about The New York Times and its discomfort around class, masculinity and its own economic privilege.
The first civil war I ever covered was in Bosnia, which went on for three years before Western military intervention stopped it in its tracks. The intervention was triggered by Serb atrocities in Srebrenica in 1995, where as many as 7,000 men and boys were machine-gunned into pits and covered up by bulldozers. All the civil wars I covered in West Africa and the Balkans were stopped by military intervention with virtually no U.S. or civilian casualties. In my experience, complete isolationism and pacifism allow horrific suffering to go unchecked, so I asked Platner, point-blank, about Ukraine.
“The Ukrainians are resisting an armed invasion, and I absolutely support [them],” he answered. “But I do think it makes it hard to support them when we are also supporting the Saudi regime and the Israelis in Lebanon right now. I’m an internationalist. I believe our foreign policy should be rooted in international institutions that we respect consistently. Vietnam wasn’t good for working Americans. Fucking around in South America in the 1980s was not good for working Americans. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not good for working people. I’d like to see us invest money in the United States rather than in a bloated military apparatus. We have helped set up all these international court systems that are specifically designed to to protect corporate power and capital around the world…why don’t we do that to protect, say, labor rights around the world? [We need alliances so that] if a company flees one country to avoid taxation, other countries will impose the same tax rate.”
One of the things that makes Platner appealing to some and threatening to others is that he is almost impossible to categorize. His worry about Trump’s capacity for full authoritarianism is rivaled only by his disappointment with the Left, which he sees as performative and weak. This concerns him, he says, because he believes the moment to save America is now.
“Establishment Democrats and normie liberal types love talking about fascism and authoritarianism,” he says. “They use the words and then nobody does anything to prepare. I do believe these people [in the Trump administration] are fascists and will try to maybe interfere in the elections come November, weaponize or militarize federal law enforcement as a political tool. So, that’s why you have to fucking organize now…just saying so on MSNBC isn’t enough. Talk to the labor unions, talk to the community organizers, start building the mechanisms that we’re going to need. Resistance isn’t magic; it requires time and discipline and energy. The Trump administration is full of incompetent morons; of all the versions of this we can beat, it’s this version. What I’m very much worried about is if we don’t resist and defeat this version now, then the next version is actually competent.”
Note:
When I called Graham Platner to do some fact-checking, our conversation developed into a fascinating dive into the state of American politics and how he wants to help. I've made it available, below, for paying members. Enjoy.
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