No. of Recommendations: 15
MANY DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS AGREE THAT PLATNER MUST GO
So Why Is He Doing So Well?
Sebastian Junger
Jun 10, 2026
Yesterday, Maine Senatorial candidate Graham Platner secured the Democratic nomination in a landslide. Journalists don’t endorse candidates - at least this one doesn’t - and I have no personal stake in whether Platner wins his seat in November. But writing a neutral profile of him last week did require examining the New York Times coverage of him, which struck many readers as decidedly not neutral. It’s rare for the New York Times to almost perfectly mirror their political enemy, the Wall Street Journal, and yet that’s exactly what started to happen in May, when Platner began to dominate the primary campaign and set his sights on Republican Susan Collins for the midterms.
In one early article, the Times focused on a skull-and-crossbones tattoo that Platner and several other young Marines had gotten twenty years ago in Croatia. The tattoo reminded some of a Nazi image, but Platner denied any knowledge of its significance, and no one was in a position to prove it one way or another. The Times then revealed that a newly-married Platner had sent sexual texts many other women, though his wife affirmed they had put the incident behind them. The Times then devoted another feature piece to his family’s middle class finances and quickly ran a follow-up with the puzzlingly mild headline, “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.” That behavior included heavy drinking, being emotionally unavailable, cheating on women and, in one case, twisting a woman’s arm, locking her in a room and being “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth,” as reported by the Times’s Bret Stephens. (That woman, Lyndsey Fifield, is a Republican who has worked with conservative organizations, and Platner has denied her claims.)
For many people, that behavior was extremely disturbing on a personal level but not disqualifying of high office. Times reporter Lisa Lerer wrote that she and a female colleague spent “months reporting out the complicated story of Platner’s relationships with women,” which involved speaking to over "two dozen people in Maine and Virginia.” But, given the litany of sexual assault, rape and sex trafficking accusations in the Trump administration, some readers were puzzled that so many resources were devoted to behavior that was ugly but was apparently not predatory or illegal. Many Times readers seemed ready to believe every word of what these women had suffered with Graham Platner and still think he’d make a good - if not transformational - senator. Of the twenty people who commented on the Times article, only three condemned Platner; the rest either supported him or questioned the Times’s efforts to discredit him, or both.
“I’m a woman and a Maine voter,” one comment read. “My vote is going to Platner. Nothing in your story was compelling to me. If this was the most you could come up with after interviewing 24 people and devoting a ton of resources, I am underwhelmed.”
“My relatives vote in Maine, and the overwhelming feeling from them is that your story isn’t worth months of reporting” wrote another man. “Spending months of effort to basically get a couple of ex-girlfriends to say he has anger issues, isn’t a great person or cheated on them smacks of a hit job just before the primary. It’s exactly the kind of reporting which makes many people distrust the New York Times and in rural areas fuels the anti-elitism sentiment which makes Platner an attractive voice.”
In comment after comment, readers pushed back against a newspaper that struck them as elitist, performative, and biased. Some wanted the Times to highlight Susan Collins’s role in confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite accusations of sexual assault. Some questioned the veracity and motivations of Lyndsey Fifield, the Republican ex-girlfriend. Some wondered why a deluge of negative reporting would come out now rather than a year ago, when it was first known. Across many social media platforms, including my Substack, comments were perhaps ten-to-one in support of Platner. Rather than turning people off, Platner’s flaws seemed to humanize him and even make him trustworthy. Rather than changing public opinion about Platner, the New York Times coverage just seemed to make people think the elites were scared of him. Bernie Sanders had a similar economic platform, people recalled, and The Times had gone after him as well. (Times reporter Yaminche Alcindor famously asked Sanders at a debate, “What do you say to women who feel that you staying in the race is sexist because of it getting in the way of the first female president?”)
And during last year’s mayoral race in New York, the Times was apparently so troubled by Zohran Mamdani’s ideas of economic reform that they delivered a tortured non-endorsement of Andrew Cuomo despite the fact that Cuomo had been accused by the Justice Department of sexually harassing as many as thirteen women, including members of his own staff. Those transgressions went beyond anything Platner has been accused of but apparently were not enough to get The Times to wave off voters. Mamdani beat Cuomo by almost nine points.
My article came up for review as well, of course, and comments were generally positive, though it’s important to acknowledge the obvious bias of people who pay to read my Substack. But a literally thrilling experience (from the Middle English, thirl, to “pierce or penetrate”) could be had by reading the negative comments. Most were premised on the hyper-progressive idea that journalistic neutrality is a form of complicity, and that if you fail to loudly condemn wrongdoing, you’re somehow guilty of it as well. Because I reported on the tattoo without declaring it to be a clear Nazi symbol that Platner had gotten for that reason, some accused me of being a Nazi sympathizer. (My father and his family fled Germany in 1933 and France in 1940 because they were Jews.) Because I said that Platner had been accused of mistreating women without going on to condemn him myself, I was effectively covering for him. But journalists don’t weigh in on their subjects; they let experts do that. The cardinal rule of journalism is that you don’t, publicly, have a dog in any fight.
One of the great breakthroughs of my lifetime was that the primary demographic division in every society in the world - male and female - was nowhere nearly as clear cut as people thought. Instead, gender is now known to span a wide spectrum of anatomies and behaviors. There are very masculine women, very feminine men and all kinds of blends in between. Unfortunately, that kind of intellectual fluidity has not followed progressives into other pastures; virtually every social issue - including Graham Platner’s transgressions - comes with an absolutist position that doesn’t allow any deviation whatsoever. Even a sincere question can get you thrown out of liberal Eden. Such binary thinking precludes any kind of compromise, empathy, or alliance-making - all of which are crucial to winning elections. One commenter described this problem better than I ever could and gave me permission to include his words here:
The left, at its worst, has a habit of turning its moral seriousness inward until it becomes a contest of purification. [It] badly needs people who have walked through hard institutions and hard experiences without coming out worshiping domination. People who have seen violence and still choose restraint. People who understand guns without turning them into idols. People who know working-class anger without converting it into cruelty.
Graham Platner may be proving impossible to keep down because our body politic - like our human body - is finally bursting out of its binary confinement and coming up with all kinds of inspired hybrids: Working class liberals, anti-military conservatives, pro-abortion libertarians, pro-gun hippies. A huge amount of money, power and prestige flows through the Republican and Democratic parties, so it’s natural that they would challenge anyone who blurs those categories, but we may have already passed the moment when the change can be stopped. As New York Times writer M. Gessen pointed out recently, “The person best positioned to break the power of Donald Trump would not be an anti-Trump Republican but an outsider to the Democratic establishment, someone who can credibly claim that Trump didn’t happen on his watch — a Graham Platner rather than a Thomas Massie.”
I doubt Gessen is stumping for Platner and neither am I, but we both have an intense dislike of authoritarians and a desire to be rid of them. That change may well come from a political outsider who is seen as beholden to no one and therefore able to speak the truth. There is a tradition in many societies of a kind of malformed truth-teller who is so different from everyone else that he has nothing to lose and is therefor trustworthy. All manner of schizophrenic shamans, blind seers and sacred freaks have filled this role through the ages. The overweight and politically disgraced former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, for example, was finally able to speak truth to Trump’s power because he was an outsider. Revolutions are not often started by the Mitt Romneys of the world, in other words; they are started by people who have known great difficulty, succumbed to great temptation, sunk to great depths. If you’re hoping for revolution, don’t expect purity. If you’re hoping for purity, don’t expect revolution.
“To be honest, Platners background could be 90% of the guys in Hancock County,” one person wrote in the Times comment section. “Life is messy when you are scraping together a life…I just don't understand why news reporters never add how people can change.”
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