The democratic establishment has labeled him a communist one day, a Nazi the next day and an antifascist another day. You can’t be an antifascist and a Nazi at the same time.
I listened to the entire Pod Save interview with him, and I’m convinced he’s a solid dude who made some bad decisions when he was younger. He owns up to absolutely everything, and says he has learned from it. He sounded completely genuine to me.
His background is really important and honestly explains all of this controversy away. He was in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan for multiple tours, and he talks an about how much that fucked him up. He struggled for a long time and shitposting was one of his outlets. Who among us hasn’t regretted something we’ve posted? Owning up to and learning from it is the key.
If we want to stop electing vanilla spineless establishment candidates, the alternative is electing normal people who haven’t spent their lives hiding themselves from public view to maintain a “clean” persona. Nobody is perfect, everybody has made mistakes, and to me the strength of a candidate comes through most clearly when they take responsibility and demonstrate how their current self has evolved from their younger selves.
He seems like an awesome candidate to me.
Let’s just hope he doesn’t have a stroke before getting into office. 😒
Y’all got to be careful with this. Because some people actually believe a stroke is what caused Fetterman to be what he is now. Instead of the actual truth which was he was always this and people just didn’t bother to, you know, actually check on his background and his past statements. You can’t fall for campaign rhetoric and think what they say when they’re running for something is who they really are. I say this because frankly it seems extremely relevant on this topic. Who is this guy really?
Ugh so true. Fuck Fetterman.
He seemed to have some cracks before he got elected that came out later on after his stroke fully dropped him into magat territory
This right here. He’s had to work for his principles which means he’s more likely to stick by them. I believe he means well and wants to step up, not just get power and bribes or maintain the status quo. Nice to see how scared the billionaires are of him.
If it “fucked him up”, why did he work for BLACKWATER after his discharge from the military?
He worked for Constellis, for 6months. Stop spreading disinformation.
That’s a totally legit question, and the host followed up with that same rebuttal during the interview. I won’t get his exact wording right, but his answer was something to the effect of him still being fucked up when he went back as a contractor, but thinking that seeing things from the other side might be better (pretty sure he worked in diplomatic security as a contractor). But it turned out to be worse, and seeing it from that side ended up being the thing that convinced him how pointless it all was. He also said it was the only thing he was ever good at, so he didn’t feel like he had any other options. Makes sense to me even if it’s not something I would ever do.
Coming back to the civilian world is hard as fuck, especially if you woke up during your time with the military. You get home and people call you a hero for what amounts to crimes against humanity, and if you try to explain the horror to them you get labeled crazy and dangerous. Nobody wants to hear that their government is run by mass murdering psychopaths and nobody wants to believe that “defense” is a myth that tricked their friends/family into participating in said mass murder. I was lucky enough to have the financial and emotional support to spend a year just working on myself, but i still have times where something will remind me of what I’ve seen and been part of and all I can do is hide myself and cry, and it still makes me uncomfortably furious when I hear people who have never experienced meaningful violence in their lives wish it upon others. I completely understand why some people who get home and immediately have to work to survive turn to a career with people who can at least understand/accept them and their trauma. It can feel like the only other option is isolation until inevitable suicide.
That’s such a valuable perspective, thanks for sharing your experience.
The fact that the people pushing against Platner—by mischaracterizing his personal growth and discounting his trauma—are the very people who sent you guys to war unnecessarily, makes it even more infuriating. This is a disgusting move from Democratic leadership.
His website has some good policy positions.
He wants election finance reform, believes in environmental protections, medicare for all, protecting small businesses and is anti-billionaire. Seems like the right kind of anti-establishment populist and it’s refreshing to see someone so unapologetically progressive.
Discussion point: Graham Platner has some very questionable aspects to their backstory.
I say this as both an unabashed leftist, and a veteran. I was downloading MP3’s of Democracy Now! and discussing Zinn with my section chief in 2003.
I propose the following material for review:
Don Lemon and Wajahat on the matter of Portner
I say this as someone who has met with Platner and as part of an organization I volunteer with, we endorsed Platner about 5 days before this came out. I’ve been on the endorsements committee, and we’ve never previously had to rescind an endorsement.
I’m interested in what you, Lemmy, have to say on this matter.
The four tours and Blackwater employment made him a Nazi before his tattoos did 😮💨
Four tours, as a veteran, like… I’m not excusing it, but some of the most anti-fascist people I know did multiple tours. I saw the writing on the wall and didn’t re-enlist but everyone’s situation and place that they are is different.
Of the people who have done several orders of magnitude more work to stop fascism, real, physical, on the ground work, all of them are military service members who saw active duty. One did two tours, and was at Falluja, and another had his humvee blown up from underneath him when command told his company to go drive a road they knew for a fact had IED’s. One went on to be a DJ (actually he might do lighting idk), the other became a nurse and worked directly with Dr. Faucci at the CDC. Both were raised extremely conservative, and because they were given an opportunity to become a person they actually wanted to be, they changed.
I think Platner isn’t as skilled at avoiding establishment Democrat smear campaigns as Mamdani is.
From someone with absolutely no horse in this race I feel this is looking a gift horse in the mouth. No matter how bad he turns out to be (which, yeah, I don’t think I’m convinced he’ll be a principled anti-imperialist in office), he’s not going to outdo establishment democrats by much. The way American democracy is going it’s worth the bet, I think.
I think we have to be very careful who we vote for these days. All candidates and parties are leaning into dishonesty and misdirection even more than usual, as they can see it being so very successful in the recent past, and they will continue to use it and push the boundaries on how much and how blatant manipulations they can get away with. What they say and what they actually do are trending in very divergent directions.
On the other hand, when we start looking for non-establishment candidates who haven’t been vetted and groomed for most of their professional lives, we need to understand that many of them, being actual humans, are going to have been wrong and stupid in the past, as we all are sometimes, and some of those things may be forgivable and some may not. In the age of social media, this is almost guaranteed to happen. The internet always remembers, and oppo research is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
One of the things I think we need to remember in this case is that some humans are still genuine creatures of thoughts and feelings and emotions that don’t always immediately lead us to a good place, and that people can and should improve and change and grow throughout their lives as their experiences do. If I was going to be judged on the political ideology I supported when I was an idiotic 15 year old no one would ever take me seriously ever again. But that might be a mistake. Because I like to think that I’ve grown quite a bit since then. I’ve read Plato’s Republic, understood most of it, and agreed with some of it. I consume a lot of information from a wide variety of sources, some of that information is not so good and sometimes it leads me astray. I’ll take responsibility for those mistakes, and I’ll genuinely try to do better. And I think other people should be given at least the opportunity to own their mistakes too. Instead of immediately dismissing somebody that said some bad shit once upon a time, go to the next step and ask them what they think about it now. Then ask them why they changed their mind, which is the much more important part I think.
Granted, some people are just predators and opportunists, and will say whatever they think their current audience wants to hear, including what you want to hear. Distinguishing these types of the people from the people who have genuinely changed is not easy and I don’t have an easy answer for how to do it. I’m wrong most of the time when I try too. I don’t pretend to be a good judge of character.
I’m preaching this point of view in the hopes that other people, who are perhaps better judges of character than I am, can find some way to identify the difference themselves. Because we desperately need to find a way to put some genuine people in leadership roles. Our current system of democracy clearly isn’t doing it. For this moment in history, I think we need a philosopher-king.
I think I agree strongly with this. The dude has MUCH explaining to do, but he deserves the oppurtunity to do so. When I’ve seen him speak publically, he’s a once in a lifetime speaker. But dude did get nazi tattoo. Dude did work for blackwater. Those are extraordinary things, which he also hasn’t denied or deflected.
And extraordinary things require extraordinary explanation. I don’t think these are deal breakers, but surely a period of explanation and reflection is warranted.
Follow the money. Maybe he’s a shill and maybe not, but at this point I’d be very surprised if the oligarchy relied solely on voter appeal to get their candidate in office. If the usual suspects start running the usual “he’s a communist” campaign then I’d say it’s pretty safe they don’t support him.
the usual “he’s a communist”
They running that at the same time they saying he’s a secret nazi
either a Nazi or a dumbass, neither make a good candidate imo.
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt until I actually saw the tattoo on his chest. That isn’t some generic skull artwork, that is literally the totenkopf. Even the swastika has more ambiguity than this does. There is no way the dude went that long without knowing what it was and had more than plenty of time to remove the tattoo before making a push for the senate. If he wants to regret the decision and make amends thats great but he gets to start with his local council or some other low level political office and work his way up. Only by doing that can he prove that symbol does not reflect his worldview
I suppose that depends where you are from. In the US almost no average person could tell you what the totenkoph is. Let alone ID it. Everyone could ID a swastika. Though not tell the difference between Sanskrit or Nazi.
I had to look it up to remind myself even. I’m most familiar with it as a piece of iconography the neo folk group Death In June has used several times.
I mean I could not have told you that it was a white nationalist symbol. It just looked like a cartoon skull to me.
thats great but he gets to start with his local council or some other low level political office and work his way up
So I saw this being put out by a (former) Republican turned Democrat consultant on a podcast yesterday. It smacks of the kind of gatekeeping that has kept establishment Democrats in control of the party but losing elections for decades.
I understand why we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good but we’re not talking about another Al Franken here. This guy has/had a literal Nazi tattoo and that takes a lot more effort to erase from the sum of actions that equals a person
What’s the issue with mills?
I get the sense she is a business-as-usual Democrat
If elected, she’d be 79 years old when she’d be sworn in as a freshman congressperson. Senate terms are 6 years. Solid shot at another democrat dying in office again with this one
Platner polls well and is much younger and has run very well with young people and progressives. He polls well against the incumbent republican. The talk for months before Mills entered the race was that Schumer was trying to get her to run
Now there’s stuff coming out about Platner and the Maine race may be screwed regardless. Mills is a bad pick anyways. Biden 2020 level pick for the same reason of too old and not setting up younger generations. Even 60 years old is solid for 2-3 terms before you really get scared that they’re going to Dianne Feinstein themselves in office
Can they be dead and burried instead? Replaced by democratic socialists and progressives.
