Keep in mind that this crowd has increasingly jumped onto the rhetoric that originated from some segments of the radical left over the past couple of years when they started using “tankie” as a bogeyman term and they very often accuse tankies of supporting anyone who flies the red flag. I know that there are also a lot of SocDem/DemSocs and adjacent people who are defending Platner right now too and they make the same accusations.

One day it’s “You guys will support anyone who claims they are communist, disgusting!!” and the next day it’s “No but we need to support the guy who calls himself a communist, despite significant evidence that he has fascist sympathies, so therefore any criticism of him is purity politicking.”

I’m loath to invoke this hackneyed term but it’s a legit case Schrödinger’s Socialist: we get attacked for supporting anyone and everyone who uses a label like socialist and yet the minute we say that a person who claims to be socialist doesn’t pass the sniff test then suddenly we’re gatekeeping the left etc. etc.