The party of Me Too has shown its true face in the rolling Graham Platner scandal.
Now that a liberal woman has credibly accused him of rape, the rats have deserted the sinking ship and the Democrat-endorsed US Senate candidate for Maine has dropped out.
But it’s “Me Too” late to save face.
Conservatives always knew the left’s effort to assert moral superiority on matters of sex, race and ideology were play-acting but now it’s undeniable for even their most blinkered supporters.
The Democratic Party’s defense of Platner to the bitter end against an avalanche of rape and sexual abuse allegations, not to mention his Nazi tattoo, has left them exposed as hypocrites.
They weaponize moral outrage against the right while rationalizing far worse on their own side.
They waved away reports of Platner’s issues with women when they first surfaced two months ago in the form of Reddit posts in which he downplayed sexual assault and suggested victims had themselves to blame if they got drunk.
These disturbing comments were dismissed as old and irrelevant, and were excused on the pretext that Platner was suffering from PTSD, an insult to military veterans who don’t treat rape like a legitimate spoil of masculinity.
In any case, Platner, 41, wrote the posts a decade ago when he was old enough to know better.
Sen. John Fetterman was the lone voice in the Democratic Party calling out Platner from the start as a “creep” and “dirtbag.”
Fetterman dubbed him “P Hustle,” the name Platner used on Kik, a grooming messaging app for underage kids where he sent explicit messages for a decade, and as recently as last year.
‘Good, decent man’?
When Platner was revealed to have cheated on his new wife by sexting at least six women after getting married in 2023, Democrats said he was “a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown.”
A month ago, when The New York Times published its soft-soap catch-and-kill story in which multiple ex-girlfriends euphemistically described “unsettling” encounters with Platner, including physical intimidation, Democrats again excused Platner by attacking a victim, conservative Lyndsey Fifield.
The Times chose to highlight Fifield while burying the graphic rape claim of another alleged victim, Jenny Racicot, a liberal ex-girlfriend of Platner who might have attracted more sympathy from their readers.
“Seems like a lot of nothing,” Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said of the Times’ piece.
“The only one who had anything to say that seemed unsettling was a woman who works for right-wing political operations.”
By design, as Fifield would later bitterly complain.
It was that betrayal by the Times that persuaded Racicot to come forward again this week to catalog her shocking rape claim.
She alleged to Politico and CNN that a drunken Platner entered her rural home uninvited one night in 2021, grabbed her pelvis and forcibly raped her despite her repeated pleas for him to stop.
The vaunted Times — the media outlet that most energetically prosecuted the Me Too explosion in the last decade — has equally been exposed for staggering hypocrisy.
Times reporter Jodi Kantor, who won a Pulitzer for her Me Too takedowns, opined to CNN last month that Platner wasn’t guilty of Me Too infractions because “they were mostly made in the context of consensual relationships.”
That’s OK then.
It was this kind of endorsement from the gatekeepers of left-wing morality that allowed Platner to stay in the race — until Wednesday.
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Warning was ignored
The Nazi tattoo he proudly sported for almost two decades should have been a warning, but Democrats cared only about power.
“My Totenkopf,” he would say in a German accent, and reportedly called his penis “Mein Fuhrer.”
The hypocrisy from the same people who accused Elon Musk of giving a “Nazi salute” when he innocently raised his arm on stage at a Trump rally, and who rail against Trump and MAGA Republicans as fascists, is astonishing.
“He’s my kind of man,” purred lefty Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Platner.
He sure is, and Democrats are saddled with his legacy.
They are back where they were in June 2024, held hostage by a fatally flawed candidate who blew himself up at the 11th hour and then demanded he choose his own successor.
They haven’t learned a thing from the Biden family fiasco.
Again, they only have themselves to blame for trying to fool the voters with a candidate who was not what he appeared to be.
Joe Biden was not honest, modest or moderate.
He just pretended to be.
He was not the grown-up in the room who would end the chaos and unify the country.
He was a divisive revolutionary with cognitive problems who flung open the border and wreaked damage on this country that will take a generation to get over.
Similarly, Platner was not a working-class “oysterman” with a heart of gold, but an alleged rapist, rabid Communist antisemite and proven pathological liar born with a silver spoon in his mouth who recklessly abused his privilege all his life.
Like so many spoiled rich kids, he never grew up.
His mother’s restaurant was reportedly his only oyster customer and his father paid for his house.
“Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” said Daniel Moraff, the ex-Bernie Sanders staffer and socialist recruiter who “discovered” Platner.
Times columnist Michelle Goldberg admitted this week Platner’s appeal was “working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics.”
A commie in a Mainer costume.
“This guy is an authentic man,” gushed Sen. Ruben Gallego.
No, Platner cosplayed authenticity with his flannel shirts and gravelly voice.
He was a caricature of what the left thinks is an authentic white working-class man — a marginal upgrade from Tim Walz.
After demonizing masculinity for a decade, Democrats have driven authentic men out of their party and can’t even recognize the real thing anymore.
They insulted men and the working class by insisting that a person of Platner’s low-character represented their values.
Hilariously, it didn’t work.
The white working-class voters who are key to winning the light blue state smelled a phony, despite his vow to fight “corporate greed” and the billionaire “oligarchy.”
Platner was trailing Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins by 23 points with white non-college-educated voters, according to a Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll released last week.
If he hadn’t dropped out and his polls hadn’t been tanking, chances are Dems would still circle the wagons around their Frankenstein monster.
They’d hold their nose and vote for the devil if the devil could beat Donald Trump.
That is their sole moral calculus these days and the source of their party’s collapse.
Instead of coming up with alternative policies for the betterment of the country, they just lazily lean into the Trump Derangement Syndrome they have stoked in their base for a decade.
It worked in 2020 when they tricked the electorate with “Honest Joe” Biden, but like the Iranians with the Strait of Hormuz, it’s a trump card you can only play once.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
