The Oysters Come Home to Roost
What happens when voters learn to tune out accusations of antisemitism?
Graham Platner’s campaign has momentum. Less than a year after some out-of-state operatives got Platner’s number from his mother and convinced him to run for Senate, the populist-branded oyster farmer is the frontrunner to win Maine’s open seat this year. The political neophyte leads most polls for both the nomination and the general election, including a splashy recent survey showing Platner with a commanding 38-point mandate over Governor Janet Mills in the June Democratic primary and an 11-point lead against Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November. This week brought an endorsement from Ruben Gallego, a boon for the campaign both because of Gallego’s prominence within the Democratic Party and because he would seem to more ideologically aligned with Mills than Platner.
On its face, it’s a coup for the American left. Platner is rising in the polls while running as an unapologetic progressive — the kind I would normally be excited to vote for — in a purple-ish state. A guy who entered the race with virtually no name recognition is now favored against the sitting governor for his party’s nomination, and is leading (and running far ahead of his more-moderate primary opponent) against a fifth-term incumbent in the general. He is a one-man rebuke to the consultant-class consensus that tripling down on technocratic centrism at the expense of the grassroots left is the Democrats’ best hope for retaking power.
Yet Platner is also known for his ties to a different party. Video unearthed last fall revealed that he had a Totenkopf, an infamous Nazi insignia, tattooed on his chest. Platner claimed he was drunk when he got it in 2007 and did not know what it was. This may be literally true, but it is at least a conspicuous lie of omission. It strains credulity that someone with Platner’s interest in military iconography, to the point where he used to spend his time debating the significance of other allegedly fascist tattoos on Reddit, would not have recognized what was on his chest once he sobered up, let alone at any point in the 18 years following his Croatian bender. Platner’s own former campaign director gives no credence to his plea of ignorance — “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff.” — and Platner’s old friend reported that the candidate had referred to his ink as “my Totenkopf.” Such dishonesty also preemptively undermines any suggestion that he has sincerely taken accountability for the supposed mistake. And even if you believe Platner’s story, it’s telling that his reaction to finding out was to start the PR damage control before he covered up the grotesque emblem, a strange Yglesiasesque reflex at odds with how any reasonable person would react to discovering an accidental connection to white supremacists.
Platner makes it very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. In January he appeared on infamous antisemitic conspiracy-monger Nate Cornacchia’s podcast. Perhaps there’s something to be said for exposing Cornacchia’s audience to more-progressive views, but that doesn’t explain Platner describing himself as a “longtime fan.” A month later Platner retweeted Stew Peters, a white nationalist so notorious that the Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a warning page about him, crowing that their shared opposition to war with Iran “brings Republican and Democratic politicians together.” To say nothing of Platner’s own lengthy history of bigoted internet comments.
I can buy that Platner genuinely thinks these stories do not represent his true ideology. Maybe he’s an edgelord troll. Maybe it’s a campaign strategy: Platner’s habit of disavowing his own dog whistles could explain why he peels off so much support from Collins, who also loves expressing empty concerns about the bigots with whom she chooses to align. Maybe he’s simply too stupid or too coddled by yes men to realize how deeply offensive his actions are. Ultimately it isn’t irrelevant. History has a term for people who do not believe in white supremacy yet willfully associate themselves with Nazis. They are called “Nazis.”
Not long ago, such revelations would have been universally understood as disqualifying for public office. Even in the Republican Party — recall John McCain rejecting an endorsement from John Hagee, the pastor who claimed “God sent Hitler” to spur Jewish migration to the Middle East — and especially among Democrats and on the left. So how is Platner leading in the polls? Why is he being endorsed by Bernie Sanders, who as far as much of the country is concerned is the face of the American left? How did a man who sported a Totenkopf for 18 years successfully brand himself as a folksy progressive?
It starts with a familiar factor in modern politics: People are mad. Mills and Collins represent continuity for voters who want change. One is an unpopular governor, the other the personification of meek acquiescence to the loud drumbeat of fascism. The clearest throughline of the last decade or so of American politics is that frustrated voters will pick an unsavory outsider over a more-genteel establishment pol who sees the status quo as fundamentally sound. To return to one timely example, an easy way to prevent antiwar voters from gravitating towards someone who consorts with Stew Peters would be for the other leading candidates to offer more than mere milquetoast procedural objections to the incredibly unpopular conflict with Iran, instead of leaving Platner as the lone voice in the race speaking against the conflict on moral grounds.
But Platner’s rise is also an ominous, foreseeable consequence of a disturbing cultural movement: A preponderance of false allegations of antisemitism has desensitized our society to the legitimate hate our community faces.
The argument that Zionism and Judaism are one in the same, and therefore that criticism of the Israeli government is fundamentally antisemitic, is not new. Nor is it unanimous within our community. But it gained more salience after the attacks of October 7, 2023, as Israel claimed to act in our name in its retaliatory devastation of Gaza. Many of us condemned the destruction as against our Jewish values. Others hardened in their certitude of Israel’s righteousness. Leaders from both parties prefer to listen to the latter camp not because they are under the thumb of a Zionist cabal but because tokenizing us so aids their own ideological agendas. It is important to tread carefully here, as there is a fine line between acknowledging the complex and heterogenous significance of Zionism within the Jewish diaspora and sounding like what Platner listens to in the car.
One of the problems with using antisemitism to mean the belief that Palestinians are people is that invoking it ceases to carry weight. Most within our community seemed to agree that antisemitism played a role in the stories of peaceful Jewish protestors being arrested, assaulted, and evicted from their sukkot across college campuses. Yet perversely, many thought the label applied to the students who were targeted for their beliefs, not the officials and sometimes-violent counterprotestors who harassed them. The Anti-Defamation League was once a respected institution, advocating against bigotry and hatred towards not just Jews but other marginalized groups. The ADL’s pivot to Zionism as a first principle has so corrupted their purported mission that last year they declined to condemn Elon Musk’s Inauguration Day Nazi salutes out of deference to their ideological allies in the incoming Trump administration.
Is it any wonder that people are increasingly willing to shrug of a Totenkopf? This phenomenon was sadly entirely predictable. As I wrote last year:
I would never accuse these members of our community of not being truly Jewish based on how they interpret our professed ideals, a principle not all of them reciprocate towards those critical of Israel. But I would ask them, and any gentiles who believe in good faith that Zionism is the primary criterion of anti-antisemitism, to think through this Faustian bargain. At a time when anti-Jewish hatred is so prevalent — including among some pro-Palestinian activists, a nuance that gets obscured while debating the broad allegations against the movement at large — will it make us safer if gentiles are conditioned not to take allegations of antisemitism seriously?
It is one thing for us Jews to litigate such things amongst ourselves. It is grosser still when gentiles insist on defining antisemitism for us. And yet! Whether in an (increasingly poorly calibrated) attempt to win votes, as a vehicle for making Islamophobia sound more politically correct, or in service of hastening a prophesied armageddon, Christian politicians on both sides of the aisle have the chutzpah to lecture us about Judaism when it suits their interests. From Donald Trump’s thinly veiled pretext for authoritarian crackdowns to Joe Biden’s decades-old lust for war in the Middle East to Ritchie Torres insisting that those opposed to the carnage in Gaza are not really Jewish, these goys who cry wolf are teaching Americans to roll their eyes at accusations of antisemitism. Again, this was eminently foreseeable. As I wrote two years ago:
I dread a world where gentiles grow up believing Biden’s representation of our people’s values. I wonder whether the President intends his strange, repeated insistence that Jewish Americans’ safety depends on Israel as a dog-whistle of othering, or whether he truly does not see protecting us as within his purview. And I am concerned for a future where gentiles do not take antisemitism seriously, if repeatedly invoking the term in the name of Zionism desensitizes our culture to actual discrimination against Jewish people.
What’s more, Platner is hardly the first high-profile Democrat to dabble in Nazi ideology in recent years, and most such transgressions have come not from the left but the center. (I emphasize the Democrats here not because the Republican Party is free of such sins, but because white nationalism no longer counts as a scandal in today’s GOP.) Joe Biden undercounted the death toll of the Shoah by over three full orders of magnitude when he called the attacks of October 7 “as consequential as the Holocaust.” His advisor Michael McFaul bafflingly remained a cable-news guest in good standing after insisting on The Rachel Maddow Show that “Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans.” Three years ago, liberal pundits scrambled to distance themselves from conservative writer Richard Hanania after his white-supremacist pseudonymous writing came to light; now Gavin Newsom, the governor of the largest state in the country and favorite for the 2028 nomination, is retweeting him. Perhaps most grotesquely of all, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the two highest-ranking Democratic legislators in the country, co-headlined a pro-Israel rally with John Hagee — the same “God sent Hitler” pastor whom John McCain was shamed into disavowing within my lifetime.
Here two wrongs certainly do not make a right. There is no virtue in condoning a progressive’s dalliances with white supremacy just because moderate Democrats received no pushback for theirs. But the inverse is also true. If you look the other way at centrists’ Nazi apologia, how can you have any credibility in condemning Platner?
Last year’s New York City mayoral election served as an interesting test case of these phenomena, for better and worse. It’s clearly a positive for both the city and broader society that voters saw through the bad-faith efforts to smear Zohran Mamdani as antisemitic. But these disingenuous allegations crowded out a more-important discussion about his opponent’s actual bigotry. How did Andrew Cuomo, who was once known as hostile to the Jewish community and referred to us as “these people and their fucking tree houses,” position himself as the anti-antisemitic candidate? And baseless as the attacks against Mamdani were, what happens when voters learn that accusations of antisemitism can be ignored? Graham Platner can’t wait to find out.
There’s a fine line between understanding and rationalizing. It should (though evidently does not) go without saying that disingenuousness from Zionist leaders and hypocrisy from other parts of the political spectrum is not a good reason to condone what even a Platner defender must concede is at least a conspicuous proximity to bigotry. Leftist political commentators who have been gassing him up, like Naomi Klein and the staff of Jacobin, certainly know better. These broader issues are absolutely not exculpatory for Bernie Sanders, whose bewildering dismissals of the significance of the Totenkopf and stubborn loyalty to a man who by historical standards would be uncontroversially labeled a Nazi ought to be considered legacy-redefining betrayals of the movement he inspired.
I’m fortunate to be mostly surrounded by people who understand that an SS symbol is a dealbreaker. I’ve heard only one person I know defend Platner: “His in-laws are Jews,” they told me after the tattoo scandal broke. Of course having Jewish family by marriage means you can’t possibly be antisemitic, which is why Donald Trump famously never associates with Nazis. (I wonder how Platner’s in-laws feel about Stew Peters.) Yet looking at Maine polls, my experience is plainly not universal. And without remotely condoning this choice, when a cynical electorate is trained to assume that allegations of antisemitism are cast in bad faith, it isn’t surprising that voters brush them off.
Some of Platner’s detractors argue that he could be a second John Fetterman, another outsider with a racist past who campaigned as a populist progressive yet now votes as the most-conservative Democrat in the Senate. I think this critique misses the point. My biggest fears about Platner’s likely election are that we as a society decide that being chest-deep in white nationalism is not disqualifying for public office; and that when our current political moment ends and the next generation of leaders reckons with how to move forward, the party that is ostensibly opposed to such bigotry will prefer settling for something less than the banishment of Nazism from polite society to reckoning with the junior senator from the Pine Tree State.
I resent the notion that the left should be held accountable for disavowing Platner, just as it should not be my responsibility as a non-Zionist Jewish American to clarify that I do not support Israel’s genocide. But I feel an obligation to push back when such bad actors claim to represent me. I will not participate in the normalization of white supremacy, nor the continued trivialization of the hate my community faces. Whatever their ideology or religion, it’s a shanda that so many civic leaders are unwilling to say the same.