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What Graham Platner Said When a Trans Mainer Asked: 'Will You Stand Up for Me?'
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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No they rightfully see Nazi symbology and go "Nazi?".
You're the performative outrage section it seems.
The tattoo dates to roughly 2009, IIRC. The Daily Wire and a few other far-right shitrags have published hysterical pieces about him--via his Reddit account--talking about training the Maine chapter of the Socialist Rifle Club in firearms use and safety in 2020. Or, as they said, "antifa". And the SRA IS notably anti-fascist in their ideology (I'm sure that some percentage of them are tankies, but the org as a whole doesn't seem to be authoritarian), and very pro-LGBTQ+. The turned up photos of one of the events that these publications are saying he's in. (I can't tell, TBH; the photos aren't that good. He could be, but I can't say for certain.)
So the problem you run headlong into here is, if he secretly has/had Nazi beliefs at one time, sufficient to get a tattoo signifying such, why would be be training SRA members?
In addition to that, everything he was posting on Reddit appears to say he's not a Nazi. Some of the stuff is questionable (slurs, for instance, although those are probably still commonly used in the military), but most people that are fascists don't hide that shit when they're posting "anonymously". And the account was deleted in 2021, four years before he declared for a Senate run. If he was planning a con, that's a looooooooong time to be building an anti-fascist online persona before it gets any kind of payoff.
Also, if you're planning such a long con to pretend to be antifascist, surely covering up your Nazi tattoo would be first thing on the list. The fact that he didn't, despite his history of opposing fascism, tells me that he honestly didn't know.
TBH, I'm not sure I would have recognized that as a Nazi symbol prior to a group of people I knew arguing about Death In June. Some were arguing that the band was fine, some were arguing that the band was pro-fash. The second group was using the band's iconography--including a totenkopf--as part of their evidence. The first group was claiming that it was satirical. (FWIW, Death In June had a long history of collaboration with Boyd Rice, who is an out-and-proud fascist, which is pretty strong evidence all on its own.) That was around 2010 or so.
If I hadn't been part of that, I can't say when it would have broken my threshold of consciousness.