Platner’s Progressive Götterdämmerung

Posted on | July 11, 2026 | No Comments

This week saw the final collapse of Graham Platner and what some have called his “Maine Kampf” Senate campaign. The causes and ramifications of that political debacle have been widely discussed. Miranda Devine:

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. . . .

(Hat-tip: Hot Air Headlines.) Some of us didn’t need this latest scandal to know the Democrats were hypocrites, but perhaps the Platner episode will convince some hitherto naïve persons that they shouldn’t trust claims of moral superiority from the party of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, et al.

Among other things, we have learned that the progressive activist who recruited Platner for the Senate campaign has himself been previously accused of offensive sexual behavior, which is similarly not surprising. Thursday, before Platner announced he was ending his campaign, I became intrigued by how progressives were missing the lesson in all this:

Amanda Litman is a Democratic Party operative who worked on President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and directed email fundraising for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign. After that debacle, Litman launched Run for Something, a 501(c)4 “dedicated to recruiting and supporting young candidates running for down-ballot office. Its mission is to get young progressive candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to run for and win state and local offices, and create a next generation slate of political candidates that will seek higher office in the future.”
What drew my attention to Litman was, first, her assertion that “everyone made mistakes” regarding scandal-wracked Graham Platner, who won last month’s primary in Maine to become the Democratic Party’s challenger to incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Did everyone really make mistakes about Platner? Or by that sweeping categorical statement, did Litman mean just the Democratic campaign operative class of which she is a member? Because I am pretty sure there weren’t many Republicans who were mistaken about what a complete dirtbag Platner is. Certainly I was not.
But it was Litman’s second post that really intrigued me: Why is “beating Susan Collins … the top priority”? Did Litman even think about that sentence before she posted it? Susan Collins is the most liberal Republican in Congress, and the only reason any Democrat would regard her defeat as “the top priority” is because this is necessary for Democrats to win a majority in the Senate. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest Substack column and, as always, while you’re over there, please sign up for a free subscription (if you’re not subscribed already), or maybe consider upgrading to a paid subscription. So far, I haven’t put any Substack content behind a paywall, mainly because I hate paywalls, but at some point I might think up something worth categorizing as “premium content.”

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