Here’s Your Proof Both Sides Aren’t The Same
One party punishes sexual assault. The other rewards it.
Just a week before his name was to be placed on the ballot for November, a third major scandal has hit Graham Platner’s Senate campaign. However, unlike his previous controversies, this one isn’t so easily dismissed by a redemption-arc narrative.
While I have not personally had enough time to thoroughly dissect the claims, Maine’s formerly rising progressive superstar has now been accused of drunkenly assaulting, harassing, and gaslighting one of his former lovers. Unlike most spurious claims of misconduct conveniently brought against a leading candidate right before election day, this one apparently comes with receipts — convincing enough at least to cause leading left-wing voices like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to turn their backs on the Marine veteran turned Senate candidate.
Now, even Bernie Sanders himself has asked Graham Platner to step aside.
Some will argue that we all should have seen this coming from miles away. Early in his candidacy, Platner was accused of wearing a Nazi-reminiscent tattoo, which he claimed was an unfortunate relic from his time in the military. More recently, he admitted to sending inappropriate text messages to various women when he and his wife were going through a difficult patch in their relationship.
As someone who lives on the other side of the country and has never even been within smelling distance of Maine, I went from being a harsh skeptic of Platner to being a reluctant believer the longer I listened to him. I can’t begin to imagine how tough it must be right now for Mainers to make sense of this awful news.
No matter what people say, even with the benefit of hindsight, I can still forgive his earlier scandals — at least if they had existed in a vacuum. Putting myself in his shoes, I can understand being peer-pressured by comrades in arms into getting a tattoo I didn’t fully understand the meaning behind. Similarly, I believe claims of infidelity are a strictly personal matter, and in this case, both Platner and his wife say they’ve moved on and grown from the experience. Who am I to judge what an adult couple has settled between themselves privately?
And unlike other recent turncoats like John Fetterman, Platner’s outspoken support for progressive causes like universal healthcare and women’s reproductive rights definitely suggests he might truly be a reformed man, at least in some capacity. After listening to his speeches, abuser and sexist certainly aren’t the first descriptors that come to mind.
Of course, his entire “redemption story” narrative might seem dubious given the newest allegations, but if we can’t provide people and candidates some room to grow and evolve, then what are we actually doing as a movement for change? After winning the Democratic primary, Platner said something along the lines of “If you believe our politics can change, you must also believe that people can change.”
Despite everything that’s happened in the interim, we should still take this message to heart. After all, the last presidential election is proof that there are a whole lot of flawed and broken people in this country — and we surely can’t exile them all permanently. We need to make room for people to better themselves.
Disqualifying someone based on commonly found male character flaws, especially when said person offers a fighting chance to make life better for everyone earning less than seven figures in this country, is the best example of perfection being the enemy of good.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we should get into the habit of electing our own crop of rapists and predators…
No matter how much someone learns or grows from their mistakes, violating consent and disrespecting personal boundaries is a red line our politicians mustn’t cross. If there’s even a small hint of truth to these accusations, and Platner is even half the reformed man he claims to be, then I do believe it’s time for him to read the room and step aside.
Worse, he should have recognized that this was going to be a problem from the very beginning. If this is all true, then what other skeletons could he have hanging in his closet?
Surely his departure from the race is only a matter of time at this point. After all, the Democratic Party of Maine has already pulled its support, and this time, Platner’s defenders are nowhere to be seen. He needed all the support in the world to have any chance of beating the Washington establishment — but now he has nothing.
This story is especially frustrating because Democrats have a moral imperative to unseat his Republican counterpart, Susan Collins, a Trump enabler who has served in Congress for about as long as I’ve been alive. Her votes have sent Americans to die in pointless wars in the Middle East, appointed radical Supreme Court justices responsible for overturning the national right to abortion, and most recently helped strip health insurance away from millions of families.
Moreover, Brett Kavanaugh, whom Susan Collins cast the deciding vote to confirm to the Supreme Court, also battled claims of drunken sexual misconduct during his vetting process. On that occasion, all he had to do was tell senators “I like beer” to get his lifetime appointment.
Even if the accusations against Platner are all true, he’s still arguably a saint compared to Collins and her deplorable colleagues.
Graham Platner may or might not be a rapist, but Susan Collins has spent the past three decades partaking in the institutional rape of everything we hold dear. Hell, each time she votes to advance one of Trump’s measures, she’s working hand in hand with the Epstein class itself.
And then there’s the president of the United States — someone who, in his own words, boasted about committing sexual assault on a daily basis in the Access Hollywood Tapes. Someone who was later held liable by a jury of his peers for assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
Someone, mind you, whose name appears in the Epstein files more than any other ‘innocent’ person.
Not once, twice, but thrice, Republicans nonetheless decided this was the man who best represented their moral principles — and who even now deserves to have his face printed on money, passports, and potentially Mount Rushmore itself. That’s who reelecting Susan Collins empowers.
That said, there’s no room for whataboutism here. The predator mindset is incompatible with the politics of liberal democracy, and we mustn’t pretend otherwise. Red or blue, rape is never something we should forgive or normalize, even if that’s what Republicans do. Tattoos and text messages are indicative of redeemable character flaws, but drunken sexual assault is an entirely different story.
Still, we might never know if the accuser is telling the entire truth here; Platner vehemently denies all this, so there might still be more to his redemption story than we’re giving him credit for. Innocent until proven guilty, as they say, but given the ghoulish crop of villains in D.C., the political standard often works the other way around for good reason.
We already gave him the benefit of the doubt twice in the past year. Three times, involving something as serious as SA no less, is really pushing it.
If things look bad from the outside, they’re probably worse in reality.
He could be the victim of another elaborate smear campaign, or be keeping a secret shrine to Hitler in his basement. Sadly, for myself and the millions of other voters across the country, we never really know who these people are behind closed doors.
However, this story very clearly establishes one thing: both sides are definitely NOT the same. For Democrats and progressives, mere allegations of sexual misconduct are enough to sink even the most important of campaigns. For Republicans, on the other hand, rape and pedophilia are practically becoming prerequisites for the job.
Graham Platner stepping aside will surely set back Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate and fending off the forces of fascism this November, but we can only hope that voters will ultimately reward them for doing the right thing, something the other side has been completely allergic to.
In a perfect world, Platner stepping down should give a head start to whoever becomes his successor, especially if they run on the same blue-collar platform.
On the other hand, as we all know too well, the United States is the farthest thing from a perfect world right now, and if the 2024 election is any indication, any 11th-hour change of candidates is likely to be a losing proposition given humanity’s declining attention span.
In other words, Susan Collins, one of the wickedest witches in all of D.C., might win another undeserved term in the Senate because Democrats held their candidates to a higher ethical standard.
No matter what happens, I guess we can at least rest more easily in the camps, knowing we had the moral high ground in the end.
And as an extra word of advice, if you or a loved one has ever been sexually assaulted by a major political candidate, could you please find the strength to document and share that history as early on as possible? It’s never easy to come out about that kind of trauma, but doing so when voters have a chance to make a course correction could spare hundreds of thousands of other people from making the same mistake and allowing an untrustworthy abuser into their lives.
It’s exactly that kind of unusual timing — with the most serious accusations coming out only after the primary concluded — that leaves me at least partially doubting the victim’s story. Nevertheless, who am I to question the advice of Bernie Sanders? If Platner is guilty as charged, he owes all of us a tremendous apology — and should never show his face in public again.