The Platner Class
Those Who Brought Us the Disaster in Maine Should Never Be Allowed to Repeat It
The campaign of Graham Platner for the U.S. Senate in Maine has come to its inevitable dénouement. A deeply-flawed human being who was plucked out of obscurity by a clutch of out-of-state carpetbaggers has brought chaos and upheaval to a contest that is key to the Democrats’ hopes of retaking the Senate and putting the brakes on the murderous buffoonery of the most corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history.
But even as shocking as Platner’s transgressions, proven and alleged are - from allegedly raping a girlfriend to abusing and imprisoning another partner to getting a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo and then lying about to blaming women for their own rapes - I think, as much as his own personal demons and actions are to blame, the story of what is transpiring in Maine is one of usurpation: Of local agency, of working-class identity and of a group of self-promoting grifters whose main task is a hostile takeover of Democratic Party politics in order to live out the revenge fantasies that animate their own disordered personalities.
For all of his severe flaws, Platner didn’t force himself on Maine’s Democratic primary voters, who handed him a thumping victory only last month. He was recruited, and how and by whom - and the continuing activities of these individuals - is worthy of examination.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last month, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan - their official titles were listed as “Senior Strategist” and “Volunteer Coordinator,” respectively - spoke of their process for selecting Platner as a candidate to run against Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has been in office since 1997. According to their story, Fan “found” Platner via a video for his oyster farm, with Moraff (the grandson of Toys “R” Us founder Seymour Ginsburg) adding that “a healthy contempt for existing Democratic Party infrastructure is really essential” in his criteria for selecting candidates. When asked how they went about vetting Platner, the pair giggled and responded “We paid a nice firm a whole chunk of money and got some stuff back. Some of what you’ve seen on the news we got back. Some stuff we didn’t.” The exchange with the Journal’s reporter Aaron Zitner continues:
Did the vetting process turn up the tattoo that became so controversial?
No.
The Reddit posts, did that turn up in the vetting process?
The firm sent us a thing that had some of the posts but it didn’t have all of them.
And what did you think about that? How did you think your way through that he had posted these things on social media?
I said none of this will or should stop him being a U.S. senator.
And what was your thinking there?
I think that if what the voters wanted was people grown in vats who have never done or said anything they regretted in their entire lives, we would have a very different country
The expedited, bare-bones review that Moraff ordered reportedly was completed in only a few days, rather than the standard deep dive that would take weeks and the slapdash approach did not, as we have seen, do Platner any favours as a client or a human being. At the time of the interview with the Journal, controversy had already been swirling around Platner for a variety of reasons, including Reddit posts (many of which surfaced last October) which revealed him saying, among other things, that rape victims should “just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” The unearthing of the posts led to the resignation of the campaign’s political director, Genevieve McDonald. Then there was the aforementioned tattoo, which Platner said in an interview last October on Pod Save America - a political podcast hosted by former Barack Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer that worked fervently to boost his candidacy - he had gotten during a drunken night in Croatia in 2007 not fully realizing its association with Nazi Germany. This contention was rejected both by a former girlfriend, who said he was well aware of its meaning, and McDonald, who said Platner “knows damn well what it means.” Within days of the interview Moraff and Fan gave to the Journal, the New York Times reported a litany of abusive behavior by Platner towards ex-romantic partners, including grabbing them and holding one on a room against her will.
Daniel Moraff has a documented history as an activist for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and has been publicly advocating that the group engage in an entryist takeover of the Democratic Party for nearly a decade. In a 2017 article titled “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries” that first appeared in In These Times (it has since seemingly mysteriously disappeared from its website), Moraff writes that “the Democratic Party is deeply flawed and repellent to left challenges—but it still offers the easiest path for socialists to win elections and build power now,” before going on to advise the DSA to “adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces—forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party.”
Some charge Moraff has been willing to cross ethical lines to chase his political objectives. According to Mike Elk a labor reporter who founded the website Payday Report, in September 2022, Moraff, who he knew slightly from working on the campaign of Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee, contacted him to ask him ask him to delete anti-Trump comments that Bryan Pietzrak, a General Electric locomotive factory worker who Moraff was trying to convince to run for Congress in Erie, Pennsylvania, had made to the website. Elk goes on to say
Moraff explained at length that Pietzrak’s quote against Trump could hurt his chances of appealing to Trump voters in Erie. I told him deleting a quote as a political favor would violate journalistic ethics. He insisted I do it even after I said no. Cajoling me, Moraff told me that, “No one would know that I deleted the quote.” I told him that wasn’t the issue, and that it was unethical, so I refused. He told me to forget the conversation and never mention it to anyone. It’s important to know Moraff asked me to lie for a candidate he was recruiting. Given what happened with Platner, I think the incident with Moraff asking me to lie is important. If Moraff felt comfortable asking me, someone that he didn’t know that well, to lie, it means that he possibly got influencers and journalists in the past to lie on his behalf.
Another key player in Platner’s rise was the New York-based political strategist Morris Katz, cofounder of the political consulting firm Fight Agency, whose has closely worked with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and who, in an interview last November with NPR, dismissed concerns about Planter by saying that the candidate represented “real people who haven’t thought they were going to run for office [and who] have lived imperfect lives.” Katz claimed Platner spoke to a “real craving for real human beings who are relatable and authentic, flaws and all.” Katz went on to say that Platner was “the exact kind of Democrat, the exact kind of person that we have been talking about since 2016” and assailed that “the response is to attack him, to take things out of context, to throw everything you’ve got at him, despite the excitement he’s bringing, despite what he’s bringing to this party.”
Beyond the controversies surrounding him, the narrative that Moraff and Katz - two children of privilege - were tying to spin about Platner as some kind of working-class man of the people was itself a lie, as a profile in GQ last October outlined in some detail:
He does not hail from a line of oyster farmers: his father, Bronson Platner, is a prominent local attorney who ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council in Ellsworth, and his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a popular restaurateur. Platner’s grandfather Warren—Bronson’s father—was a leading modernist architect who designed interiors for the Ford Foundation and, most famously, Windows on the World, the restaurant that sat atop the old World Trade Center. At the time of his death in 2006, according to The New York Times, he was working on a new shopping center in Greece.
Both Moraff and Katz are said to have created a toxic work environment around Platner’s campaign, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday
Treatment of staff by Moraff and Katz became an increasing source of friction inside the campaign, according to several former staffers. Women on the campaign told Platner he was being managed by advisers who treated them unfairly and didn’t value their ideas, according to some of the former staffers and texts viewed by the Journal. Some directly raised their concerns with Platner, who was sympathetic but sided with his advisers, these people said. [Paige Loud], one of those women, raised concerns specifically regarding Moraff. “I reached out to Graham, who I’d become very close to at that point, and was just like, ‘Hey, you have a very sexist, misogynistic staff.’”
But beyond Moraff, Lam and Katz, there was a whole ecosystem of media and elected officials that went to bat for Platner time and again and mocked those who argued that the problematic aspects of Platner’s history that had surfaced were worthy of attention.
“Graham Plater isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man,” wrote Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau [Hunter Biden once memorably described Favreau and the show’s other principles as “four white millionaires dining out on their association with Barack Obama from 16 years ago”] Last month, Zaid Jilani, a former reporter at left-wing outlet the Intercept, mocked the reports of Platner’s mistreatment of women, writing “He’s running for Senate not Boyfriend In Chief. You rich people are obsessed with superficial crap.” The antisemitic, misogynistic Twitch streamer Hassan Piker denounced what he charged was “the manufactured scandals around Platner” as being a plot to “take out a left populist anti-zionist candidate,” while the journalist Mehdi Hasan attacked what he called was a “massive bad faith right wing smear campaign going on against Platner.” Last month, when the political strategist Laurie A. Watkins wrote an article for The Hill where she related her skepticism about Platner in the context of herself having been the victim of intimate partner abuse and also her own family’s roots in Maine (“I spent my childhood summers there, picking blueberries and strawberries, long afternoons at Stanley Pond, bean suppers at the local firehouse, and county fairs that smelled like fried dough and late August”), Andy O’Brien, the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, wrote that she should be “First up against the wall when the revolution comes.”
[Earlier this month, O’Brien - who has also voiced his doubt about the allegations of domestic violence against Platner - wrote that he had intended the comment as a jokey reference to the Douglass Adams book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and had “never, ever intended it to be taken literally.” As someone who has actually seen people killed in political violence, not just read about it, that sounds to me like insincere, ass-covering bullshit, but you can read O’Brien’s entire explanation for the comment here and make up your own mind.]
Even worse than the journalists and professional activists have been the politicians. Bernie Sanders - someone who didn’t have a job until he was 40 and has been a professional elected office-holder since 1981 as he inveighs against a system he is in many ways the living embodiment of - continued his unblemished of terrible character judgement by adding to his alliance with Tulsi Gabbard and employment of toxic filth like David Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray by endorsing Platner. After the first allegations of mistreatment of women surfaced last month, Sanders told reporters that “I think it’s important for us to focus on the issues facing working families a little bit more than Graham Platner’s marriage.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren also endorsed Platner and, even after reports of the Nazi tattoo surfaced, declared him “my kind of man.” Oligarchic California Rep. Ro Khanna, another Platner endorser, apparently took a look around his $6 million, 8,000-square-foot Washington, D.C. mansion, mused on the three golf courses his young children own, exhaled and lapsed into religious imagery as he typed out how “to heal, we need to find a way to have grace [and] if Graham Platner and all of you can find a way to build that redemption through this campaign, this transformation, maybe it can show a way for this country to redeem itself.” When the first allegations of domestic partner violence against Platner surfaced, Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse dismissed them as “nothing” because “the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations,” a reference to Lyndsey Fifield, one of the women interviewed for the New York Times story, who would later describe to CNN’s Jake Tapper how Platner “regularly grabbed her, sometimes hard enough to leave marks, while they were dating” and “would remove the condom he was wearing without telling her.”
Even after the stomach-churning revelations of Jenny Racicot to Politico and CNN about how a drunken Platner allegedly let himself into her house and raped her, the candidate continued to have his defenders. The former Intercept journalist Lee Fang sulked about “the sheer volume of American politics dedicated to sexual blackmail and MeToo hysteria” Ryan Grim, also a former Intercept journalist and founder of the fringe-left website Drop Site News (who knew Platner from the latter’s time working as a bartender in Washington, D.C.), wrote of how Racicot may have sent a text to Platner the day of the alleged attack, appearing to imply that might somehow ameliorate the gravity of Platner’s alleged assault on her. Not one to leave his degenerate fixation on loathing women lie fallow, Zaid Jilani dutifully chimed in again on Grim’s report, opining that “I already thought the story was weak but that makes the story downright suspicious.” Cenk Uygur, the antisemitic conspiracy theorist and co-creator of the Young Turks news and commentary programme (itself named after genocidal Turkish nationalists) raved that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying group must be behind Platner’s fall, as “the minute a candidate says he’s not going to listen to the donors, especially AIPAC, he is set upon 24/7 by people posing as reporters. They are the attack dogs of the wealthy and powerful people who run this country - and they hate it when their orders are not follwoed [sic]...they are agents of propganda [sic] and not real news.”
As I have written before (and as they themselves have articulated), the far left - for whom fixating on Israel and Palestine has become a virtual religion and all too often now curdles into base anti-semitism - has no desire to help the Democratic Party win elections. They are far more animated by the idea of cannibalizing the party itself than they are about the prospects of beating Republicans in a general election contest. As outlined above, there is a small army of grifters and opportunists who do very well financially, thank you, by helping to speed this dynamic along and by amplifying a deeply unhealthy, millenarian worldview that leads often very troubled people to develop nearly-hysterical parasocial bonds with political figures. [This could be seen during Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaign, as well.]
In my analysis, the Democrats are heading for a similar problem in Michigan, where the former director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services of Wayne County, Abdul El-Sayed, is locked in a tight senate primary with Haley Stevens, who has served as U.S. representative from Michigan’s 11th congressional district since 2019. Morris Katz’s Fight Agency is also involved in this race, backing El-Sayed, whose campaign has been marked by a series of warning signs about his unsuitability as a candidate, including blaming a March 2026 attack on the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and mocking Stevens in grossly misogynistic terms, claiming she “is a suit with a large AIPAC bank account, that’s it [and] I hope maybe they find some way to teach her how to string together two coherent sentences.”
El-Sayed also has a record of lying, not just stretching the truth the way many politicians do. Despite repeatedly insisting that he never supported the (highly unpopular) “defund the police” movement that was all the rage circa 2020, CNN recently unearthed interviews from that year where El-Sayed repeatedly endorsed the concept. El-Sayed has also cagily guarded his personal financial disclosures, claiming that he has not released them yet as it was “necessary to gather tax documents from his wife’s family with property in India.”
He has also appeared on the stump with Hassan Piker, claiming it’s “critical” that Democrats embrace Piker. El-Sayed is saying this about a pro-Kremlin, pro-Beijing creature who once said “What do you call Crimea? I call it a part of Russian territory, bitch” and responded to an elderly Vietnamese woman describing her suffering under that country’s communist dictatorship by saying “Fuck you old lady. Shut the fuck up you stupid idiotic old lady. Suck my dick, old lady. Goddamn, Yo, fuck this refugee.”
Though I am not even a great fan of Haley Stevens, Abdul El-Sayed, by both his statements and his associations, is clearly deeply unfit to be the Democratic nominee in such a crucial senate race to run against Mike Rogers, who came within a whisker of defeating Democrat Elissa Slotkin for the senate only two years ago. The same people who brought us the fiasco in Maine are pushing El-Sayed’s candidacy and that should tell people everything they need to to know.
Democrats need to stop playing nice with those who desire nothing so much as their ultimate destruction. If these sectarian freaks want to organize on their own time and in their own parties, fine. But the Democrats need to wake up and stop making it easy for them. Within the party apparatus itself, burn them to the ground and let the four winds carry the ashes off where they may. Then let’s dynamite this grotesque regime out of power in Washington once and for all come November.