Uh-oh

 This doesn't look good.

Platner better have some good explanations or some apologies, at least.

UPDATE 10/24/2025:

“I hate Nazis, and I think far-right extremism is a cancer that needs to be excised from our politics,” Graham Platner tells Zeteo in an exclusive interview Wednesday night.

[...]

The anti-establishment oyster farmer had just spent the last 48 hours explaining that he never realized the skull-and-crossbones tattoo he got during his time in the Marines resembled a Nazi SS Totenkopf symbol.

  Zeteo

Skull and crossbones is a widely used symbol. Not surprising a Marine would have it as a tattoo.

Platner says his campaign had heard several weeks ago that rumors were going around about his tattoo, and he dismissed it as “insane.” He says he only discovered the meaning last week when his team was contacted by a news outlet.

“That’s when I was like, ‘We’re going to schedule a tattoo appointment, because I don’t want this thing on my body,’” he says, adding: “I have been an avowed anti-fascist my entire life.”

Platner says he got the tattoo covered up Tuesday night, before showing off the new, slapdash tattoo cover-up in a shirtless appearance on local TV news on Wednesday.

So now they'll just be squealing about why he covered up a Nazi tattoo.

Later in the day, he posted a video on X explaining he was horrified about what the tattoo meant. (It was the second recent apology video of sorts from Platner, following a wave of news stories about old Reddit posts in which he said, for instance, that women should drink less to avoid being assaulted and asked why Black customers don’t tip well.) A half hour later, The Advocate reported that Platner previously used anti-gay language online. “It’s indefensible,” he said.

Yes, it is. Thanks for admitting it.

But on Wednesday night, hundreds of people (his campaign says 600) came out to hear Platner speak in Ogunquit, a small seaside town in southern Maine with a population of 1,600. They didn’t seem to care about the news.

They're from rural Maine. Many of them probably expressed similar sentiments in their lifetimes (and maybe still do). Don't be trying to tell them who to vote for. If they replace Susan Collins with a Democrat, we're a long way to solving the problem.

The crowd soaked in his message about how Democrats must center workers’ “material needs,” and his anger at a US political system that has been “built by establishment politicians to fleece working Americans.” The audience showed him grace as he once again said he didn’t know what his tattoo meant, and rejected his past statements on the internet.

[...]

Amazingly, new public polling of the race released Friday found Platner with a commanding lead in the primary over Maine Democratic Governor Janet Mills, who announced her Senate candidacy last week. The New Hampshire University poll – conducted from October 16-21, as Platner faced a barrage of negative news hits – found him with a stunning 54%-28% advantage over Mills.

She was pushed to join the race by Chuck Schumer, not Maine residents. How old is she? Oh yeah, 77. Even older than Chuck. Just what the Senate needs.

During the Q&A portion, one attendee asked Platner to give his thoughts on all of the negative news stories he’s faced since Mills jumped into the race. “I’m not going to minimize what has come out,” Platner said. “I am not, today, who I always have been. I used to hold different opinions. I used to use different language. I said things and believed things that today I find abhorrent.”

[...]

“I also grew,” [Platner] said. “I met new people. I learned of other people’s experiences. I realized that my experiences were my own, and they colored my opinions … and that the more open I could be to listening to other people’s stories, the more open I was willing to be to extend compassion and empathy to others, the more I realized that many of those stories and beliefs that I had were wrong. And I changed them.”

“I am ashamed of things I once said, but I am not ashamed of who I am today,” Platner said resolutely. The crowd roared with approval.

Republicans are still excusing Nazi chatter on Young Republican websites as they're just young. They're not THAT young. And they don't seem to be apologizing for it.

Platner told the audience that the political machine is coming after him now because “they feel threatened” by his campaign. He said he wouldn’t let the negative stories make him quit. “If they thought that this was going to scare me off, if they thought that ripping my life to pieces, trying to destroy it, was going to make me think that I shouldn’t undertake this project, they clearly have not spent a lot of time around Marines,” he said to cheers.

[...]

“We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing,” he says, “which is focusing on the fact that we live in a system where people feel like they are not represented, that regular Americans feel like politics, in no shape or form, is reflective of them, and they know it because of the inequalities in our system. I’m going to keep pointing out those inequalities, and I’m going to keep pointing out the policies that we need to push to make sure that we fix that so we make Americans’ lives better. They’re mad about that, and they’re gonna keep on coming.”

Keep on standing up, Graham. And don't be a John Fetterman.

UPDATE 10/26/2025: