Guy Who Wants To Beat Susan Collins Is Concerned. No, In A Good Way!
Meet Graham Platner!
We like Graham Platner, the hunky oyster farmer who hopes to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine and send Susan Collins into retirement so she can be very concerned on her own time, without still voting for fascism. Over the weekend, a video of Platner speaking at a town hall in northern Maine went viral, after he responded to a bigot who was spouting a very familiar lie about undocumented people somehow getting all the “free benefits,” which of course they aren’t, because virtually all federal social programs are limited to citizens, and in some cases to noncitizens here legally.
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: What’s your plan for the illegals that are in this state that get free benefits?
CROWD: THEY DON’T!
The audience is, of course, completely correct.
Platner then replied, not so much to the bigot lady, but to the audience that accurately shouted her down, and that reply is why the clip went viral. And it wasn’t because of the part where he starts to say “If you listen to what she’s saying …” and a guy in the audience interrupts, loudly, with “No,” which I actually enjoyed and have replayed a few times for laughs.
Platner continued,
“If you listen to what she was saying, at her core, she’s angry about the exact same things you are. People are propagandized, people are misinformed, but people are not stupid, and we shouldn’t treat them as such. People are angry because they know they’re being screwed. They might get lied to, they might get taken in.
“If somebody robs your neighbor’s house, you don’t go over there and laugh at them afterward. They’ve been taken advantage of, and that’s what this is. People are being robbed. They’re being robbed of their critical thinking, they’re being robbed of their empathy.
“The answer to that is not shame, the answer to that is not anger, the answer is empathy and compassion.”
We really do wish we could see what followed that, because the reply, as it stands, feels not fully fleshed out. Like, did he go on to explain that the woman was wrong, or was that just so obvious that he didn’t feel the need to underline it? Or did he have more to say about that empathy and compassion stuff? Unfortunately, we haven’t found any longer video that would add context. We did a journalism and emailed the Platner campaign to ask if they have a more complete clip, but haven’t heard back.
(There’s a full video of the Platner town hall in another town the same day, which we’ll discuss in a moment.)
We have thoughts about Platner’s response. Our first reaction was that it had a whiff of the old claim from 2016 that people supported Trump out of “economic anxiety,” even as Trump supporters have made it increasingly clear in the years since that they mostly groove on his racism and authoritarian rhetoric. All too many more of them will reply to videos of families being separated or immigrants being slammed to the pavement by saying “Yes! This is what I voted for!” than to say “I am horrified and can’t believe I thought he would bring down grocery prices.”
But unlike that take, Platner seems to be doing something a bit more nuanced than drawing a simple correlation between “economic anxiety” and voting for Trump. He’s arguing that a lot of people who have gone to the Dark Side have been propagandized and lied to, and I think anyone who’s seen a parent go bonkers after a steady diet of Fox News can probably identify with that phenomenon. (There’s a whole subgenre of writing on the topic, in fact!)
We certainly wouldn’t go as far as some comments on the video have gone, saying that this is the way to “win back” folks who have gone over to Trump and are disillusioned, if only because we don’t know that we’ve actually seen a lot of Trump voters that are genuinely disillusioned with him. Maybe they’re there but not terribly visible because the Trumpers who are with him all the way to the apocalypse simply make far more noise. Maybe they’re illusory.
And Trumpers aren’t at all willing to stop clinging to their propaganda, as this reply to Platner (archive link) makes clear:
As multiple replies to Platner on both Twitter and Bluesky point out, it’s pretty hard to feel a lot of empathy for people who seem intent on being lied to, or revel in it. Many have voted three times for Trump and would love to vote for him a fourth time if he tries it, legal or not. And of course, his party considers empathy not just a weakness, but a dangerous character flaw.
Despite what he said here, I also wouldn’t say Platner is particularly going out of his way to try to connect with Trump voters, and thank goodness for that. In his other town hall Saturday in northern Maine, in Caribou — Susan Collins’s hometown — Platner made an impassioned case for one of his key issues, universal healthcare, which he called a “moral imperative.” We’ve cued the video up to that bit:
In reply to a question about universal healthcare, and how the US is “the only G7 country that doesn’t fucking do it,” Platner noted that he’s only where he is now because of the socialized medicine he gets through the VA. “I was lucky enough to do four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and get blown up enough that the VA says that I deserve healthcare and a little bit of money every month.” Only after that could he afford to move back to his own hometown, Sullivan, afford a mortgage, and become an oyster farmer. Correction/Update: This is what I get for trusting YouTube’s AI transcript: I originally copied and pasted what it had as Platner’s home, “Solomon Bank.”
He emphasized how important those basics are to that old-fashioned notion of the pursuit of happiness: “Because I get free healthcare and because I get a roof over my head, that gave me an immense amount of freedom. That gave me an immense amount of material freedom to build a life that I wanted to build.”
Hello children, that is the case for a universal basic income, too, but Platner didn’t go quite that far. Choking up a bit, he added, “I don't think that you should have to go fight in stupid foreign wars” to get healthcare or a decent living, because it’s a human right. He went on to discuss how, if people weren’t tied down to jobs they hate because they rely on them for health insurance, so many more of us would be free to start small businesses, become more involved in our communities, and by god even create art.
While he was at it, Platner also said that he supported ethics investigations into “at least two justices” on the Supreme Court, possibly leading to impeachment, called for Democrats to be less afraid of using power when they have it, and insisted that he’s not a “reform candidate” who wants to make small changes, but to make systemic changes to protect democracy — like enshrining abortion rights and LGBTQ rights in law, and building the longterm political base for getting rid of Citizens United and reducing the influence of corporate money in politics.
Platner also told the crowd he wants to build a bottom-up resistance to Trumpian politics. “This race, for me, is not just about beating Susan Collins. It is not just about flipping the Senate back to a Democratic side. It is about building in the state of Maine an organized working class power that we have not seen in generations.”
And that says a hell of a lot more about how we should employ empathy in politics than anything else. Having empathy for Trumpers may feel optional, but having empathy for the people whose lives are affected by government is essential.
[Maine Morning Star / The County]
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Thanks to the several people who pointed out that Platner's hometown is Sullivan, not "Solomon Bank," which is what I get for trusting YouTube's AI-generated transcript of the video.
Off topic headline at RawStory: 'Straight challenge to MAGA': Trump's fans rage at Pope Leo's 'woke manifesto
Wouldn’t it be funny if they gave the Nobel peace prize to Leo?