This Maine oysterman thinks Democrats are doing 'jack' about fascism. So he's running for US Senate [View all]

[KPN]

One of Graham Platner’s high school yearbooks shows him babyfaced with a buzzcut, holding a sign proclaiming, in part: “Free Palestine.” The image is accompanied by a superlative his classmates bestowed upon him: “Most Likely To Start A Revolution.”

“We'll see!” Platner wrote on X Thursday, posting a photo of the yearbook page, in a post that’s been viewed 4.5m times. Now bearded, burly and tattooed, with a sweep of dirty blond hair above a sunburnt face, Platner still believes in a free Palestine. He also thinks it’ll take something revolutionary to save the US, so earlier this week, when the oysterman announced his candidacy to be the next US senator from Maine, he pulled no punches.

“I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out,” he said in a campaign launch video, showing him chopping wood and at the helm of a small fishing boat. “And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins. I’m not fooled by this fake charade of Collins’ deliberations and moderation.”
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Platner believes the party needs an outsider. He believes that pedigreed, establishment Democratic candidates have failed repeatedly to appeal to working-class Americans, hastening the rise of Maga. “This isn’t a vanity project,” Platner says of his Senate campaign. If anything, he says, the campaign has thrown his life into “a bit of disarray”. He’s doing it because he cares about the community that has cared for him and believes in a type of politics that may have appeal across the political spectrum – one he believes has the ability to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US.

His policy proposals – Medicare for all, the return of “serious federal support for building housing” and a “billionaire minimum tax”, among others – may not sound too dissimilar from the platforms of progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders. But Platner is wary of labels, eschewing words like “liberal” or “leftie”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/24/graham-platner-maine-senate-oysterman
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More at the link above. I like what this guy has to say and how he says it. He kind of speaks my mind.