Tucker Carlson’s apology for having supported Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a lot of brouhaha about Tucker Carlson’s unctuous “confession” to his brother Buckley (a lot of “ucks” there), saying that he deeply and contritely regrets his previous support of and campaigning for Trump. If you can stomach his sanctimonious mien, and his self-serving claim of outsized influence, here’s the clip:

But in all I’ve read on this, I haven’t seen anyone emphasize what’s so especially disingenuous about Carlson’s apology. As Churchill might say, he’s re-ratting. Remember this? It wasn’t so very long ago that the story came out, either; just three years (2023, prior to the 2024 election in which Tucker campaigned for Trump):

The latest filings in the case suggest Mr Carlson expressed his dislike of the outgoing US president two days before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to derail lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election win.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he wrote in a text sent on 4 January 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately,” he added.

Mr Carlson, the top-rated host on the conservative network, also appeared to denigrate the Trump presidency in these private messages, despite lauding his achievements on air.

“That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Fancy, fancy, FANCY that. And all that time, Tucker had been pretending to like Trump – and then later in 2024 he campaigned for him.

Have people forgotten this? I’m puzzled; why are so many taking his apology seriously? I can understand why the left would, because it suits their purposes. But the right? I remember the revelation of Tucker’s hatred for Trump while at Fox because it surprised me at the time, and I filed it away as “Tucker Carlson is not ever ever to be trusted.” We discovered then that all that time he’d been pretending to be for Trump he really wasn’t.

Then again, which was the actual pretense? Was he just pretending to like Trump while at Fox, or were the emails the pretense and he was just pretending to hate him when he wrote them? And then later, during the 2024 election, what was Tucker pretending? Was he just supporting Trump then in order to get supposed influence over Vance or Trump? Or had he changed his mind once more and liked Trump again?

And now what is Carlson pretending? One thing I don’t think he’s pretending now is his hatred of Jews and Israel. I think it’s very sincere. His brother Buckley is quite his equal in that, as well:

But here I am, writing about Carlson again. Why? First of all, I think that he’s a fascinating case. And secondly, although I also think he has less influence on the right than his traffic would indicate, and that he’s following trends as much as he’s creating them, I think it works in both directions and that he does indeed have some influence in spreading the hyper-Buchananesque word and that his message does find traction, especially with young men.

I’ve written several previous pieces on Tucker’s transformation (see this list). But I want to add one more event that might have fostered it: the death of his father in March of 2025. Dick Carlson was a strong and colorful figure with a life of achievement, but among other things he was a “Christian Zionist,” a group that Tucker said in November of 2025 that he “dislikes more than anybody” and which he called “a heresy” It may be that, with his father’s death, Tucker finally felt free to more fully reveal his sentiments about Christian Zionists and Israel and Jews.

Did the press get a wake-up call at the Correspondents’ Dinner?

The New Neo Posted on by

Political changer Sasha Stone writes:

Cole Allen took the press at their word, which is why he couldn’t understand how they could have dinner with a “rapist, traitor, and pedophile.” He has a point. After all, why would they if they really meant everything they’ve been telling us for ten years?

Had he been better at breaching security — if he’d had a better weapon that could fire multiple rounds, there is a good chance members of the press could have been mowed down too …

The press didn’t seem to get it. None of them even took a pause, except to blame Trump, …

The press, however, should have better discernment. If they could just tell the truth for once, or at least try to correct the record, maybe we wouldn’t be here now, where yet another assassin felt he had no other choice but to do the world a favor by killing Hitler.

All of that is true. But I don’t think it matters, because today’s press is uninterested in telling anything but the partisan story. They are propagandists first and foremost. That’s why most of them got into “journalism” in the first place – not to tell the truth wherever it might lead them, but to further the left’s message of the left, a left in which most of them truly believe. They are in it for the perks too, of course, and the power. But they are also in it for the virtue.

Nor do they want to stop the Cole Allens of the world, except when the Cole Allens threaten the safety of the members of the press themselves. The foiled attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner was highly unusual in that regard. The press was not the target, but they would have been the collateral damage had Allen been better at his chosen task. Blaming Trump rather than themselves is a no-brainer for the press, because to blame themselves would take a much higher level of self-awareness and devotion to truth than they can muster at this point.

Why doesn’t the left care about the Iranian protesters who were slaughtered by the mullahs?

The New Neo Posted on by

One would think they would care – after all, it’s a oligarchic theocracy slaughtering people who want freedom. But no. It’s as though it never even happened:

The Left justifies its obsession with Gaza by citing casualty numbers provided by Hamas — a designated terrorist organization — while ignoring the verified slaughter in Iran. This reflects a deliberate epistemology of ignorance. When a terrorist regime like Hamas reports numbers, the Left treats them as gospel to fuel anti-Israel sentiment. When the Islamic Republic slaughters its citizens, the Left does not put the blame on the Iranian regime. Instead, it claims that there is a Western context behind the regime’s crimes — that is, that the crimes are a direct cause of “US imperialism.”

It’s not true that the Left doesn’t have guiding principles. One of the most influential is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” America and Israel are the enemy; therefore Hamas and the current Iranian regime are the friends because they share the same enemies. Iran calls the US “The Great Satan” and Israel “The Little Satan.” There really couldn’t be more of a mind-meld between the Left and the Iranian leaders than that. Everything else is secondary or lower.

The left pretends to be for “the people” – but it’s the case only if the people are on the same side of an issue as the left. If the people choose wrongly, screw the people. One example of this is the left’s constant attempts to take down the duly-elected Trump, whether through assassination or impeachment or lies. The people of Israel can be raped and murdered or even blown to bits by a nuclear weapon, and according to the left they had it coming and will have had it coming.

And so the left is able to ignore the brutal Iranian regime’s killing of its own protesters. The left is aware that, were the protesters to win their battle, the Iranian people would almost certainly be grateful to none other than the oppressor Trump and The Great Satan the US, not to mention The Little Satan Israel.

Can’t have that.

When the 1979 revolution occurred in Iran, the left in that country was very much for it. But that was mainly because the Iranian left believed they were just using the mullahs and that the clerics would take a back seat to the left in running the country. The Iraniaqn left was sadly mistaken, and thousands of them were summarily slaughtered by the mullahs whose ruthlessness they had much underestimated. But as far as I know, that disabused the Iranian leftists – the ones who remained – of their affection for the mullahs. The American left seems to have held onto that affection, and at this point the American left has taken control of the Democratic Party.

There’s lithium in them thar hills

The New Neo Posted on by

This certainly seems like good news:

The USGS is saying that Appalachia contains an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium, enough to replace 328 years of U.S. imports at last year’s level. …

As lithium demand is projected to grow more than 48-fold by 2040, driven by electric vehicles and energy storage technologies, securing new domestic sources has become increasingly critical.

USDS Director Ned Mamula notes that the US was the dominant world producer of lithium three decades ago. The newly published lithium resource estimates are preliminary, and much more work is needed to fully realize our current mineral capacity.

The Golders Green stabber had a record

The New Neo Posted on by

This should surprise no one:

Yesterday afternoon there was an anti-semitic knife attack in a neighborhood called Golders Green in north London. A man with a knife walked through the streets and stabbed two Jewish men at random before police showed up and tased him.

The assailant has now been identified as a man born in Somalia named Essa Suleiman.

Sulieman had a criminal record: he had stabbed two policemen and a police dog back in 2008, and was sentenced to nine years. The violence occurred when the police were responding to a call about a knife attack in progress.

Guy seems to love knives.

The question is why he was not deported back then, and the answer is that he may already have been a citizen – although that’s not clear. But Nigel Farage says that, had his party (Reform) been in charge at the time, the man would have been stripped of his citizenship and deported. It seems to me that such action might have been legal:

Depriving someone of their British citizenship for the public good is generally used in the context of national security or counter-terrorism. The aim is to prevent a person who poses a threat to the United Kingdom from returning to the country, which they would otherwise have a right to do as a British citizen. There are also rare cases involving serious or organised criminals.

Will it happen even now? I tend to doubt it.

New facts about the Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, but gaps remain

The New Neo Posted on by

Charges have been filed against Cole Tomas Allen, and yet there are still some significant gaps in the record. Awaiting ballistics tests, we still don’t know whether he fired the shot that struck the agent in his protective vest, although nothing indicates he didn’t.

We also don’t know exactly how his capture occurred:

… [O]fficials have still not said whether Allen … fired the shot that wounded a Secret Service agent at the scene.

Federal authorities charged Allen, 31, with transporting firearms across state lines while traveling by train from California to Washington and with discharging a firearm during the incident at the Washington Hilton, where officials said a federal agent was shot in his ballistic vest. Assistant U.S. Atty. Jocelyn Ballantine said Allen “traveled across multiple state lines with a firearm” and “attempted to assassinate the president with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.”

Why the train? Not necessarily to save money, because one can often find flights cheaper than the train. Perhaps he felt the firearms would be more likely to cause him trouble on a plane; although firearms are permitted in checked luggage, they must be declared.

Then there’s this :

…[T]he defendant rushed the screening checkpoint on the Terrace Level of the Washington Hilton with a raised shotgun,” the federal prosecutors alleged. A law enforcement source told The Times that Allen fell as he ran after losing balance, and that is when officers were able to jump on top of him, pinning him down and disarmed him.

So perhaps in his haste, eagerness, and anxiety, Allen fell, giving the officers their opportunity. I know it can be difficult to hit a running target. But still, officers can’t expect all assailants to be so obliging as to fall (I also saw some newsperson saying he tripped on something, but I don’t know whether that is true).

And then there’s this:

Moments before he charged, the suspect appeared to enter a doorway near where several TSA and Secret Service agents were gathered and two magnetometers had been set up.

A law enforcement officer with a K-9 noticed Cole and followed him toward the side room.

However, the officer did not enter the room and eventually turned his back to the doorway.

Allen emerged from the doorway seconds later in a full sprint and fired at security personnel, according to authorities.

Excuse me but, WTF? This account may be in line with that of an alleged eyewitness whose story I wasn’t sure was reliable, but which I read a few days ago:

A White House Correspondents’ Dinner volunteer said the suspected gunman appeared to assemble a “long” weapon in a lightly monitored area near the terrace-level entrance before opening fire and rushing toward the ballroom.

The witness, Helen Mabus, a volunteer working the event who said she is from Harrisburg, Pa., described a “makeshift room” near the entrance where bar carts were being stored and where “there was no security” at the time.

She may or may not be describing the same thing, but it’s curious.

Also:

The night of the alleged assassination attempt, Allen walked toward the security checkpoint wearing what appeared to be a black trench coat, black pants, black shirt and red tie.

However, it did not appear he was wearing the trench coat when he emerged from the side room and rushed the officers.

I assume he was wearing the trench coat to conceal the weapon, whether assembled or unassembled at that point. Then he ditched the coat for his run.

Here’s some video of Allen casing the joint the night before, and then on the night of the dinner walking down a hall wearing a trenchcoat and then running through the metal detector without the coat and while holding the shotgun:

And this appears to be the footage with the dog:

Disturbing.

Mayday!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun – weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. As children, who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times – a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made in the 1920s, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor – that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center – the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

Mamdani is there to make Hochul look moderate

The New Neo Posted on by

She’s refusing to give him more and more money to play with in his Socialist paradise-to-be:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani joined forces with City Council Speaker Julie Menin to try to squeeze more dough out of Albany — a plea that an increasingly peeved Gov. Kathy Hochul rejected Tuesday.

Hochul was forced to answer questions about forking over more money to help bail out the Big Apple shortly after the lefty Mamdani and moderate Menin called to peel back a tax credit as the city struggles to fill a projected multibillion dollar budget gap.

The governor claimed she was turning the tap off, but political insiders questioned if her stance was firm after she has already appeased the democratic socialist mayor and the “tax the rich” crowd with a new proposed levy on pricey second homes in the city.

And then we have this:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed tax on luxury second homes in the Big Apple will fall far short of its $500 million goal — and drive wealthy residents out of the city, according to the city comptroller’s office.

City Comptroller Mark Levine found that the proposed policy — framed as a needed revenue booster for the city and state — would likely bring in closer to $340-$380 million, over $100 million less than Hochul and Mamdani have claimed.

Controllers actually have to do math.

More:

The tax — which would apply to secondary homes priced a $5 million or more and follow a sliding scale based on assessed value — would target around 13,000 residences, but the comptroller’s audit warned that revenue estimates move were based heavily on unknown factors.

Many of the pricey pads are rented to tenants by the owners, which may exclude them from the tax, and it was unclear how the levy would treat homes owned by trusts, LLCs, or family members.

The report, released Thursday, also looked at a similar tax implemented in Vancouver, Canada in 2017 — which resulted in nearly 60% of second home owners selling off their properties to avoid the costly fee as of 2025.

The comptroller assumes the city could see a similar scramble to sell homes — estimating an around 10% revenue loss.

Ah, but maybe they’ll institute the brilliant “exit tax” solution – taxing people who sell in order to leave the state. That’ll do wonders to attract a great many new buyers, right?

Hochul really can’t complain. Although her backing came rather late in the game, she endorsed Mamdani in the election.

More:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin are calling for a new way to tax the rich. They want the state to reduce something called the Pass-Through Equity Tax credit, aka PTET.

“The PTET is essentially a loophole that allows high-income earners to reduce their federal tax burden,” Mamdani said. …

“That’s not happening,” Hochul said. “We are not changing PTET.”

Hochul said she has already found over $4 billion in state aid for the city, and that Mamdani and Menin have a spending problem.

“And we’ve encouraged the speaker and the mayor to do what every other city has to do, [which] is look at your expenses. What is growing exponentially? They have programs that are growing not 4% a year, but 4% [in] months. And so they have to do whatever the other city is doing,” Hochul said.

Socialists don’t believe in cutting expenses, Kathy. They never run out of other people’s money.

NOTE: Mamdani made this this classy move with King Charles:

Mamdani’s eagerness to avoid Charles was clear, his team distancing themselves from the king from the moment the 9/11 ceremony, at the World Trade Center, was announced. “The mayor will not meet privately with King Charles. But the mayor will be at the wreath laying ceremony today,” Joe Calvello, the mayor’s press secretary, said in a terse statement on Wednesday morning.

Charles should count himself lucky, as even the leftist Guardian acknowledges:

It was hardly the treatment Charles is accustomed to, but as the day unfolded it seemed he may have gotten lucky by avoiding a private audience. Asked on Wednesday morning what he would say to Charles if they were to spend time together beyond the ceremony, Mamdani said: “If I was to speak to the king separately from that, I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.”

The 106-carat diamond, which currently sits in the crown worn by the queen mother, has been the subject of an ownership dispute since it came into the possession of Queen Victoria in 1849. Critics say the diamond, which is the size of a hen’s egg, was immorally taken from Duleep Singh, a 10-year-old maharajah whose kingdom was seized by the British.

Oregon’s voter rolls have a tiny little problem

The New Neo Posted on by

Oregon is one of those mail-in ballot states where everyone registered gets mailed a ballot:

The U.S. state of Oregon established vote-by-mail as the standard mechanism for voting with 1998 Oregon Ballot Measure 60, a citizen’s initiative. The measure made Oregon the first state in the United States to conduct its elections exclusively by mail. The measure passed on November 3, 1998, by a margin of 69.4% to 30.6%. Political scientists say Oregon’s vote by mail system contributes to its highest-in-the-nation rate of voter turnout, at 61.5% of eligible voters.

However, from Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch announced a settlement in its federal lawsuit against Oregon election officials, which confirms 800,000 ineligible voter names are slated for review and removal from voter registration lists. The settlement requires state officials to produce detailed data and enforce federal voter roll clean-up procedures under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). …

In its complaint, Judicial Watch argued that Oregon’s voter rolls contain large numbers of old, inactive registrations; and that 29 of Oregon’s 36 counties removed few or no registrations as required by federal election law. Judicial Watch asserted that Oregon and 35 of its counties had overall registration rates exceeding 100%; and that Oregon had the highest known inactive registration rate of any state in the nation. In combination, all of these facts showed that Oregon was failing to remove inactive registrations as required by federal law.

One important point: the names being removed are already inactive, and Oregon officials say they do not receive ballots anyway. So no harm, no foul, right? But – why are they still on the rolls, then? Why did it take a lawsuit to remove them? Who polices whether a name is “inactive” or not?

Maybe it’s all fine. But I’d like to get answers to those questions. It may be the case that now we will:

The settlement requires Oregon to open its voter roll maintenance processes to unprecedented scrutiny. State officials must now regularly provide detailed, county-level data on voter registrations, removals, confirmation notices, and inactive voters—including those eligible for removal under federal law. This includes data reported to the Election Assistance Commission, as well as additional datasets that will allow ongoing monitoring of compliance. The agreement ensures that this information will not be hidden behind bureaucratic barriers, requiring timely disclosure and identification of data sources.

It’s a start.

Maine’s governor drops out of the Democrats’ Senate primary ….

The New Neo Posted on by

… leaving the Nazi tattoo guy to face incumbent Republican Susan Collins.

Mills is 78, and I think her heart wasn’t in it, but she also ran out of money. New York Magazine refers to her campaign as “lackluster,” and that’s a fitting description.

More:

Senate Democrats had touted Mills as a top recruit to take on Collins, who is the only Republican senator representing a state that President Donald Trump lost last year. Maine is practically a must-win if Democrats are to net the four seats they need to take control of the chamber in the 2026 midterm election. But Collins has proven a tough opponent in previous elections.

After launching her Senate campaign in October, Mills struggled to gain traction against Platner, who burst onto the scene as a brash political newcomer and quickly built a loyal following. Platner notched endorsements from high-profile progressive leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Most importantly, he built major support among Maine Democrats, leading by double digits in recent polls of the primary. Platner’s rise — and the governor’s struggles — came despite top Democrats’ preference for Mills, turning this campaign into a rare rebuke of party leaders in a top-tier race.

Mills was kind of the Jeb Bush in the race, except for the lack of money. Note the NBC piece linked and quoted there doesn’t mention Platner’s most salient characteristic, the Nazi tatoo, early on. You have to get very deep into the article – paragraph fourteen – before it’s mentioned, and then it’s described as classic “Republicans POUNCE!”:

Republicans have already begun to attack Platner, as he pulled ahead in the primary. The GOP super PAC Pine Tree Results PAC launched an ad Monday highlighting those controversial social media posts and Platner having a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol. Platner has said he was not aware of the Nazi connection and has since covered up the tattoo.

Well, doesn’t everybody get a Totenkopf tattoo and not know what it is? Could happen to anyone. More, from Platner’s Wiki page:

While acknowledging the resemblance, he said he had not been aware of it until reporters and political operatives from DC contacted him during his campaign. He said he had recently gotten it covered up. CNN and Jewish Insider reported that an anonymous former acquaintance of Platner’s claimed that Platner was aware of the tattoo’s meaning and had previously called it “my Totenkopf”. Maine governor Janet Mills, one of Platner’s opponents in the Democratic primary, called the tattoo “abhorrent”.

Ah, but that’s really the least of it. There’s this:

In October 2025, various news outlets reported on Reddit posts Platner made between 2013 and 2021 in which he called himself a “communist”, wrote that all cops are bastards, and agreed with a post calling rural white Americans “racist and stupid”. In an interview with CNN, Platner said of those comments, “That was very much me fucking around the internet … I don’t think any of that is indicative of who I am today”. In a 2013 Reddit discussion about anti-rape underwear, Platner wrote that people worried about assault should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to”.

Platner also referenced political violence in multiple posts; in 2018, he wrote: “Fight until you get tired of fighting with words and then fight with signs, and fists, and guns if need be.” He also wrote that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice” and urged readers to “Get Armed, Get Organized. The Other Side Sure As Hell Is.” He has said that many of the comments do not represent his current political beliefs, and that they were the product of disillusionment after his military discharge and struggles with PTSD.

Collins called Platner’s internet history “terrible” and “offensive”. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said that while he did not approve of Platner’s comments, he did not consider them “disqualifying”. Platner said in an interview with Semafor, “How do you expect to win young people? How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’ Good luck with that. Good luck winning over those demographics.”

Of course Martin doesn’t consider them “disqualifying.” Au contraire; they match the mood of the party and its up-and-coming younger candidates. Platner is 41, by the way, born in 1984. You do the math; we’re not talking about posts or comments he made in high school. He was 29 years old in 2013 and 37 in 2021, the years in which the posts were made. Hardly an impressionable child, and not that long ago.

From Platner’s Wiki page:

[Platner says in an early campaign video] “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, and the politicians who sell us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins.”

This video received 2.5 million views in its first 24 hours, sparking national media attention. The campaign raised $1 million in its first nine days, and reported amassing over 2,700 volunteers.

Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed Platner on August 30, ahead of a Fighting Oligarchy tour appearance in Portland with Platner and Maine gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson. The event had originally been scheduled to be held in an auditorium but had to be moved to a much larger arena due to high public interest. Platner has also been endorsed by former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich; Senators Ruben Gallego, Martin Heinrich, and Elizabeth Warren; and Representative Ro Khanna. He has also been endorsed by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Maine State Nurses Association, and United Auto Workers.

You get the picture. He also is running as a working-class Joe, but it seems to me – from his Wiki page – that he had a very comfortable family situation growing up: restaurant owner (in resort area) and lawyer parents, private high school in Connecticut, architect grandfather of some renown (grandpa designed the interior of the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, Windows On the World).

Graham seems to be hiding the extent of his leftism, another common theme among Democrat candidates these days. From Wiki again:

Before running for office, Platner described himself on Reddit as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was “pretty radically left” and a “vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist” (in 2017) and “rabidly anti-Hillary [Clinton]” (in 2016 Democratic presidential primaries). In a December 2025 interview with The New Yorker, he declined to call himself a socialist and described his political involvement before his campaign as “organizing around mostly local economic justice issues or social justice issues”.

Blahbity blah.

Does Platner have a chance of winning? Yes, especially if you believe polls:

RealClearPolitics’ polling aggregate shows Platner with an average 7.6-point lead over Collins as of Thursday morning. Collins held a 0.2 point lead over Mills in polling average.

Maine backed former Vice President Kamala Harris by about 7 points in the 2024 presidential election and is generally viewed as Democratic-leaning but with an independent streak. Collins, a popular Republican in the state, has been able to win thanks to bipartisan credentials. Democrats believe she may be in for her toughest race yet, given President Donald Trump’s declining nationwide popularity.

I think it’s way too early to tell, and the polls aren’t especially meaningful. But Collins is definitely threatened. And no, a more conservative Republican wouldn’t have a chance in Maine. Collins has carefully positioned herself for years to be carefully calibrated to Maine’s basically blue/purple tastes.