Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 11% (104 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 4.4% (42 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 5.6% (53 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 4.9% (46 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 0%
• Framing Effect - 0.8% (8 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 1.6% (15 hits)

Article text

Graham Platner and the death of ‘The Resistance’

I, for one, am shocked that the dude with the Nazi tattoo turned out to be a bad person.

Normally blokes who go around with an SS-style cross-and-bones inked on their chests are such lovely people.

Not Graham Platner.

The Democratic candidate for the Maine Senate, famed sporter of a Nazi-like Totenkopf, appears to be a rotter.

There are now allegations that he sexually assaulted an old girlfriend.

Who could have seen that coming?

Forgive the sarcasm.

The answer is that everyone could have seen it coming.

Everyone, that is, whose moral sensibilities have not been turned to mush by their slavish devotion to the flagging cause of the Democrats.

To understand the depth of the moral rot at the top of Democrats, to see what a thin, gutless pantomime their ‘Resistance’ always was, look no further than the Platner storm.

For it indicts more than one dodgy bloke – it indicts an entire political machine.

Platner is the Dems’ much-troubled candidate for Maine in the November midterms.

His troubles increased tenfold this week when Politico published a report in which a woman he once dated claims he forced her to have sex with him despite her ‘repeated objections’.

She recalls thinking, ‘I am in a situation where there’s no consent here’.

Platner says any accusation of ‘non-consensual behaviour’ is ‘categorically untrue’.

The Politico piece has lit a fire under the Democratic establishment.

Bigwig backers of Platner are getting cold feet.

Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have called on him to ‘immediately withdraw’ from the Maine race.

Dem old-timer Elizabeth Warren, a loud backer of Platner, says he should pull out because ‘there can be no tolerance for sexual assault’.

So these Dem powerhouses stood by Platner during the Nazi tattoo scandal, and following the discovery of his old Reddit bigotry, and after his claim to be a small-town working-class guy was trashed by intrepid hacks, yet now they decide he’s an iffy candidate after all?

Please don’t mistake this for a belated discovery of moral principle – it’s pure arse-covering.

Platner’s campaign has been radioactive since Day 1.

His Nazi tat was just the start.

It was equal parts hilarious and terrifying that a Democrat with a literal Totenkopf was being gushed over by the kind of Ivy League brats who’ll call you a Nazi if you say men should stay out of women’s bathrooms.

The coastal classes who scream ‘Fascist!’

at working-class Trump voters were swooning over a man with an SS insignia on his literal body.

Platner said he didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol, though an old acquaintance claimed to have heard him lovingly refer to it as ‘my Totenkopf’.

Yikes!

Then came the treasure trove of his crazy Reddit posts.

Sexual-assault victims should have taken ‘some responsibility for themselves’ and avoided booze ‘for fuck’s sake’, he said.

‘Why don’t black people tip?’, he asked.

White Americans ‘actually are’ stupid and racist, he said.

‘Fuck off and die’, he liked to bark at people who disagreed with him.

Again, none of this seemed to bother pussy-hat Dems who spent the past 10 years having sleepless nights over Trump’s 21-year-old off-the-record remark that you should ‘grab ’em by the pussy’.

It was the Democrats’ frenzied longing to reconnect with ‘the working class’ that led them to turn a blind eye to Platner’s legion red flags.

After all, he has a beard, and he wears sweatshirts, and he was a farming boy ‘living on the sea’.

They couldn’t believe their luck.

At last, the party that used to represent the working class – before becoming the moral plaything of rich kids from Yale and billionaires who hate themselves – was getting back to its roots.

That Platner was a caricature of a working-class man, his closet positively bulging with skeletons, didn’t matter.

The Dems were craving ‘authenticity’ and this oyster grower from Maine seemed to provide it – SS tattoo be damned!

It’s the hypocrisy of ‘The Resistance’ that is most glaring.

You remember them – the Dem-backing graduate classes who fantasised that their bloviating hatred for Donald Trump made them modern-day resistance fighters.

People who thought that taking a Saturday off from brunching to call Trump ‘Hitler’ was the bravest thing anyone had done since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

With historic hilarity, even Hillary Clinton signed up for The Resistance.

This faux-progressive vanguard carved lucrative careers from posing as the protectors of women, the smashers of fascism, and the unyielding defenders of moral virtue.

‘Punch a Nazi’, they said.

‘Fuck the patriarchy’, they cried.

Imagine telling them that one day they’d be manning the barricades for a man with an SS tattoo who once said drunk bitches should avoid getting into ‘compromising situations’.

Yet here we are.

Clearly none of the rules of their tyrannical fake virtue apply to them.

It takes arrogance to dizzying new heights that these priggish activists are more than happy to commit all the sins they would destroy a lesser mortal for committing.

That’s the real Platner story – the Democrats dreamt this man would inject their party with some American grit, but he ended up exposing how wholly removed from ordinary Americans the Dems now are.

Their virtuous preening turned out to be as fake as Platner’s own salt-of-the-earth origin story.

What a mess.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked's chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O'Neill Show.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now.

And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.