The Great Leftist Ignorance Scam

The new left movement in America is taking off mostly with the very wealthy, which isn't an accident

I almost died laughing when I read that Graham Platner, the “progressive warrior poet” running for Senate in Maine, went to school at Hotchkiss, one of a handful of prep schools in the Northeast more precious and exclusive than my own Concord Academy. The original comic appeal of the Platner story was in watching the legacy press mouthpieces who denounced Pete Hegseth’s “Crusader Cross” pec-tattoo rally to the defense of Platner’s Nazi Death’s Head tat, which he got in Split, Croatia, while he was so wasted. That’s been hilarious, but the Free Beacon story about the “warrior poet” with accidental Nazi ink who went to a $75,000 high school describes a political scam of chef’s kiss perfection.

He fooled even me, and I basically am Graham Platner: a northeasterner of means who went to high school with sons and daughters of rock stars and CIA chiefs, but also has a few Oyster-shucking scars. It would never have occurred to me to market myself as “working class,” but Platner obviously doesn’t suffer pangs of conscience on that score, describing himself in a launch video as a “working-class Mainer” who can stand a post and chop his own goddamned firewood:

Even more incredible is how far and wide the humble origins tag has flown, with everyone from The New Yorker to the Washington Post to Bernie Sanders and Politico selling him as a “candidate from the working class” taking on the big, bad establishment. It should have been a major red flag that even Bon Appétit ran a gullible feature on Platner’s journey from “working class fisherman to Maine’s Zohran Mamdani,” but I still didn’t catch it, underestimating the sheer stones behind this marketing gambit:

In Bon Appétit

Platner will do well, since his glass-chewing voice and military chops will provide enough on-camera verisimilitude for voters to forgive his salesmanship indiscretions. He’ll be forgiven, unlike Gavin Newsom, already being savaged for his recent effort to rebrand himself as an ex-street waif forced to live off crusts of Wonder Bread. It’s all hilarious until you read other parts of the Platner story, which include hanging out on a Socialist reddit under the name “P-Hustle,” describing himself as a communist and “antifa super-soldier,” and suggesting violence is necessary for social change. An old Bangor Daily News editorial he wrote contained the following passage:

In post-9/11 America, every terrorist is portrayed as evil. We seem to have forgotten the old adage: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Understanding the motives of terrorists is one thing, but the really concerning theme in Platner’s writing, and in the rhetoric of lefty superstar and New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, zooms past trying to understand certain violent movements into something like sympathy for their underlying goals and mores. The ideas currently fashionable among upper-class lefties are suicidal lunacies that will force actual working class Americans to vote against them out of self-preservation.

What’s depressing for me is that I know exactly how this happened. Only people who can afford the kinds of schools Platner and I attended can afford to be as detached from reality as the new progressives have become. Writing on his site recently, Andrew Sullivan is right. If the new choice is between this brand of leftism and MAGA Republicanism, we’re in for a “very long” period of “MAGA dominance.” And that’s the best case scenario: