The New York Times published accounts this week from multiple women who dated Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, describing behavior that included bizarre statements about rape as an act of dominance, a forestry ax he honed while watching television and expounding on killing people he considered threats, and physical altercations that left marks. One woman, Virginia conservative Lindsay Field, is cited in texts the Times reviewed that she sent long before Platner’s candidacy became public, referencing his Nazi tattoo, directly contradicting his claim that he did not know the tattoo was a Nazi symbol. Platner denied the physical altercations in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes while acknowledging he was not a good boyfriend and struggled with alcohol after returning from combat.
Molly Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the Federalist, senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College, and bestselling author of Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the situation and a broader pattern she sees in Democratic candidate selection.
Hemingway said the Lindsay Field Nazi tattoo contradiction is a pathological lying situation. The Times reviewed texts Field wrote before any of this became a public issue in which she referred to the tattoo by its correct characterization. The idea that she would know it was a Nazi tattoo while he genuinely did not is not credible on its face, and Platner’s simultaneous invocation of his difficult post-combat period as context for getting the tattoo while denying he knew what it meant is self-undermining. You do not explain why you got something you claim not to have known you had. She said the lying extends well beyond the tattoo to his personal biography, his business background, his claims about other people’s military service, and fabrications about Susan Collins sending him off to war, adding that truth appears to be a stranger in essentially every domain of his public presentation.
She said the physical behavior documented by Field and others is not the standard politician-cheats-on-his-wife variety of personal failing. This is a different category, involving documented physical restraint, forced confinement, and a pattern of treating women with contempt that multiple former partners have independently described. She noted that his wife reportedly told the campaign he has been involved with other women during their two-year marriage. She said many men return from combat and face serious struggles without resorting to this kind of treatment of the people around them, and that being a Marine is not a sufficient credential to override the totality of what has been reported.
She said the actual reason Maine voters should be most concerned about Platner is probably his politics rather than his personal conduct. He is, she said, genuinely radical, a child of extreme inherited wealth with elite educational privilege who wants to dismantle American economic institutions and is fundamentally opposed to markets and the rule of law. Susan Collins, the person he is running against, is widely acknowledged as the most moderate member of the Senate regardless of one’s political views, which makes the willingness of Democratic voters and party figures to line up behind Planer all the more revealing about where the party is.
On the broader candidate quality problem, Hemingway noted that the New Jersey congressional candidate who just won his primary has documented ties to an al-Qaeda front organization and defended the Blind Sheikh, and that he is expected to win because the district is heavily Democratic. She noted that the district he will likely represent was the home of Todd Beamer, the Flight 93 hero, and that twenty-five years after September 11th a supporter of an al-Qaeda front organization representing that specific district is a civilizational data point worth sitting with. She said Mamdani as mayor of New York City and Hamway potentially representing Todd Beamer’s home district in Congress represent something serious about what the country has done, or failed to do, with immigration policy and cultural transmission of its founding values.
On the California vote count, she said the weeks-long ballot counting process is an embarrassment for a first-world country and evidence that California and Los Angeles are adopting third-world election tendencies. She said the problem is not just the duration but the practice of changing the total number of ballots being counted as new batches arrive and are added to the pile, which makes it impossible for anyone to have confidence in the integrity of the result. She said California Republicans have been demoralized by this system for decades because it makes it nearly impossible to fix the state’s problems when the people controlling the ballot count are not handling the process with integrity.
On Scott Pelley’s departure from 60 Minutes following his refusal to work under new CBS News director Bari Weiss, Hemingway said the media class reaction reveals how thoroughly these institutions function as Democratic Party infrastructure rather than news organizations. She said Pelley recently claimed in explaining his situation that he had served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, which she noted is false: he read copy near people who were in combat. She compared him to the characters in Anchorman, people who read lines off a teleprompter and mistake it for intellectual weight. She said the genuine source of the left’s horror at his departure is that they need 60 Minutes to remain functioning Democrat propaganda, and that the decades-long acceptance of this arrangement in major media has been genuinely nefarious for the country.