Ragebait turns Graham Platners flaws into winners with help from GOP critics

If the Devil couldn’t manage to convince the world he didn’t exist, his next best bet would be to pitch himself to its inhabitants as a relatable rogue.In Maine, Republicans are ready to pop the champagne over the seemingly endless stream of scandals hanging over Graham Platner’s Senate campaign.Over the weekend, Platner tacked infidelity — he apparently sent explicit messages to as many as a dozen women and operated an account on Kik, a platform notorious for hosting child sex predators — onto his ever-expanding list of obscene acts.That list includes his emblazoning a Nazi tattoo across his chest, rape victim-shaming, mockery of a Purple Heart veteran, praise for Hamas, disparagement of rural Mainers and affinity for pleasuring himself in porta-potties.But other than that, Mrs.Lincoln?Still, Platner remains a viable candidate — not just in spite of, but because of his personal defects.After all, we’re living in the age of ragebait, where incendiary acts, words and people are used to elicit a hostile reaction that the offending party can, paradoxically, exploit for its own purposes.Because where some see a destructive denizen of the drunk tank, others see a flawed man on a redemption arc perfectly suited for success in today’s polarized, distrustful politics.In his 2014 book “The Revolt of the Public,” Martin Gurri described how elites’ mismanagement of their prestigious posts and the digital revolution had conspired to create an unbridgeable gap between laymen and those in power — and thereby “a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions” manned by the latter.The result? A fractured information environment that cynical, self-interested actors can take advantage of.It’s in this context that Platner and his top adviser Morris Katz — a Zohran Mamdani campaign alum — have found a way to not just weather the candidate’s moral failings, but weaponize them.By flooding the zone with a metric ton of deflections, counternarratives and...