Graham Platners brain-dead baloney is the REAL scandal

Set aside, for a moment, that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner spent years with a Nazi SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest.Set aside that he blamed sexual assault victims for their predicament, or that he called rural white Americans stupid racists, or that he advocated political violence, or that he mocked a wounded Purple Heart recipient, or that he joked about the Virgin Mary being a “skank,” or that he joined a hookup site while married.Who among us is a saint, after all?The more interesting question is why Democrats have shown such loyalty to him. After hearing so much about Platner’s everyman appeal, I went down a rabbit hole, watching his speeches and listening to his interviews.Virtually every one of them is crammed with brain-numbing platitudes and freshman-level socialist sloganeering.His rhetoric makes former Vice President Kamala Harris sound weighty by comparison.“They think this is a race about the performative politics everyone is used to,” Platner told a crowd recently.“What they don’t understand is that this is a race about us.”This kind of banality, and there’s a lot of it, calls to mind Lt.

Frank Drebin trying to win over the love of his life in “The Naked Gun” by telling her, “Maybe the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans.But this is our hill, and these are our beans.”The late philosopher Daniel Dennett called phrases like this “deepities” — words that create the impression of moral and emotional weight while offering no actual insight.Obviously, most politicians traffic in deepities to some extent.Platner, however, can spew inane class-war clichés for an hour without wandering anywhere near a deeper thought.That’s because Platner is the embodiment of performative left-wing populism.His cosplay working-man candidacy was created by Faiz Shakir and Ben Wikler, two Ivy League-educated former Bernie Sanders staffers.“Part of the thesis here is that people don’t want candidates wh...