someone pointed out on a thread on here recently how all of the people rushing to Plat’s defense are the exact same people who dropped Maurrine Galindo like a hot potato the instant the NYT did an article about her making a couple of sus statements. I guess being a tenant organizer and supporting progressive politics wasn’t enough for her, but doing nothing of note and supporting progressive politics is enough to completely wash Plat’s entire history. If you think the electoral and lesser evil or “people can get better” arguments hold water, then that’s a MASSIVE double standard. Why does Plat get so much grace that other progressives simply don’t?

I think that on some level that’s what people who are really mad about Platner are responding to. Platner gets grace because Amerikkkans view going to another country and murdering brown people as a lesser crime than saying something slightly sus on social media. Platner gets grace because even many of the progressive minded among us still kinda worship troops and so the fact that he’s lied about his record and gotten immediately caught multiple times gets handwaved away. Platner gets grace because he might flip a Maine Senate seat - that last one is the kind of purely practical political calculation I would expect from someone invested in the Democrats as a political project, and I would accept it (while disagreeing that that should be the goal) if they were at least honest about it.