It’s been a tough few weeks for Graham Platner, the political novice who became the surprise frontrunner to take on Maine’s long-serving GOP Senate incumbent, Susan Collins. A rolling series of bad headlines have bedeviled the populist candidate over unearthed years-old Reddit posts, which show him making offensive comments about women and African Americans, using “gay” and “retard” in derogatory ways, disparaging rural voters, and seemingly advocating political violence. And that was before the revelation of an SS Totenkopf tattoo forced him to publicly deny he was a “secret Nazi.”

Platner has addressed and apologized for both the tattoo (he says he did not understand its significance when he got it and has since had it covered up) and the posts and said that he wrote those things in an earlier, darker time in his life. That may well be true.

But it’s also true that the handful of Platner’s comments that have been singled out for national attention in recent weeks are just a drop in the ocean of his Reddit posts, which span the Barack Obama years to Joe Biden’s presidency. Jacobin obtained the full archive of posts under Platner’s Reddit username, P-Hustle, which numbers more than 1,800 comments from July 2009 to November 2021. The story is a lot more complicated than the public is being told.