Strange Views for a Neo-Nazi

If you’re not interested in detailed technical discussions about firearms and military tactics or the finer points of aquaculture, a lot of Platner’s Reddit activity would likely make your eyes glaze over. But when it strays from these topics, it doesn’t much resemble the thoughts and opinions of a racist extremist.

In post after post, Platner expressed disgust at both US troops’ mistreatment of Afghan civilians and Washington’s betrayal of their Afghan allies, whose resettlement in the United States he celebrated and felt should have been granted months earlier, with the security and immigration hurdles cleared once they were safely in the country. He bitterly criticized US atrocities during the war there and verbally smacked down users who apologized for soldiers accused of war crimes.

“Shooting innocent civilians for fun and stabbing wounded prisoners is simply disgusting and illegal activity that wouldn’t be condoned within a professional fighting unit,” he told one Donald Trump supporter seeming to excuse the actions of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy Seal accused of a litany of abuses in Afghanistan whom Trump pardoned in 2019. “So you can f*ck right off back to whatever disgusting little hole of cowardice and immaturity you crawled out of.”

“I actually love the Afghan people, they have been the best part of my deployments there,” Platner wrote in 2018, as he explained why he nonetheless supported the end of the US presence in Afghanistan. In a comment three months earlier, he scolded a user for spreading what he called “full on Islamophobic propaganda.”

“F*ck off with that sh*t,” he wrote.Platner’s posts also complicate the image of his racial views, right now defined by a single 2013 post charging that black people “don’t tip.” But Platner — who posted about attending a 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Ellsworth, Maine, and criticized the local police chief who was there for refusing to take a knee — frequently expressed outrage at racism.

When a Trump-loving GOP candidate said that African Americans commit more crime because they were raised in fatherless homes and that police only shoot a black person who “needs to be shot,” Platner called him a “racist motherf*cker.” When a fellow Hancock County resident defended the local sheriff for blocking an addiction recovery nonprofit from working with inmates because of its support for BLM, Platner told him, “F*ck off, racist.”

He called a video of a police shooting of an unarmed black woman “disgusting” and frequently criticized what he said was widespread racism in police forces. He complained that no one cared about handgun violence “because handguns mostly kill young black men” and “nobody really gives a sh*t about things until it’s well spoken white kids getting hurt.”In other posts, he criticized Winston Churchill for “being a horrific racist” and criticized an article for pointing to British-dominated India as a model for “victory” in Afghanistan. “Racists have quite openly said Trumps [sic] election emboldens then [sic],” Platner wrote in 2018. “And they’ve said it often and very publicly. So . . . . . that’s pretty much all one needs to know.”

Against Fascism

Needless to say, these are all deeply strange views for a white supremacist or fascist to express.

That’s because, as Platner made clear in dozens of comments over the span of years, he was not a right-winger. He was, rather, “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist,” as he explained in one 2020 thread, a two-time Bernie Sanders voter who had been “radicalized” by his years fighting foreign US wars, who liked folk singer Phil Ochs and left-wing media like the Michael Brooks Show, the Majority Report, and the Intercept, and who was both contemptuous of Trump and the threat he posed to American democracy, and alarmed at what he saw was an increasingly violent, armed far right that was emboldened by the president.

“As a left-leaning guy who runs frequently in hyper-right wing circles” by virtue of his military career and enthusiasm for firearms, Platner warned in 2018, “there is a sizeable portion of the population who feel that ‘liberals’ are the enemy, and they fantasize about the day they can destroy them,” a trend he insisted had been “getting much worse since the election.” “I personally know several Trump supporters who are stockpiling arms and ammunition in case a Democrat wins,” he wrote two years later.Platner has been criticized for posts and activities that suggest the political left should be well-armed. But in various Reddit comments, he made clear this was driven by his anxiety about armed far-right violence. He had become “a firm believer that the best thing a person can do is help their neighbors and live a loving life,” he wrote in 2020. “Still got the guns though, I don’t trust the fascists to act politely.”

In April 2021, he fretted about the presence of American neo-Nazi group NSC-131 in the northeastern United States and rebuked other users for claiming its members were simply disingenuous trolls. “The energy these subreddits are putting into glossing over the fact we have organized Nazis in New England is pretty godd*mn concerning,” he wrote.

Months earlier, he chastised a user of a subreddit devoted to military gear for posting a picture of a tactical vest branded with the letters “AKP,” which Platner took as a reference to the Islamist party of Turkey’s authoritarian ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “Is this a f*cking joke? AKP patches just fly around here?” he wrote. “I’ll make sure to post kit with swastikas and then say ‘hey bro, it’s just gear’.”

Elsewhere, he railed against the “disgusting” treatment Americans received during the second Red Scare for their earlier “combat valor against the forces of fascism” in Spain’s civil war. “Punished because they confronted the threat before most other people even recognized it as one,” he wrote. When a user posted a 1994 photo of South African neo-Nazis about to be killed by a police officer, Platner didn’t mince words.

“And not a thing of value was lost. These c*nts were firing indiscriminately into civilian homes, just trying to kill blacks,” he wrote in reply to the 2021 post. “No quarter for fascists. Good on the constable.”

All of it lends credence to what Platner has publicly said regarding his SS Totenkopf tattoo: that he is not a “secret Nazi” who got it as a way to signal his covert allegiance to the far right, but that he had it done on a drunken night out with his Marine Corps buddies “because we were marines and skulls and crossbones are pretty standard military thing.”

For Rural America

The full archive likewise gives a fuller picture of Platner’s views of his fellow rural Americans, which current reporting has boiled down to a single quote plucked from his Reddit history: that white, rural voters “actually are” racist and stupid.

Yet Platner’s other posts show a more nuanced view. A little over a year after that comment, Platner angrily objected to a user’s claim that Sara Gideon’s 2020 loss to Collins showed Mainers in his rural district would only vote for candidates who were born and raised in the state and never left it and became “more worldly” than them.

“This whole ‘everybody in D2 [Maine’s 2nd congressional district] is a raging uneducated racist’ schtick is godd*mned idiotic,” Platner wrote. “What a nuanced and informed take you have of Maine politics.” In this and other threads, Platner insisted that the problem wasn’t rural voters’ backwardness, but that “the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] just did a sh*t job of choosing a candidate” that year — someone, he said, who was “a rich lady from out of state, and who lives in what lots of Mainers consider northern Massachusetts,” and who “reflect[ed] the corporate politician make up of their usual choices.” In one 2018 thread on the subreddit “BlueMidterm2018,” Platner objected to a number of users running down rural Mainers. “Maybe you should get out more and talk to folks in certain areas instead of just write them off,” Platner told one user who said the district would stay a GOP seat because its residents were poor, white, and old. “You couldn’t ask for a better character out of central casting to fill the role of arrogant liberal,” Platner said to another user who made a disparaging remark about rural voters who own AR-15 assault rifles. “It’s a shame, because when you talk to people in rural areas about campaign finance reform, ending the drug war, and healthcare, you can find lots of support for progressive issues.”

In this and other threads, Platner insisted that rural voters could be part of a potential coalition for a progressive agenda and could be won over by Democrats — if the party only toned down its hostility to firearms.

“People in my area readily accept progressive concepts like getting money out of politics and adopting some form of socialized healthcare, but will always lean away from Democrats over guns and the assumption (not entirely wrong) that liberals think they’re idiots for their lifestyles,” he wrote. “These people can be allies if we could only stick to more systemic issues like class and political corruption, but we lose them everytime the phrase ‘assault weapon’ gets mentioned.”“The best thing a candidate can say on gun control in the current environment is nothing,” he wrote in another thread. “Many undecided rural voters will be able to be wooed if guns are just not on the list of things that are discussed.”

But it’s clear this wasn’t just a matter of political strategy: Platner really likes guns, regularly gushing over various firearms (“Great piece of kit”; “Holy f*ck I want that gun. Beautiful”), defending suppressors as a legitimate hunting tool, or otherwise upbraiding gun control proponents for their ignorance about firearms, even as he called the National Rifle Association “an organization that disgusts me.”

He pointed to rural Maine as proof that relaxed gun laws didn’t mean more crime, and preferred being responsible for his own protection instead of relying on local police, whose abilities and authoritarian tendencies he distrusted. Any attempt to outlaw even just semiautomatic rifles would result in “the killings of numerous American citizens by the state,” he argued, once a ban “turn[ed] millions of innocent Americans into federal criminals overnight” and police were sent to confiscate banned guns from those who refused to give them up.

Progressive, but Not Woke

Gun control aside, most of the political positions Platner expressed on Reddit were conventionally progressive ones: pro-vaccine, pro-LGBTQ, pro-universal health care, belief in climate change, virulently anti-Trump, and enraged by January 6, to name a few.

Platner typically expressed them in the same vulgar, politically incorrect way that has dominated recent headlines. Trump was a “f*cking c*nt” and a “mentally incapable narcissist,” the latter next to the word “retarded” struck through. Oliver North was a “lying piece of sh*t.” A Capitol rioter asking for clemency was “a f*cking worthless pussy. And a traitor.” A former congressman who cheated constantly on his wife was the “epitome of the frat bro officer douchebag.”

Customs and Border Protection asking people for their papers at a bus station was “godd*mn disgusting.” A Republican state representative voting against providing prisoners with menstrual products was “a f*cking asshole.” The group of marines investigated for allegedly sharing nude photos of their female coworkers, Platner wrote, were “f*ckwads” and “just losers who hid behind a computer and ‘camaraderie’ to justify their hatred of women,” adding, “nail these f*cks to the wall.”

It’s a tone in keeping with what Platner affectionately called “our crude and offensive world” of military service. Many of the stories Platner shared on Reddit about his time in the military are too offensive to print, even — or more accurately, especially — when they don’t even involve combat.

One involved what Platner termed “an old fashioned gay off,” or a game of “gay chicken,” against members of the British Royal Navy (“pale limey squids”) in a bar in Bahrain, that ended when one of the British side pulled out his genitals and had his colleague lick them. “I proudly withdrew our team on the grounds that one cannot play gay chicken if one is actually gay,” Platner wrote. Yet in other posts, Platner wrote that George Orwell’s “homophobia in [sic] indefensible in my opinion,” and expressed sympathy and sadness for a gay marine who had to hide his sexuality.

“I’m sorry that we have to work through this bullsh*t, and I’m sorry you have to bear the brunt of it,” he wrote. “Some of us really are ashamed that our institution is still working on this thing.”Platner also talked about how the GI Bill had let him go to a private university he could have never afforded without it. “I’ve got no problem extending that kind of program to the population as a whole,” he wrote. He vehemently defended both the US Postal Service — it “does more for regular Americans on a daily basis than all the billions upon billions of dollars I watched poured away on nothing overseas,” he wrote — and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), pointing to the stark difference between the quality of his VA experience in DC and Maine to argue that the service should be better funded instead of privatized.

Several times, Platner, as a former service member who had completed four tours in two countries, used Reddit to give his much younger compatriots advice. “If sh*t is getting rough, talk to somebody,” he told one Marine posting about his struggles. “Military OneSource, a civvie therapist, whatever. But don’t bottle that sh*t up.”

He advised them on how to successfully navigate their VA entitlements, urging them to file claims and compile evidence before their health took a catastrophic turn, and how to claim for injuries that had developed after their military service.

“It doesn’t make you a leech or a pussy,” Platner told users of a subreddit for US Marines. “This country pumped billions of dollars into the bank accounts of defense contractors, all on the backs of your suffering and sacrifice.”

“Vietnamed Us Again”

That “suffering and sacrifice,” Platner made clear, had been core to his political transformation.

In his Reddit posts, Platner looked back on his time in the military with ambivalence: proud of his service and those he served with, sometimes nostalgic for the excitement and rush of the job, but bitterly scathing of the politicians and military brass that sent them to fight, the military contractors who profited handsomely off it all, and the wars themselves, which he again and again called “pointless” and a “waste.”

It became “increasingly clear the wars were a waste of our time and dead friends/violence we committed was all for naught,” he wrote in 2021, and after he was done in Afghanistan, he “pretty much stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got me there in the first place.”

Years after, he wrote, the “sadness, loss, and futility to have fought so hard for utterly pointless reasons,” combined with the “dead friends, guilt, the feeling of alienation from the society that asked so much of us for so little purpose,” had “made me a deeply cynical man, and extremely wary of how this nation wages war.”“Every day was a stark reminder of the ethical horror show that imperialist adventures always turn into,” he wrote in 2021. “It was also deeply disheartening to see men I liked and respected conduct themselves in awful ways, because frankly morally bankrupt military campaigns always seem to extend that rot down to the people tasked with doing the fighting.”

In many posts, Platner insisted that it was clear from being on the ground that the Afghanistan war was a failure, but that “the mil, intel, and defense leaders Vietnamed us again with fake reprots [sic] of progress” and made it go on and on anyway. “This stupid f*cking war can’t come to an end soon enough,” he wrote in August 2021, as Biden oversaw the chaotic US withdrawal from the country “after 20 years of this dumb bullsh*t,” as Platner put it. He insisted to other Reddit users that “it was always going to suck, and better to just get it over with.”

“My time in America’s imperial wars definitely radicalized me further,” he explained in May 2021. “It is difficult to see all that horror, as well as all the grift and corruption, and not find the entire thing utterly bankrupt.”

Beyond a Handful of Posts

Platner’s Reddit archive contains thousands of comments over more than a decade, and it is possible to single out many of them to accuse him of any number of unflattering things. This is, in fact, exactly what seems to be happening in the media coverage of his posts, in which Platner is simultaneously portrayed as both a bigoted, far-right reactionary, and a dangerous left-wing radical.

But read in their totality, Platner’s posts paint a different picture of the candidate: someone who, far from a secret fascist, was openly and passionately opposed to fascism; who held a variety of typical progressive views even as he expressed himself in ways many liberals would regard as crass and offensive; who sympathizes with rural Americans despite being vehemently opposed to many of the candidates they vote for; and who was disillusioned with and radicalized against the system by US wars.

Platner, in other words, comes off as a flawed, complicated, and sometimes contradictory human being whose political views don’t always fit neatly into a box. In that, he resembles millions of Americans — including some of the exact voter demographics that American liberals say they want to win back, yet seemingly can’t help but vilify.