Splinter: Graham Platner Exposes the Twitter/Bluesky Divide on the Left

Despite what prominent pundits and national media outlets forever stuck in an increasingly outdated Cold War paradigm think, the left is a pretty diverse coalition. We have all been smushed into one small box thanks to America’s rigged electoral system where third parties are functionally illegal, and “the left” has become synonymous with being anti-establishment. The problem with this characterization in the media that was always more favorable to the establishment than the left (what a shocking coincidence!) is that just because I say I don’t like apples doesn’t mean I do like oranges. That is the short story of the 2024 election and Trump’s subsequent collapse in support, another major theme the mainstream media missed in this century where they have woken up every day and set fire to what is left of their reputation.

But now that the Democratic Party is polling below the least popular president ever thanks to a collapse in their own support, that media canard of anti-establishment equaling the left is exposed for the farce it has always been. The bleeding heart resisters donating money to Chuck Schumer in 2018 now want to have him thrown in the stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables. The times are changing, and the left is not immune to this dynamic.

So enter Graham Platner, the frontrunner per all polling for the Democratic Senate Primary in Maine, and seemingly a dream candidate for the left. A gruff oyster fisherman who posts on Reddit and calls himself a New Deal Democrat while unapologetically standing up for Palestine running in the oldest and one of the whitest states seems like one of the best situations the left has found itself in recently. Coming off Zohran Mamdani’s big win in the New York City Mayoral race, the left as a broader national force is gaining momentum, so why are so many on the left opposed to Graham Platner?

Well, he does, or did, have a Nazi tattoo. I asked a very simple question about this back in October, and it was focused on general competence: why would you run for Senate before knowing you have a Nazi tattoo?

This fact that Platner acknowledged and tried to get out ahead of way too late has split the left, and over the past few months I have grown increasingly dismayed at how unhinged much of this fight has become. It almost feels like a proxy war where Platner isn’t really the main subject of this fight, and this is more about the fact that Twitter lost a big chunk of its left to Bluesky and now we’re all just talking past each other. The coalitions around Platner are a lot more complex than just splitting them along two social networks the vast majority of Americans don’t use, but the culture of both sites helps provide a useful shorthand to summarize this divide on the left where we have actually siloed ourselves inside our own separate echo chambers.

The Bluesky Left

Bluesky gets a lot of deserved and undeserved crap for having some of the most annoying reply guys on the planet. I don’t have that big of an account, around 5,000 followers, but I can confirm that every time a post of mine goes viral, I get exposed to some of the most insufferable people the left has to offer. If there is one defining characteristic of Bluesky, it’s that it has a lot of users who spend their days arguing with jokes and shitposts. Everyone on Bluesky, including myself, could use a chill pill.

Bluesky is where the lefty opposition to Platner has really mounted, and like any social network with 43 million people on it, has seen the criticism go in productive and unproductive directions. Personally, I think the people who are saying a drunken 19-year-old marine getting a tattoo in Croatia is disqualifying are naïve at best and hysterical cynics at worst. Anyone who knows a marine knows that getting tattoos you’re not quite sure about the provenance of when you are young and dumb is a time-honored marine tradition. That part of Platner’s story around the Nazi tattoo is by far the most believable, and people arguing with jokes and staking their disqualifying claim in this realm are not to be taken seriously. He is not a 19-year-old Nazi sleeper cell. Get a fucking grip. Also, while I understand people pushing back on the humble oyster fisherman trope with Platner’s world-famous architect grandfather, upper class traitors are good, and if you think only poor and middle-class people can be socialist leaders, you have a very bad historical understanding of socialism.

But as anyone who has read the Reddit posts from Platner’s longtime handle “P-Hustle” can attest, he is not some military history naif either, which does cast doubt on his claim that he didn’t know what the Totenkopf on his chest looked like. Where my concern comes in is not in him getting the tattoo or being a Nazi, it is his incuriosity over that thing on his chest every day thereafter. P-Hustle’s posts are pretty clear on his Nazi stances too. There’s nothing you can find in his Reddit history which suggests he’s a longtime secret Nazi sympathizer. “Is this a f*cking joke?” he wrote after a user in a military gear subreddit posted a tactical vest with “AKP” on it (which Platner assumed was a reference to Turkey’s authoritarian, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “I’ll make sure to post kit with swastikas and then say ‘hey bro, it’s just gear’.”

And yet, this extensive lefty posting history has not dissuaded many Bluesky hysterics from writing elaborate conspiracy theories filled with lies and suggesting that Platner is some secret Nazi. There has been an overcorrection of sorts with some people, as they rightly revolted from a Nazi site designed to turn its users into Nazis, but now they see Nazis everywhere. There are good critiques to be made of Platner, but this secret Nazi notion that has gained purchase in some circles with serious #resistance vibes is unhinged. Comparisons of Platner to a former lefty darling in John Fetterman are not without merit, but speaking as someone who was close to folks working on Fetterman’s campaign, I promise you that isn’t a 1 to 1 comparison, largely because there are no local Maine activists on the ground pleading with the left to take a deeper look at a man who pulled a gun on a Black jogger long before the rest of America learned how much he sucked.

Just because the squeakiest wheels always get the grease in our discourse doesn’t mean the people forever stuck doing different versions of #resistance posting speak for all of us on Bluesky who have concerns about Platner’s candidacy. There are a lot of us on Bluesky who don’t think that Platner is some secret Nazi, just a doofus who has repeatedly displayed poor judgement and worry he could blow a very winnable race. There are also many others who see the value in Platner’s pitch to the left, and have pushed back against those saying he’s disqualified himself. Anyone who says that Bluesky opinion is 100% homogenized is simply just broadcasting their ignorance to the entire world.

One of the reasons I feel communities of color in Maine haven’t given up on Platner is that he shows up in a way that’s rare for white folks. Much less a political type. When the ICE surge started here, he reached out directly to me and others to see how he could assist.

— Shay Stewart-Bouley (@blackgirlinmaine.bsky.social) March 5, 2026 at 9:35 AM

 

The Twitter Left

I gather that everyone here is 100% certain Graham Platner is a Nazi antisemite.

I also gather you all are trapped in an epistemic chamber sealed tighter than the one around Fox News.

So, who here actually knew that Platner’s wife is Jewish?

And how does that influence your certainty?

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 7:35 PM

To my internet browsing eye, the strongest digital constituency for Platner’s candidacy remains on the MechaHitler site with the CSAM bot. Bluesky has been characterized in the discourse by its most hysteric users, but somehow that standard doesn’t apply to the website run by the wealthiest man on the planet openly trying to turn the entire world into neo-Nazis. Twitter is still the “commons” according to many lefties addicted to their artificially inflated follower counts, despite the fact that just 21% of U.S. adults say they use the Nazi site, which falls behind Snapchat (25%), Reddit (26%), WhatsApp (32%), TikTok (37%), Instagram (50%), Facebook (71%), and YouTube (84%). All of us posting on text-based apps are in small echo chambers most Americans watching vertical video are completely unaware of, and you’re catastrophically out of touch with modernity if you think otherwise.

“Bluesky has brain worms—it’s a bunch of people locked in a closet huffing each other’s farts, debating an imaginary candidate” posted one prominent lefty Twitter account while quoting Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau’s critique. “I can’t remember the last time there was such a giant disconnect over a candidate between online (mostly BlueSky) Dems and Democratic voters,” wrote Barack Obama’s former speechwriter while boosting a poll showing Platner was up 9 points on Maine governor and 78-year-old Democratic establishment darling, Janet Mills. “Another very normal day on Bluesky, where users are now calling for the federal government to invade and occupy Maine if Platner wins his Senate race,” wrote self-described “free speech activist” Nathan Bernard about a post from a Bluesky account with 255 followers that as of this writing, has five reposts (Bernard’s post has 150 reposts on X as of this writing).

I know that it’s shocking to learn that people who spend time scrolling through an algorithm designed by Elon Musk may be misinformed, but every time the Twitter addicts paint the site that argues with jokes with a uniform brush, they expose their ignorance even more. And this I think is where the true divide on the left lies. It’s not really about the Maine Senate race; I think a lot of these folks on Twitter are bitter that a lot of us abandoned them and now say they hang out at the Nazi bar (because they hang out at the Nazi bar).

How else do you explain this characterization of a site with 43 million people as wholly uniform? No website anywhere would be characterized charitably if it was defined by its bottom 10% posters, and yet, there is an entire group of Twitter users who have become convinced that 255 follower accounts speak for all of us who migrated to Bluesky because we were sick of hanging out on a website that has become indistinguishable from Breitbart’s Black Crime section. As someone who posts on Bluesky and still occasionally scrolls Twitter (Bluesky’s userbase is seemingly entirely based in the Western world, so it is basically useless when you want to know from locals what is going on in the Middle East, that is where Twitter still has real value), the way people on Twitter talk about Bluesky is totally alien to my experience on the vast majority of days when my posts don’t land on the discovery tab.

I think it’s quite clear at this point that spending your time marinating in the Nazi site desensitizes you to Nazis to some degree, and still using Twitter like it’s 2018 is a choice to ignore the fact that you are hanging out at a Nazi bar because you found a quiet corner with the few remaining lefties still willing to tolerate this shit as background noise. If anything, Bluesky is 2018 Twitter now, as that place was filled with unhinged hysterics, too, while everyone said it was irrelevant to the discourse. I think that multiple dynamics are converging around Platner here that have little to nothing to do with Platner, and it is dismaying to see all these lefties on Twitter I respect and still read project these kinds of blind spots while letting a website designed to spread misinformation misinform them.

First, to Drop Site‘s Ryan Grim specifically, I cannot find any evidence that Platner’s wife Amy Gertner is Jewish. I can’t find any evidence of what she believes. Talking Point Memo‘s Hunter Walker looked too and couldn’t find anything. I hope you have some because otherwise that claim looks very bad. His sister-in-law is Jewish—her wedding is where he took his shirt off and had the infamous video of his Nazi tattoo exposed, which does support the notion he didn’t know what it was. A MyLife.com listing for Amy J Gertner in Hope, Maine, says her religious views are “unknown.” The Midcoast Villager published a profile of her back in January and never mentioned anything about her religion. The only specific link I can find that asserts his wife is Jewish comes from Peter Brimelow, the founder of the white nationalist site VDare, writing on his Substack that “Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, has an Ashkenazi Jewish name,” and that “If Gertner is Jewish, this surely puts in perspective Platner’s claim that he didn’t realize the tattoo was an SS symbol.”

Perhaps Grim mis-rage typed when he logged on to troll a website he fundamentally doesn’t understand, and he meant sister-in-law. But if he did mean wife, the only source I can find for that claim is a white nationalist. Unless he has his own proof that hasn’t been published yet, this is an embarrassing error from a man who has done a lot of good journalism. If he doesn’t and he did mean wife, then this is a classic example of why those of us on Bluesky tell people to get the fuck off Twitter. The Nazi algorithm is invading your brain whether you believe it or not. It’s especially rich to see people at the Nazi bar get mad when people point out they quote-tweeted Nazis (Platner’s campaign deleted a post that did this), and ask indignantly if they should vet everyone before quote tweeting them. In normal times, no, but if you are regularly hanging out at the Nazi bar, it might be a good idea to double check to make sure the person you’re about to boost hasn’t called for my extermination first.

Platner went on a right-wing podcast earlier this year, and while that is not an unforgivable sin for a political project trying to expand the tent enough to overthrow the two-party duopoly, saying you are “a longtime fan” of a podcast that posts episodes like these below is not exactly a comforting direct quote from Platner. Some of the fervent defenses of this revelation on the Twitter left have coded as antisemitic and racist to me, because dismissing this podcast and Platner’s direct quote as supposed nothingburgers is bleakly informative as to what your Overton Window looks like. Do we just have to accept that indulging antisemites and racists in their racism is the price our political project has to pay to try to beat the establishment? Would a Jewish or Somali American lefty candidate have to go on this show to expand the tent too?

It’s hard not to look at many on the left’s obsession with Platner and see our version of the Democratic establishment’s hopeless habit of fighting the last war in their desperate bid to find their own Joe Rogan. 

The Establishment and Bad Faith Charges of Antisemitism

On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the defenses of Platner in the face of mainstream charges of antisemitism. I am Jewish and Platner has never read as antisemitic to me, although saying he is “a longtime fan” of the above show does give me some pause as to whether my instincts are off, but I have no firm evidence yet to believe they are. I still think doofus is the likeliest explanation for all this (perhaps this is what “dumb woke” as prophesized by Chapo Trap House looks like). I share a lot of politics with Platner, and have long been opposed to the joint-US and UK imperial project known as Israel that began with the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people, and have written extensively the past two-plus years about how the US mainstream media has parroted Israel’s propaganda amidst their genocide in Gaza. Reading Israel and Palestine-based outlets like Haaretz and +972 Magazine every day and learning about Israel’s atrocities only to see the New York Times and Wall Street Journal literally print Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies as their own headline was one of the most intensely radicalizing experiences of my entire life. Fake news is an accurate description of American media’s coverage of Israel and frankly, you never have to believe anything the scolds at the NYT‘s and the CNN’s of the world say about Israel anymore. Jake Tapper was more than happy to broadcast bald-faced lies about Rashida Tlaib that CNN then boosted across their media platforms and only quietly corrected on Dana Bash’s show and did not promote.

When it comes to Israel, American media is closer to Israeli state media than it is to any formal definition of journalism. American elites adopted a classically antisemitic stance as the acceptable status quo in their defense of Israel’s genocide and lost folks like me forever. The McCarthyite media and so-called Jewish groups like the ADL (they have proven themselves to be a Likud advocacy group, not a Jewish advocacy one) have been beyond shameless and have further endangered Jews around the world for at least a generation. My white-hot hatred for all the people weaponizing bad faith charges of antisemitism to defend a genocide is boundless (that goes double for all you non-Jews out there pulling this shit), and so I get the knee-jerk reaction to defend Platner when the people with the least credibility on the planet attack him.

But just because antisemitism has been cynically weaponized across the political spectrum to try to shut down opposition to Israel’s genocide does not mean that every charge of antisemitism is done in bad faith, and this is where I have felt icky watching the discourse unfold on Twitter. The lefties now joining the right and ironically posting “goy” as if they think that makes them any different from the 4chan swamps this tongue-in-cheek usage of it came from are often dismissing genuine antisemitism, and these folks are doing Graham Platner no favors by associating themselves with him. Not all antisemitic charges against him have merit, but it is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about a man who said he spent a lifetime not knowing he had a Nazi tattoo and who told a right-wing podcaster two months ago that he was “a longtime fan” of a show that treats Nick Shirley as a journalist.

But really what makes me feel the saddest about this split between the Twitter and the Bluesky left are the Twitter lefties in the trenches next to the Obama bros believing they’re carrying the anti-establishment banner. What the hell happened to us, man? Where is your skepticism around the Pod Johns adopting this candidate as their own? THAT is the big red flag around Platner from a lefty perspective in my book. To my eye, he sure looks like he is also swept up in a Democratic establishment civil war too. The dinosaurs in the party are clinging on to the past with Mills, while the younger generations who agree with radicals like David Brooks that Bernie was right are adopting an economically populist stance, and you can see this split within the establishment well beyond the Maine Senate race. I think it’s pretty clear that the Obama bros are backing Platner as a larger commentary on the kinds of candidates they want to see Democrats run across the country instead of the Democratic establishment status quo of picking the oldest person still alive and in line, and this race is something of a proof of concept for them.

I think it was very instructive that when Platner wanted to get out in front of the Nazi tattoo story, he went on Pod Save America to do it, and those guys going to the mat every day for him and hosting him on their podcast multiple times only increases my skepticism around their relationship. My core question is that when this previously self-described “communist” and newly self-described “New Deal Democrat” gets elected to the Senate and inevitably has to vote on an issue where the left and the Obama bros are opposed, which way is he voting? I do not know, I am not one of those Bluesky hysterics who assumes things of which there is no evidence for, but I simply do not trust that group of speechwriters and Fortune 100 CEO advisers who have played all liberal sides against each other to cast themselves as the true center of the Democratic Party while riding the coattails of the greatest orator of our time.

I am generally sanguine over the Maine Senate race, and want the best candidate to win a pretty weird state in a must-win Senate race if the Democrats are to retake the Senate. Mills would be unelectable in a place like California, but if there is anywhere a 78-year-old candidate could still win, it’s the oldest state in the union. Given the mess we have to clean up, I really wonder how many bills under a Democratic president Platner would vote for that Mills wouldn’t (an AOC presidency may be a different story), and I tend to think that all of us, including people like me writing 3,000-word articles about this issue, are making a bigger deal about this divide than there would functionally be. We definitely need more Graham Platner-types in the Senate if we are ever to reform an unreformable institution in the future, but I just do not know if Graham Platner is a Graham Platner-type and unlike many of my lefty compatriots, I am not willing to throw my entire reputation behind a politician who most of us just met yesterday.

This is a divide you can track largely along Bluesky and Twitter, but so long as both of our lefty echo chambers are characterizing the other by its worst posters, this divide will only widen, and the net result is it will weaken the left. We should be vigilant against cynical bad faith charges of antisemitism, but when your Jewish lefty allies like me are telling you that some of these Platner defenses I only see on the Nazi site code as antisemitic (seriously stop fucking ironically saying goy, you are not my ally, you are JD Vance’s), you should tap the breaks a bit and take in the bigger picture. The absolute worst thing that could happen to the left in this race is that Platner wins, continues to say things that could paint him as an antisemite, and then loses to Susan Collins, because then it won’t matter whether he actually is a lefty antisemite or not, as that will be the story the establishment will tell and all future races with pro-Palestinian candidates will be weighed down by Platner’s baggage. I would hope the Twitter left could see this bigger picture and the broader gains we are risking in Platner’s candidacy, but unfortunately, so long as they continue to hang out on a website with an algorithm designed by Elon Musk, I fear they simply are not able to see what he doesn’t want them to see.