They’ll call everyone else a Nazi, but the media aren’t sure about the Nazi tattoo guy

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The funniest thing about the Graham Platner (D) Senate campaign in Maine, aside from its forcing progressives into wildly unflattering rhetorical pretzels, is that it proves the moral panics over “white supremacy” and “toxic masculinity” were never sincere. They were only ever about smearing conservatives.

For the last 11 years, activists in politics, news media, and academia have linked even the most banal, everyday activities to white supremacy and fascism.

Hitting the gym, common hand gestures, having babies, and even just appearing at Madison Square Garden was white supremacist, racist, Nazi-adjacent or Nazi-coded.

Even more absurdly, we were all supposed to pretend that these analyses were the product of intelligent and honest consideration, rather than the targeted slandering of everyone outside the confines of the far left.

But now we have a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate who, until he recently covered it up to run for office, had an honest-to-goodness Nazi SS tattoo emblazoned upon his chest. Suddenly, the same news outlets that had once warned of the white supremacist nature of milk consumption and the circle game — the ones that claimed to spot fascist devils under every doily — are playing it safe, couching their words and insisting subtly that Platner’s SS Totenkopf tattoo might have been something else, or the product of an innocent mistake.

What an odd time for these news outlets to have rediscovered circumspection, and for this topic specifically!

Note how various news outlets used the word “resemble” to report on Platner’s tattoo. “Platner had a tattoo from his Marine days that resembles a Nazi symbol,” NBC News reported last week of the Democratic Maine Senate candidate. The Washington Post also reported that he “got a tattoo on his chest covered up that resembled a Nazi symbol.” Even the New York Times claimed Platner had a “tattoo on his chest [that] resembled a Nazi symbol called a Totenkopf.”

PBS said last year the since-covered-up tattoo “resembled a specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS,” while USA Today likewise claimed the skull-and-crossbones tattoo “resembles the Totenkopf. And so on.

Each of these reports came after a former acquaintance had already claimed that Platner knew what the image meant as far back as 2012. The most recent examples of “resembled” were also published after an acquaintance had produced texts from before the body art became public knowledge, showing that Platner knew its meaning.

Since Platner knew exactly what the image meant — he reportedly referred to it as “my Totenkopf,” and of course everyone knows the 20-year-old punchline to one of the internet’s favorite comedy sketches — at what point do our media drop this “resembled” nonsense and just call it what it is?

Remember all that talk a few years back about how, when reporting on President Trump’s falsehoods, the media needed to come right out and use the word “lie” to describe what he was doing? Has that brand of candor vanished from the earth?

To be serious, I don’t believe Platner is actually a fan of the Third Reich, nor do I believe, based on what I’ve seen, that he is a eugenicist, a white supremacist, or an antisemite. Even when he talks about Israel and Palestine, he’s obviously just appealing to the Democratic omni-cause; he doesn’t appear to have an original thought on any high-level topic, let alone peace in the Middle East.

The best that can be said about him is that he is a lying weasel, a man who cheats on his wife by sexting multiple women, a meathead sex-pest with no impulse control, psychotic opinions and a violent demeanor. He also has an annoying penchant for pretending he comes from some kind of working-class background, even though he comes from privilege and once attended a boarding school whose tuition is higher than that of most private universities. But he’s not a Nazi.

I also don’t believe Elon Musk is a Nazi, despite what you may have read in the pages of the New York Times. But whether Platner or Musk is a Nazi isn’t the real point. The real point is that the same journalists who only recently claimed the “okay” hand gesture is a hate symbol are now pretending, with straight faces, that they don’t know what to make of a guy who paid money to have a Totenkopf tattoo placed on his chest.

You don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that Democrats probably cannot retake the Senate unless Platner wins, do you?

We should also note the media’s cautious, almost skeptical response to credible allegations that Platner was abusive toward at least one former girlfriend. The New York Times’s Jodi Kantor, for example, downplayed a woman’s claim that Platner abused her both physically and emotionally, saying the story doesn’t quite clear the bar for a genuine “MeToo” allegation.

“The accusations against Graham Platner are not classic MeToo accusations,” said Kantor. “They’re — they were mostly made in the context of consensual relationships. … They were mostly like being his boyfriend gave me a view into him and I did not like what I saw. His character was scary.”

This is particularly amusing coming from Kantor, considering the time, energy, and weight she gave to the spurious allegation that the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had once been a teenaged gang rapist.

Say what you will about the hair-splitting of “classic #MeToo accusations” versus alleged abuse done “in the context of consensual relationships.” But at least eyewitnesses can attest to the fact that Platner did indeed date the ex-girlfriend who says he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved and shut her into a room, then confined her there to make her “calm down.”

Now compare this cautious reaction to the media’s reckless embrace of the uncorroborated and in many cases absurd allegations leveled against Kavanaugh. No witness has ever verified that accuser Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh had even met before he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

It would be nice if this Platner business and the public implosion of all that supposed concern for “bad men” and “white supremacy” meant that we could finally go back to having normal news coverage, where things as mundane as stage set designs don’t have to be scrutinized for secret coded Nazi double-meanings.

But let’s not kid ourselves — the moment the affiliations in question switch from “D” to “R,” we will be knee-deep once again in bogus and bad-faith allegations of misogyny, racism and white supremacy.

Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.

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