"While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke..."

"... I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was 'nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.' If anything, he seems to be significantly worse...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster" (NYT).

That article she wrote and links to came out last October. It sets out to prop him up as he was falling long before the primary: "Platner is the oyster farmer and former Marine with a baritone voice and a Bernie Sanders endorsement who this fall came seemingly out of nowhere to capture progressive hearts nationwide. Recently, a barrage of ugly revelations made it look like perhaps all the hope invested in him had been misplaced...."

Hearts. Hope.

Here's Goldberg, back in October, explaining that Nazi tattoo: "During the 1970s, some punks had deployed Nazi imagery for shock value, but in the 1980s white supremacists started infiltrating the subculture in earnest. The bands Platner loved — Dropkick Murphys, the Dead Kennedys — positioned themselves squarely in opposition to these fascist interlopers. He recalled going to hardcore shows in Bangor in the late 1990s and early 2000s at a time when there were still regular fights between antiracist punks and neo-Nazis. Ever since then, he told me, antifascism has been at the core of his politics. Many of Platner’s most controversial Reddit posts stem from this antifascist ethos. In 2018, for example, he responded to a poster worried about how a roommate would respond to the purchase of an AR-15. “Tell them that if they expect to fight fascism without a good semiautomatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” he wrote. In another post he wrote, citing the socialist Eugene Debs, 'An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.'... American politics makes room for violent ideations on the right; Republican politicians regularly pose with semiautomatic weapons and promise to use them to safeguard their notion of freedom. There is much less evidence that voters will tolerate such rhetoric from the left. Republicans, who’ve been painting antifascists as a terrorist threat, would surely relish the chance to run against a man who once — jokingly, he says — referred to himself as an 'antifa supersoldier.'... Much of his extended family is Jewish, and he said he’s taken off his shirt in front of them without a second thought...."