Graham Platner; Maine’ primary won't be held until April, but already the sheeple army is out in force below the tofu line

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HotAir’s John Sexton is not a fan:

Graham Platner Is Still a Socialist and Wants to Pack the Court

…. In one now-deleted Reddit comment from 2021, Platner responded to a thread about people becoming more conservative as they age by saying: “I got older and became a communist.” The comment was made on a subreddit called r/Antiwork, a far-left forum “for those who want to end work.”

In another Reddit post that year, Platner reflected on his life after his military service, saying he was “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days."...

In his interview with CNN, Platner wanted to assure voters: “I’m not a communist. I’m not a socialist. I own a small business. I’m a Marine Corps veteran.”

There's plenty of evidence that Platner really was a socialist and that it went beyond just the things he said on Reddit. For instance, he identified himself as a member of the Socialist Rifle Association and encouraged others to join a local chapter.

But even now, a month after his denial, his message still sounds a lot like socialism. Last week he posted a video from one of his town hall events in Maine in which he discussed billionaires.

“Nobody works hard enough to justify $1 billion,” the military veteran and oyster farmer told potential voters at the event. “Not in a world where I know people that have three jobs and can’t even afford their rent.”

With audience members nodding their heads in agreement, Platner continued by saying, “I refuse to believe that in a state like Maine, where people work as hard as we do here, that it is merely hard work that gets you that kind of success. We all know it isn’t. We all know it’s the structures. It’s the tax code. That is what allows that money to get accrued.”...

“The world that we live in today,” he explained, “is not organic. It is not natural. The political and economic world we have did not happen because it had to. It happened because politicians in Washington and the billionaires who write the policies that they pushed made this happen. They changed the laws, and they made it legal to accrue as much wealth and power as they have now.”

The solution? “We need to make it illegal again to do that,” says Platner.

No one works hard enough to justify being a billionaire. pic.twitter.com/Ezvf5fPLfv

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 14, 2025

It's "the structures"? What does that mean? What structures does he think are responsible for people becoming billionaires? Unless the structure in question is capitalism itself.

He mentions the tax code but taxes only take a portion of what you earned after the fact. Higher taxes on billionaires would take more of their money but it would only take what they earn, not what they own. Most billionaires are rich because they own some company that is worth a lot of money, not because they make a huge salary.

He bypasses this difference between income taxes, which tax money people take as salary, and wealth taxes, which take a portion of what people own. So, for instance, if you wanted to tax Jeff Bezos wealth, you'd need to force him to hand over part of his ownership of Amazon to the government, which is literally seizing the means of production. The government wouldn't pay him for those shares of stock, they would just demand them in the form of a wealth tax. Is that what Platner has in mind?

He says he wants to make it "illegal again" to accrue that much wealth, but when was it illegal before? The answer is never. He's just making stuff up.

….

Platner wrapped up his thoughts on billionaires saying, "It’s up to us to organize, use our immense power as the working class, and win the world we deserve." In other words, workers of the world unite. He still sounds like a socialist to me.

And then there’s the Supreme Court problem; the oysterman has an answer to that, too: