🔒 Graham Platner and the Trolley Problem

I hadn’t intended to talk about Graham Platner. I’ll talk about the right and the left using American politics as the reference, but I try to steer away from granularity that I can’t purport to understand. In short, all I really know about Maine is that’s where Pennywise lives.

 However I also write about masculinity and toxicity and online discourse, and there’s plenty of all of that in this story, so here goes.

 Graham Platner is, at the very least, a massive jackass. To say nothing yet about the people he’s harmed in his life, even running for office with his kind of baggage is incredibly reckless. Opposition research found a Facebook message that JD Vance deleted in 2016, you think they’re not going to find out that you once locked a woman in her room to end an argument? Or that you have an SS Totenkopf prominently tattooed on your chest? 

So now he’s massively screwed up the Senate midterms for Maine Democrats by managing to… well, I have to be careful, here… allegedly hide a sexual assault or rape long enough to win the primary but not long enough to get elected and serve out his term. And of course I believe in innocent until proven guilty but I also don’t find anything implausible about this story.

 The contrarian takes that have emerged to defend Platner and call his accuser a liar don’t make a convincing case, and for most of them the best way they could help him out here is to stay silent. Reporter Ryan Grim thinks his accuser led him on, and that this fact is being omitted by the mainstream media.

Then there is, of course, Matt Taibbi and Michael Tracey, who have teamed up recently to enter into some kind of Men’s Right’s Activism phase. Taibbi, who has been outspoken about the supposed epidemic of false rape accusations against prominent men ever since he felt the wrath, perhaps unfairly, of the MeToo movement himself, thinks that such accusations just shouldn’t be reported on at all, at least not until some sort of full criminal investigation has run its course. His fellow quasi-MRA Twitter-Files journo Lee Fang concurs.

Michael Tracey views high profile sexual abuse accusations like his own personal bat signal for some reason, swooping deftly into the discourse slinging his lying-whores batarang. He’s recently been in the public eye as a contrarian about Jeffrey Epstein, and while I’ve been vocal myself in doubting that Epstein raped half the world as some people contend, Tracey’s thing is that Epstein never even cut the tag off his mattress let alone committed a sex crime.

 His own spittle-flecked rant about what he sees as a particularly flagrant false accusation in Platner’s case delves into deep conspiratorial territory that at one point seems to suggest that Platner’s accuser was sort of hypnotized by malicious actors into constructing false memories of a rape that never occurred.

There are numerous reasons why various people want to push so hard for this false-accusation narrative, and particularly for those who didn’t like Platner and maybe don’t even like Democrats to come out swinging for him now, a lot of it does come down to misogyny and the bro code. For those who actually did support Platner and weathered his scandals, and who are not ideologically misaligned with feminism, that doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. It’s also cope.

 As every piece I’ve read by people still on the Platner bandwagon has argued that the events of which he is being accused never took place, I’d like just one of them to answer: What if they did?

For free subscribers, this is a preview. Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 17-July