Dem senate hopeful insists ‘Nazi’ tattoo doesn’t make him a ‘secret Nazi’

Oyster farmer, military veteran and political candidate Graham Platner is back in the news for a rather interesting tattoo he sports.

While visiting the Pod Save America podcast, Platner’s campaign shared a video from about a decade ago, in which he is singing while shirtless. It was quickly noticed that he had a skull tattoo on his chest, which looked eerily similar to the “Totenkopf,” a known symbol of Adolf Hitler’s SS.

But Platner claims that he’s not a “secret Nazi.”

“I am not a secret Nazi. Actually, if you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and antisemitism and racism in general. I’d say a lifelong opponent,” he said, adding that he got the tattoo while “very inebriated” with his fellow Marines in 2007. It happened in a Croatian parlor, and the Maine Democratic Senate candidate contends  that the skull and crossbones is a “pretty standard military thing.”

“At no point in this entire experience of my life did anybody ever once say, ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi.’ It never came up until we got wind that, in the opposition research, somebody was shopping the idea that I was a secret Nazi with a hidden Nazi tattoo. And I can honestly say that if I was trying to hide it, I’ve not been doing a very good job for the past 18 years,” the Democrat added.

Platner is no stranger to controversy.

As BizPac Review previously reported, Platner has apologized for previous comments he made in which he called all cops “bastards,” implied that all white people are “racist” and said he was “disgusted” by America. He even said that people who “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” adding in another post that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”

He walked back all of these comments, which have also been deleted, by saying he was just “being an a**hole on the internet.”

“I don’t want people to see me for who I was in my worst internet comment — or even frankly who I was in my best internet comment … I don’t think any of that is indicative of who I am today, really,” the candidate told CNN.  “I have an immense amount of friends who are police officers. They’re not all bastards because they’re literally buddies of mine.”

“As I told CNN, I was f**king around on the internet at a time when I felt lost and very disillusioned with our government who sent me overseas to watch my friends die,” he said in a separate statement to Politico. “I made dumb jokes and picked fights. But of course I’m not a socialist. I’m a small business owner, a Marine Corps veteran, and a retired sh*tposter.”

Writer/Columnist

Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to BizPac Review.

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