Progressive Senate Candidate Graham Platner Deletes Tweet Boosting Notorious Neo-Nazi

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Graham Platner, the progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, deleted a tweet on Thursday that shared a post from avowed Neo-Nazi Stew Peters.

Peters wrote on X, “War with Iran is the only thing republicans and democrats have both given a standing ovation for. Let that sink in.” Platner shared Peters’s take approvingly and added, “As always, there’s one thing that brings Republican and Democratic politicians together: sending other people’s children to die in stupid wars in the Middle East.”

Whether or not Platner knew who Peters was when he shared the post was unclear, but it’s certain he soon found out as Platner’s post was deleted within a few hours after being made.

Independent journalist Yashar Ali commented on Platner boosting the white supremacist and rabid anti-Semite, writing, “Stew Peters isn’t just a far-right conservative or a white nationalist; he’s a neo-Nazi.”

“Stew plays a central role in mainstreaming neo-Nazi propaganda to broader audiences,” Ali explained, adding:

It appears that Graham Platner has now deleted this quote tweet, but it wouldn’t have taken him much time to find out who Stew is.

And Stew wasn’t making a particularly profound or interesting statement to begin with — one that Graham couldn’t have just made himself without elevating Stew

Peters has long embraced anti-Semitic rhetoric, calling Judaism “satanic” and a “death cult, while questioning the Holocaust. Last March, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by calling for a “final solution” to mass-deport the Jewish population in the U.S.

Platner has stirred scandal since jumping into the Democratic primary to take on incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). CNN’s KFile reported on a series of posts from 2021 in which Platner referred to himself as a communist, called rural Americans “racist” and “stupid,” all cops “bastards,” and used the word “retard.”

Platner was also later revealed to have a Nazi-era symbol tattooed on his chest. “It was not until I started hearing from reporters and DC insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol,” he told Politico last fall. “I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that — and to insinuate that I did is disgusting. I am already planning to get this removed.” Platner later had the tattoo redesigned.

Some on the progressive left came to Platner’s defense over boosting Stew Peters. DropSite’s Ryan Grim wrote on X, “This thing where we are expected to do background checks on people before doing a QT is so tiresome. Shit posters on here don’t have time for that. A QT is not an endorsement of the OP’s entire body of work! Most normal people do not know off hand who the Nazis are.”

Jonathan Cohn, a progressive activist, took a different approach, commenting, “If you are a regular person, you should always do a quick check before retweeting an account. If you are running for US Senate, you should set an even higher threshold of due diligence before promoting anything.”

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