Democratic Senate Candidate Once Defended a Marine Who Urinated on Dead Fighters

AP Photo/Caleb Jones

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner once defended a Marine who had urinated on a dead Taliban fighter.

On Monday, The New York Post claimed to have gained access to now-deleted Reddit posts from 2013 through 2020 made by the Senate hopeful himself — and it’s not the first time his Reddit posts have been exposed.

CNN first linked the former Reddit handle, “P-Hustle,” to Platner in 2025.

In the newly leaked post, Platner contradicted himself, asserting that urinating on “bodies is a poor choice” only because of “current media affairs.”

“Out of curiosity, what would you say to the many Marines and Soldiers who took trophies and desecrated bodies while fighting the Japanese?” Platner wrote in the Reddit screenshot shared by The New York Post. “I find the urinating on bodies is a poor choice, but only because of the current state of media affairs. It’s amusing that today killing a man isn’t worthy of comment, but God forbid you display dominance. Only 50 years ago, and for the rest of the history of warfare, this stuff was pretty standard.”

Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer running on an anti-establishment, populist platform, also called war the “most enjoyable experience of my life” in another Reddit comment, though he recently told The New York Post in a statement that his views have evolved.

“I was a teenager when I enlisted in the Marine Corps,” Platner said in the statement. “I was searching for a way to serve my country and I had pride in that service. But also in the years since, like many veterans, I realized how much we were taken advantage of and developed a new understanding of war.”

In 2025, CNN called out Platner’s foul-mouthed Reddit tirades.

“I have to ask, and I do mean this in the most charitable of ways, but are you retarded?” Platner wrote in one CNN-exposed post, responding to a Canadian commenter who questioned a 2021 vote in Maine to block a U.S.-Canada power transmission project. “We shouldn’t have to eat the pain because you c*nts and Massachusetts couldn’t act like adults. F*ck off and die, leave Maine out of your capitalist fantasies.”

The Senate candidate has been the subject of other controversies, too, from an alleged Nazi tattoo that he claims is “just a skull and cross-bones” to his controversial Reddit posts on rape.

When his Reddit account first leaked in 2025, Platner took to X in a nearly 5-minute video to declare that the comments are “not reflective” of who he is and come from a time when he was “struggling deeply” after serving in Afghanistan.

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