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Post-Platner Democrats must ask: 'Are we the baddies?'

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13.06.2026

Post-Platner Democrats must ask: ‘Are we the baddies?’

“Are we the baddies?”

That line from a famous comedy sketch came to mind this week as Democrats struggled to embrace Graham Platner, the Nazi-tattooed, Hamas-praising, veteran-bashing, sex-texting, self-described Communist who was just nominated to be the next U.S. senator from Maine.

The hilarious sketch from the British show “That Mitchell and Webb Look” portrays two Nazi soldiers suddenly questioning whether they might be the bad guys in World War II. Among other things, they notice the telltale death head or “Totenkopf“ insignia on their caps and uniforms. At one point, an officer asks his friend: “Hans — are we the baddies?”

It is a question that more Democrats should be asking as their leaders from House Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) back Platner.

For years, Schumer and others have been calling their political opponents “Nazis.” With help from an enabling media, they even fueled outrage over a false claim that Elon Musk had given a Nazi salute at an inauguration celebration.

Yet presented with a man who paid to have an actual Nazi death head tattooed on his chest, Schumer would only repeat the same mantra to reporters, that a Platner victory means Democrats will “win back the Senate.”

The co-host of ABC’s “The View” was cheered by the studio audience after declaring that Democrats have to abandon “the moral high ground. … Let’s get some power!”

Former Biden aide Ron Klain dismissed Platner’s tattoo as “a skull and crossbones to remember his fallen comrades.” But the SS-Totenkopfverbände was not a grief support group, and the Nazi Totenkopf is not a Jolly Roger symbol. Rather, it is the well-known symbol of Adolf Hitler’s Third SS Panzer Division,........

© The Hill