I needed someone to write this piece about Graham Platner (about whom I wrote months ago, before the tatoo, before the icky posts, etc. (ellenbender2.substack.c… ). Anyway, after the tatoo and icky posts, I decided I would hold off and see what happened in the primary. Well, his only real opponent dropped out last week, so he is or soon will be the nominee so I made a donation yesterday, and I just saw that Sheldon Whitehouse endorsed him. I also watched this old clip of him in a feature about former service members who return to college as older students . . . which is not easy. x.com/KFILE/status/2049… But the discourse on X is insane, and my timeline is full of people who claim to be “lifelong Democrats who are now supporting Susan ‘Im Concerned’ Collins” and I can only imagine the discourse on Bluesky. Read Mike Brock who expressed my feelings about all of this better than I could. I don’t like the tatoo or the posts, but I do like the way he speaks now about the war, about the oligarchy, about health care. I appreciate that he and his wife have been open about their struggle with infertility. I don’t think he will be another Fetterman. And I definitely don’t think he is a Nazi.