By In a revealing display of the harder, more violent edge now emerging within the progressive left, U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner used a weekend town hall to call for aggressive, sustained harassment of lawmakers who resist Medicare for All — an escalation that lands against the backdrop of his earlier, publicly resurfaced comments endorsing militant pressure tactics.
Speaking Saturday in Windham, Platner told supporters that confronting elected officials in their personal lives is a necessary tool for compelling cooperation on federal healthcare legislation. “In the future, when we’re trying to vote on something like Medicare for All, if there are other members of the Maine delegation that don’t want to come along, we need to be able to impose costs,” Platner said, according to The Washington Free Beacon. “We need to be able to turn people out to flood their offices. Frankly, I want people to follow them around and don’t let them have a public dinner without getting yelled at. Because that’s power. That’s real power.”
He defended these tactics as a legitimate form of strategic leverage. “We also have to build secondary power. Real power of organization, the power to turn people out, the power to shut things down, frankly, the power to impose costs,” he continued. “If we can’t impose costs, then they’ll never listen to us, because they won’t care.”
Platner has made Medicare for All the centerpiece of his campaign, pairing it with proposals to remove the cap on Social Security payroll taxes, create a minimum tax on billionaires, and sharply raise taxes on capital gains and corporations. He argues these steps would reclaim money he says was wrongfully extracted from working-class Americans by the existing tax system. His campaign did not respond to requests for comment on the weekend remarks.
The controversy follows an October report detailing past statements calling for violence that Platner made online, in which he argued that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice” and mocked anyone who “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.” He acknowledged writing the comments but attempted to dismiss them as “years old,” insisting he had been “in a dark place” at the time. The episode drew renewed scrutiny when national progressive figures rallied behind him, with one defender insisting the uproar reflected “party insiders trying to kneecap an outsider” rather than the substance of his rhetoric.
Planter has also been accused of training a radical leftist paramilitary group after a photograph resurfaced photograph of a Nazi-era “Totenkopf” skull tattoo on his chest, alongside Reddit posts from years ago in which he made racially charged remarks such as “Why don’t Black people tip?” and comments suggesting sexual-assault victims “take some responsibility for themselves.”
The same report further disclosed his documented ties to the Socialist Rifle Association in Maine, where under a handle he reportedly instructed members in firearms tactics and helped oversee monthly “introduction to firearms” courses.
In light of these revelations, Platner’s latest call for “secondary power” and direct, even personal, pressure campaigns against legislators takes on a sharper cast that reveals the growing violence on the left. What might otherwise be dismissed as provocative campaign rhetoric now intersects with a portfolio of militant associations and inflammatory statements, thereby amplifying concerns about what he means when he speaks of “following them around” and denying public dinners “without getting yelled at.” The question confronting voters is not simply whether his policy prescriptions are viable—but whether the style of politics he embraces reflects an approach to power that moves beyond persuasion into coercion.
Taken together, Platner’s call for targeted harassment of lawmakers and his earlier embrace of armed confrontation paint a picture of a candidate who views political conflict not simply as a debate over policy but as a struggle requiring the imposition of personal and social costs on opponents. Whether Maine voters will reward that posture — or recoil from it — now stands as one of the central questions of his Senate bid.
[Read More: Democrat Wants Voting By Phone]
