I am going to wade into the very deep and turbulent waters churning right now about one Graham Platner, the now nominee for the Democratic Party in the Maine Senate race. He is facing off against Senator Very Concerned, Susan Collins, who offers strong resistance to the worst behaviors of the Trump administration via her very formidable furrowed brow.

Winning back the Senate is an uphill climb for Democrats but certainly doable. Winning Maine is an important part of that. So, before I dig in, my own feelings about Platner:

– I support many of his progressive policy stances, and in a vacuum, we need more messengers like that. Tim Wahls is another example of this kind of progressive-but-“regular-person” type that could be very effective.

– However, as you may have noticed, we do not live in a vacuum, and there are a lot of skeletons in Platner’s closet, including some “young” ones, as in sexting someone not his wife in 20-fucking-23. There are also some other red flags, like a claim he held a girlfriend in a room against her will and some other things that skate a line between shitty guy and very abusive guy. There’s that whole Nazi tattoo thing, which I think really is the least of our worries with Platner. There are also some terrible things he posted on Reddit.

– So, he’s not the ideal candidate, needless to say, but he’s who we have and we need to win the Senate. Therefore, he needs to win.

– The Democratic Party completely dropped the ball if they didn’t want Platner. Running Maine’s Governor Janet Mills as an alternative was a disaster. Nothing against Mills, a fine politician, but there is no stomach for elderly candidates right now and she has become less popular over the last year.

– Again, Democrats need Platner to win, full stop. Now is not the time for any stuff like the Party Unity My Ass (PUMA) crap that some angry Hillary supporters tried to pull in 2008.

However, in the middle of all this, there’s a very distasteful aspect to it, a kind of “rural boys will be rural boys” with a side order of misunderstanding of PTSD. I’ve been noticing this for a while now.

Platner’s alleged abusive or volatile conduct in past relationships and sexually explicit messages with women during his marriage, if true, is also something that is sort of accepted as part of living a rural area. It’s even being used in a very sneaky way as a political argument.

Few of Platner’s defenders say outright that “rural men are just like that.” The argument operates more subtly. His alleged treatment of women are folded into an archetype of the authentic rural man: the gravel-voiced veteran, the rugged oyster farmer, the damaged but redeemed outsider who is supposedly closer to “real” working-class life than the polished liberal professional. In that frame, concern about women becomes scolding, elitist, or politically naive, while tolerance for male misconduct becomes proof that Democrats are finally willing to speak to “normal” men. The result is not just forgiveness for one candidate; it is the normalization of a politics in which rural masculinity and veteran trauma are treated as explanations for behavior women are expected to absorb.

Rural domestic violence is not an eccentric cultural quirk or a harmless expression of “rough” masculinity. Domestic violence is widespread everywhere, but rural survivors often face compounding risks: geographic isolation, fewer shelters and services, more difficulty reaching help, and evidence of more severe abuse or later-stage intervention. Women living in rural areas, like where I live, do not deserve this.

Another related thing I want to bring up is this “HR Lady” nonsense. “HR Lady” is being used as a gendered slur for accountability itself—a way to make concern about Platner’s alleged treatment of women sound petty, bureaucratic, feminized, and politically unserious. The phrase surfaced in the formulation that Platner represented a rejection of “Dem HR lady politics,” which critics immediately read as meaning that objections to alleged domestic violence, misogyny, sexting, or intimidation were being downgraded into the tastes of scolding professional-class women rather than treated as substantive political concerns.

In that context, “HR Lady” does some pretty heinous ideological work: it contrasts the supposedly rugged, real, working-class man with the allegedly censorious woman who wants rules, consequences, and a workplace-code standard of behavior. The insult does not just defend Platner; it tells women that naming harm is bourgeois fussiness, while overlooking it is political realism.

Now, none of this is anything that Platner is saying outright. It’s the Horseshoe Left people, like Matt Stoller, who are making their way towards a future of being yet another Glenn Greenwald. But it’s pretty bad that this kind of thing is happening, likening real concerns about Platner to being told by an uppity woman that you can’t tell dick jokes or make unwanted flirtations toward female employees.

Regardless, the bottom line here is Platner needs to win. It would greatly help the Democrats (and there’s no real evidence he’d do a heel turn like like Senator Hoodie Lurch, John Fetterman). But this is a side of this entire debate that we need to acknowledge. It’s ugly and misogynistic.

The last word goes to Die Spitz with some old fashioned rock and roll for your Friday.