00:00:00.000All right. Hey, everyone. How are you doing? Hello, everyone. I think I'm now on, but we'll see. It says my internet connection is unstable. That's not good. I will just proceed as planned anyway.
00:00:20.560All right. I see a lot of people joining. I would like to offer up a defense of Graham Plattner. And apparently no one else is willing to do this. So it's left to me.
00:00:36.400Now, you probably heard, if you are watching this, that a woman named Jenny Rassicott, I believe is how you pronounce her name, from Maine, who is a Democrat, has accused Plattner of rape.
00:00:53.280And Plattner is denying this, but he sort of left the door open to leave the campaign.
00:01:00.980The impression I got looking at Twitter for 15 or 20 minutes afterward is that this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back for Graham Plattner.
00:01:15.580They put up with a lot. They put up with similar accusations, actually accusations by Jenny a couple of months ago.
00:01:25.080They put up with a suspicious kick profile.
00:01:28.960They put up with his weird work history, with the fact that he worked for Blackwater, with the fact that he's quite messy and so on and so forth.
00:01:38.020They put up with all that, but maybe this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
00:01:42.580And there are a lot of voices calling for him to resign, even people who supported him in the past.
00:01:51.480First off, let me just talk about the accusations themselves. If you take them at their most salacious, they seem to imply that Graham Prattner broke into Jenny's house, raped her, left the next morning, and Jenny was ashamed and didn't want to accuse him of anything, and blah, blah, blah.
00:02:17.040Well, that's not really what happened, now, is it?
00:02:22.380Jenny and Graham were dating at the time.
00:02:27.960She claims that her door was unlocked.
00:02:32.440Okay, I wonder if Graham actually had a key.
00:05:26.960If I were a woman, I probably wouldn't want to date Graham Plattner either.1.00
00:05:29.940But that doesn't mean that you can recreate, imagine a rape that never happened and that is more fairly described as some drunk former soldier in Maine who acts like a jerk.0.98
00:05:46.620That seems to be a very fair way of describing what happened as opposed to rape.0.98
00:05:53.620The fact is she has no evidence of this. There is evidence of her telling her besties or telling her therapist about something. That's not evidence of anything. That's evidence of having regrets after having a bad experience with Graham Plattner, which I don't doubt was was unpleasant.
00:06:15.280But it is not rape. It is the essence of Me Too in the sense that it is the will to power among some women and a will to recreate the past.
00:06:28.140you saw this against uh justice kavanaugh you see this again with graham platner i'm saying this
00:06:34.560from a completely non-partisan perspective i like democrats i vote for centrist democrats
00:06:40.340i myself am a bit skeptical of some of graham platner's more outlandish statements uh but
00:06:47.780ending the me too era would be such a triumph by graham platner such a almost era defining thing
00:06:57.060That I hope he sticks in this race, and I hope he beats Susan Collins, just to show them, basically, that we can't be held hostage by people, men and women, who want to invent memories, recreate the past, revalorize, trans-evaluate the past, and make things that were either socially acceptable or at least understandable, somehow now crimes.
00:07:26.240because we've decided to think of them in this way.0.96
00:07:30.020I think Graham Plattner sticking it out
00:07:32.740and ending Me Too would be an excellent, heroic thing.
00:08:23.420So the DSA people who previously were sticking up for Graham Plattner, I'm thinking of Ryan Grimm, Emma Vigland, this type of, Emma Vigland's a bit of a fellow traveler in that she's a fellow traveler in life.
00:08:43.040but um ryan grimm is a particular telling one uh ryan grimm is russia aligned um he is he edits a
00:08:54.040website that delivers brain worms to streamers like asan piker asan piker is another example of this
00:09:01.040they've all turned on gram platner this is it oh no what these are serious reliable allegations
00:09:08.740We can no longer support Graham Plattner. Well, I think it's easy for people to associate Graham Plattner with someone like Hassan Piker or someone like AOC, etc. But the fact is, he's not. He's not associated with them. He's not a member of the DSA.
00:09:28.480I have looked up his statements on Ukraine, and they are pro-West, pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine unequivocally. That's who he is. He might actually rub me the wrong way on some economic points because in my old age, I've become more libertarian or whatever.
00:09:50.140But he doesn't rub me the wrong way on foreign policy, actually. And his criticisms of Israel's actions in Gaza, his criticisms of the AIPAC lobby, etc. First off, these are sort of off the shelf criticisms at this point in time. This is the mainstream of Democrats. It's not that unusual for him to say these things.
00:10:13.740A. B, those go directly in line. Those aren't incompatible in the slightest bit with being pro-NATO and pro-Ukraine, which he is. So isn't it interesting? Isn't it interesting that all of these DSA people are throwing Graham Plattner under the bus? Because he doesn't quite fit in with their agenda now, does he?
00:10:36.360He doesn't fit in with the Ryan Grimm outlook on the world of the wretched of the earth or
00:10:42.940multipolarism triumphant to destroy the West and destroy the American empire, etc. He doesn't quite
00:10:50.040fit in with those things. He's not really reliable when it comes to those things. Hassan as well.
00:10:55.620Hassan is just like a, if you took Ryan Grimm and hit him over the head with a hammer, he'd be0.96
00:11:00.860Hassan Piker. Just, in other words, a dumb version of Ryan Graham. But it's the same thing. It's the1.00
00:11:07.040same tanky crap. And they're all turning on Graham because he's not really lengthen, now is he?1.00
00:11:13.880They want bricks socialism. That is, first off, in terms of the people they support,
00:11:20.100they want people who embody, incarnate, in fact, bricks. That is, they find someone more trustworthy
00:11:28.820When they're non-white, when they're Muslim, when they're more of the kind of millennial with a master's degree type person, that's the DSA candidate that they're looking for. Because that person can be relied on as being a communist with a happy smile on her face.0.68
00:12:14.000This is just a drop in the bucket, just some little bobble they throw out there to pretend like they're socialist. It's foreign policy that, in my estimation, is motivating to them. Graham Plattner is not part of that crowd. And they all turned on him, one after another, very consistent. They're all in the same group chat, and they all turned on him within five minutes because he isn't part of the club.
00:12:41.400So this is an interesting moment, I would say, in terms of not so much of an alliance, but a kind of elective affinity, elective affinities between the DSA types and the Democratic establishment.
00:12:57.960The Democratic establishment has sort of basic, you know, problems with Graham Plattner. And they probably don't like his critical comments about Israel, but they might be able to tolerate those. But, you know, he's a little too rough around the edges. Is he electable? This talk of socialism? We're worried about it.
00:13:21.200So the Democratic establishment doesn't like him.
00:13:24.960The DSA doesn't trust him because he's not really one of them.
00:13:28.700So again, I'm not claiming that there's some alliance like they have the same interest.
00:13:33.280What I'm claiming is that they have elective affinities, and that is to get rid of Graham Plattner.
00:13:38.140So Graham, in the off chance that you're listening, I hope you are.