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- Graham Platner and the Working-Class Fetish
As of (checks watch) 6:00 pm on Tuesday, Graham Platner, who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, who is a Democrat (not to be mistaken with the Republican girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, who accused him of manhandling her and locking her in a room and saying he’d rape any intruder in his home, but “not in a gay” way), is still the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate from the great state of Maine. [6:22 p.m. update: Fifield has now added that he had a habit of surreptitiously removing condoms during sex.] After sticking with the political novice and oyster farmer following accusations of physical assault, a documented sexting account, and a much-discussed Nazi tattoo, Platner supporters are fleeing him, including Representative Ro Khanna, the Pod Save America hosts, and Senator Bernie Sanders. The 41-year-old Marine combat veteran has yet to bow out, although that seems inevitable. Reportedly, Platner intends to hold the Democratic Party, Maine voters, and the fate of the U.S. Senate in his hands until he’s assured that he will be replaced on the Democratic ticket by someone who shares his values. What Graham Platner’s values are, of course, might be open to debate. Look, this magazine has, in the writings of our Political Editor Bill Scher and Contributing Writer David Masciotra, raised all the right questions about Citizen Platner from the get-go. I’ve been posting about it for months. That’ll all be history soon when Platner bows out—as he must, with the Democratic Party arrayed against him. The question now: What should Democrats take from this nauseating episode? One lesson: Do not fetishize working-class voters. Court them, of course. Obviously, this bloc has befuddled Democrats in recent years. But the idea that nominating a working-class Democrat would sway working-class voters was always reductionist and absurd. Democratic Brahmins like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy did just fine with working-class voters. Sherrod Brown grew up in an affluent home and went to Yale. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio three times in part because of his connection with working-class voters, and today he faces good odds of returning to the Senate from a Buckeye State that’s gotten tougher for Democrats. Working-class voters have supported Republican billionaires like the president and candidates such as Senator Jim Justice, the U.S. senator and former governor from West Virginia who ran… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue
The Senate race in Maine looks significantly different than it did 48 hours ago. Yesterday, Politico reported a credible allegation of sexual assault against the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. In a video posted after the story broke, Platner denied the accusation but said that his campaign would explore the best way forward, opening the door to what seems like an inevitable withdrawal from the race.Now the voices that had most vehemently defended Platner during previous scandals or vouched for the necessity of his folksy progressivism have withdrawn their endorsements, one after another, and called for him to drop out. Among those voices are Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ro Khanna, and Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau. No doubt, none of these Democratic politicians, party power brokers, or podcasters were aware of the alleged rape when they made and maintained their endorsements. Nearly everyone who previously supported Platner seems to have since reversed course. Credible allegations of sexual assault do, indeed, go too far.But the question remains: Why was this horrific allegation the threshold when Platner had so obviously transgressed so many times before? Perhaps Platner’s Nazi tattoo should have been a sufficient indicator that he lacked the character to be a senator. Perhaps maintaining that SS logo for two decades, covering it up only when it became politically inconvenient, demonstrated that he lacked the judgment for national office. Perhaps a multiyear history of not just having abhorrent views about women and minorities, but feeling the need to post them for the world to see, could have told us that he is not the person to be Maine’s voice in Washington. Maybe a well-documented history of contemptible behavior in his personal life should have been enough, when taken with everything else, for Democrats to conclude that Platner was exactly the person he appeared to be.[Jonathan Chait: With Graham Platner, Democrats got drunk on the beer test]When Platner emerged last year as the Democrats’ shiny new object—DSA sensibilities with a gruff voice and working-class clothes—many who favored his brand of leftist populism rallied to help him defeat Democratic centrism. He managed to do so when his primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign before votes were cast. Platner’s backers hoped that he could do the same against Susan Collins this fall. But when a clear pattern of Platner’s bad behavior and bad judgment emerged, these Democrats held firm, using… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - The Demons of Maryville
Photographs by Houston CofieldFrom the outside, the church looked like a plain brick storefront, the mirrored windows peeling, a sign above painted white with blue letters. THE WELL, it read, and underneath, REVIVAL HUB.There were older and grander churches in Maryville, a college town in East Tennessee where you could barely drive a minute without passing a cross or a sign about Jesus. But when Mike and Andrea Brewer established the Well, in 2016, they understood themselves to be part of something more mystical and revolutionary than any existing denomination—a charismatic-Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.By his own account, Mike had been an exhausted factory worker and a lapsed Pentecostal addicted to pornography when one night, at home and praying for a better life, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling out to him and believed that it was God. At church a few days later, he would write, he felt a “tangible explosion” in his chest, followed by “the purity and righteousness of God moving through me in waves.” He came to believe that a demon had exited his body and that the Holy Spirit had taken its place. He decided that God had chosen him for a divine assignment.The Brewers began attending conferences with names such as “Voice of the Prophets” and “Voice of the Apostles” in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. At one gathering, Mike claimed to have seen an actual angel, and at another, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that he described to me as “like five fog machines, like a cloud just rolling into the room.” He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them.Houston Cofield for The AtlanticAndrea and Mike Brewer, the founders of the Well, consider themselves hardened spiritual warriors.They went abroad as missionaries to India and Haiti, which only confirmed their emerging understanding of a universe with three distinct realms—the heavenly, the earthly, and the underworld, with the Earth being the realm of spiritual warfare. On one side, the Holy Spirit, angels, and believers comprised an army of God. On the other were the forces of Satan—legions of demons with names, ranks, and personalities that could inhabit people, geographical regions, and entire nations. In India, the Brewers claimed… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - What Makes Sam Alito So Angry?
The last day of the Supreme Court term proved to be eventful for Justice Samuel Alito. While no one was surprised that he dissented from the Court’s decision invalidating President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, there was also a mistaken National Public Radio report, promptly retracted, that Alito had announced his retirement. With the midterm elections later this year, the commentariat had speculated that perhaps the 76-year-old Alito would retire to ensure that a Republican Senate would be in place to confirm the president’s nominee before November. Alito, to be clear, did not say or do anything to prompt this speculation. Why would Alito leave the Court now? With its current 6-3 conservative supermajority, not much stands in the way of the Court’s ongoing efforts to revise the law of the land. The Trump administration may have lost the birthright citizenship case, but it nevertheless prevailed the week before in two cases in which the Court agreed with the administration’s restrictive interpretations of federal immigration law. Alito was the author of the Court’s principal opinion in both cases. Although it may not be apparent from the sense of grievance Alito often projects, the Court has been moving steadily rightwards since he was appointed more than two decades ago. More than any other justice, except perhaps Clarence Thomas, Alito has supported that project by voting consistently with the Court’s right wing. In Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, Peter S. Canellos traces the roots of Alito’s conservativism to the turbulence of the 1960s, shows how the son of an Italian immigrant father and a first-generation Italian-American mother advanced to the highest tiers of the legal profession through the support of the Federalist Society, and describes how Alito has helped the Court shift the law significantly to the right since his appointment. Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement by Peter S. Cannellos. Simon & Schuster, 384 pp. This portrait of Alito is familiar to those who follow the Supreme Court, largely because of his authorship of the opinion in Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Perhaps the most interesting part of Canellos’s book, then, is his account of Alito’s confirmation hearing. In late 2005 and early 2006, President George W. Bush and the Senate were navigating the shifting terrain of… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - 0% intro APR until 2024 is 100% insane
[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - The Axe Files with David AxelrodGo beyond the soundbites and get to know some of the most interesting players in politics. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
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