Graham Platner is the rash that won’t go away. He was finally forced out of the Maine Senate race after he was exposed for having a graphic social media history, a Nazi tattoo, domestic abuse claims, and a credible allegation of rape. There’s damaged goods, and then there was whatever Platner was — many echelons above that. He was a disaster.
And is he going away? Oh, no, he’s headlining some local Labor Day rally in Maine, and one local Democrat had a brutal take on the event (via Bangor Daily News) [emphasis mine]:
Democrats expressed confusion and frustration after activists in Hancock County announced a Labor Day rally featuring former U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner with many in the party looking to leave him behind after a rape allegation ended his campaign.
Sources said the announcement caught the campaign of the new nominee, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, by surprise. The mix-up lands at a pivotal moment for him as he races to build a national operation against five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.
Republicans have spent weeks trying to tie Jackson to Platner even as Jackson has opened a slim lead over Collins in early polling. Any fresh attention on the former nominee threatens to undercut that effort just as national Democrats rally behind him.
“I don’t know what they were thinking,” former Maine Democratic Party Vice Chair Peggy Schaffer said. “He’s not an elected official, not a union member, and he’s an accused rapist.”
The Oystergruppenfuhrer has entered into the Flensburg phase of his political career.
August 14, 2026
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
The fever dreams of boomer white leftist female university administrators may turn out to be more lethal than we ever imagined, as they begin to intersect with AI-era truth equilibration. How many thousands will die from the unbearably efficient rectification of names? https://t.co/Tzp2NakOl4
Tweet concludes, “One student, Zacarias Moussaoui, keeps asking how to fly a plane, but insists that he doesn’t need to know how to take off and land. Moussaoui is arrested.”
Ms Bryant is an official with the US department of agriculture in Florida, and the late Mr Atta had gone to see her about getting a $650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.
The meeting got off to a rocky start when Mr Atta refused to deal with Ms Bryant because she was “but a woman”. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly.
When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Mr Atta threatened to cut Ms Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon, etc – and asked, “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”
Fortunately, Ms Bryant had been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”
As the “vibe shift” takes hold, Democrats who enthusiastically partook in the most extreme “Woke 1” rhetoric find themselves in a bind. Their old statements now seem unhinged. They can admit they were wrong, perhaps with a nod and a wink to how crazy we all went during lockdown. Or they can dig in their heels and stand by their old positions. Neither option is particularly attractive.
If you try to distance yourself from 2020-era statements, you come off as intellectually spineless and willing to go along with whatever’s popular, either because you have no ideas of your own, or because you’re too cowardly to break ranks. Your convenient conversion might also not be believed. As Ms. Hong found, no one buys that a 37-year-old ought not be judged by the beliefs she held as a 31-year-old. Refusing to capitulate feels good, but doesn’t solve the core problem that voters perceive you as an extremist crank.
So what is a plucky, progressive Democrat suffering from a nasty 2020 hangover to do? If it were me, I’d start by deleting my tweets.
Good luck with that — presumably, the craziest stuff from those running in the midterms and (especially) the Dems’ 2028 presidential candidates have all been screencapped by now by opposition researchers.
And for those on the left who reject the word “woke” to describe 2020 and/or their current worldview:
I'm going to try to write something about this later on today or tomorrow. But this should never have happened for six different overlapping reasons, the most obvious being that it never should have been allowed to get this far: https://t.co/ofkZojlQzS
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) August 14, 2026
Inheriting the [Bernie] Sanders fanbase would give AOC a pretty darn solid base of support to start a presidential campaign. Even if the calendar of early states isn’t quite as Sanders-friendly as it was in 2020, you figure she would have a decent shot of winning Nevada and New Hampshire, and the recent narrow primary victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primary suggests that about half of the state’s Democrats are open to a Democratic Socialists of America-style candidate.
That doesn’t add up to a guarantee of winning the 2028 presidential primary, but it is about as good a shot as any Democrat has. If she waits another four years… who knows what the national political dynamics will be like?
As with Kamala in 2024, there’s a treasure trove of nutty statements AOC made in 2019 and 2020. But if the economy is perceived to be bad (QED, the way the DNC-MSM portrayed the economy under Papa Bush during the 1992 election cycle), that might not be enough.
Perhaps the most obvious comparison between Arday’s story and a fictional tale concerns Forrest Gump. The classic 1994 film features a boy compromised by both mental and physical handicaps, who, thanks to the enduring love of an unflappable, aphorism-spouting mother who dismisses the doctors who write him off, breaks free of his shackles, becomes a long-distance runner, and goes on to secure his triumphant place in history. In his memoir, Arday directly compares his inspiring life story to the “fantastical” film. He cites his unflappable mother, who is herself a font of the sort of self-help sayings women embroider on pillows, pointing out the “similarities there.
Arday fully acknowledges in his book the remarkable parallels between his life and Forrest Gump’s, quoting his mother, Giff, pointing this out.
Prone to fixations, autistic people often become superfans of narrow slivers of pop culture and other arcana. Research shows they also have a tendency to engage in “scripting”—memorizing and rehearsing, for example, lines from films or TV and weaving them into their everyday lives—and can form strong parasocial bonds with fictional characters. This can help them mirror and better comprehend real-life emotions.
Referring in particular to the penchant among people on the spectrum for role-playing games, Liam Cross, an autism researcher at the University of Plymouth’s school of psychology, told the Free Beacon: “Not only can this act as a way to scaffold social learning, but we see what’s called ‘bleed,’ where parts of the character one is playing and the self start to merge together and overlap.”
Gray Atherton, who is Cross’s Plymouth colleague, said: “One possibility of an individual ‘confusing’ fantasy with reality could be that if an individual spends an inordinate amount of time engaging with a fictional world or characters, they may begin to relate to those characters or story in a way that can feel ‘real.'” But Atherton cautioned: “It would be a stretch to characterize autism as a condition that would mean an individual genuinely confuses their own lived experience with those in a TV show, movie or book.”
Newton is remembered now as a great genius, which he was. He was also a peculiar man. He was famously rude and antisocial, with little apparent interest in friendships or romantic relationships. He was obsessed with his work, which included theology as well as natural science, and he would labor on a problem for days without food or sleep. An assistant who worked for him for five years saw the great man laugh only once: when someone asked Newton why anyone would want to study the mathematics of Euclid. His was a mind that not only voyaged “through strange seas of thought,” but did so—as Wordsworth understood—alone, for all his life. Brilliant people are not like the rest of us.
I wonder how Newton would fare in the Cambridge of today. Would he be able to negotiate funding applications? HR? Student politics? Would he demonstrate social grace, prudence and a veiled but also irrepressible drive toward acquiring power within the institution? Would he use the correct pronouns, honor the correct identity groups and keep perfectly within the confines of the Overton Window at all times? Would he succeed as a 21st-century academic? Something tells me he wouldn’t.
Nahh, Sir Isaac would be right at home in 21st century Cambridge. The Grauniad assures me that Arday was simply a strange one-off who somehow beat the long odds against him and stumbled into the university (albeit with the BBC there to videotape his arrival, along with the head of the university’s faculty of education declaring him, “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”)
Now the Guardian is obsessively delving into the backstory of the Arday saga, to reinforce the ‘one bad apple’ theme and quietly obscure the structural problem of which the paper is itself a part: the ideological capture of culture and intellectual life. https://t.co/yjJ2s0eGrX
UPDATE: Grauniad still continues to assume Arday was a one-off. Tweet continues, “Did they not consider that students were doubtlessly being damaged and — when it eventually came out — so would sociology and the reputation of black academics? It seems second and third order consequences weren’t their strong points.”
The far-Left comedian recently went on social media to celebrate the death of GOP stalwart Sen. Lindsay Graham. She also wished death on Sen. Mitch McConnell, the retiring politician who hasn’t been seen in public for weeks following a medical incident.
A comedian could make hay with the latter, mocking the lack of transparency in play.
Instead, she played the Cruelty Card.
Margaret Cho celebrates the death of Senator Lindsey Graham while wishing for Trump to be next. “From the closet to the coffin- real seamless. So it’s Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham…it does happen in threes. Hope.” pic.twitter.com/hkXxmFXLtb
— NATIVE_AMERICAN_BITCH_FROM_THA_SLAPAHOE_TRIBE 𖧶🪓 (@TRUMPGIRL_STL) July 13, 2026
Now, Cho is demanding her fellow comedians stop telling jokes at the expense of the trans community. That sentiment ran wild during Peak Woke, a time when the Left nearly cancelled Dave Chappelle for sharing those jokes in 2021’s Netflix special, “The Closer.”
Did it matter that Chappelle ended that stand-up special with a heartfelt tribute to a late trans comic? Apparently not.
Cho says the mere act of telling a trans joke can be deadly.
She means they might commit suicide over hurt feelings because they’re mentally unstable. https://t.co/am5zJjlP31
Cho has a point though. “In 1945 Peace broke out. It was the end of the [Killer] Joke. Joke warfare was banned at a special session of the Geneva Convention, and in 1950 the last remaining copy of the joke was laid to rest here in the Berkshire countryside, never to be told again.”
Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.
In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times2, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically3 and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.
But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”
The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.
At well over 15,000 words in length, I can’t automatically just say “read the whole thing,” but it’s definitely worth perusing.
Ahem. It wasn’t Enes Kantor Freedom or Royce White who created this problem. Sophie Cunningham didn’t create it either; an ESPN reporter demanded Cunningham’s opinion on it while Cunningham was criticizing the league’s treatment of her teammate Caitlin Clark. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve made it worse by attempting to troll Cunningham at a game with a “Trans Kids Belong” T-shirt during a game against the Fever, and the Lynx made it worse by attacking women and girls who support Cunningham.
And now that two biological males want to compete in the league, the woke morons who run the league find themselves hoist by their own petard.
So when do these geniuses plan to settle on a definition of woman? Maybe they’ll drop it under the Christmas tree. No, I am not kidding:
The WNBA and team representatives from across the league met Wednesday, Aug. 12 for planned talks on various matters, including ongoing debate over transgender females’ participation in women’s basketball.
“Today’s meeting covered a wide range of topics, including ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online. We will continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months,” a statement USA TODAY received from a WNBA spokesperson said.
“Weeks and months”? Will it take the Women’s National Basketball Association “weeks and months” to define the word “women”? What did the league think it meant for the past thirty years since its founding?
They’ll get back to Ed on that in weeks or months, or after they’ve chosen where to go for lunch, depending upon which comes first:
Sad: WNBA Task Force Fails To Define Woman After Spending Entire Meeting Trying To Pick Restaurant For Lunch https://t.co/enE6fnxsGl
Once they arrive in England, former Tory MP Edwina Curry (sarcastically, I think) suggests even more fun and games be arranged:
Former CONservative Edwina Currie, infamous for having an affair with John Major, says to stop invaders raping the public as they are, brothels should be opened next to their taxpayer funded accommodation.
LOL. Your comparison between these two cities is very significant. Detroit's main industry of automotive production was destroyed and left the town hollowed out. The same thing is happening with Los Angeles. The entertainment business has been steadily drained from this place… https://t.co/nLaj4iL2PF
Bateman’s tweet concludes, “The entertainment business has been steadily drained from this place for at least a decade. LA will soon be hollowed out just like Detroit. It is becoming just sprawling city with no central industry at all.”
Cobb is a former Trump administration name and is now displaying Stage-4 TDS symptoms just means CNN producers are positively vibrating to have him on camera. For the latest, he has gone so far around the corner we need to turn around in order to see his point.
Erin [Burnett] teed up Cobb for his hysteria by noting the figures seen at the swearing-in – Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel, the current lawyers, and others. She then, in what sounded like a prearranged dialogue, asks Cobb what he sees, after “what they chose of an entire event to release to us.” Cobb was then let off the chain:
Well, I think there was a summer night in 1934 when Hitler consolidated his power surrounded by Himmler, Göring and Goebbels. This is reminiscent of that to me, because you’ve got Blanche and (Emil)Bove, who saw the president through a trial that resulted in 34 felony convictions. Uh, you’ve got Steven Miller and, uh Kash Patel. Um, I think that is the axis of evil that we’re up against.
I was surprised to find an article in Shakespeare Quarterly ‘refusing to celebrate’ the quatercentenary of the publication of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. The author reasoned that we should not be ‘dedicating our energies, at a time of international emergency, to the production of ever more scholarship on a 400-year-old book’. If this is really his view, we have to wonder what he is doing in the English department of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.
The author goes on to blame the Folio for climate change, arguing that Henry and Emily’s Folger Shakespeare Library collection ‘was built from the money he made working for the Standard Oil Company and its later derivatives, which became the progenitors of ExxonMobil’. He then asks us to reflect ‘on the extent to which modern cultural dispensations float on an often unacknowledged reservoir of fossil fuels’. Drill, baby, drill.
Exit quote: “If your life’s great passion is the study of bouncy castles, pole dancing or writing essays on autoethnography, there ought to be nothing to stop you from working at Toys R Us, a gentleman’s club or the Guardian. But these people have all chosen to pursue academia. They are attracted to the status it confers. This was the world in which Jason Arday thrived. His colleagues at Cambridge were carrying out research on how fairy tales can break the gender binary in playgrounds or writing ‘a self-portrait of an artist who teaches’. Is it really surprising that his error-ridden thesis didn’t stand out against this backdrop?”
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash And Burn – The Patty Jenkins Story.
The Drinker’s next “Crash and Burn” video may have just written itself:
I just think it's so funny that both of the Wachowskis decided to start identifying as women and haven't made a good movie since https://t.co/f5znq8wuSX
Tweet concludes, “‘People like it, but they really don’t want to make it because it’s [got a] wall-to-wall trans cast. I have to get creative and figure out different ways that I can get this in front of people,’ Wachowski said on KCRW’s ‘The Business’ podcast. ‘This is a script that was extremely important for me to write. It was a response to what is happening in the world for trans people, and it gave me a hugely cathartic receptacle to dump all of my anger and rage and frustration into.’”
You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon’s true face. Yes! Hidden beneath its rich exterior is a hideously moist cherry cordial! What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.
Caramel Chew
There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.
But then, while Matthews was cashiered out of MSNBC in 2020 for alleged #MeToo issues, as Glenn wrote at the time, “In 2020, He’s Not Crazy Enough for Them…It’s really because he dissed Bernie. The rest is just window dressing.”
Matthews came on after Democratic strategist James Carville went on a diatribe against Sanders, and as the MSNBC host made reference to that, he invoked the historical episode when the Germans overran the Maginot Line and forced France to surrender in the middle of World War II.
“It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat right now,” Matthews said. “I’m with Carville all the way in terms of the dangers of what lies ahead in November. They’re sitting on so much oppo research on Bernie.”
15 years ago, the late Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Politics is still played between the 40-yard lines.” The “American game is played between the 40-yard lines. So long as Democrats don’t repeat Obama’s drive for the red zone, Democrats will cyclically prevail, just as Republicans do.”
No wonder at least one DSA candidate really hates football:
It's not just that that makes him sound anti-American.
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