The Platner Affair

Plus: the Charlie Kirk assassination trial and an interview with Mike Cernovich on the Tech Right.

This week’s big news is that Graham Platner, Democrats’ far-Left candidate for Senate in Maine, has dropped out of the race after rape allegations surfaced. This accusation came from a woman named Jenny Racicot, but it wasn’t the first accusation of sexual misconduct against Platner. The New York Times reported in early June that Lyndsey Fifield, a Republican political operative and ex-girlfriend of Platner’s, also claimed he had abused her. At the time, national Democrats downplayed Fifield’s allegations as politically motivated—but now, with a highly explicit rape accusation from a progressive Democrat, they’ve finally abandoned their candidate in Maine.

My take on this saga is going to diverge from what you’ve likely seen in conservative media, which is contempt for Platner and a generally celebratory attitude regarding his destruction. When the Fifield allegation emerged last month, I watched the entire conservative intelligentsia adopt what was essentially the MeToo framework: immediately accepting every accusation of sexual assault and condemning the accused without any kind of scrutiny.