Episode 535 - Veterans Are the New Black: The Graham Platner Story (w/ Branko Marcetic, Matthew Hoh, & Yasmin Nair)
Bad Faith
Bad Faith
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2025
⏱️ 105 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Jacobin columnist Branko Marcetic, Green Party Senate candidate and veteran Matthew Hoh, & Current Affairs editor-at-large Yasmin Nair join Bad Faith to discuss the controversies surrounding Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner in light of a new Politico article that dives deep into his background. Branko has written a piece for Jacobin arguing that the press is only telling a partial story about the man that is more unflattering for being incomplete, while Yasmin has written that he embodies a kind of toxic masculinity that the left is fetishizing because it thinks it will help them win. Matthew provides an example of a different kind of veteran who has learned & narrativized his past service differently than Platner. The three engage in a rich conversation about whether the left should embrace this candidate, whether it necessarily condones US imperialism by fetishizing veteran candidates, and more broadly, whether it's too willing to abandon its morals in order to "win."
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Produced by Armand Aviram.
Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).
Transcript
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| 0:11.0 | I'm I'm I'm |
| 0:21.6 | I'm |
| 0:22.6 | I'm I am thrilled at the panel that I've been able to put together today to talk about an issue that has been percolating around the left for quite some time. |
| 0:54.2 | It can be defined more narrowly or more broadly. |
| 0:56.8 | More narrowly, it's the question of what to do, say, or think about Graham Platner, |
| 1:04.0 | the lefty candidate who has been chased by a series of controversies over the course of the last couple of months. |
| 1:12.2 | And there is a division of opinion about whether or not these controversies should be sort |
| 1:17.3 | of put to the side because he is a progressive candidate in Maine who is challenging Susan |
| 1:23.3 | Collins and that the left shouldn't let the imperfect be the enemy of the good. |
| 1:28.8 | Whether or not the left should embrace somebody who has working class bonafides, |
| 1:34.3 | who's an oyster man, who is a military veteran, and who may believe to have a kind of appeal |
| 1:42.5 | outside of a narrow Brooklyn-coded, white, lefty, |
| 1:50.6 | DSA-branded circle that it needs to escape in order to win politics big, or whether or not |
| 1:57.1 | there is an absence of a commitment to what might be deemed as litmus tests on the left |
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