Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was, for a moment, a Democratic golden boy—an oyster farmer and Marine veteran whose rough-hewn authenticity thrilled progressive strategists. Then came the Reddit posts, the Nazi-linked chest tattoo he claimed not to understand, and finally the rape allegation that collapsed his campaign.

But what does it say that a Nazi tattoo and edgelord posting weren't disqualifying, while an accusation of sexual misconduct was?

Arno Rosenfeld, who covers antisemitism for the Forward (but is soon joining Haaretz as its Washington correspondent), joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy to unpack the strange dynamics of the Platner saga: how anti-Israel positioning became a permission slip to wave away scandal, why he became the target of two mutually exclusive antisemitic conspiracy theories at once, how "authenticity" got tangled up with a certain kind of white male gentileness, and what Platner's rise and fall reveals about antisemitism's shifting place in the Democratic Party—and whether it's still disqualifying at all.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
• Music: " Gypsy Waltz " by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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