Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, a Democrat vying to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, issued a prolonged apology video Friday after inflammatory Reddit posts he’s made lately got here to gentle.
“As I learn by means of them, I learn issues that I completely don’t agree with. I learn by means of and I see issues that phrases and statements that I abhor,” Platner, who served in the US Marine Corps and the Maryland Military Nationwide Guard, mentioned within the video posted to social media.
Platner’s apology comes a day after CNN confronted him about his feedback on the discussion board, the place he known as himself a “communist” and mentioned he’d change into “a vegetable rising, psychedelics taking socialist” who’d “just about stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense” since being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
However extra troubling feedback had been uncovered Friday by The Washington Submit. In these posts, Platner dismissed considerations about sexual assault within the army, claiming that “each whisper of a misplaced hand brings down a characteristic size movie” and that “anybody who really thinks the army is purposefully masking up rape” is an “fool.”
In one other remark, he mentioned people who find themselves “so fearful” about rape shouldn’t over-consume alcohol.
Platner appeared to deal with these feedback in his apology video, although he didn’t tackle them immediately. He described the impact that being within the “very male-dominated,” “very masculine world” of the army had on him, even after he’d left the service in 2012.
“After I bought out, I nonetheless had the crude humor, the darkish, darkish emotions, the offensive language that actually was an indicator of the infantry,” he mentioned.
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“It’s vital to know that this was a time in my life the place I used to be struggling deeply,” Platner continued. “I bought out of the Military in 2012. I had PTSD, I had melancholy, I had the entire issues that include serving in a battle ― two wars ―that I ultimately started to not imagine in in any respect. It left me feeling very unmoored. It left me feeling very disillusioned, very alienated and really remoted.”
Platner, an oyster farmer with an enormous endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), additionally apologized in feedback to the Submit and requested for grace from his potential constituents.
“I don’t need individuals to evaluate me off the dumbest factor I mentioned on the web 12 years in the past,” he mentioned. “I would love individuals to have interaction with who I’m immediately.”