How a Rich Kid Politician Was Spun as a Working Class 'Oysterman'

There is the Graham Platner that the media wants you to see: Maine oysterman, veteran and gun owner, a working class type who could easily be MAGA, but is running as a Democrat.

Then there’s the real Graham Platner, son of a prominent local attorney, grandson of a major modernist architect, whose business was funded by a nonprofit grant meant for black people.

And by his mother who owns multiple businesses.

While he’s been billed as an outsider candidate with no interest in professional politics, he’s actually the activist son of a council candidate and the husband of a town selectwoman, as well as a local official whom the media had regularly turned to for quotes since at least 2009.

Media write-ups about the Maine Senate candidate’s oyster business typically mention that he grew up in the area leading to the impression that he came from a working-class family from some of the traditional trades, but nothing could be further from the truth about the Platners.

Graham Platner attended the prestigious John Bapst Memorial High School, a college prep school (current tuition: $12,500) and came from a wealthy and prominent local family. At school the leftist activist was described as “most likely to start a revolution” in his yearbook while holding a ‘Free Palestine’ sign which based on speeches still appears to be his biggest issue.

Platner claims that “everyone knows we live in a system that is not built to represent working-class people.” How would he know? He was never a member of the working class.

Bronson Platner, Graham’s father, was not an ‘oysterman’, he was a lawyer, including for a local town, who was reprimanded for professional misconduct, and a former assistant DA. Platner’s father was a major donor to Democrats, including Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, donating thousands to the Vermont socialist who would later endorse his son, and Bronson eventually made a failed run for city council in the town of Ellsworth.

One of Bronson’s positions was in favor of painting a crosswalk in LGBTQ rainbow colors.

Bronson Platner had donated over $50,000 to Democrats over the years. This is not the kind of money that a working class family or even a regular lawyer spends on politics as a hobby.

Graham’s grandfather, Warren Platner, was a prominent modernist architect who had worked with I.M. Pei and had designed dorms at Yale and part of Manhattan’s Lincoln Theater. Graham’s aunt is the director of child care at the Yale New Haven Hospital. It’s the kind of family that the New York Times and other media outlets would normally love to write about.

But instead the media ignores Platner’s wealthy Connecticut society roots, his time at George Washington University and portrays him as a hard-working local oysterman.

A month before Platner announced his candidacy, the New York Times stopped by and took a boat tour with him accompanied by photographs of the future Senate candidate in his usual working class drag, gimme cap and t-shirt, harvesting and shucking oysters. Those pictures were then reused for the Times profile on his Senate campaign (a privilege most local candidates don’t get) leaving readers with the impression it’s a one-man operation.

(Tourism at $95 a person appears to form a significant part of Platner’s business.)

Graham Platner’s takeover of an existing oyster business was actually funded by a $20,000 grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, a Greek billionaire’s nonprofit, and by his mother, Leslie Harlow, a local businesswoman who owns two restaurants and a gift shop in the area.

“His best customer happens to be his mom,” one description put it. “The fact that I get to have a personal and business relationship with my mom, the fact that my mom has a restaurant that I get to sell my products at, it’s really quite wonderful,” Graham Platner said in a video profile.

The Niarchos Foundation grant that helped finance Graham Platner’s business was supposed to be for small businesses owned by “underserved groups” without “access to capital” like “people of color, women, and veterans as well as those in lower-income communities”.

While Platner was a veteran, he came from a wealthy family and his business was not recovering from the pandemic. The progressive maxed out the $20,000 grant and took money that the Niachos Foundation had intended should go to help black people to build his business.

As a profile politely put it, “with a built-in support system of friends and family in the hospitality industry, Platner bought a boat and began the process of expanding.” It’s unclear who else besides his mother was working in the “hospitality industry”, but it appears that Platner’s business was built on friends and family. And a grant he should never have gotten.

Finally the media narrative about Graham Platner is that he’s an outsider candidate with no interest in professional politics. Platner is actually the son of a political candidate and his wife Amy Gertner was on the Select Board of the town of Hope. And Graham is a local official.

Platner is not an outsider. He’s a ‘progressive’ leftist activist from a family of them.

His Senate campaign tweeted a high school yearbook picture of him holding up a sign reading “Free Palestine” above the headline “Most likely to start a revolution”. Unlikely behavior for a working class family, but quite in keeping with the scion of a wealthy and progressive family.

During his campaign, Graham Platner claims that he left the military because he became disillusioned with the war. “I left the Army in 2012 pretty cynical. I’d become pretty disgusted with American foreign policy. Pretty disgusted with the wars.” he claimed in an interview.

But there was nothing to be “disillusioned” by because Graham never supported the war.

As a teenager, Graham Platner had taken part in anti-war rallies during the Iraq War. He didn’t join the military because he believed in the cause, but as he admitted, “I wanted to be a soldier since I was two years old…at 19, I was also a young man drawn to an adventure – and serving overseas was the ultimate adventure.”

Was Platner really so disillusioned and cynical about the military in 2012? Then why does a $1,000 donation to a Democrat in 2018 list his employer as one of the incarnations of Blackwater? In an interview, Planter was described as having felt a conveniently “renewed call to service” in 2018 that led him to work in Afghanistan as a security contractor.

If you believe Graham Platner, he joined a war he didn’t believe in, then he dropped out because he didn’t believe in it, then he decided to believe in it some more, and then stopped believing in it a few years later, and now he’s running against a war that he switched between being for and against so many times that it would have given John Kerry whiplash.

The most curious thing by far about Platner though is how much interest the media had in him, not just now when he announced his candidacy, but going back as far as the oughts.

Quotes by Graham Platner appear in media stories, not local ones, but in national papers like the Washington Post going back to 2009. One or two might be coincidence, but whenever the media needed to quote an Iraq War veteran, it turned to a seemingly obscure man from Maine.

In 2016, for example, the Washington Post looked to Platner to condemn Trump for not really caring about veterans. “Graham Platner, a Marine who fought in the battle of Ramadi, thinks that Trump is playing the part of ‘patriotic culture warrior’ and thinks that Trump’s ‘knee-jerk patriotism’ plays directly to his base.” That’s something Platner may know a lot about.

Past the gimme cap and the oysterman costume is the shiftless radical son of a wealthy family who joined the military for adventure, spent years at George Washington University on the taxpayer dime without emerging with any obvious employable profession (a Washington Post story from 2009 describes him taking an ‘art history’ class) and then had his mother, friends and family set him up with an existing oyster farm that he then used to conduct tours for tourists.

And sell oysters to his mother’s restaurants.

It’s a less ‘Made for MAGA’ profile than the veteran oysterman grumbling about wasted lives in Iraq that is part of the Senate candidate’s current brand. Truer still is the wealthy prep school kid who held up a ‘Free Palestine’ sign in his yearbook still running against Israel’s war on Hamas which make up a significant part of his ad binge and gave him the nickname ‘Maine Mamdani’.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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