Extremely telling detail from this WSJ piece about Platner's demise: "Women on the campaign told Platner he was being managed by advisers who treated them unfairly and didn’t value their ideas," with one telling him point-blank "Hey, you have a very sexist, misogynistic staff."

a victim's statement is evidence.

His very first impulse was always to make himself the victim and that should have been a giveaway

The desperation to avoid confronting why the bloodthirsty rapist merc composed entirely of red flags was so appealing to them, the petulant tantrums over why liberals can't elect a rapist as a treat when conservatives do it all the time, it's frothing resentment that misogyny is less tolerated now.

You can only ignore “personal red flags” as irrelevant to the political if you don’t understand that the interpersonal exercise or weaponization of power - like in telling rape victims to take responsibility, calling women “hatchet wounds,” or locking a girlfriend in a room - is itself political.

If you’ve spent the last 48 hours saying “none of the prior ‘red flags’ were relevant,” “it’s not about whose instincts were right or wrong,” or “anyone saying they were right is gross and gloating” you should be doing a lot of introspection about why you want to downplay misogyny.

You simply must understand: Leftist men *need* to engage in a little rape, as a treat, because it is their right. Disqualifying rapists would remove the Real Men from contention, and Real Men are the only voters and candidates who count.

Pretty tired of men observing the "HR lady" phrasing and thinking it's a reflection of class anxiety about email jobs and not undiluted misogyny from men whose animating principle, whether they acknowledge it or not, is "girls are not the boss of me"

You can only ignore “personal red flags” as irrelevant to the political if you don’t understand that the interpersonal exercise or weaponization of power - like in telling rape victims to take responsibility, calling women “hatchet wounds,” or locking a girlfriend in a room - is itself political.

Patriarchy rewards almost all men who are accused of sexual violence while multiplying the harm felt by women who come forward. Platner’s “movement” never intended to change that. Plenty of “progressive” movements don’t, because they do not actually believe harming women is a moral wrong.

Thank god someone as callous and dishonest as Graham Platner in his dropout announcement won’t be in office

what a surprise. again, he reacted like this when the Nazi tattoo was revealed! he wasn't contrite, there was no actual acceptance or suggestion of change, it was pure entitlement and anger. All of this should have been obvious.

Extremism researchers have been pointing out for ages that misogyny is the ideological gateway or skeleton key belief that consistently draws people into violent extremism and networks of far-right supremacism, and that is true regardless of what one's economic policy preferences are.

This is the culture they want. They do not believe in the kind of progressivism that ends patriarchal violence; they believe in the inferiority of women as a sex class; they believe that an accusation of sexual violence is worse than the act of violence.

I actually kind of believe the likes Platner & Brett Kavanaugh when they say they have no memory of committing sexual violence. Not just because these guys were so drunk at the time, but also because committing sexual violence is so banal to them that it’s not distinct enough to be remembered.

One of the findings in my research is that there is never enough evidence to satisfy people who want to offer a perpetrator impunity. They can always dream up a new way to blame the victim—and ignore all the other damning, relevant evidence by cherry picking some small detail that shouldn’t matter.

Graham Platner is a Bad Person and if you’re supporting him through this you are too.

This is rape culture, this is why victims don’t report, and anyone doing this is a bad person.

They think the real moral failure is when women dare to speak up about men.

if you make it a point to call credible allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence "uncorroborated" you're a piece of shit

It's tedious to have to litigate every disclosure of sexual violence against a powerful or hell even not-powerful man in terms of "credibility" and "corroboration," when everyone knows that what's at stake is not whether the specific allegation is true but whether it matters.

Any progressive movement that cannot commit to dismantling misogyny and excising rapists and rape apologists deserves to fail

Lmao. Lmfao even. Our antipathy was based on a clear pattern of behavior by a man who clearly has a tenuous relationship with morality, called women “hatchet wounds,” engaged in DV, etc. Antipathy towards a person like Graham Platner was the definition of rational even before yesterday.

If he hasn’t dropped out by the end of the business day I’m walking Rt 1 in Hancock and taking down his signs

When people say "innocent until proven guilty," I hope they know that the vast vast vast majority of rapists and abusers are never "proven guilty." The status quo is that there is no due process for victims. If you require a conviction to believe victims, you're siding with perpetrators.

The history of misogyny was part of the charm because what real man hasn’t occasionally engaged in rape apology

There were plenty of red flags. There was disqualifying behavior. And some people are still claiming that nothing before yesterday mattered — that there was no information that should have warned them before.

If roughing up a girlfriend and locking her in a room was a virile, authentic a rejection of “smoothgroined” “HR lady” politics, but a rape is too far, then what’s at stake is not a principled rejection of violence against women but a cynical assessment of how much violence a man can get away with.

the last round of allegations against platner were also credible, btw.

Re: Graham Platner, I felt like I was being punked when people acted like he wasn’t obviously dishonest and untrustworthy this entire time. Starting with the unbelievable defense of his tattoo, which I was shocked to see people fall for

Everyone who decided they didn’t believe the first allegation because the woman was a Republican should be deeply ashamed of themselves. Instead they’re on Twitter complaining about the people who were right all along.

One of the scariest trends happening over on the other platform is the many, many (now) ex-Platner backers who’ve had to disavow him today, but are maintaining that no prior red flags were relevant. That means misogyny doesn’t matter unless it hits the tipping point.

It’s very, very telling that Platner’s first impulse in his response video was to call her accusation “false” — to deny, again, when confronted by a woman he harmed. Men’s egos — and their political ambitions — are not more important than women’s right not to be raped.

Poor and working men are meant to have women of their class to abuse and dominate as compensation for the exploitations and humiliations of capital. When you point out that allowing this is a violation of class solidarity working class women, you’re accused of siding with management’s interests.

"What if we taught men to get laid leftistly" what if men cared about the loss of our bodily autonomy, the abuse we face as a result of coerced economic dependence and the actual pandemic of femicidal violence we have to contend with, more than they cared about sexual access to our bodies

Human rights, or cishet men’s prospects of sexual access to women? 🤔 Who can say which society should be in outrage over!

If you look closely you’ll notice that the Venn diagram of straight men who think left spaces should help them get laid and straight men who think leftists talk too much about sexual assault and patriarchy is nearly a perfect circle.

This is not a “men getting laid” problem. It is a “men not thinking women are valid except as fuckholes” problem.

the left-liberal advice for men on dating is “treat women like humans our culture pretends that’s not only the best advice but that it’s anti-advice, demonizing our poor little boys bc it doesn’t offer schemes to control women men don’t want advice, they want to be bolstered in their misogyny

Women are seen to exist in a kind of perpetual emotional and moral debt, owing care, attention, sexual access, or empathy to men who are not seen to owe this back to women in equal quantities.

The sense that women have excessive moral obligations to men—to care for their feelings, to defer to their interests—but can legitimately make only minor claims in such care from others is central to how misogyny actually perpetrates itself as an ideology.

That they overturned Roe and immediately the media started a nationwide moral panic over “male loneliness” has got to be one of the least subtle moments in the long history of antifeminist backlash.

Women are genuinely in an emergency, and the obsessive focus on men’s wounded sense of gendered entitlement—they’re not getting laid enough!—adds insult to these injuries, because it suggests that people like it that way.

“We must find a leftist way to commodify women and enforce men’s entitlement to sexual access to their bodies.”

"Rolling abortion back to the states" means the rights and power of women depend on which state they're in - something that doesn't apply to men. THAT was why the right was willing to fail forward for 50 years, and why they're aiming at birth control next.

Women’s right to autonomy, economic & social freedom, and participation in the public sphere is actually more valid & worthy of protection than men’s desire for sexual/romantic access to women! Men should not need guaranteed sexual/romantic access to women in order to not hate us!

The rest of us don’t even have the option of creating mass movements of hatred (especially directed towards the white/male oppressor class). For example, women who choose to decenter men because of rampant misogyny are frequently equated to incels, when incels are violent & hateful!

Always a great sign of your own unseriousness and evil to point out the ways that women are hurt because they are women; never all that objectionable that the misogynist violence or indignity actually happens in the first place.

The misogyny is a feature, not a bug; a selling point, not a symptom. The Trump/Musk/Project 2025 agenda is one that would explicitly restrict women’s participation in the public sphere, & the backlash to the minuscule steps women have made towards equality is such that that goal is POPULAR.