Oh, let's not always see the same hands ...

Actually, the question isn't directed at Hot Air readers, as we have been discussing Graham Platner's red flags since October of last year. Herr Totenkopf even began appearing in Final Word posts that same month. The question arising from the Wall Street Journal's belated look at Der Oysterführer's Red Flag Parade reflects on the multitudinous failures by American media to report honestly on a candidate manufactured out of whole cloth by socialist activists:

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The red flag that led to Graham Platner’s collapse was hiding in plain sight.

For months, a 2024 Facebook post cautioning women against dating Platner, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Maine, had been circulating among the political class in the state and in Washington, D.C. The post was written by one of Platner’s former romantic partners, and her name was attached.

It was one of many signs overlooked by a set of upstart political activists who recruited Platner and ran his campaign. They had set out to prove that they knew better than Democratic leaders how to win elections, but they failed to reckon with the flaws in the candidate they had backed for one of the party’s most important elections of the year.

Hiding in plain sight, eh? The deuce you say. How many reporters does the WSJ employ to cover politics? At least Axios included a weak mea culpa on this point yesterday, admitting that they had swallowed the Morris Katz/Daniel Moraff narrative wholesale without ever checking it seriously. The WSJ seems oblivious in its recap of the Democrats' political and moral collapse in Maine to its own dereliction of duty in looking for those red flags hiding in plain sight, and not just on Facebook groups warning people to stay clear of Platner. 

The WSJ doesn't even blink while relaying this comment from Moraff:

The accusation by Racicot, 41 years old, was the latest in a series of controversies that dogged Platner, many of which were played down by the people who had recruited him: Daniel Moraff, a 34-year-old activist with roots in the two presidential bids of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Morris Katz, a 27-year-old New York ad maker. They argued that newcomer candidates who bring needed life experiences to politics might also have complicated and controversial histories.

“Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” Moraff said in an interview in May. “They want people who are real human beings.”

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Come on, man. Platner was grown in a Katz-Moraff vat to be an "authentic voice of the working class," when the record clearly indicated otherwise from the very beginning. Platner wasn't working class; for most of the last ten years, Platner wasn't working at all. He mooched off his parents, and even the oyster farm that Moraff and Katz romanticized only had his mother's restaurant as a customer. The WSJ doesn't bother to mention the Frankensteining performed by Moraff and Katz, and it takes more than half the article before the WSJ admits that the entire narrative was bovine fecal sludge:

But in time, Platner’s image as an authentic voice of the working class came under challenge. His grandfather had been a famous architect and designer, and his father, a lawyer, provided the $200,000 mortgage that allowed Platner to buy his home, which critics used to argue that he had a financial cushion unavailable to many others. Platner had attended a private high school and, for a short while, an expensive boarding school in Connecticut.

Another problem with Platner’s personal narrative: He had pinned his problematic past on depression and post-traumatic stress disorder upon his return from combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, in about 2011, and said returning to Maine to reconnect with his community, and to marry Gertner, had restored his mental health. But the controversies that emerged included those that came after his move back to Maine, including Racicot’s sexual-assault allegation and the Platner campaign’s admission that he texted with women while he was married.

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This entire article aims at Democrats for missing a parade of red flags in Platner's life while fraudulently promoting him as the "authentic voice of the working class." Democrats certainly deserve every bit of opprobrium possible for selling voters a whiny, entitled, upper-class mooch as a working-class stiff, just a couple of years after attempting to sell a senile old man as a Sharp As a Tack™ candidate who could totally handle another four years as president. Democrats are spending a lot of time growing candidates in vats, as long as they come out socialist blue once formed. 

However, the WSJ does not include one single word about how the media helped sell that fraud to voters in Maine and to the entire country. Their article never admits – as Axios at least did – that the media repeated the Katz-Moraff narrative "without scrutiny" for months. It never mentions the New York Times "tamp and tame" effort last month in which they manipulated three women, including Lyndsey Fifield and Jenny Racicot, in an attempt to muddy allegations to the point that Platner, Moraff, and Katz could claim that it was a partisan smear campaign. And of course, the article never mentions that Racicot finally came forward with the rape allegation specifically due to the NYT's manipulation of Fifield. 

The Platner stain covers Democrats almost completely, with a few exceptions, such as John Fetterman. It covers the Protection Racket Media just as comprehensively, including the Wall Street Journal. These red flags were obvious enough to start emerging eight months ago, and none of the legacy media bothered to look for them, even when those flags waved right in front of their eyes. Why didn't they report on this fraud when it mattered?

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Oh, let's not always see the same hands ...

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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