Feel this is a good accompanying piece for all the folk insisting on caping for a Blackwater merc wth a nazi tattoo because he said something they liked.
Feel this is a good accompanying piece for all the folk insisting on caping for a Blackwater merc wth a nazi tattoo because he said something they liked.
I disagree with the idea that we should even want our politicians (or leaders in general) to have lived perfectly virtuous lives. I would much rather someone who has made mistakes AND LEARNED FROM THEM in a leadership role because… that is literally life experience.
The problem is that… there is absolutely zero indication that platner learned from anything. He was still using homophobic slurs as recently as 2020, he is outright lying about why he still had a nazi tattoo, and, most importantly:
NOBODY knows who he is. Near as I can tell, his credentials are that he is a reddit shitposter who says good things about M4A. He does not have an extensive history doing volunteer/charity work or any form of activism. He basically was in the military, then joined Blackwater, then took over an oyster farming business with his wife where even he acknowledges he mostly depends on his disability payments for said time in the military.
Whereas, at an old job, I was regularly part of the unofficial commitee that worked to improve diversity and equality in our hiring practices. And one of the strongest allies was a woman who was fairly cagey about her past. She was the one who most regularly took advantage of company programs to maximize donations to advocacy groups and she very regularly was suspected to be the person who put the flyers up about protests and the like. And she was always the first person to go REAL fucking hard when people started using dog whistles to explain why they didn’t want to even advertise to Women in Engineering or the various Black Engineering lists.
And… for a lot of us who got to know her out of work, she was fairly open that she grew up in The South to a very religious family and did a lot of things she is ashamed of in her youth. And… a few of us definitely had suspicions over a fairly large and prominent tattoo on her shoulder that seemed to be covering Something up. But she was also very open that she has spent most of her life atoning for her past mistakes and I don’t know a single person who didn’t consider her a fucking Ally.
Contrast that with “I talked about how much I like socialism on twitter”.
That is a comical and disgraceful summary of Platner’s career. Hell, running for office wasn’t even his idea. He was recruited by local labor unions, directly as a result of his activism work, not his online posts.