Diplomats in embassy pool triggered Maine Senate candidate

Graham Platner is an oyster farmer and military veteran seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Maine. He’s become controversial after the discovery of old posts he wrote on Reddit under the handle “P-Hustle” and other pseudonyms where he identified himself as a communist, asked why black people don’t tip, suggested a good semiautomatic is needed to fight fascism, and echoed Eugene Debs by declaring that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”

Oh, and he has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg writes that U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan fueled his outbursts.

Platner, now 41, says that he was spouting off on Reddit during a period of intense disillusionment and even nihilism about the direction of America. He had served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, having trouble adjusting to civilian life, had returned to Afghanistan as a State Department contractor on the security detail of the American ambassador. He’s described watching diplomats swimming in the embassy pool, with neither fresh ideas nor real understanding of the conflict grinding on outside their fortified gates. He lasted six months, and when he came home, he felt hopeless about a political system that, in his view, had sent him and his friends into pointless wars. Isolated and adrift, he expressed his despair online.