Diplomats in an embassy pool triggered Maine Senate candidate

Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and military veteran seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Maine, is notorious for old Reddit posts he wrote under the handle “P-Hustle” and other pseudonyms.

In those posts 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 symbol tattooed on his chest.

He told a columnist for The New York Times that his Reddit persona was due in part to his experiences with U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan.

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.