It Gets Worse From Here
If you thought 2020 was as far left as the party would go, look at who's next in line — and who's no longer standing in the way.
Graham Platner spent Tuesday saying nothing.
He didn’t answer Fox’s Nicholas Ballasy, who caught him climbing out of the car. “Mr. Platner, are you here to calm the waters, sir?” He didn’t answer walking into DSCC headquarters. He didn’t answer ninety minutes later, walking back to the car with reporters shouting after him. Head down. Mouth shut.
Inside, the senators did the talking for him. Gillibrand. Sanders. Warren. Welch. Schiff. They filed into the same building to prop him up.
Eight months ago the DSCC told him he had no right to run. They had a candidate. Janet Mills, the two-term governor, was recruited to stop him. Mills suspended in April. So the very people who tried to stomp out his campaign spent Tuesday in a conference room making sure it survives the week. The message went from “you have no right” to “whatever you need.”
While the news cycle is focused on Platner’s texts and tattoos, it is casually ignoring the larger issue.
The Democratic Party’s center has moved further left than it has ever been — further than 2020, further than anything the Biden years shoved down our throats. And here’s the part the party would like you to miss: they aren’t exactly kicking and screaming about it.
In 2020 the slogans came off the street. The party borrowed the language, made excuses for the activists and the riots. Biden ran as the restoration candidate. He beat the left in the primary, then governed far to the left of what he promised — if he was even the one governing.
What’s coming next is more of the same, only further left. Because the activists aren’t outside chanting anymore. They’re the candidates. They’re about to hold the pen. If you thought the Biden years were as far as it went, look at who’s next in line.
Platner is in the headlines because the receipts are loud and hard to ignore: the Totenkopf tattoo he wore for seventeen years and covered after launch (the one he claims he never recognized as an SS symbol despite calling himself a lifelong student of military history), the Reddit account where he called himself a communist, called cops bastards, and wrote that rural White Americans are racist and stupid, the post praising a 2014 Hamas raid as “well executed and successful,” and the texts to other women that his own wife flagged to the campaign.
That should be disqualifying. All of it. But the Democrats’ attitude is essentially “no, it’s cool.” And that isn’t even why you should be worried. It isn’t why I’m writing this.
A bad tattoo and a decade-old Reddit account make for an easy scandal. They photograph well. They give moderates something to wring their hands over and the base something to forgive. No question they are a problem.
However, the candidates who should scare you are the ones whose policies are the real disqualifier — what they’re running on right now in 2026, and what they quietly deleted last month because a campaign adviser told them to.
I wrote about the deletions a few weeks ago. The Great Erase. It keeps happening.
The Great Erase: El-Sayed, Platner, and McMorrow deleted the posts. They kept the politics.
On March 12, a man named Ayman Ghazali drove a vehicle packed with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Preschoolers were inside. The FBI later called it a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism targeting the Jewish community. Ghazali’s brother had been a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, killed in an Israeli airstrike a week earlier.
Abdul El-Sayed scrubbed roughly a dozen defund-the-police posts before he launched in Michigan. Then he opened his mouth. He campaigns next to Hasan Piker, a fanboy of Lenin and Mao. He said Israel is as evil as Hamas. After a Hezbollah-inspired attack on a synagogue full of preschoolers in West Bloomfield, El-Sayed reached for “hurt people hurt people.” He might have deleted some social media posts, but his worldview is on full display.
In New Jersey, Adam Hamawy just won his primary. A plastic surgeon and Army veteran who, as a medical student in the early nineties, served as a defense witness for Omar Abdel-Rahman — the Blind Sheikh convicted of seditious conspiracy, whose followers bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Hamawy had ridden with him from New Jersey to a Michigan conference where the cleric spoke of conquering the land of the infidels. He even acknowledged translating a document for him after the bombing. Under cross-examination, prosecutors walked him through the transcript until he conceded the cleric “always talked about” jihad. Andrew McCarthy, who led that prosecution, says the denials weren’t convincing. Hamawy denies wrongdoing, was never charged, and calls the scrutiny guilt-by-association aimed at Muslim and Arab candidates. His rivals mostly wouldn’t touch it. The left flank had no such trouble. Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Piker backed him. He won.
In New York, the candidate Mamdani endorsed over a sitting congressman — Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA member — deleted an entire account. The old posts surfaced anyway. The endorsement didn’t move.
When the delete doesn’t hold, the move isn’t to apologize. It’s to explain. Morris Katz, the strategist Platner shares with Mamdani (that association should tell you plenty), sat down with David Axelrod and made the case: You want real people in politics? Real people said things online fifteen years ago. You can’t have one without the other. Pick the authentic veteran or pick the man who’s wanted the Senate since he was three. You don’t get both.
Good line, I suppose. But it also gives the game away. Katz doesn’t argue the posts were taken out of context or that they don’t mean what they plainly say. He grants they’re real and asks for absolution anyway. He calls it redemption. And this week: don’t worry about that sexting two years ago — it’s none of your business.
Platner’s own response ad runs the same play. The words were abhorrent, he says, from a low point after the war. Not who he is today. Notice what’s missing: Not “I was wrong about the cops.” Not “I no longer think an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.” Simply: that was then. Judge who I’m selling you now.
The opinions didn’t change. The packaging did.
And when redemption doesn’t sell, they pivot. Before the texts broke, Katz leaned on the one person who knew about them — Genevieve McDonald, the campaign’s own former political director. Fifteen thousand dollars to sign an NDA. She said no thank you. So they went to work discrediting her in the local press. The Bangor Daily News has the messages. He claims redemption for the cameras. A payoff, an NDA, and a threat when no one is looking.
The scrub used to be how you survived your own party. The internet Left — the people who spent fifteen years digging up other people’s tweets and running the struggle sessions — knows exactly what an archive does. It was their weapon for years. Now they’re running the candidates the weapon was built to destroy, and they’re betting the party and the media will cover for them once they win.
So far the bet is paying off.
That’s the question Tuesday’s meeting was built to avoid: Who’s really in charge, the party, or the candidates?
For the socialist wing, there’s a clear answer. It’s on their website. In New York, DSA elected officials meet with the chapter on a schedule, share information, and line up their votes. They call it co-governance. Mamdani put it flatly: to be an unorganized socialist is a contradiction in terms. He told a DSA convention that he and his fellow electeds are special not because of themselves but because of the organization. The chain of accountability doesn’t run through voters. It runs through the chapter.
And the discipline cuts both ways. When Chi Ossé moved to challenge Hakeem Jeffries, the DSA’s own people voted narrowly not to back him. Mamdani wanted Jeffries left in place. So the movement told one of its own to stand down — and he did. Why protect the most powerful Democrat in the House? Because Jeffries is exactly the kind of leader they can work around. Weak, careful, easily rolled. They’d rather keep the door they already know how to walk through.
Some of them keep their distance from the word “socialist.” Platner ducks “communist” even though he wrote it himself, then deleted it. Now he’d rather you call him an “economic populist.” James Talarico won in Texas running “Medicare for Y’all” out of a pickup truck with a Bible on the dash — branding perfect for Texas with the same platform. They aren’t much different in policy from the DSA. They just know the word “socialist” doesn’t play in Maine or Texas.
Medicare for All. Abolish or overhaul ICE. The same anti-billionaire populism. The same line on Israel. Sanders and AOC have been beating the same drum for years. They’re hoping candidates like Platner give them backup.
With Platner, the oysterman in the dirty hoodie is just packaging. A working-class aesthetic made safe for voters in a state Susan Collins has held for thirty years. But the party knows exactly what it is: another pull further to the left. And they’re happily along for the ride.
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I suspect that the Democratic establishment comforts itself with the idea that it can let these candidates win and then curb them. Bring them inside, hand them a committee, watch them mellow.
They are in denial about having lost their teeth with age. History supports it. We have seen how progressives don’t get absorbed. They absorb. They’re loud, they’re disruptive, they live on the platforms, and they move the party every time — not the other way around. Look at Mamdani. Look at AOC. Neither one drifted toward the center after winning. The center drifted toward them. You don’t tame the loudest person in the room by giving them the microphone.
Some will point to Illinois. In March, the open DSA insurgents got tested and lost. Kat Abughazaleh lost. Robert Peters lost. Junaid Ahmed lost.
Look at what beat them. These were not Clinton Democrats. It was a field where most of the fifteen Democrats ran on Medicare for All, a citizenship path, and dismantling ICE. The establishment pick was a progressive, and the only “moderates” who won were floated on a few million in AIPAC money. The furthest-left candidates might have lost, but the furthest-left agenda is now the baseline the party runs on.
So when someone points at Illinois, point back at who the progressive wing, the online talking heads, and the leftist media are rooting for everywhere else. Point out what these candidates deleted. Point at who they share a stage with.
There’s a meme: a stick figure, the Democratic Party, getting dragged further and further left across the frame. Five years on, the stick figure is at the edge. And the party isn’t digging in its heels.
The good news is that most of the country doesn’t like crazy. And they really don’t like socialists. A bet worth making is that as the party continues to pull left, it’s too hard to ignore, and gets told so at the ballot box.
But that only works if people show up. So show up and drag everyone you know with you. All the way to November.