Graham Platner’s since-deleted Reddit comments became a flashpoint during his Democratic primary campaign against Gov. Janet Mills for U.S. Senate, but they didn’t prevent him from effectively clinching the nomination after Mills withdrew her candidacy April 30.

Many of those individual comments have been reported on or featured in attack ads by both Mills and Sen. Susan Collins-aligned super PACs, but they represent just a handful of the roughly 2,000 that make up Platner’s Reddit footprint. Now The Maine Monitor is presenting the full archive below, so people can read the comments more easily for themselves. 

The collection spans more than a decade — from when Platner was ages 24 to 37 — and provides a rare glimpse into the thinking of a candidate at a time when he betrayed no political ambitions and could not have known how future voters might have viewed his online commentary. 

He said he “became a communist” as he got older, criticized police officers and asked why Black people don’t tip. But perhaps the most discussed comment was from 2013, when Platner responded to a post titled “shorts that prevent you from being raped” by writing:

“Holy fuck, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to? Men and women, you make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose your self control. So if you don’t want to be in a comprising situation, act like an adult for fucks sake.”

Looking back, Platner has said he wrote many comments during a dark time in his life when he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and being “an asshole on the internet.” He has apologized and said they don’t reflect his current thinking. 

“A lot of it isn’t even things I believed then,” Platner told the Portland Press Herald in October. “A lot of them are just stupid joke comments. I look back now and I don’t mean to be flippant, but it was just dumb stuff on the internet, and when I stopped being lonely and isolated I didn’t use that as an outlet anymore.”

The Platner campaign declined to comment on the publication of the full archive. 

Reddit is sometimes called a social media platform, but it’s more similar to older chat rooms or message boards than Facebook or Instagram. The site is divided into subreddits, essentially topic areas. Platner often posted in subreddits dedicated to discussing the military, the U.S. Marines, guns and Maine. People can start a post, reply to another person’s post or reply to another person’s comment on a post. 

The trove of unguarded thoughts contains not just Platner’s controversial comments but a mess of contradictions.

While Platner made some comments with homophobic language, he also argued on behalf of LGBTQ rights and denounced homophobia. He denigrated rural, white voters but also criticized commenters for similarly stereotyping rural Maine voters. While he mentioned signing up for the U.S. Marines to kill, he also called himself “an incredibly non-violent guy” and stated he despised “fighting for any reason besides mission accomplishment or survival.” 

Platner’s comments — posted between 2009 and 2021 — are consistent, however, about a few things: his identification with left-wing politics, with the exception of his steadfast support for the Second Amendment; his passion for soldiering as a profession and his commitment to its highest standards; his dislike of Donald Trump; and his love of Maine. 

Platner, who has called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide,” faced accusations of antisemitism after news broke that he had a Nazi-linked tattoo (which he then covered, saying he did not realize the connection), and again after he appeared on a podcast whose host had engaged in antisemitic conspiracy theories. But there is nothing in the archive to suggest allegiance with those ideologies. On the contrary, he repeatedly wrote about opposing fascism and Nazism. His only mention of the Jewish people was to push back against a commenter who likened the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide; the Holocaust represented more of a society-wide effort to wipe out a population, Platner argued.

In 2014, he praised the tactics of a Hamas raid that killed Israeli soldiers in a subreddit dedicated to combat footage, noting that he participated in the subreddit to critique combat footage, not discuss politics. He added that he would “give credit where credit is due, no matter who they are fighting for.” In another subreddit, he defended the Israeli military in response to footage of an Israeli tank firing at the person filming, while clarifying that he was a “fervent opponent of the occupation.”

He used the slur “retarded” to insult other commenters on Reddit. He also used the word in an interview with The Monitor when describing his initial reaction to a question about the possibility that he had a white supremacist tattoo, drawing rebuke from disability rights advocates. He then apologized.

Platner deleted his Reddit account, and its history, before launching his Senate bid to unseat Collins, a Republican, in November. But the comments were preserved on other sites, and, in October, two days after Mills announced her entry into the Democratic Senate primary, CNN published a story about some of the more controversial comments posted under Platner’s handle, “P-Hustle.” With the knowledge of his username, reporters, politicos and interested citizens have found ways to comb through the preserved commentary. 

The Monitor downloaded all the comments made by “P-Hustle” from a site dedicated to preserving Reddit comments, read them all and categorized them into a few broad themes to make them easier for voters to search through.

Platner is a combat veteran and gun owner who wrote that he participated in a local Maine chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association. Seventy-five percent of his comments were in conversations about the military and firearms, typically in subreddits dedicated to those topics. Some of these comments touched on politics, both domestic and international.

Another 17 percent, made mostly in later years after he returned to his home state, were related to Maine, a broad category that encompasses his comments related to oyster farming, state politics, Moxie and the ethics of eating lobster.

About 5 percent of the comments were more general in nature. Another 3 percent were about national electoral politics unrelated to the other categories. 

Below is the database of Platner’s deleted comments. You can search by keyword or browse comments by topic. Most recent comments appear first. Click on each comment to see the full thread in which the comments appeared. Click here to learn more about The Monitor’s methodology.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.