When People Have Tattoos That Tell Us Who They Are, Believe Them

Graham Platner, everyone’s favorite guy with a Nazi tattoo — the manly, hirsute, blue-collar-cosplaying hunk of gross manufactured authenticity — who is running for Senate in Maine, seemingly forced his wife Amy to post a reaction video to the claims that he cheated on her multiple times within the first year of their marriage.

Welcome to politics in 2026, where that is, in fact, a sentence.

Amy Gertner (who decided to keep her last name, make of that what you will) didn’t actually negate the claims that Graham sent dozens of sexually explicit text messages to at least six other women shortly after the two were married in 2023. She couldn’t, because she was the one who told the campaign about it in the first place. But she did manage to say “stop hating on my husband, he’s the best, I swear!” in so few words.

Not pictured: the gun to her head.

During the 4:58-long video, which unquestionably did more harm than good, Gertner admitted: “This is like my 20th take. This is very hard to do. I just really wanted to make sure everyone knows Graham and I have a great marriage. Being married is hard … I don’t even know if I have the right words to describe what we’re going through. We work on our mental health every day.”

Hmm. So to summarize: yes, he cheated on me shortly after the honeymoon by sexting other women on KiK, the messaging app that’s notoriously a Welcome Mat for sexual predators, but it’s totally fine because we’re spending thousands of dollars on couples therapy, individual therapy, and counseling just three years into our marriage.

Girl power! Blink twice if you need saving, Am. 

But I digress.

I should not judge what goes on in the bedrooms (or the porta-potties) of others. And frankly, attacking Graham Platner on personal grounds isn’t moving the needle anyway. Leftist Mainers don’t seem to care that every week, another skeleton gets erected out of this man’s very crowded closet.

So let’s give Amy what she wants. We will cease discussing the SS Totenkampf tattoo, the porta-potty jerk-a-thons, the adultery, the victim-blaming of sexual assault survivors, the time he said a Purple Heart veteran “didn’t deserve to live,” the time he called rural Americans “racist” and “stupid,” the time he called cops “bastards,” the time he instructed fellow servicemembers to spend their money on hookers in Thailand instead of their “b”tchin’ wives” back home, or the fact that he called the Virgin Mary a “skank.”

You win, queen.

Instead, let’s talk about the communistic, deranged, and fiscally derelict policies that would drive Maine into the ground and erode the foundations of this country from the inside out.

Amy said we should focus on the real issues her hubby-wubby cares about: healthcare, education, and the CHILDREN!

(Personally, I would not let my child within 10 feet of this faux oyster-farming beaver, but to each their own.)

Graham’s meretricious healthcare plan is to make it all free and universal. Oh! Why didn’t we think of that? What a bright, shiny, completely untested idea!

The only small problem with his communist fever dream is that it has been tried. Repeatedly. And it fails. Repeatedly.

Medicare for All, breaking up monopolies, expanding government drug-price negotiations, allowing drug imports, banning pharma ads, guaranteeing “convenient” mental health access — every plank of Platner’s platform collapses under the same structural failures we already watch play out in Canada and the UK in real time.

Those single-payer systems, once hailed as the gold standard of civilized governance, are now delivering rationing by waitlist. Canada’s median wait time from specialist referral to treatment hit 30 weeks in 2024 (the longest on record), with patients routinely forgoing care entirely because they simply cannot wait that long. The UK’s National Health Service currently has over 7 million people queued for treatment, with hundreds dying weekly from ambulance delays and critical bed shortages. Emergency rooms are so overwhelmed that patients are treated in hallways. In parking lots. On the floor.

Sure, there are no out-of-pocket bills at the doctor’s office — technically. But Canadians and Brits are still paying for their below-average care, just through crushing tax burdens instead of copays. And here’s the punchline: both countries are quietly, embarrassingly, desperately moving toward private healthcare options, because their citizens are fed up with the wait times, the infrastructure collapse, and the quiet rationing of basic services.

This is what Platner wants to import to the United States. Third-grade thinking, first-class price tag.

If enacted, his plan would explode a federal budget already hemorrhaging $2 trillion annually in deficit spending by additional trillions. It would stifle the pharmaceutical innovation that makes America the engine of global medicine; the United States accounts for roughly 40% of the world’s drug pipeline and the largest share of novel medications, a direct product of our free-market economy and robust intellectual property protections. Blow that up, and you don’t just hurt Wall Street. You delay or kill the next cancer treatment, the next antibiotic, the next breakthrough that keeps people alive.

We already tried a version of this, by the way. It’s called Obamacare. Taxpayer-funded healthcare that was rammed through without a single Republican vote and has been a boondoggle rife with fraud ever since. This year alone, at least 6.2 million people are improperly enrolled in heavily subsidized plans. According to the Wall Street Journal, taxpayers will fund up to $25 billion in improper subsidy payments this year because enrollees or their insurance agents misstated income to qualify for larger subsidies.

Progressives want this on steroids. They want the fraud supersized, the wait times nationalized, and the innovation strangled.

This is not the way. Socialist-style central planning always — always — fails. The better path forward is market-oriented reform: competitive bidding, price transparency, and deregulation that puts patients, not bureaucrats, in charge. 

Did you know you can see a doctor through Amazon now? It’s cheaper, and the wait times are shorter than Graham’s attempt at monogamy.

That is capitalism doing what it does: innovating, competing, delivering better results than any government queue ever has. President Trump is already building on this through TrumpRx, and it’s lowering costs more effectively in months than government mandates have managed in decades.

Their only counterargument: “But Healthcare is a right!”

My response: It’s not. You have a fundamental right to life. You don’t have a fundamental right to tax me over how you’re choosing to live it.

As for education, Graham virtuously signals that “we all need a decent form of it.” Does he mean the kind he received at Hotchkiss? The elite Connecticut prep school that runs over $75,000 a year? The one that produces exactly the kind of man who knows how to perform blue-collar cosplay without ever having held a wrench?

The machismo man’s push for sweeping federal intervention and “universal education” from kindergarten through college would accelerate the very decline that Washington’s top-down meddling has already caused.

The data is brutal. A “Report Card” from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows scores have stagnated or plummeted since the rollout of Common Core and the Every Student Succeeds Act, with high school math and reading now at multi-decade lows despite record per-pupil spending of over $17,000 nationally. We are spending more and getting less because central planners with ideological agendas keep overriding the teachers, parents, and local school boards who actually know these kids.

The downstream consequences are rapidly presenting themselves in higher education. At UC San Diego, the share of students requiring remedial middle-school-level math before they could attempt precalculus jumped from 0.5% to 8.5% between 2020 and 2025 — a 17-fold increase — driven largely by schools abandoning SAT and ACT requirements amid a wave of grade inflation. Federal “equity” mandates don’t lift struggling students up; they lower the floor for everyone and call it progress.

Real improvement demands returning control to states, localities, and parents, not doubling down on the Beltway bureaucracy that has made things measurably worse every time it’s tried.

Hurry up and nuke the Department of Education already, Linda. We’ll be fine.

Finally, Platner’s pledge of universal zero-dollar childcare, framed as essential “public investment” for children under six, is perhaps his most seductive promise and his most dishonest one.

Quebec launched its celebrated $5-a-day childcare program in the 1990s, and the academic literature on what followed is perturbing. Researchers found the program drove up aggression, anxiety, and hostile behavior among children enrolled. Infections spread. Juvenile crime indicators worsened. Maternal depression increased, and hostile parenting patterns rose.

As our president would say, “Not Good.”

Meanwhile, demand overwhelmed supply, quality cratered in for-profit centers scrambling to meet enrollment quotas, and costs ballooned year after year without meaningfully lifting the poorest families out of poverty. The people best positioned to navigate the bureaucratic enrollment system? Upper-middle-class families who didn’t need the subsidy in the first place.

Similar U.S. subsidy expansions have been riddled with billing fraud and waitlists that favor the connected and affluent, who are more likely to navigate the system. Capitalist alternatives, such as targeted tax credits, parent vouchers, and deregulated private markets, deliver higher-quality care at lower cost by letting families choose rather than trapping them in government queues.

Platner’s slogan-heavy pitch reads more like a third-grade class-president promise than a serious Senate plan, ignoring the fiscal wreckage and human costs of turning yet another sector of American life into a failed government entitlement.

Amy Gertner says Mainers want affordable gas, the ability to see a doctor when they’re sick, and the chance to send their kids to good schools and daycares while raising their families the way they choose.

Agreed. Which is why conservatives want the government and people like the grunting, grizzly Graham out of the way.

We want schools free from federal indoctrination. We want nuclear families supported, not undermined. We want an energy policy that embraces natural gas and free markets; the formula that has given states like Tennessee and Texas lower costs at the pump and stronger economies than anything a Senate candidate with a KiK account and strong Reddit presence could dream up.

The goal of governance is to make it easier for Americans to work, build families, and be left alone. Graham Platner’s entire platform is the opposite of that. A sprawling, expensive, already-failed experiment in government dependency dressed up as a creepy pseudo-compassionate couple.

Amy called her husband “probably a genius” in her hostage video.

No, Amy. Probably not. But Maine gets to decide, we’ll see how they choose.