Watching liberal Democrats attack Graham Platner is infuriating but not surprising. The donkey party has abandoned working class Americans for the professional/managerial/class (PMC’s) and to cover up their betrayal they have embraced an identity politics (id-pol) version of liberalism. So whenever an authentic economic populist comes along the attacks on him are almost always primarily about violations of “woke”.

Platner was a Marine, and when in the Corp, he got tattoos. There’s the skull and crossbones tattoo: Nazi symbology which he got when he was serving in Croatia. Like Platner, I served in the military. I was an Army paratrooper who joined the military for the adventure. Like Platner, I was young and “stupid”. It’s a thing in the military. They desire that demographic. How else are you going to indoctrinate civilians to go off and kill and die for some abstract ideal?

Anyway, liberal Democrats attacked him on the tattoos but it didn’t gain traction. It didn’t work for the same reason attacks on Trump didn’t work–because Americans are pissed and have been voting for anyone they thought would challenge the poisonous status quo. Platner appears very anti-establishment. He’s a left-wing economic populist. These are the policies he’s running on:

Take Back American Power: End Big Oil Price Gouging, Build Now

End Billionaire Welfare: A Tax Policy for the Rest of Us

Defend Democracy and the Constitution

Healthcare Policy: Replacing and Rebuilding A Broken System

You can see how these policies might upset the billionaires who fund both US political parties. So out came the sexual allegations. During his marriage he sent texts to former girlfriends. That caused marital issues, as one might imagine, but he and his wife, Amy Gertner, appear to have worked it out. Moreover The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Gertner told Platner’s campaign about the sexually explicit texts last year, near the start of his Senate bid. Her disclosure came during a conversation with campaign officials about potential opposition research into Planner, the two outlets reported, with the Times citing a former senior official in Platner’s campaign and the Journal citing people familiar with the matter.

If the sexual allegations don’t work, I’m sure they will find something else in which to attack him because Platner is a threat to the apparatchik’s that run the Democratic Party. They’ve perfected a system where they pretend to be liberal by deploying identity politics, while supporting the same oligarchic and imperial policies as the Republicans. The billionaires that fund the Democratic Party may have terrible policies against unions, workers health and safety, and workers rights in general, but now they can be given a pass by liberals by simply being an “ally” to the various identity groups. Those politicians and their billionaire owners can support exploitation of poor people, they can send billions of tax dollars to wars for profit, but if they fly a rainbow flag and use the proper pronouns it’s all good.

With identity politics political energy flows into defining, debating, and policing identity categories rather than material outcomes. Thanks to munificent corporate support, the liberal/progressive Democrats of yesterday who focused on concrete material policies have been transformed into a movement being singularly concerned about racial and ethnic issues, cultural issues, sexual and gender issues.

But identity politics divides people. It tries to change the working class from seeing themselves as a member of the working class with the concomitant class-based concerns about wages, health care, housing costs, etc., which had unified their class in the past through unions and political activism, into seeing themselves as belonging to separate and atomized tribal group identities based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. Divide and conquer is the idea behind billionaire support for identity politics. They are literally paying woke ideologues to promote separatism between different racial, sexual, and ethnic identities, and even hatred towards people of a different race or sexuality.

What’s ironic is that as liberals pile onto Platner for his Nazi tattoos, they are literally cheering on and supporting actual Nazi’s in Ukraine. And when it comes to concrete material benefits, historically the socialist/New Deal ideal, that’s now something that only the working-class, who’ve been defined as “white supremacists”, desire. Whomever challenges the new identity based corporate/political agendas and decrees, like Platner, they are now treated as a de facto part of the worst identity group of all: white supremacist authoritarian extremists.

I am Graham Platner too. After the military I became an anti-imperialist/socialist, but have come to realize that Orwell’s 1984 didn’t go far enough in describing the lengths that the ruling uni-party would go to. With the new id-pol consensus, war is needed because other, “authoritarian” “regimes”, like Russia, China and Iran are not allies to the sanctified identities. If we don’t “color revolution” them then they will target gays and women. No identity will be safe. Anyone who is anti-war is by definition not an ally, they are part of the red/brown coalition that all like minded liberals should oppose. Instead you should support your local pro-war politician and billionaire ally.

Platner is a fly in the ointment. The “woke” attack takedowns, perfected and used for a couple generations now, are beginning to fail. Americans are looking at the actual issues and thinking that they care more about the fact that they can’t afford rent, food, gas and healthcare than some more cultural war bullshit.