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Beefin' With The Bulwark

Beefin' With The Bulwark

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This week on Autocratic Despair, the comedy podcast about surviving American authoritarianism, Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig run a leaner three-segment episode — and it opens on the hardest one, because it's the one that hurt. Graham Platner. If you'd tuned out: Platner was the Marine combat veteran and Maine oyster farmer who came from nowhere on a viral launch video, ran as an unapologetic populist on Medicare for all and a real social safety net, and won the Maine Democratic Senate primary with more votes than any Democrat in the state's history. He was going to be the one who unseated Susan Collins. He was the progressive insurgent's great hope. And this show never trusted it — Nick had been saying so since episode one, pointing at the Nazi tattoo Platner got covered up instead of removed, the earlier allegation his supporters found easy to wave away, the pattern of people repeatedly deciding to give him one more pass.This week the pass ran out. Politico published an on-the-record account from a former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, alleging that Platner forced himself on her in 2021 over her repeated objections — corroborated, Politico reported, by a later partner, friends, and her own correspondence with a therapist. The Democratic Party's response was near-total and immediate: Schumer, Gillibrand, Warren, the DSCC, and even Ro Khanna — who had stood by Platner through everything else — called for him to go. As of this recording, Platner denies the allegation and has not dropped out.Nick and Craig handle it the way the show insists on handling this material: the accuser is the wronged party, full stop, no litigating her, no qualifying the credibility of a woman who came forward at real personal cost. False allegations of this kind are vanishingly rare, and Craig names the reflex to treat this one as the exception for exactly what it is — the disease, not the diagnosis. He also points out how many women it took, over how long, and how the apologies only arrived now.But the heart of the segment isn't the news. It's a feeling Nick can't shake and doesn't try to hide: this should feel like vindication, and it doesn't. He called this from the beginning. He spent months asking Platner's supporters to name the line the man would have to cross, and watching them refuse to name one. So the "told you so" was right there — and it curdled the instant he reached for it. Because Nick didn't want to be right. He wanted Platner to prove him wrong, to be living proof that a person with an ugly past can change, because if that guy could, the door was open for a lot of people with non-sparkling histories to have a place in the movement. Instead Platner did the one thing that slams that door on everyone behind him. In the episode's most naked moment, Nick admits it: he gave Talarico his heart, and Talarico hurt him a little. He never gave Platner his heart — and Platner may have hurt him worse, because he didn't know the man had the capacity to reach him at all.Craig widens the lens with history, as he does. He connects Platner to the figure of the caudillo — the Latin American strongman archetype embodied by 19th-century Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, a fabulously wealthy landowner who cultivated the image of a knife-fighting, rough-and-tumble everyman. The point that lands hardest: the violence in that persona isn't a flaw in it. It's a feature of it. The authentic-brawler, anti-establishment outsider who's secretly a rich man and secretly cruel is a recognizable type, and Platner was running the American version of it — the veteran, the oysterman, the mustache, the focus-grouped LL Bean of it all. Craig also does the necessary corrective work, refusing to let the discussion blame the popular policies for the flawed men attached to them: single-payer health care and a real safety net are wildly popular and successful everywhere they're tried. The tragedy is that the left keeps attaching those ideas to fragile individual personalities instead of to a durable party — and some of those personalities turn out to be monsters.From there the episode turns to Nick's beef with The Bulwark. The Bulwark, for the uninitiated, is the well-capitalized media outfit built by former Republicans — the Never-Trumpers who carved out their own lane in the resistance and pull a genuinely large audience. Nick hate-listens, and mostly, uncomfortably, agrees with them. But last week they had David French on — the respected lawyer and New York Times columnist — and, asked in passing about Prairieland, French framed it in the exact opposite way this show has: a violent ambush, a jury verdict to be trusted, no sympathy absent compelling evidence of a miscarriage of justice. Nick's problem isn't that French is stupid; it's that for a million listeners, many hearing about Prairieland for the first time, a trusted voice just filed the whole thing under "lock them up and throw away the key" — without doing any ...
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