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Good Friday Morning! A squirrel got loose inside a Meta office in Thailand this week. It arrived in a package delivered right to their front door. Someone proceeded to open that package, and chaos ensued.
An internal memo reviewed by Wired described the squirrel coming out of a delivery at Meta’s Bangkok office and tearing through the building, scratching a janitor before someone finally wrangled it. Nobody knows who sent a squirrel to Facebook’s parent company, or why. Meta has not commented, which is the correct move. There is no good statement to make about a package squirrel.
The employees handled it the way modern office workers handle everything. One of them made an AI-generated video of an HR training course on squirrel-related office best practices. I’ve sat (endured) through enough real HR trainings to know I’d sit through a squirrel training any day of the week.
This week, I want to talk about how the Democratic Party got rid of Graham Platner in Maine, and what that says about a party that calls itself democracy’s last line of defense – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- Mamdani drew a map of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods and left the Italians off it. New York’s socialist mayor put out a map of the city’s immigrant enclaves to promote World Cup tourism, and it found room for “Little Palestine” and “Little Haiti” but not Little Italy, the neighborhood where the largest wave of Italian immigrants in American history put down roots. The Italian American Civil Rights League said Mamdani “wants to erase Italian Americans,” and its president, Mike Crispi, said City Hall “can find room for every fashionable progressive constituency, but somehow it cannot find Little Italy.” The group also says Mamdani’s office denied its permit for this year’s Italian heritage Unity Day. None of this is out of character. Back in 2020, Mamdani posted a photo giving the finger to a Columbus statue, captioned “Take it down.” The socialist left sorts people by ethnicity, and it keeps a running list of which heritages are allowed to be celebrated. Italians are not on it. Jews are not on it either: this is the same mayor who spent his campaign refusing to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.
The Left Called It a Protest. A Jury Called It Terrorism. Now Antifa’s Convictions Are Going International. – Conservative Institute
A Scottish Soccer Fan Can See America Clearly. The Left Can’t Anymore. – Conservative Institute
Democrats Called It a Coup When Trump Didn’t Defy the Courts. Now Their Own Mayor Does. – Conservative Institute
Protecting Democracy Just Means Protecting Democrats
Maine Democrats gave Graham Platner three out of every four primary votes. Five weeks later the party pushed him out in two days and handed the replacement to a room of insiders. It is the third time in two cycles they have done it, and each time they have run from the same thing: their own voters.
Maine Democrats already told everyone who they wanted. On June 9 they handed Graham Platner 77.7 percent of the vote in their Senate primary, a landslide over a sitting governor and a former nominee. That was the electorate speaking, and it was not close.
On Wednesday, Platner ended his campaign. The party is not going back to those voters to choose again. There will be no second primary. Maine Democrats will pick Platner’s replacement at a convention of roughly 600 people, about 500 delegates chosen by county committees plus the 100-member state committee, before a July 27 deadline. The people who delivered that 77.7 percent get no second vote. A room of party officials writes the do-over.
The Democratic Party has spent a decade running as democracy’s last line of defense. Its own voters just handed it an answer it could not use, and it spent two days making that answer disappear.
Everything that could stop Platner was public before June 9
Nothing that finished Platner was a secret when Maine Democrats voted for him. It was all sitting in the open.
The tattoo on his chest is a Totenkopf, the death’s-head skull the SS wore. That story broke last fall. So did the deleted Reddit posts a decade in the making, which reporters dug up in October and which Platner spent months explaining away. And five days before the primary, the New York Times published the accounts of ex-girlfriends who described him as demeaning to women and, in at least one case, physically threatening. I laid all of it out in these pages a month ago and said the tattoo alone should have ended him.
The party read the same material and shrugged. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Platner eleven days after he launched, brushed the tattoo aside as less important than the issues. Chuck Schumer fell in line once his own preferred candidate ran out of money and quit. The base delivered the landslide. A party that trusted its voters would have made this case to them in the primary and let them rule on it. Democrats had that option in October, and again in June, and they passed it up both times.
Then Platner won, and only then did the machine move. On July 6, Politico reported that a woman named Jenny Racicot says Platner forced his way into her home in 2021 and assaulted her. Within about 48 hours he was finished, with the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm vowing to spend nothing on the race if he stayed on the ballot. Yes, that allegation is the most serious of the bunch, and yes, it came after the primary. Every other reason to reject Platner came before it, and the party used none of them. The party could have let its voters reject Platner. It chose to wait until they no longer could.
Lyndsey Fifield was credible in July and inconvenient in June
The first accuser got two very different receptions from the same people, five weeks apart.
Lyndsey Fifield went on the record for that June 4 Times story. She is a conservative, and Platner’s defenders used it, waving her away as a Republican operative. I explained a month ago why that dodge collapses on contact. A Republican who wanted Susan Collins to win would want Platner to stay on the ballot, not leave it, and Fifield’s account came with contemporaneous texts and named witnesses. Her politics were the excuse, not the reason.
What sank her in June was not her party but the framing. The line that spread from the Times piece was that the paper “could not corroborate” her story, and that line did the work of dismissing her. Fifield says it was built to. She wrote this week that she gave the Times five friends to call and it reached only the two she had flagged as unable to speak to the abuse. She gave them former roommates who saw Platner stalking her house, screenshots, emails to her landlord, dated diary entries, and other men who could confirm it. The reporters, she says, told her they had enough and did not need the rest. “Tell me again how they could not corroborate,” she wrote. Her word for the treatment was “by design.”
The same press that “could not corroborate” Lyndsey Fifield in June takes her seriously in July. The same Democratic leaders who looked past her now believe her. Nothing about her account changed. What changed is that the primary is over and a second, worse allegation made denial impossible. Even Abby Phillip on CNN called out the Democrats who would not believe the first accuser because of her party.
In the first essay I showed that Fifield’s supposed conservative bias was cleared by the facts, because everything she said checked out. The press ran the opposite way. Its bias was confirmed by its conduct. It found a credible woman not credible while the primary was live, and discovered her credibility the week believing her cost the party nothing. Believe-all-women, applied to a Democrat the party needed, had an expiration date, and the date was June 9.
Three times in two cycles, the same move
None of this is a Maine accident. It is the third time in two election cycles the party has undone its own result and handed the fix to insiders instead of voters.
In 2024, Joe Biden won essentially every Democratic primary and more than fourteen million votes, then a bad debate and three weeks of pressure forced him off a ticket he had already clinched. His replacement was not chosen by the voters who picked him. As CBS put it at the time, the primaries were over, so Democratic voters had “no time or mechanism to pick a replacement directly,” and the choice fell to delegates, the state and local party officials who then installed Kamala Harris without a single primary vote cast for her as the nominee. A Cook Political Report analyst drew the same comparison this week, saying a new Maine nominee would be starting late “in the same way that Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ballot.”
Eric Swalwell is the more recent case, and the closer fit. This spring, with sexual-misconduct allegations surfacing, Democrats pushed him out of the California governor’s race in a matter of hours. His baggage was not new. His ties to a suspected Chinese intelligence operative had been public since 2020 and had already cost him a seat on the Intelligence Committee. The party lived with him for years. What changed was the calendar. California runs a top-two primary, and Democrats were frightened that two Republicans might grab both general-election spots and lock every Democrat out of the governor’s race. A scandal candidate dragging the Democratic vote raised that risk, so the party cleared him out the moment he became inconvenient to the map.
Biden, Swalwell, Platner. The same move each time: a result the party could not live with, undone by the apparatus rather than sent back to the people who produced it. And the party has gotten faster at it. Biden took three weeks. Platner took two days.
The people the party fears most vote in its own primaries
The reflex always runs the same direction, away from the voters, because the voters keep choosing people the leadership cannot control.
Platner was one of them, a Sanders-backed outsider who beat the establishment’s pick. His own parting words said it plainly. He was quitting, he said, because of “structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.” That is the losing side of the party accusing the winners of exactly what happened, and he has the mechanics right. He was wrong only to think that winning the primary would protect him.
The grip is loosening as the old guard heads for the door. Nancy Pelosi is retiring at the end of this term, pushed toward the exit by a younger, angrier generation challenging her in her own San Francisco seat. The Democratic Socialists swept a string of New York primaries this summer, knocking off senior Democrats the leadership had backed, including a sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The base that is rising is well to the left of the party that nominated Barack Obama, and it is rattling a leadership that no longer has the votes to stop it. The leaders who used to run this party could at least steer a primary. The ones replacing them win primaries the leadership cannot control.
So the conventions and the forced exits are the last lever the establishment still controls, the tool it reaches for when its own voters hand it someone it cannot sell.
Beat the socialists at the ballot box, not around it
The insurgents keep coming from the same place: the socialist left of Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I want them to lose. Every primary, every seat, every argument. A Democratic Party that purged that wing would be better for the country, and a country that kept its ideas away from power would be better still. Some of the leadership has finally started to fight back, uniting against the socialists and warning the party to stop appeasing them. Good.
The party keeps losing to the socialists at the ballot box, primary after primary. Its recourse is the machinery it used on Platner, built to overrule the voters rather than out-vote them. For someone who wants the socialists to lose, that is cold comfort. It is not a victory over the left so much as the same retreat from democracy, aimed at a target I happen to share.
And even that machinery is losing. The hands on the levers are aging out, and the base rising to take them is the one the leadership is trying to purge. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries could face the same kind of challenge that just took out senior Democrats in New York. The Democratic Party is fighting for its soul and trying to win elections by any means necessary, and right now it is not clearly winning either fight.
Democrats are protecting Democrats, not democracy
The Democratic Party fears its own voters more than it fears the other side. It gave Graham Platner a primary and watched three out of four Maine Democrats choose him. Then it built a way to erase that choice without asking them again. It did the same to fourteen million Biden voters, and it did it to its own front-runner in California the instant he threatened the map.
A party that spends this much effort overruling the people who show up to its own primaries is not defending democracy so much as defending its hold on the machinery. That fight is not with Donald Trump but with its own voters. Protecting democracy, for Democrats, has come to mean protecting Democrats from the people who vote for them.
Links of the week
Platner’s disastrous candidacy exposes rifts that could dampen Democrats’ Senate hopes – BBC
The Socialist Democrat Party Is Obama’s Legacy – PJ Media
Anatomy of a Hype Job: How the New York Times Boosted Graham Platner – Free Beacon
The Smithsonian hates America – Spectator
Top New York Times Editor Joe Kahn Distances Newsroom From Kristof Dog-Rape Column—‘Wouldn’t Have’ Run It – Free Beacon
Castro heir wants a Trump deal: his exclusive first US interview – USA Today
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Brutal side-by-side comparison of Swalwell and Platner videos.
Marco Rubio learning he has to run as a progressive in Maine now too.
Satire of the week
‘Love Island’ Contestant Under Fire After Newly Surfaced Photos Show Him Wearing Shirt – The Onion
Nazi Really Regretting Getting Graham Platner Tattoo – Babylon Bee
Embattled Platner Flees To Argentina – Babylon Bee
Digital Detox? This Woman Went Phone-Free After Throwing Her Phone at the Wall – Reductress
Rising Gas Prices Forces Touring Band To Flintstone Their Way Between Gigs – The Hard Times
FIFA Declares Belgium’s 4-1 Win Over USA Invalid: ‘Balogun Should Not Have Played’ – Waterford Whispers News