I have also heard this yes although I think it’s worth being clear in the difference between as yet unevidenced online rumour and verifiable fact being openly stated by the figure involved
Was it not an Iranian Shah who built the *original* Red Wall?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_W...
The Red Wall won’t stand for not bringing the Shah back
Yeah I don’t think it’s like the Sole Thing happening here or anything but it seems reasonable to think that if Grim knew him from here then so did other political types Grim hung with.
Whoops, nearly forgot this week’s check-in! Enjoy your WFWTD evening everyone!
(FWIW I have seen the stuff theorising about how some elites are so wedded to him because they met in DC etc but I honestly assumed it was just Bsky conspiracising. This though is literally Ryan Grim saying this lmao)
FWIW I think you also get the answer here to “why are they so adamant that he must totally be a working class tribune” - I mean if they met him bartending on them, of course!
I would agree with that, in that his experiences bartending specifically certainly seem like they landed him a savvy set of DC consultants who were able to craft an image for him early which could absolutely be electorally beneficial
Don’t think there’s a great conspiracy here or anything but like, “Huh, how did these DC consultants find this one particular random guy and get him a bunch of buzz and cash early” always felt like it had an answer and hmmm.
I do think “Graham Platner was a bartender who personally served some DC pundits and reporters and was known to them” is a pretty big part of the skeleton key to unlocking how he got so much cash and media attention so fast and why they’re so determined to stay all in on him now
For the record, I expect him to win the primary and the seat, and then to do a piss poor job of representing working class interests because he clearly doesn’t especially share them in either background or policy priorities. But we shall see
(Wealth of course a deeply imperfect proxy for class but given polls are literally the only evidence we have here…)
Ok so we agree he has zero proven ability whatsoever and all you have is “uh some polling show him winning despite doing better among wealthy voters than poorer ones”, ok
I did not say it does; I explicitly say he has never shown any such ability. Maybe it exists! But nobody knows, and there is currently no reason to think so
And to end this by coming full circle, since we obviously won’t agree, we both find the fact that his most ardent defender is essentially forced to concede this obvious fact and resort to incredibly lame backup claims, well, risible.
We both agree, which is why it’s certainly fair to say “Graham Platner has worked with working class people more recently than Janet Mills”, but obviously just straightforwardly false to claim he is himself working class, or has shown any ability to represent or appeal to working class people
Yeah i just think this is utterly, wildly wrong, and that if you described his occupation, family, and education to ten random people on the street, you would be lucky if a single one considered him working class lmao
I agree, and the core fact is that even his most dedicated online stan, desperately trying to defend his self presentation, cannot find a definition of working class known to the human race which fits the guy and is trying to work around said fact
It is literally the entire context for the discussion. If Grim were trying to say “hey fun fact, this guy has actually worked with some working class people, although I accept that this has no impact on his ability to appeal to or represent them” then there’d be no point!
I mean, ok. I think you have to essentially abandon any train of logic that isn’t “but the vibes!” to get even remotely near that, but you are of course free to do that
“He deserves to be considered a special working class whisperer despite not being working class and having demonstrated no special working class appeal because he has worked with some” is an embarrassingly bad argument
Right, Grim is desperately trying to show he is working class, is forced to a acknowledge that you have to completely torture the evidence to come up with anything even vaguely close, and concludes with what’s basically a non-claim dressed up to look meaningful. Hence risible
“This guy who is very obviously not working class and has literally no working class credentials whatsoever should nonetheless be considered working class by proxy because he hangs out with them” - I mean, ok
Ryan has already spoken a word about that: it’s ok because an online Nazi says he has a Jewish wife
I mean it is risible, because the logic of the conclusion is incredibly tortured and does not in any way flow from the substance
This whole post had me wheezing from start to finish, British class discourse has nothing on this
Few things on this: Maine (and some other New England states like Vermont) treat private school differently. In many towns you can go to private school free, paid for by the town, because the towns are too small to have public high schools. But yeah, it appears Platner was at least middle class, maybe upper middle class with a lawyer dad and architect grandad. Yet since high school his work experience is the military, bartending (he was actually my bartender at the Tune Inn), and oystering. To dismiss the latter because he "owns an oyster farming business" misses the fact that he is out on the water every day working it. When he launched his campaign, friends in Maine reached out and said holy shit the guy we buy oysters from is running for Senate. He kept oystering through this summer, they told me. They've been buying from him for years. This is not a hobby, it's his work. At minimum, if you don't want to grant him the "working class" title, he has been working with working class people since graduating high school, which basically nobody in the Senate can say. (He never graduated college.)
For posterity:
x.com/ryangrim/sta...
so yes the Van Hollen plan taxes the rich, but it does so to redistribute those gains primarily to people with middle-to-upper incomes, and in the form of tax cuts which weaken the broad base needed for any kind of social democracy
(do not ask what happened to the defense budget after a decade of Tory mismanagement)
Combining the British people’s love and respect for Kemi Badenoch with their enthusiasm about Donald Trump and his Iran war: no party is doing it like them right now
