![OwenGregorian's tweet photo. Meet the champagne socialist duo who groomed rich kid Graham Platner into a ‘working-class’ candidate | Chadwick Moore, New York Post
Graham Platner has done a better job of hiding his privileged roots than the Nazi tattoo on his chest — a move which is by design.
The embattled Maine senate candidate is vocal about his disabled war veteran, rugged oyster farmer, “working class” persona; less about his attendance at an $80,000-a-year boarding school, lawyer father, or major architect grandfather.
That’s because he’s been coached how to present himself, molded to present a specific image and, in a sense, manufactured.
The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic Socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.
And for his champagne socialist handlers, the more scandals that engulf Platner and the more centrist outrage he can stoke, the better as it gets more stories written and drowns out his opponent in November, incumbent Susan Collins.
“For all we know, they’re leaking this stuff because they want to get more attention,” a former candidate who hired the same team behind Platner a few years ago told The Post.
That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancé, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.
The pair had originally met while working for Bernie Sanders in 2020 (I-Vt.) and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for senate in Nebraska, and Summer Lee, a member of the Pennsylvania State House since 2018 and part of the DSA ‘squad’, alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on Union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico.
It remains to be seen if those skeletons were worse than Platner’s. Williams did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Moraff — who has his own Dark Forest consulting firm — and Fan had first got wind of Platner through the local DSA network, where he had been active in the local DSA-offshoot group Acadia Action and had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine.
They first entered Ironbound, Platner’s mother’s restaurant, just a few miles from where he lives in Sullivan and made contact. After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate.
“Daniel looks to work for candidates who are non-conventional, willing to go against the status quo. That’s what he aligns with, the type of folks that don’t live their life with the idea they’re going to run for office one day,” said the ex-candidate, who lost their election and asked not to be named.
Moraff cut his political chops in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he had moved after an undergraduate degree in engineering at Brown University. He became a prominent leader in the local DSA chapter, which underwent rapid growth after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 and advocates for aggressive action.
His efforts fundamentally remade the Democrat party in Pittsburgh, local politico Erin Koper told The Post.
“The DSA now is in every corner of local politics. They have been putting up candidates, getting them elected to county council, city council, state rep seats,” said Koper, who ran for city council as a Republican last year.
She claimed city council meetings suddenly got flooded with “90 percent” DSA members hounding officials, a process which continues to this day.
Moraff’s ideas were hatched as early as 2017, when he penned a now-deleted essay in the progressive magazine “In These Times” titled “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries” where he argued socialists should run as Democrats rather than as independents or third-party candidates.
“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists,” he wrote.
Moraff’s first big win happened when he helped get fervently anti-Israel Democratic Rep. Summer Lee elected to the Pennsylvania State House in 2018, serving as her campaign manager. Lee is now a member of the so-called “Squad” of far-left minority women reps.
“The local Democratic committee, which typically leaned pretty traditional Democrat, has been taken over by progressive politics. You can’t even be a moderate now, [the DSA] will completely ruin your political career if you’re a traditional Democrat,” Koper added.
Moraff next foresaw that his movement needed white, working-class men, who were rapidly being lost to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
He and Lee traveled to Nebraska, where they claim to have “stumbled” across Navy veteran and former labor union boss Daniel Osborn in his garage.
The Boston-based pair put their socialist theories to the test by putting up Osborn — also a Nebraska National Guardsman and industrial mechanic — as an independent candidate in the deep red state in 2024, accompanied by a political action committee literally called the “Working Class Heroes Fund.”
He narrowly lost out to incumbent Deb Fischer but, still backed by Moraff and Lee, he is running again this November against Sen. Pete Ricketts, with the latest polls showing a neck-and-neck race.
Osborn’s campaign has been under scrutiny for paying family members, including his wife,
Megan Osborn, and her consulting companies have more than $278,000. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Moraff and Lee also teamed up with Nathan Sage in Iowa, mounting a longshot bid to become the first Democrat since 2008 to win a Senate race in the state.
In a campaign video about himself, he told viewers he grew up in a trailer, worked as a mechanic and was deployed twice to serve in the Iraq War as a Marine.
“The economy is rigged, and those in power don’t give a damn,” Sage, who is now executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, said in the video, adding: “They’re the ones doing it.” Sage dropped out of the race in February. Attempts to reach him by The Post for this article were unreturned.
When placed in the context of Platner’s rise this playbook sounds familiar. However, unlike the other candidates, the Maine hopeful has dominated national headlines in recent weeks, after scandals started to compound, including revelations he made Reddit posts which downplayed sexual assault, defended US soldiers desecrating Taliban corpses and alluded to familiarity with prostitutes.
“Everyday people don’t want the perfect candidate these days, right? They want someone who makes mistakes and owns up to them,” said the ex-candidate.
The revelations seem to be more than Moraff and Lee can handle alone, and the DSA network kicked into gear, with another figure, Morris Katz, stepping up as Platner’s adviser.
Katz is often cited as one of the main figures behind the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — one of the DSA’ s biggest wins in recent times, propelled to office by a stream of videos relatable to Gen Z, which Katz took much of the credit for.
Aged just 27, Katz appears hardwired for the attention economy and to thrive on the controversies around Planter. He is also linked to the Pennsylvania DSA scene through the Fight agency he works for, which is based in the state and boasts in his bio how he “has never backed away from a fight.”
In a report published in Maine’s Bangor Daily News, messages show Katz threatening to accuse a former staffer, who left Platner’s campaign over his growing scandals, of spreading “explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Last week, Platner’s people went into overdrive after his extramarital messages were exposed, resulting in an awkward video made by his wife, Amy Gertner, bizarrely claiming the messages were a distraction from Platner’s policies. It later emerged that like Orborn’s wife, she is also on the payroll, receiving $30,000 since September of last year as a salaried staffer.
Katz was also explosive in his response, posting to social media: “It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”
It’s anyone’s guess whether Platner will go down as a product of chutzpah or gob smacking incompetence as chatter swirls in Washington circles of even bigger scandals to drop before November. On Thursday, he had a closed-door meeting with senior Democrats where he pleaded his case to stay in the race.
Were it not for his implosion, comparisons could likely be drawn between Platner and the rise of another unconventional Democratic senator, John Fetterman.
Famed hoodie wearer Fetterman was one of the most talked about success stories of the 2022 election cycle, narrowly beating out celebrity candidate Dr. Memhet Oz (now administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).
Curiously, Fetterman’s campaign was helped by political consultant Rebecca Katz, who is no relation to Morris, but does work alongside him, running the Fight agency.
However, Fetterman— who became the senior senator for Pennsylvania in 2025 — has since parted ways with both the agency and a large swathe of the seemingly ever-radicalizing Democrat party.
While prominent politicians like Sanders and Chuck Schumer have made excuses for Platner, he pulled no punches.
“When I was growing up, if someone had a clear Nazi tattoo on them, you probably could conclude that they’re a Nazi sympathizer,” Fetterman told CNN Thursday, adding “What kind of a creeper has been on … a platform like Kik, and send a dozen explicit kinds of messages and who knows what else?”
https://t.co/gYtVm6EXEe](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKIPpOIWsAAa197.jpg)
Olivia
Online
Linda Helen ❤️✝️🌞☮️🌹
@TenhatLB
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
~ Walt Whitman
50s Ranch House, GA
Joined August 2011
3.5K Following
1.6K Followers
29.8K Posts
Pinned Tweet
“Looking at the totality of up-to-date evidence and what you've heard from eminent witnesses today, in my view, millions of Americans and millions more across the world may be in clear and present danger of suffering premature cardiovascular disease and cancer.” - @DrAseemMalhotra
Truly, the greatest generation. 💪🔥💖🇺🇲
Ray Lambert had already been shot twice and blown up once before he ever set foot on Omaha Beach.
He had survived the invasion of North Africa in 1943. Then Sicily. Each time he had been wounded. Each time he had gone back. By June 6th, 1944, the 23-year-old Staff Sergeant and head medic of the 16th Infantry Regiment's 2nd Battalion was on his third invasion in two years. He had already won a Silver Star for running through German lines in North Africa to drag wounded men out.
He was not supposed to survive a third one.
Lambert landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach. Of the 31 men in his landing craft, only 7 survived the day. The other 24 were killed before they even reached the sand.
He started working immediately.
The first bullet hit his right arm and shattered the bone. He kept going. A second round tore through his right elbow as he was pulling a wounded soldier through the surf. He kept going. Something hit his leg and opened it down to the bone. He put a tourniquet on himself, injected himself with morphine from his own kit, and kept going.
He found a slab of concrete on the beach that offered a few inches of cover. He set up a treatment zone behind it, dragging men out of the water and working on them one by one under constant fire. That piece of concrete is still there today. People who visit Omaha Beach call it Ray's Rock.
Then a loose landing craft ramp swung loose in the surf and slammed into him. It broke his back.
He kept going.
Lambert lost count of how many men he treated. The official record credits him with saving at least 15 lives that morning. Other accounts say closer to two dozen. He worked until his body physically stopped, collapsing unconscious at the edge of the surf, bleeding from multiple wounds, his back broken, still in the water.
A doctor spotted him. A landing craft pulled him out.
Here is the part that does not feel real.
Lambert's brother, Euel, had also been wounded at Normandy that day. The two brothers were loaded onto the same evacuation landing craft. They were placed in the same wheeled ambulance. They were taken to the same tent hospital in England. They were brought into the same operating room at the same time.
Lambert spent almost a full year recovering before he could walk properly again.
He went home. He lived quietly for decades, rarely talking about what happened. In 2019, at the age of 98, he went back to Normandy and stood on the beach again. He published a memoir called Every Man a Hero. It became a New York Times bestseller.
In 2021, Ray Lambert died peacefully at home. He was 100 years old.
He had three invasions, four serious wounds, a broken back, a Silver Star, multiple Bronze Stars, multiple Purple Hearts, and two dozen men who came home because he refused to stop moving on the worst morning in American military history.
Today is June 6th.
Remember him.
Can I just say something?
The “grab them by the 🐱” thats always used to tar Trump as a rapist is completely false.
If you listen to the conversation, it’s about women throwing themselves at him because he is rich and famous. About OFFERING it up. And the joke is, sure, he takes advantage of it.
Is it promiscuity. Yes. Is it disrespectful…yes. (Reminder to women if you want respect act like you deserve it.) Is the situation accurate? Yes.
Is it sexual assault, rape or force?
Not in the slightest. Yes, Trump has been unfaithful. Stand in a very, very, very long line of US Presidents back to at the very least Jefferson. That doesn’t excuse it, it’s still bad. It’s just a statement of fact.
Beyond that there has never been a corroborated/evidence-based case of rape and abuse against him.
So all y’all who selectively shut down the Platner issues with a “But Trump” can sit the hell down.
(Cue sexually disgusting comments from disagreers. 🙄)
Who to follow
Jude ⚜️Geaux Tigers⚜️Trahan
@wooknponub
Freedom for all the things!!#AntiWar! Support @innocence #FreeDexterT! Government is violence.
Salty Bitch™ achievement.
George Carlinist.
#killertermite
#ITM
Jeremiah
@PanarchyJay
SHIT POSTING
is an anagram for
TOP INSIGHTS
WeenLebowski the Metaphorical Oracle🎳
@WeenLebowski
what doesnt kill us, makes for good sarcasm.
Thomas Sowell: “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
@JenniferSey Impressive!👏 What a story of triumph. The right sport brings out true grit for a person.
Graham Platner belongs in Hollywood.
Meet the champagne socialist duo who groomed rich kid Graham Platner into a ‘working-class’ candidate | Chadwick Moore, New York Post
Graham Platner has done a better job of hiding his privileged roots than the Nazi tattoo on his chest — a move which is by design.
The embattled Maine senate candidate is vocal about his disabled war veteran, rugged oyster farmer, “working class” persona; less about his attendance at an $80,000-a-year boarding school, lawyer father, or major architect grandfather.
That’s because he’s been coached how to present himself, molded to present a specific image and, in a sense, manufactured.
The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic Socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.
And for his champagne socialist handlers, the more scandals that engulf Platner and the more centrist outrage he can stoke, the better as it gets more stories written and drowns out his opponent in November, incumbent Susan Collins.
“For all we know, they’re leaking this stuff because they want to get more attention,” a former candidate who hired the same team behind Platner a few years ago told The Post.
That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancé, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.
The pair had originally met while working for Bernie Sanders in 2020 (I-Vt.) and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for senate in Nebraska, and Summer Lee, a member of the Pennsylvania State House since 2018 and part of the DSA ‘squad’, alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on Union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico.
It remains to be seen if those skeletons were worse than Platner’s. Williams did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Moraff — who has his own Dark Forest consulting firm — and Fan had first got wind of Platner through the local DSA network, where he had been active in the local DSA-offshoot group Acadia Action and had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine.
They first entered Ironbound, Platner’s mother’s restaurant, just a few miles from where he lives in Sullivan and made contact. After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate.
“Daniel looks to work for candidates who are non-conventional, willing to go against the status quo. That’s what he aligns with, the type of folks that don’t live their life with the idea they’re going to run for office one day,” said the ex-candidate, who lost their election and asked not to be named.
Moraff cut his political chops in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he had moved after an undergraduate degree in engineering at Brown University. He became a prominent leader in the local DSA chapter, which underwent rapid growth after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 and advocates for aggressive action.
His efforts fundamentally remade the Democrat party in Pittsburgh, local politico Erin Koper told The Post.
“The DSA now is in every corner of local politics. They have been putting up candidates, getting them elected to county council, city council, state rep seats,” said Koper, who ran for city council as a Republican last year.
She claimed city council meetings suddenly got flooded with “90 percent” DSA members hounding officials, a process which continues to this day.
Moraff’s ideas were hatched as early as 2017, when he penned a now-deleted essay in the progressive magazine “In These Times” titled “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries” where he argued socialists should run as Democrats rather than as independents or third-party candidates.
“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists,” he wrote.
Moraff’s first big win happened when he helped get fervently anti-Israel Democratic Rep. Summer Lee elected to the Pennsylvania State House in 2018, serving as her campaign manager. Lee is now a member of the so-called “Squad” of far-left minority women reps.
“The local Democratic committee, which typically leaned pretty traditional Democrat, has been taken over by progressive politics. You can’t even be a moderate now, [the DSA] will completely ruin your political career if you’re a traditional Democrat,” Koper added.
Moraff next foresaw that his movement needed white, working-class men, who were rapidly being lost to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
He and Lee traveled to Nebraska, where they claim to have “stumbled” across Navy veteran and former labor union boss Daniel Osborn in his garage.
The Boston-based pair put their socialist theories to the test by putting up Osborn — also a Nebraska National Guardsman and industrial mechanic — as an independent candidate in the deep red state in 2024, accompanied by a political action committee literally called the “Working Class Heroes Fund.”
He narrowly lost out to incumbent Deb Fischer but, still backed by Moraff and Lee, he is running again this November against Sen. Pete Ricketts, with the latest polls showing a neck-and-neck race.
Osborn’s campaign has been under scrutiny for paying family members, including his wife,
Megan Osborn, and her consulting companies have more than $278,000. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Moraff and Lee also teamed up with Nathan Sage in Iowa, mounting a longshot bid to become the first Democrat since 2008 to win a Senate race in the state.
In a campaign video about himself, he told viewers he grew up in a trailer, worked as a mechanic and was deployed twice to serve in the Iraq War as a Marine.
“The economy is rigged, and those in power don’t give a damn,” Sage, who is now executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, said in the video, adding: “They’re the ones doing it.” Sage dropped out of the race in February. Attempts to reach him by The Post for this article were unreturned.
When placed in the context of Platner’s rise this playbook sounds familiar. However, unlike the other candidates, the Maine hopeful has dominated national headlines in recent weeks, after scandals started to compound, including revelations he made Reddit posts which downplayed sexual assault, defended US soldiers desecrating Taliban corpses and alluded to familiarity with prostitutes.
“Everyday people don’t want the perfect candidate these days, right? They want someone who makes mistakes and owns up to them,” said the ex-candidate.
The revelations seem to be more than Moraff and Lee can handle alone, and the DSA network kicked into gear, with another figure, Morris Katz, stepping up as Platner’s adviser.
Katz is often cited as one of the main figures behind the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — one of the DSA’ s biggest wins in recent times, propelled to office by a stream of videos relatable to Gen Z, which Katz took much of the credit for.
Aged just 27, Katz appears hardwired for the attention economy and to thrive on the controversies around Planter. He is also linked to the Pennsylvania DSA scene through the Fight agency he works for, which is based in the state and boasts in his bio how he “has never backed away from a fight.”
In a report published in Maine’s Bangor Daily News, messages show Katz threatening to accuse a former staffer, who left Platner’s campaign over his growing scandals, of spreading “explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Last week, Platner’s people went into overdrive after his extramarital messages were exposed, resulting in an awkward video made by his wife, Amy Gertner, bizarrely claiming the messages were a distraction from Platner’s policies. It later emerged that like Orborn’s wife, she is also on the payroll, receiving $30,000 since September of last year as a salaried staffer.
Katz was also explosive in his response, posting to social media: “It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”
It’s anyone’s guess whether Platner will go down as a product of chutzpah or gob smacking incompetence as chatter swirls in Washington circles of even bigger scandals to drop before November. On Thursday, he had a closed-door meeting with senior Democrats where he pleaded his case to stay in the race.
Were it not for his implosion, comparisons could likely be drawn between Platner and the rise of another unconventional Democratic senator, John Fetterman.
Famed hoodie wearer Fetterman was one of the most talked about success stories of the 2022 election cycle, narrowly beating out celebrity candidate Dr. Memhet Oz (now administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).
Curiously, Fetterman’s campaign was helped by political consultant Rebecca Katz, who is no relation to Morris, but does work alongside him, running the Fight agency.
However, Fetterman— who became the senior senator for Pennsylvania in 2025 — has since parted ways with both the agency and a large swathe of the seemingly ever-radicalizing Democrat party.
While prominent politicians like Sanders and Chuck Schumer have made excuses for Platner, he pulled no punches.
“When I was growing up, if someone had a clear Nazi tattoo on them, you probably could conclude that they’re a Nazi sympathizer,” Fetterman told CNN Thursday, adding “What kind of a creeper has been on … a platform like Kik, and send a dozen explicit kinds of messages and who knows what else?”
https://t.co/gYtVm6EXEe
![OwenGregorian's tweet photo. Meet the champagne socialist duo who groomed rich kid Graham Platner into a ‘working-class’ candidate | Chadwick Moore, New York Post
Graham Platner has done a better job of hiding his privileged roots than the Nazi tattoo on his chest — a move which is by design.
The embattled Maine senate candidate is vocal about his disabled war veteran, rugged oyster farmer, “working class” persona; less about his attendance at an $80,000-a-year boarding school, lawyer father, or major architect grandfather.
That’s because he’s been coached how to present himself, molded to present a specific image and, in a sense, manufactured.
The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic Socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.
And for his champagne socialist handlers, the more scandals that engulf Platner and the more centrist outrage he can stoke, the better as it gets more stories written and drowns out his opponent in November, incumbent Susan Collins.
“For all we know, they’re leaking this stuff because they want to get more attention,” a former candidate who hired the same team behind Platner a few years ago told The Post.
That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancé, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.
The pair had originally met while working for Bernie Sanders in 2020 (I-Vt.) and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for senate in Nebraska, and Summer Lee, a member of the Pennsylvania State House since 2018 and part of the DSA ‘squad’, alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on Union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico.
It remains to be seen if those skeletons were worse than Platner’s. Williams did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Moraff — who has his own Dark Forest consulting firm — and Fan had first got wind of Platner through the local DSA network, where he had been active in the local DSA-offshoot group Acadia Action and had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine.
They first entered Ironbound, Platner’s mother’s restaurant, just a few miles from where he lives in Sullivan and made contact. After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate.
“Daniel looks to work for candidates who are non-conventional, willing to go against the status quo. That’s what he aligns with, the type of folks that don’t live their life with the idea they’re going to run for office one day,” said the ex-candidate, who lost their election and asked not to be named.
Moraff cut his political chops in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he had moved after an undergraduate degree in engineering at Brown University. He became a prominent leader in the local DSA chapter, which underwent rapid growth after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 and advocates for aggressive action.
His efforts fundamentally remade the Democrat party in Pittsburgh, local politico Erin Koper told The Post.
“The DSA now is in every corner of local politics. They have been putting up candidates, getting them elected to county council, city council, state rep seats,” said Koper, who ran for city council as a Republican last year.
She claimed city council meetings suddenly got flooded with “90 percent” DSA members hounding officials, a process which continues to this day.
Moraff’s ideas were hatched as early as 2017, when he penned a now-deleted essay in the progressive magazine “In These Times” titled “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries” where he argued socialists should run as Democrats rather than as independents or third-party candidates.
“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists,” he wrote.
Moraff’s first big win happened when he helped get fervently anti-Israel Democratic Rep. Summer Lee elected to the Pennsylvania State House in 2018, serving as her campaign manager. Lee is now a member of the so-called “Squad” of far-left minority women reps.
“The local Democratic committee, which typically leaned pretty traditional Democrat, has been taken over by progressive politics. You can’t even be a moderate now, [the DSA] will completely ruin your political career if you’re a traditional Democrat,” Koper added.
Moraff next foresaw that his movement needed white, working-class men, who were rapidly being lost to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
He and Lee traveled to Nebraska, where they claim to have “stumbled” across Navy veteran and former labor union boss Daniel Osborn in his garage.
The Boston-based pair put their socialist theories to the test by putting up Osborn — also a Nebraska National Guardsman and industrial mechanic — as an independent candidate in the deep red state in 2024, accompanied by a political action committee literally called the “Working Class Heroes Fund.”
He narrowly lost out to incumbent Deb Fischer but, still backed by Moraff and Lee, he is running again this November against Sen. Pete Ricketts, with the latest polls showing a neck-and-neck race.
Osborn’s campaign has been under scrutiny for paying family members, including his wife,
Megan Osborn, and her consulting companies have more than $278,000. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Moraff and Lee also teamed up with Nathan Sage in Iowa, mounting a longshot bid to become the first Democrat since 2008 to win a Senate race in the state.
In a campaign video about himself, he told viewers he grew up in a trailer, worked as a mechanic and was deployed twice to serve in the Iraq War as a Marine.
“The economy is rigged, and those in power don’t give a damn,” Sage, who is now executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, said in the video, adding: “They’re the ones doing it.” Sage dropped out of the race in February. Attempts to reach him by The Post for this article were unreturned.
When placed in the context of Platner’s rise this playbook sounds familiar. However, unlike the other candidates, the Maine hopeful has dominated national headlines in recent weeks, after scandals started to compound, including revelations he made Reddit posts which downplayed sexual assault, defended US soldiers desecrating Taliban corpses and alluded to familiarity with prostitutes.
“Everyday people don’t want the perfect candidate these days, right? They want someone who makes mistakes and owns up to them,” said the ex-candidate.
The revelations seem to be more than Moraff and Lee can handle alone, and the DSA network kicked into gear, with another figure, Morris Katz, stepping up as Platner’s adviser.
Katz is often cited as one of the main figures behind the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — one of the DSA’ s biggest wins in recent times, propelled to office by a stream of videos relatable to Gen Z, which Katz took much of the credit for.
Aged just 27, Katz appears hardwired for the attention economy and to thrive on the controversies around Planter. He is also linked to the Pennsylvania DSA scene through the Fight agency he works for, which is based in the state and boasts in his bio how he “has never backed away from a fight.”
In a report published in Maine’s Bangor Daily News, messages show Katz threatening to accuse a former staffer, who left Platner’s campaign over his growing scandals, of spreading “explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Last week, Platner’s people went into overdrive after his extramarital messages were exposed, resulting in an awkward video made by his wife, Amy Gertner, bizarrely claiming the messages were a distraction from Platner’s policies. It later emerged that like Orborn’s wife, she is also on the payroll, receiving $30,000 since September of last year as a salaried staffer.
Katz was also explosive in his response, posting to social media: “It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”
It’s anyone’s guess whether Platner will go down as a product of chutzpah or gob smacking incompetence as chatter swirls in Washington circles of even bigger scandals to drop before November. On Thursday, he had a closed-door meeting with senior Democrats where he pleaded his case to stay in the race.
Were it not for his implosion, comparisons could likely be drawn between Platner and the rise of another unconventional Democratic senator, John Fetterman.
Famed hoodie wearer Fetterman was one of the most talked about success stories of the 2022 election cycle, narrowly beating out celebrity candidate Dr. Memhet Oz (now administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).
Curiously, Fetterman’s campaign was helped by political consultant Rebecca Katz, who is no relation to Morris, but does work alongside him, running the Fight agency.
However, Fetterman— who became the senior senator for Pennsylvania in 2025 — has since parted ways with both the agency and a large swathe of the seemingly ever-radicalizing Democrat party.
While prominent politicians like Sanders and Chuck Schumer have made excuses for Platner, he pulled no punches.
“When I was growing up, if someone had a clear Nazi tattoo on them, you probably could conclude that they’re a Nazi sympathizer,” Fetterman told CNN Thursday, adding “What kind of a creeper has been on … a platform like Kik, and send a dozen explicit kinds of messages and who knows what else?”
https://t.co/gYtVm6EXEe](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKIPq0VXsAArmJd.png)
@AntiLeftMemes Yes. Yes we did.
None braver...🇺🇲🔥🌹
They refused to bathe. They refused to salute. They poached deer from an English lord's estate and used their washing water ration to cook it.
The night before D-Day they shaved mohawks and painted their faces like warriors.
Then they jumped into Normandy on one of the deadliest missions of the invasion.
This is the story of the Filthy Thirteen..🧵1/7
🇺🇸As the 82nd anniversary of D-Day nears, I’d like to share a story.
The logistics/medical battalion I commanded in the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan held the lineage and honors of the Division’s original medical battalion (which was company-sized on the night of June 5, 1944).
On the night of June 5, 1944, medics from the 307th Airborne Medical Company jumped in with the Division HQ, and immediately started treating casualties.
Meanwhile, the main body of the Company was loaded up on gliders and landed in a swampy area on the Cotentin Peninsula, where by midnight they had formed up and established a triage and clearing station for the stabilization and evacuation of casualties. On the evening of June 6, Major (Doctor) William H. Houston, the Company commander, was KIA due to enemy action. More reinforcements landed by glider on D+1, and for the next month the 307th stayed right at the front, stabilizing casualties and evacuating them to England.
I went to Normandy a couple of years ago, and did a deep dive on all things 82nd and 101st. As part of that, I hired an English historian to research the 307th, and we visited the sites where they landed and where they established the constantly-moving medical clearing stations.
Below is a picture of a farm building in Normandy that is now a residence. That hand you see is my historian’s, and the picture his iPad shows is the 307th’s clearing station in that same farmhouse.
I thought that was kind of amazing.
When I went to Normandy, I was surprised at how much respect the locals still have to this day for the D-Day warriors, and military tourism there is absolutely thriving, even among Gen Z. (Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan are big reasons, I am told.)
I think it is great that the history of that day lives on so strongly. Never forget.
I gotta go now, Episode 2 of Band of Brothers is coming on. Airborne.🇺🇸🪂🇺🇸
Eighty-two years ago today, the fate of the free world turned on the courage of ordinary men asked to do the extraordinary.
On June 6, 1944, more than 156,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy — many knowing they might never return.
They came not for glory, but for something far greater: the liberation of a continent crushed under tyranny. D-Day was not simply a military operation — it was the moment the tide of history changed, purchased at an almost incomprehensible cost in blood and sacrifice.
As we mark the 82nd anniversary, we don’t simply remember a battle. We remember the men behind it — their fear, their faith, and their extraordinary willingness to give everything so that others could live free. That debt does not expire with time. It only deepens.
@Normandy @WW2Facts
#dday #normandy #dday82 #ww2 #ww2history
I asked Grok to glam up my profile pic. 😘
@ThatEricAlper Born To Run
Unlike a well brought up twelve-year-old child, the Leftist Brain has not yet learned that it is not entitled to anything it wants. It is still unaware that it must comply with rules that apply to all and is personally responsible for its own decisions.
Last Seen Users on Sotwe
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
240.2M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.3M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.6M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
109M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.3M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.1M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.6M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
86.8M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
80.6M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
72.2M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.4M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.6M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
68.6M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.4M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.5M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
61.1M followers
X
@x
60.9M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
59.9M followers