10/31/25: Epstein Israeli Agent Confirmed?, Nick Fuentes GOP Takeover, Graham Platner TELLS ALL

27:41It's out there in the open and they're not doing it. It's not that they don't have the ability and the information. They don't have the willingness to do the story. They don't want to do the story. There's so many. And what do you attribute that to? Is it the origin of the emails coming from Iranian hacker? No. Is it that they don't want to dig into these power relationships? Is Israel? Exactly. They wouldn't mind the Russia aspect of it, but Epstein and Israel. I mean, when was the last time that you saw any headline anywhere in the world that used the word Mossad even. Like, we all know this organization exists.

28:15It's very powerful. I mean, Barry Weiss did interview someone. That's true. She was learning. She was learning the first time. That was so funny. You just don't talk about these things. This is how the grown-ups run the world back there. We just pretend like it's different. It's so fascinating. Yeah. It's an incredible story. I mean, And just to see them speaking so flippantly about how to make money and change geopolitics is completely insane. And Ryan, I think the big takeaway that you made earlier, the point that you made earlier, that's a huge takeaway is like anyone who said Epstein wasn't acting.

28:55I mean, this is because this is one of the big questions about how Epstein made his money and influence is that he was back channeling negotiations between different countries. And this actually confirms that. I mean, that's an argument that you hear a lot from people who are deep in the weeds in Epstein world. But it's plain as day here in the report. Like, that's what's happening. And yeah, and the thing, exactly, the thing we're learning from a lot of these emails and documents that we've been reviewing recently is that Epstein was, there's this idea that Epstein was just basically just on the dole and doing nothing but running a blackmail operation.

29:34and I don't think that that holds up. Epstein was legitimately making connections between these spy agencies, between these top political figures around the world. And when you get into the tax advice he was giving, he was actually, and maybe it's because he's not a trained tax guy, like pushing the envelope on a lot of tax strategies that legitimately was saving these oligarchs and these billionaires and plutocrats in the United States, you know, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, he genuinely was doing the work for these people that was making him valuable. Now, is he doing, you know, blackmail and videoing all the gross stuff that people are doing on the side with him?

30:25Yeah, probably. And that's part of it. And even if he's not, everybody knows that he is, you know a disgusting creature well they assume they assume that he is whether he is or not and 2009 he's already been to jail like by this point he's already yeah tied in with Israeli intelligence yeah are they gonna like you know kick him out of the bank or disassociate with him or you know cross him in another any other way when he's number one valuable and making them money and number two they just assume any bad thing whether in the context of you know his island or just in their life in general, they assume he's got access to all of that.

31:05So it does help explain how he maintains all of these relationships and all of this power, even after he is a literally like convicted, registered sex offender. Yeah. And yeah. And who else is going to get the meeting with Bill Clinton and then with Vladimir Putin? or, you know, it's a it's a it's a rare he had rare. He's like one of the most connected people in the world at that time. Yeah, I want to read this one little section here. It says in the same email thread, Epstein offered Barack guidance on how to ratchet the pressure on the U.S. to strike Iran. I would use the opportunity to compare it with Iran.

31:47The solutions become more complex with time, not less. I think many people would like your views on Egypt, Syria, et cetera. Russia's role? Question mark. I think you might point out the gassing of women and children is an expression from the 20th century. Women are no longer equivalent to children. Civilians versus combatants only. Yeah, it's surprising because, you know, it's like I think most people just think of him as like mainly doing the island stuff. But now he's a foreign policy expert. Mm hmm. Yeah. And it fits in this, this was the height of the Davos man era where everybody was an expert on everything.

32:24Yeah. And so if you spoke with authority, you didn't even have to spell the countries right. And it was, that was good enough. Well, that's another crazy part of this. Especially if you're a billionaire. Yeah. You're just watching them like totally boomer text. you know what i mean like in these emails about changing geopolitics where they're all lowercase with the most bizarre punctuation sorry boomers um but like just the craziest back then and maybe today still was a power move like i noticed and crystal you may remember this too like really powerful people ariana for instance um my old boss like they would i think they would leave in all the typos and radical errors as this display of their own authority and power that like i don't have to i don't have to care about yeah well you get my point you do the work to like interpret what i'm saying because you're going to because i am a person of deep authority and power it's i think my son i think my son still uh still operates on that model actually To be honest with you, it's actually a Zoomer thing.

33:34I learned this from Ella, actually, that capitalized, like proper capitalization of your sentence is considered like an old person thing to do now. Yeah. Or a literacy. Zoomers turn off the auto capitalized so that their texts are all lowercase. That's, yeah, that's a young person thing. They have that in common with Jeffrey Epstein. So good for them. Yeah. There you go. There you go. So, I mean, I think I mean, in a way, Ryan, you have put on the public record now, like one of the big mysteries, like you said, does Jeffrey Epstein, is he connected to Mossad? You know, is he working with him? And OK, case closed.

34:16We know that at least no longer, no longer conspiracy. That is now recorded, known, reported out. What's the relationship? How deep? What else did they do? That remains to be discovered. But how does he get himself into that position? All of that is still, you know, still up in the air. But it's a sort of important piece of the puzzle that you've that you've been able to fill in here. And I just also do think it's extraordinary that the lack of lack of interest from the national media, the opposite, the anti-interest from the national media in digging into these emails because they could have had the scoop themselves, you know?

34:51Well, yeah, I mean, there's this like maximum journalism. If it bleeds, it leads. And everyone tends to blame journalists for over sensationalizing stories and only covering bad stories, sad stories, awful stories. But the fact that they're not interested. I mean, right. There's CBS News reporting on the prison and the cameras. We've seen some of that. But if it bleeds, it leads is clearly not true because this is the most sensational Epstein material that you could report out. It's right there in emails. And it reminds me of the time that one reporter was, I forget what the exact scoop was, but Trump just came out and said it.

35:24And the reporter was like, I've spent months investigating this and he just he just said it. He just came out and said it like it's they're saying it. They're just putting it plain here. And it's like juicy, like intriguing, crazy stuff. And they're not touching it. Yeah. Well, I'm telling them now we have a bunch more stories to do. So if you want to scoop us like you still can. And the opportunity is still available. Yeah. All right. We should get to this heritage thing. But we didn't even mention at the top of the show, Graham Platter is joining us in a little bit. So and we we asked our premium subscribers to submit some questions for him as well.

36:01So people can hear from him what they're interested in. But before we get to this, Emily, you want to set up this this heritage situation? I get the. Absolutely not. of it but i think i need i need some of the like granular like the texture the color from you of how this is you can tell me where i get it wrong oh yeah that's fine i like that yeah that'll be more here's my outside here's my outside looking in uh i mean depending on where you want to start but for the sake of time we'll start with tucker interviewing nick fuentes the other day. You know, we know Tucker can badger a guest. Ted Cruz learned that firsthand.

36:44The Fuentes interview was, you know, more of a kid glove situation. I noticed he like, you know, Tucker has like made fun of him for being gay in the past. And I noticed that Tucker spent like enormous amount of time kind of forcing him to like talk about women, which I don't like Tucker's like kind of passive aggressive way of messing with Fuentes the whole time because what women did they talk about um all of the women at one point fuentes is like tucker was like okay so what's the problem and fuentes was like well it's the women yeah so like it's that part it's just the whole the whole thing's ridiculous but so that created this you know fuentes is like an on the record anti-semi like right he doesn't he says like basically that he's anti-semitic like that he like yeah he's one he's like the jews control and it's not israel it's the jews like he he is a i mean he he talks about being quote-unquote radicalized on race even in he'll talk about a question like this is not a guy who's leaving yeah who's trying to like he says women should be burned at the stake more no he is and he is an overt like avowed identity politics racist that is his ideology and so there's been this effort to kind of cut Tucker off, and this happened at TPUSA.

38:02There was, you know, Charlie Kirk was under a lot of pressure to not let Tucker speak at his event. And then Heritage came under pressure to distance itself from Tucker Carlson. And so the head of Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, put out this startling video in response to this, which, and we can talk about this a lot, but there's a bunch in here that just taking the traditional, like genuine, I think reasonable definition of anti-Semitism, not the like, oh, you're criticizing Israel, that's anti-Semitic. Like there are, while we go through this, we can just like count the dog whistles in it.

38:47Like they're like, and you can argue about whether or not people are too sensitive to whether or not these are anti-Semitic dog whistles or not, but they're known. and he deployed them anyway. Globalism, venomous, what do you call them? Basically snakes or whatever. Anyway, Griffin, if you want to play this, you'll hear them like bing all the way through. I'll have more to say on this in the coming days, but today I want to be clear about one thing. Christians can critique the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic. And of course, anti-Semitism should be condemned. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always.

39:32When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn't, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington. The Heritage Foundation didn't become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians. And we won't start doing that now. We don't take direction from comments on X, though we are grateful for the robust free speech debate.

40:12We also don't take direction from members or donors, though we are inherently grateful for their support. And we're adding more every day. This is the robust debate we invite. with our colleagues, our movement friends, our members, and the American public. We will always defend truth. We will always defend America. And we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.

40:52Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right. I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer either. When we disagree with a person's thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate. And we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left. As my friend Vice President Vance said last night, what I am not okay with is any country coming before the interest of American citizens.

41:33And it is important for all of us, assuming we are American citizens, to put the interest of our own country first. That's where our allegiance lies. And that's where it will stay. and so the beginning of that is just normal like look you can criticize israel and not be anti-semitic and well christians specifically christians according to him i don't know so much right right launches with the christian thing uh yeah globalist venomous um the reference to donors Like, if he was writing this speech trying to cater to more tender feelings about anti-Semitism, that he wouldn't have used those terms.

42:22Like, those are very deliberate and provocative terms to use in a video that defends not only their relationship with Tucker Carlson, but the value of engaging with Nick Quintus. Mm-hmm. Last thing I'll say, and I'm talking too much here, I made this point on Twitter. During the Obama years, Netanyahu basically went to war with Obama over the Iran nuclear deal. And that was kind of the beginning of the end of Israel's relationship with the Democratic Party, which was already strained because some Democrats would offer some rhetoric criticizing some human rights abuses related to the occupation.

43:10And they did not want that. The Republicans were much more willing to just be fine with whatever you're doing to the Palestinians. And so they actively pursued this. they had a bipartisan approach. AIPAC and Israel had a bipartisan approach. They switched it to a one-party approach, still tight with Schumer, Jeffries, etc., the leadership, but went to war with the base of the Democratic Party and abandoned the party more broadly and lined up with a party roughly the same time that Charlottesville is happening. It's clear that there's becoming this, like, strong Fuentes element within this coalition.

43:51And so the long-term play of aligning with these kind of Christian nationalists was, to me, always going to blow up in their face. You then have two years of this genocide where the younger Republicans are watching it unfold on their phones. And the combination of that means they've basically lost everybody now at this point. I feel like we're usually on the same page about this stuff. I don't see the globalism and venomous and vile comments about donors. I mean, I assume he addressed donors in that video because he was... I think you can argue about whether that's anti-Semitic, but what's clear is that people read that as anti-Semitic.

44:41Yeah, I mean, whatever was going on on the scenes. And to use it deliberately is then a provocative... It was not written to cater to people who were genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism. It's written to cater to Groypers who are the who apparently everybody in the party is just afraid of. I don't know. I mean, judging by J.D. Vance, judging by Tucker, judging by the statement. Like, I mean, that's Richard Hanani has been arguing like Nick Fuentes and the Groypers of the future of the Republican Party in a lot of ways. And I've been saying this. I think they're already the president of the Republican Party as it exists right now.

45:17Kevin Roberts is the man who greenlit Project Esther, and there are a lot of internal divisions over the old neoconservative line at Heritage that is categorically pro-Israel and pro-Lakud, pro-Netanyahu at every turn, unless they're also going pro-Smotrich, right? Like that's there's there's he has stood up to that. He said they're not taking money from defense contractors anymore. Now, I would have to go back and look and see how well that's held. But it has been explosive inside of Heritage. And so to Ryan's point, it does sound like there was a deliberate writing of the script to basically be like, we are not catering to you guys over on whatever floor working over there on Project Esther who are blowing up.

46:06And maybe even like having people blow us up on social media for being affiliated with Tucker. Now, Tucker lost his job at Fox within like a day of giving a big speech at the Heritage Foundation about how there was like a spiritual battle happening in American politics. And so Kevin Roberts is, I mean, there's a lot of like internal politics on this, but Kevin Roberts is seen as somebody who has aligned heritage actually with like the grassroots MAGA universe as opposed to like the DC MAGA universe. And so at the same time, though, he's got this like contingent of neocons over there doing their Project Esther thing.

46:46And he's genuinely pro-Israel. But he's also trying to like, I don't necessarily know that people are, I mean, I know some people are definitely afraid of the Gripers and of Laura Loomer. But I think they're also like, if we sound like that Seth Dillon op-ed he wrote for the Free Press, which was super controversial on the right, saying we must gatekeep, we must gatekeep. what we actually want to do to attract people to our side and to get them to trust us is to say, hell no, do not gatekeep. Gatekeeping is the worst thing possible. It's like a virtue signal in one direction versus a virtue signal in the other direction.

47:19And like this video has exploded the right, like the MAGA coalition. Everyone is like debating this and freaking out over it. And it is like dividing people in personal sensitive ways. And he actually might like lose his job. It's not impossible that the board like votes him out over all of this. Did you guys see this thing that was going around that was like, you know, I'm told there's lots of ideological diversity on the right. Here's the real ideological diversity in the right. And it's a screenshot of Laura Loomer fighting with someone else. And she says to them, you're a Muslim. And they reply, you're a Jew.

47:53I mean, that's that's kind of what's playing out here. Right. You've got Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, who is also a, you know, a racist and white nationalist. Just ask Trump. They'll tell you if he's being candid, who is, you know, extremely powerful. But he is on the side of like the Muslims are the real baddies. We've got to you know, we will back Israel. And in his view, Israel and the Jewish people are all you know, this is all tied together. This is not reality, but this is his view. So we'll back Israel no matter what. And we'll do everything we can to, you know, like his wife threatened Cenk Uygur with deportation on Piers Morgan show the other day.

48:33Right. That is that's that view. And then the Fuentes view, like the purist version of the other side is no, it's actually really the Jews that are the biggest problem and they're controlling everything. And that's why we're doing all this stuff for Israel and whatever. And so that is like this big divide that is ultimately playing out. And so obviously, D.C., you know, the Trump regime and their acolytes and a lot of the, you know, the sort of like entrenched interests or whatever are on the Stephen Miller side of that. And then you've got Fuentes, which embodies the other side of that. And so, you know, to go back to the Tucker thing, like this was very interesting to me as well, because you're right, Tucker is very powerful media figure in his own right, very talented media figure in his own right and flirts with the ideology that Nick Fuentes just says plain.

49:22So when it was Tucker talking to, wasn't it, Candace, he trashes Fuentes. He says he's a loser. He's a gay loser in his mom's basement. But then when they're face to face, no, it's kid gloves. Let me hear what you have to say. I think you've been taken out of context. Don't you really mean this? Why don't you tell me more about yourself? So that's why I say even someone as powerful and as talented as Tucker Carlson, he's afraid of these guys. And you can see, you know, the J.D. Vance event this week, the TPUSA. USA event, you know, bunch of griper questions, you know, kids coming up and being like, well, what about your Hindu wife coming up and being like, well, what about why are you in hot to Israel?

50:03And, you know, taking like a Christian nationalist perspective on why that's a problem. Like they are, J.D. Vance is the most online character you can imagine. They are all well aware that this is where the energy in the party is and they're afraid of it. They're afraid of crossing it. So on the question of gatekeeping, Emily, I mean, look, I know we all have like pushed all of us in our own way of pushback and cancel culture and like woke scolding and all this sort of stuff. But you're not going to draw the line at a literal Nazi. Like, is there really literally nothing that is out of bounds?

50:38Because apparently that is increasingly the position in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement. And that's why it's becoming, you know, increased like incredibly radicalized in a way that I think a lot of maybe like Norby's outside don't realize how much of this energy there is at this point. I think Jen, well, so this is kind of just as we're talking about it, I'm thinking of this. So Fuentes is engaging in intense revisionist history and his appearances on. That's what I was going to say to Emily. Yeah. Oh my gosh. The revamp. Yeah. I don't hate anybody. Yeah. No, as a Christian, I don't hate anybody.

51:15It's like, dude. And Tucker, and this is what was, sorry to cut you off, Emily, but this is what was so lame about Tucker's approach. He said, oh, let me hear you in your own words. No. You need to take his words that he's actually said and say, well, what about when you said this? What did that mean now that you're trying to present yourself and, like, launder yourself for a more mass audience? You can't just put all that stuff in the past unless you've had some sort of a genuine evolution of which there is no evidence whatsoever. I think with this, again, like I was working in conservative campus politics at the time that Fuentes was ascendant.

51:47And the way he tells the story about how he ended up getting canceled is insane and untrue. And he's like, I was just questioning Israel. It's like, no, you fucking weren't. That's not actually what was happening. And so I think there are these like people who don't understand, again, having dealt with a lot of students, they get lost. I wrote a whole op-ed for The Federalist this week about how to deal with this stuff because it's so, it's like genuinely dangerous, but it's also not the majority. and the more that you gatekeep, the more that you push people in that direction because they're like, hey, you're calling, like, it doesn't matter if we say one thing, we're going to get called Nazis, we're going to get called bigots.

52:27It doesn't matter. See, I don't agree. When Nick Fuentes was canceled, he was a much smaller presence. Like, it worked when he was deplatformed and you didn't have all of these people having, let's just sit down and chat conversations with him. He was much less of a force. Like I do think that I do think cancellation of him and gatekeeping Nazis was like it did work to a certain extent. I think you just have to do it in a way. This is what I wrote the piece is like you have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate already alienated people. So not Fuentes, but the people who are listening to Fuentes and are being taken in by him saying that you are you're being called bad.

53:06You didn't do anything wrong, but you're being called bad. You're just asking questions, but you're being called that. That's just what I'm saying is like that does need to be you do have to do that carefully because there's this sense of like victim mentality among people who have to some degrees been alienated their colleges telling them this that and the other thing. So I do think you have to be careful with it. That said that said it's just like the entire you don't have to talk to Nick Fuentes like you actually don't have to talk to Nick Fuentes. says. And you definitely don't have to then respond to people who are mad because someone else that you associate with talked to Nick Fuentes.

53:46Like you can just not say anything about Nick Fuentes and ignore him and let him wither. Or don't even you don't even have to ignore him. Just be like, this is insane. Like where this is America. And Tucker went into this whole thing about blood guilt and about how that's anti-American. But yeah, I mean, I don't think people are wrong to say he was much tougher on Ted Cruz than he was on. Of course. Right. But there are a lot of especially because Fuentes and Charlie Kirk, that was the scene is like the dark and the light on the right. That like dark Charlie was actually Fuentes and they were bitter enemies.

54:20And Fuentes saw himself that way. And after what happened to Charlie Kirk, Fuentes has been trying to rehabilitate himself and to like do the soft launch of Fuentes 2.0, who's just anti-Israel and just a Catholic anti-Israel guy. And so I think a lot of people don't know what to do with that, but you definitely don't have to treat it like it's credible. He also complains to like he's like tell some of his fans, you guys are doing like low IQ anti-Semitism. Like I'm trying to do a professional tidied critique now. I think that's a key point because effectively policing boundaries of conversation requires basically stigmatizing odious things.

54:59And canceling people requires kind of moral credibility. And that's why the left was able to do it in the 2010s or so. They blew it. They overshot. They lost their moral credibility. That's why they can't kind of do it anymore. But Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL and the entire kind of Zionist movement by weaponizing anti-Semitism claims simply as a tool to like help out Netanyahu and help out Israel destroyed the moral credibility of the claim of anti-Semitism. And so people like Fuentes then recognize that's absolutely true. They have completely destroyed this. They don't have the weapon anymore.

55:42So now if I just talk about Israel, I'm completely covered and can smuggle my genuine answer. That's exactly what I wrote. Go ahead, Griffin. I was going to say outside of the Israel conversation, I do think that Nick Fuentes' popularity is a product of conservative media having no Trump critiques. Like Fuentes has critiqued Trump, not just on Israel, but a lot of stuff. And if you look, the majority of conservative media are kind of just ball lickers. Like there's no critiques on tariff, no critiques on anything. And Fuentes does have those critiques. Unless it's from the center. So if you are a young conservative who's not happy with something that's not even not even Israel-related, but not happy with something Trump-related, well, Nick Fuentes is filling that vacuum.

56:28So I actually think his popularity isn't just this Israel stuff, but the fact that he's willing to critique Trump on other things, something I see very few conservatives doing. And the polls with young people are going down for Trump. He's like basically lost all of the gains. So I think that's absolutely true. I think it also explains Tucker and Candace's popularity right now. It's that like there is no criticism. Like Tucker flirts with it. He hasn't gone full in criticizing Trump. But yeah, I think that's true, Griffin. Well, and on the Israel point, though, to like, listen, they if you are giving people a frame of like the Jews are bad and then you're like, look at this genocide for two years.

57:05Look at our politicians like doing everything that they want. Look at the way that the ADL tries to control you and smear you. Look at the way all these donors back Israel. Like, it's not hard to make that case, especially when, Ryan, to your point, you have Netanyahu and everybody else who's a Zionist insisting that every Jew be associated with this genocidal state. So Israel is doing half the work for the anti-Semites by saying, yes, of course, you know, yes, Jews must be associated. They are associated. They support what we're doing. Like they are doing they are creating half of the propaganda that is necessary for the Fuentes of the world to be able to sell their view.

57:48And, you know, in a sense, it reminds me a little bit of like Trump's rise, you know, or you could think of like a Sarah Palin's rise, like the things that Fox News would flirt with or, you know, other conservative influencers would flirt with the kind of dog whistles they'd flirt with. Trump would just come out and say. And of course, people who have been sort of propagandized to think things in that direction, if you just come out and say, yes, finally, someone's actually saying it, not just doing the code words and the dog whistle. And so Fuentes is like the actually say it version of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson.

58:25So, you know, since there is this like, you know, there's there's always been this strain, certainly on the right and going back a long time. But now with the, you know, with the horrors we see coming out of Israel and the insane way our politicians behave vis-a-vis Israel, it's just created a perfect, perfect storm for the rise of this movement. And that's why I say, like, this is where the Republican Party is. The ideology is, you know, incredibly baked in, especially among young conservatives. And, you know, that's that's why I think a lot of these characters, including the Heritage Foundation people, apparently, or this dude, at least, are afraid of the Gripers and, you know, feel like they have to sort of like contort themselves to cater to them and to their hateful, like racist worldview.

59:13you. Last thing I will say on this is that I think that is the like these young men, I've talked to some of them. They grew up at the height of Me Too, at the height of cancel culture. They were going to schools where it was this constant drumbeat about how. I just hope that there are lessons going forward about these broad categorizations of, for example, anti-Semitism, because it does allow people to come in and weaponize it. And it's very seductive in those circumstances. Hey, Graham. All right. How are you?

1:00:16Good. How are you? I don't think I've got anything. I've got a while. Yeah, I got essentially as long as we need. So. All right. Well, there's a lot of fun. There's a lot of fun, a lot of good, a lot of probing questions that we got that we can get to. But to start, does Crystal or anybody want to start with anything from yourself before we get to the audience? Yeah. Yeah, let's go. I mean, Graham, I do just want to know, like, you've been a candidate for a while, but this is really your first time with this level of, like, heated national media scrutiny. And so what has that been like for you?

1:00:56I keep having to point this out to people. I've only been a candidate for, like, 10 weeks. That's kind of crazy, actually. We didn't launch until August 19th. And the whole conversation around the launch started at the beginning of August. So, I mean, like, you know, end of July, none of this was remotely on my plate. I was still legitimately just farming oysters in Sullivan and having a very normal existence. So, yeah, it's I mean, it's it is I feel like I inhabit two worlds where there's like the whole politics pundit class world, which I don't actually spend a lot of time in at all. But, you know, obviously I have to interact with it because people send me stuff and I see things.

1:01:45But then there's like the actual world I inhabit, which is still Eastern Maine where I live. And that's like a totally different world. That's like that remains to be very normal. And all the people that I know still know me. and we all like every everybody's incredibly supportive and then as we've been going around the state doing all the town hall stuff that continues to be like people turn out in droves and they want to talk and they want to they want to engage and yeah i mean it's very it's just funny that it's like the the the national media sphere which i've always had a lot of cynicism and frankly, like skepticism about the past like two weeks of my life.

1:02:28I'm just like, yeah, well, that's all made up. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, I saw this extraordinary report from Alex Seitzwald, who I used to work out with back in the day at MSNBC. And he went from being a reporter from NBC to, I guess, starting a local Maine news outlet, which I didn't realize. Yeah, the Mid-Cost Villager. And of course, because it's Maine, And so we all know a lot of the same people. Unsurprisingly. I'm sure you do. Yes. So I saw him doing a report on MSNBC and he's like, guys, this is the biggest disconnect I've ever seen between on the ground and national media coverage. And I have tried to find anyone who has like turned on Graham over the Reddit story, over the tattoo.

1:03:09And I have tried really hard and I can't find anyone. And I'm curious if you have found. I mean, obviously you had campaign personnel who departed who has turned on you. So we've got that one certainly publicly. But I wonder if, you know, you have had people in person tell you, you know, that they're upset or they're disappointed or they're switching support. What have you experienced with that regard? Only one person has texted me saying that the, and it was actually, it's a very weird one too, because essentially they completely misread a comment I made like eight years ago. And they've just, and they're like, I didn't get defensive about it, but like what they referenced, I'm like, I didn't, I never even said what you thought I said.

1:03:53I mean, you clearly didn't even read anything, but that's okay. one and the rest has just been overwhelming amounts of support I mean like I my phone is a nightmare but not because people are mad at me my phone's a nightmare because I just I have hundreds of missed messages of people just saying stick with it this is insane you know we're I mean it's all like yeah overwhelming support and so but no there was but there was one person who was like I can't abide it and then I read why and I was like I never even said that dude But that's I'm not going to, you know, I'm not I'm not I don't take things very personally.

1:04:28So, you know, it's fine. I'm not going to get into it. What do you what do you say to lefties who are worried about getting Fetterman? If I was me looking at me, I would worry about the same thing. So I mean, I get it. We've been burned before. I think a couple of things I would say is there were plenty of hints around Fetterman early on. that maybe things weren't quite what they seemed. I don't, despite what people are claiming are in my Reddit posts. I think my Reddit posts show a fairly, like - What would you flag as those hints? I agree with you, and I think we elevated some of them, probably, but not enough to our discredit.

1:05:11What do you think are some of those hints? For Fetterman? I mean, Israel, from the get-go. You know, there was, and then also, like, There was a lot of that kind of shying away even early on from, I would say, more progressive social change. And I don't shy away from that. I mean, it's not the core of what we're doing here. I think economic social justice or economic justice is the core of what needs to be done. But I'm also not willing to, frankly, back off wins that we've had towards justice and equality in this country. and I'm very blunt about that. So, yeah, and then there's also the element that, and I don't like, Fetterman was trying to get into politics for a long time.

1:06:03I still don't really want to be doing this in some ways. Like, I'm doing this because I have, I mean, I didn't go looking for it. I was approached with this idea. It is a, there is a moment in history right now where I think my kind of politics, the politics I want to see in politics is just ripe for developing. And that's why I'm doing it. But I've not been, I mean, everybody likes pointing out, I have no background in politics and I don't. I mean, I have a very political background, but not in electoral politics and campaigning because I, yeah, the kind of politics I look at, I view as it's very power focused and it's very organizing focused.

1:06:48And that's where I've put my energy for years at this point. But that's also what we're doing with this campaign. So. And what do you say to that? Because I look back on Fetterman and it's like, this is a guy who came from a very good background and was kind of doing what people would say was like the stolen working class valor, like walking around as though he was just, you know, it is, it is t-shirts and is Carhartts and the like. What do you say to people who are now bringing up, like, boarding school and all of that sort of thing? Like, what's your response? Because there's been some of that circulating.

1:07:21Yeah, look, my grandfather was an architect who worked with Saarinen and a few others. He's not, like, famous, famous, but he designed Windows on the World. He designed the lobby at the St. Louis Arch, a few of these things. and yeah but it's very funny too because growing up like i knew my grandfather was like an architect but i didn't know what that meant and there's also this kind of weird thing where like i mean my parents like i grew up in eastern maine like i was my mom has been she likes she doesn't have a college degree she started a restaurant in the 1970s in bar harbor and she's essentially been a serial entrepreneur in the food industry since she still runs a restaurant to this day because she has no money and she can't retom it and she's in her 70s and she's still running a restaurant like it's my my dad was a small town lawyer um and i mean i grew up i would say like solidly middle class uh but also in eastern maine so there's this weird mix of i mean i got my first W-2 job before I went to high school.

1:08:32You know, like I worked all through high school. I washed dishes. I did landscaping. I worked on the Appalachian Mountain Club's trail crew. I bagged groceries and pushed carts at Hannaford. I mean, I had, I have always worked since, and I come from a family, I don't know, like that's just kind of what you do. And I know that they're trying to frame me as some like silver spoon rich kid, but I'm sorry. Like to anybody that like comes down here and asks around about how I grew up and my, like everybody in here knows it's nonsense. But I, my mom did want me to go to a good high school and the local school, which I wanted to go to, had lost its accreditation through the state in like 99.

1:09:16And so there were a number of families around here that, that sent their kids up to Bangor to go to John Abst, which at the time was just kind of like, it was a private school, but it's weird. And it's not, it wasn't like choked or something. And I, my mom did try to send me to Hotchkiss for half a semester in the beginning of my sophomore year. And I realized I was the only kid who'd ever worked and I hated everybody. And so I, so I got myself thrown out because I found out that if you don't go to class and prep school, they just send you home. And maybe a formative experience. I mean, without exaggeration.

1:09:57Yeah. I had never engaged with people with like that kind of wealth and lifestyle. Like it was it was my middle school had like there were like 13 kids in my graduating class. You know, I grew up in a really tiny town and eastern Maine is full of a lot of poverty. So now does Maine does Maine have I know Vermont has this thing, But does Maine have the thing where if your high school loses its state accreditation, then the local town subsidizes the private school tuition? In other words, did the town then subsidize the private school? Because the year after, the school got its accreditation back.

1:10:39Okay, so then you lose the subsidy. But at that point, my mom was just like, well, you're going to this high school because it's where you've started. And at that point, I liked going there. I mean, it was a good school. I got a great high school education. It was also cool. It's in Bangor. I drove an hour from Sullivan. And there were other kids that went to John Bapps who drove an hour from all the other directions. So I met kids from all over the state of Maine. And it was an interesting mix because you had, like, kids from, like, wealthy families, you know, car dealerships, that kind of thing.

1:11:14And then there were a lot of kids who just went there because it was a good school and they got in. And, you know, the kids that lived in mobile home parks. But it was a very – Maine – wealth in Maine is interesting. I think it actually gives us a different – it's actually why I think our politics is kind of the way it can be. Because there's this weird mix of ultra-rich and ultra-poor, but everybody still inhabits the same space. And people know each other. It's very – it's weird. Yeah. I mean, that is something I wondered about because, I mean, Maine is a very rural state predominantly and it's a very white state.

1:11:52And yet it's still, you know, those are demographics that have fled the Democratic Party in most of the country, probably like Maine and Vermont are some of the only exceptions to that. And yet, obviously, Democrats can and do still win in the state of Maine. So I was curious about what has kind of kept that that politics together. I think part of it is the fact that Mainers are, even a lot of conservative Mainers still kind of have a distrust of like the system and the ultra wealthy. There is the residual kind of leftovers of what the Democratic Party used to be and in my opinion should be again.

1:12:33Um, there is, I mean, but there's also, I would say like a social, uh, progressivism, even amongst, I mean, a lot of conservatives I know are also pro-gay marriage and, and, you know, they like, they don't care about like their, their conservatism is, it's around guns. it's around weirdly at this point, like this kind of Trump style anti-establishment element, which I actually think is why like a working class oriented message works really well. I mean, I mean, I know guys who will literally say things like, can't stand Bernie Sanders. He's a communist, but I still love him. He still cares. And you're like, okay, these are guys who like love Donald Trump.

1:13:17So there's still a fair amount of that up here. And then there's also just the fact that Southern Maine at this point is kind of a more like standard, like liberal hub. And there's a lot of voters down there. So.

1:13:34Oh, sorry. I was just going to have a quick follow up. Go ahead. Go ahead. Just on like the culture question, Crystal's question about how to keep this together. Like I saw your Instagram post about not, and this is a, as the populist left kind of reckons with what's happened over the last 10 years, the idea of like what to do on trans issues and immigration issues. I saw you posted on Instagram that you have no intention of throwing trans kids under the bus or immigrants under the bus, that sort of thing. But how do you talk to people who disagree with you completely? Like Janet Mills is getting sued by the Trump administration over the idea of whether trans athletes should be able to compete in women's sports.

1:14:10And that matters a lot too. a lot of like Trump curious Mainers whose trust you need to win over. Same thing with like Bernie came out and said Trump did secure the border when he was on Tim Dillon's show. So how are you navigating those conversations? Because that can't be. It's not easy, but also. Let me add an audience question to that, because there's there's one that really lines up with this. I'm not going to do the guy's handle because it's inappropriate for a family show. But he says what they say, love your left populist economics, but can't stand your dogged refusal to moderate on unpopular culture war issues.

1:14:44How is protecting women's sports, shelters and prisons from opportunistic males, quote, throwing trans people under the bus, unquote? How is ensuring we have a functioning border and limiting illegal immigration, quote, throwing immigrants under the bus? Question mark. And no, I do not support Trump's policy either. So to kind of dovetail with what Emily was asking. On the immigration front, we need to have a total overhaul of immigration policy in this country. The foundations of it were written in the 70s, and we only did some overhauls in the 90s, which frankly weren't even that intense. We are living with an immigration structure that was built for a world that we no longer inhabit.

1:15:26And we're going to continue running into – and this is why people are like, oh, Obama did this and Biden did this and Trump did this. And when you look at it in the aggregate, there aren't that big of changes because the law never changed. I think that we do need to have a legal pathway to citizenship for people who have been here for ages. I'm sorry, rounding them up and throwing them out is not going to happen. And also, as we are seeing right now, the doing of it is pretty unconscionable. but that doesn't mean that we don't have a border and that doesn't mean we don't have like an effective system we need to have a system that is i would say reflective of the needs of our time and the realities that we live in and it is it's going to require more judges it's going to require more courts it's going to require more energy and time to adjudicate whether it's asylum cases, whether it's people with illegal applications, but we've never been able to do that because there's been no coherent overhaul of the underlying policies.

1:16:37And what I mean by not throwing immigrants under the bus, I'm not saying that we don't have to overhaul our immigration system. We absolutely do. I don't think the answer there is armed masked men kidnapping people off of work sites. And I'm going to say that I think that's a good idea. I'm never going to. I refuse. I mean, that's just authoritarianism. That's garbage. And it's also, in my opinion, unconstitutional. So there are, yeah, we shouldn't be doing that. On the issue around, like, trans people, I do not believe, and I think this is true for a lot of Mainers as well, because we have a real libertarian streak up here, including us lefties.

1:17:19It is not the role of the federal government to come down and tell people, tell communities, tell school boards, tell municipalities how to handle what are frankly often very complicated and nuanced discussions. We need to set standards when it comes to equality and decency and treating everybody like that. But I do not think it's the role of the United States Senate to go down into a municipality or go to a local school board and tell them how they're supposed to figure out what can frankly be deeply complicated discussions. That is not the role of the federal government. And I think that there are a lot of people who don't think that's the role of the federal government.

1:18:02I also think, and I'll just be very upfront, that this continues to get pushed and pushed and pushed as this huge discussion so we don't talk about universal health care. So we don't talk about the fact that we need to remove the cap on Social Security or that we need to raise taxes on, frankly, pharmaceutical companies and big agricultural corporations that have just been building an apparatus that screws working people constantly for their own benefit. We don't talk about that stuff because we spend all this time talking about things that I think are nuanced discussions that should be left up to municipalities.

1:18:44Again, it doesn't mean that we that that doesn't mean the federal government comes down and says, hey, municipalities can just do whatever they want and we can treat people unequally. We need to set basic constitutional standards. But these are complicated discussions, and I don't think it's the role of the U.S. Senate to have them.

1:19:04uh we've got some we got a whole bunch on you know your service and then also your time um with uh the blackwater offshoot what constellus i think it was called um one of them uh so from halal flow says like how does someone with your worldview end up working for blackwater i think a lot of people on the left would find that helpful to hear they're worried you might be another Federman. Man, Federman is haunting. There's a lot of trauma. I feel it, too. There's a lot of trauma there. He says, but I don't think you are. There were already signs of who Federman was when he was running and caving to DMFI, pro-Israel lobby.

1:19:43Yeah, not to mention that whole incident where he tried to murder a random black guy in his neighborhood. There was that. There was that as well. Not mentioned enough. He said, you touched on this a bit during your last appearance on the show when you talked about your U.S. military service, but we didn't go into much into the State Department security contractor. So who did you work for and why? And for people who are skeptical of American Empire, why should that not be disqualified? So I never worked for Blackwater. This is a, I've, like, I see this everywhere and I'm always like, oh, for God's sake.

1:20:23The company that we all know is Blackwater, the one that Jeremy Scahill wrote about back in the late 2000s, that company, Eric Prince's little kind of warlord fantasy, that company essentially went away after 2012. And it was sold. I forget who bought it. There were several iterations afterwards, similar, like same facility down in North Carolina. And this is something that I think gets lost in all of this. The State Department has contracts for high-threat security. They don't do it in-house. And the contracts were written with very specific requirements about what kind of training people have to receive, what kind of background they have to have.

1:21:12It's all around combat backgrounds, combat arms, special operations, infantry, that kind of thing. And so they've maintained those contracts. There were only a few companies for a long time who could meet any of those requirements. Triple Canopy, Blackwater back in the day, and then the Academy afterwards, Z, SOC, SMG. There were a number of these outfits because they were the ones who had the training facilities. They knew how to meet the contract requirements. There's a story in all of this that I think often gets lost, which is that after Blackwater folded, hedge funds started buying all of it up.

1:21:56And because they saw, they essentially saw, like, if you can have all the companies, then you can set your price. You're the only ones that have the ability to meet the contract requirements. By the time I got around to doing this, which is 2018. So I left the army in 2012. I frankly didn't know what to do with my life for the next six years. And at some, in 2017, I was back in Maine, utterly lost, had left college, didn't know what I was doing, but I was fully qualified to go work for the state department in Afghanistan. And I had a lot of friends who were, who were on that contract. And so essentially a friend of mine hit me up on Facebook.

1:22:40It's like, hey, dude, what are you doing? I'm like, honestly, man, I have no idea. I'm lost. I can't figure out where I fit in this whole thing. And he was like, I mean, come on over and get on the Ambo's detail and, you know, it's the money's okay. We don't do, like, we did nothing. I mean, this is, by 2018. Yeah, we talk about what you actually did because people think of it as like, you went out there and you're shooting kids. For the record, all of that used to happen. Back in the late 2000s, like, all of, like, all the horror stories from that shit are true. Sorry. All that it is there, but there is also a reason why the hammer came down, um, because that stuff happened by the time I get there.

1:23:22Essentially it's this, like, it's, it's a corporate money grab. And, uh, like they use guys like me with these backgrounds to meet the contract requirements so they could pay us bare minimum and walk away with the balance, which is frankly what everything in Afghanistan was by 2018. The whole thing seemed to exist purely to move taxpayer money into the pockets of defense contractors. I was a driver on the ambassador's advanced security team. So I would go to a venue before the AMBO would go, and I drove the vehicle, and guys on the team would make sure that everything was set up, and he'd be able to walk in the door and meet the people.

1:24:03It was all—in 2018, we were barely leaving the green zone. There were, we, we didn't, I mean, look, I was there for six months. I mean, I probably went on like 12 or 13 moves. All I did was lift weights and play video games. And, and, and I got huge and I played a lot of Far Cry. Far Cry. Okay. Nice. Which one? The Montana one. The one that was all, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was deeply boring. and it was, which was, I mean, for me at that point was good. Cause I was like, I wasn't, I was overlooking for excitement. I was just trying to figure out what was the only skill I had. And so I, but you know, six months, I, I, I actually, honestly, three months into it, I was done.

1:24:55I was like, I, this is such a waste. And then there was this other element where there I am at the embassy, like watching the embassy staff and watching the ambassador and the generals and the NATO staff and the UN staff and no new ideas. I hadn't been in Afghanistan in seven years. And there I am seven years later at like with access to the whole, all the brain trust, nothing had changed. Same nonsense. And I was like, I'm this one. We are going to lose this war. And when it collapses, it's going to be a mess. Now, I don't want to say I was right, but, you know. So I didn't want to be there when that happened.

1:25:35But two, I was like, there's no purpose to this. Nobody has any idea. Like, the embassy is constantly under construction because there's always some new security threat that we have to pay somebody. Some contractor comes in and has – the whole thing was just a scam. Just one huge scam paid for by tax dollar money. And I wanted no part in it. So I quit. I was only there for six months. I quit and I moved back to my hometown and I became an oyster farmer. And I'll be honest, until this stuff happened, I had no intent on ever looking back because I was just I was done. You said someone approached you about running.

1:26:16Who was it? Who was it that approached you? So the past couple of years, I've done a lot of community organizing.

1:26:23I after I left Afghanistan, I got real disillusioned and thought there was no value in anything. And that made me essentially sink all of my time and energy into living in a small town, which ironically then rebuilt. You've mentioned the community organizing. Can you be more specific? Like, what did you do? Yeah, no, so I was an organizer with a local group called Acadia Action. And we focused on, I would say, like, building basic organizational capacity in the county I live in. getting people connected, getting people engaged with mutual aid projects, getting people engaged with identifying local races and finding candidates that people could run, but locally, all like local school board stuff, select board, that kind of thing.

1:27:08And really, honestly, for me, I read No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey a few years ago and then took Organizing for Power a couple times, got really into this idea of on-the-ground power building. And I just didn't see it in my, I didn't see an existing structure. That's a labor training session, right? Yeah, it's a labor organizing training. But I just took that into my community because, you know, where I live, labor organizing is fairly hard because, you know, everybody has like seven jobs. It was doing that that I got connected with a lot more people around the state in labor and in like kind of statewide organizing around economic justice issues.

1:27:51And there was a, I mean, unbeknownst to me, there was a, there was a move to try to find a candidate to run who came from like a working background, who was a normal person living a normal life to run on kind of an economic populism. And Maine is tiny and everybody knows each other. At some point, somebody's like, you should go talk to Graham and Sullivan. Uh, and so they did. And my wife and I initially told them to get out of our house because I mean, I mean, I like, I cannot like the whole concept is insane to us. I mean, we, we've, we, my wife and I have built a very idyllic, but very small and simple life.

1:28:34We do not make a lot of money. We weren't trying to, we run a very small oyster farm that is focused on frankly, like a high quality product. We do a lot of tours. I like the ecotourism side because I think bivalve aquaculture is one of the most fascinating things I've ever been involved in. And I want to tell everybody about it. And when I go to the U.S. Senate, everyone's going to have to hear about mussels and oysters for the rest of time. We can't wait for that. But, but we, when this idea came to us, the thing that we realized is that as people who've dedicated a lot of time past couple years to organizing in our community, this is an organizing opportunity.

1:29:19That this is not about just winning a Senate seat. This is about actually injecting, I would say, like the mechanics of on the ground power building around working class issues that I have been waiting for and wishing to God existed my entire life, essentially. and we didn't go looking for it it literally showed up at our doorstep but we recognized that if we don't take this we had this moment of like do we believe in what we believe and and to crystal's question who who was that that showed up it was a combination of folks some folks i knew from from uh labor uh people affiliated with the afl and then uh a there was some input from people who came who had worked on dan osborne's campaign uh who a whole kind of project try to do something similar so yeah i heard from people on dan osborne's campaign who flagged your campaign for me so that actually tracks yeah graham i share your sense that the moment is right for your politics which of course very much similar to my politics um but and like Like, obviously, you had that same inkling.

1:30:39What is what do you think has struck a nerve or hit a chord in Maine? Because I think it's pretty undeniable at this point. I mean, here you are 10 weeks into a race. You're according to a lot of polls up on the sitting governor of Maine, certainly competitive with the sitting governor of Maine. We all watch your town hall after your scandal broke. There's 700 people. There's overflow capacity. It's literally in a town of just over 2000 people, like totally insane. So there's clearly something happening here. To what do you attribute that energy?

1:31:15The material conditions for regular people are getting worse. Like here in Maine, our hospital system is legitimately collapsing. It's not academic. It's not theoretical like it's going to happen a year from now. Hospitals are closing now. People cannot get access now. Elderly people are dying in their homes in undignified, horrific ways alone right now because there is no support for them. That's happening.

1:31:51it's happening and people continue to be told by the kind of i would say the establishment political system that things are still actually okay all in all that we don't need to try anything new that really what we need to do is kind of double down on sort of more corporate establishment Democrats, but not even that. I mean, just kind of the whole thing is like everybody sees what's happening. Everybody can like witness. Everybody's watching videos of masked federal agents kidnapping people. They're also watching their neighbor like die alone in their house. They're watching their ability to have access to health care happen.

1:32:35They're watching the Trump administration talk about starting a new war with Venezuela. They're watching the establishment Democrats continue to like not do anything about anything. And the reason I think this is all happening right now is I just came along and told everybody that what they were seeing was happening because it's what I'm seeing. And people hate getting lied to. They hate getting told that like there's a different reality happening than the one that they are witnessing. It's like Gaza. You know, you got the Democratic Party telling people for years now like, no, this is fine. And everybody's like I'm watching videos of children starving to death and getting ripped apart by American bombs.

1:33:15Don't tell me this is fine. I think you can just extrapolate that out to the larger system. And that's where the energy is. People are, people are angry and they are sick and tired of this. And there is an irony for me. Like I've been saying this stuff for like the past couple of years. And like, you know, I could say this in a bar and somebody would be like, yeah, man, sounds wild. But then I do it on a Senate campaign and people are just like, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this reflects exactly what what I'm seeing. And I think that. Yeah, I think just the material reality that we are living in is what is driving all of this.

1:33:57Yeah, we have a question here from. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Crystal. I was just going to real quick. We have seen some public polling. Do you have any, you know, what are your internal polls or do you have? We don't have any. I'm going to be entirely frank. The last two weeks I have barely slept. I am. I am like. You're very coherent. So we are. We are. Yeah, we are in the we are in the midst of doing all of that. We also you're fielding a poll. We are in the midst of fielding a poll. Um, we also have, again, this is something I want to kind of reiterate. I know from the outside, this whole thing looks like big and real.

1:34:34I just want to, we are 10 weeks in and I've never done this before. So we had, we essentially threw everything at the wall for eight weeks. We built an immense amount of momentum. We built a substantial war chest. We kind of flesh things out. You know, last two weeks, we essentially have made contact with our opposition. We had our first kind of stress test. There were people on the campaign that, frankly, weren't kind of up to the task, and they are now gone. The bulk of the campaign is very much still here, and I think in many ways this has kind of galvanized everybody. So we were planning – November is when I sink my oyster farm.

1:35:15I have to go – actually, when we get off the phone, I'm going back to go out on the boat. Um, so we were planning for November to be kind of a slowdown period where we take all the connections and the resources and the information, the visibility, and now we coalesce it into an actual like structural campaign based around movement building based around organizational capacity. That's the project that we are engaged in right now. So it's a, yeah, I want to reiterate because a lot of people are like, where's your policy team? I'm like, dude, I'm driving all over Maine and I haven't had five minutes to myself and we're only eight weeks in.

1:35:53Go ask one of the other candidates in this race who's been in it since April where his is. He should have a better excuse.

1:36:02Go ahead, Griffin. He's too busy running scam packs. That takes a lot of time, Crystal. So we want to hit you. We've got a lot of other audience questions, so we're going to do some like rapid fire ones really quick with you, Graham. But this one actually comes from me first. I wanted your take on Pete Hegseth, his renaming of the department, Department of War. He routinely calls the soldiers war fighters is kind of like his coined term. And he's made a lot of talk about women and trans people in the military and their place. What do you make of that? Joseph is a deeply insecure man who did a highly unimpressive military career and wants everybody to think that he was some kind of god of war, which he most certainly is not.

1:36:43He was an infantry officer who doesn't even have a ranger tab. So, pardon me while I don't think the man deserves an ounce of respect. Now, all of this is just masculine insecurity. And he never should have been confirmed in that role. All right. So we've got a few others here. Now, this one is a Sagar-related question. Sagar referred to you as a Brooklyn leftist. And a Hicklip. Interesting. And a Hicklip. He's shifted from Hicklip to now. He's shifted? Brooklyn leftist. Yeah. That's the tag now. This is from Kate M. I'm sure this will be asked by Fonon. How does Graham respond to Sagar's characterization of him as being no different than a Brooklyn leftist?

1:37:23Well, I've never lived in Brooklyn.

1:37:29Strong start. And my politics really developed more coherently since I moved back to small town Maine. So if, I mean, I guess, yeah, I don't know. It seems like an insane thing to call me, but. Are you still pro-gun, Graham? I was going to ask, because we have this question from Hunter who says, Hunter Shade says, Maynor here, my question for Graham is about a Second Amendment support. Would you vote along party lines on issues of gun control or is this something you feel strongly enough about to buck the party trend. And what is your position generally on civilian gun ownership? Also, could you give a little background your side to the, quote, militia training accusations I've seen in the news?

1:38:08I'm assuming that's the Socialist Rifle Association picture that's been going around. What do you make of that? Emily, the last paragraph is good, too, actually, of that one. Do you have that? Yeah, it says I've lived it says I've lived in Maine my whole life and know the gun culture is stronger than most New England states. But do you think your position on firearm ownership will help or hinder your endeavors in the state given most of the population lives in York and Cumberland counties, which do not have the same gun culture as, say, Aroostook County? Aroostook, it's okay. This is our Brooklyn left list.

1:38:40I'm literally in Brooklyn right now, okay? And I don't claim you. I don't claim you here, okay? You're different than me. Firearms have been an entrenched part of my life since I was a kid. I grew up in Romaine. I grew up hunting. I grew up shooting. I learned how to shoot at 4-H. I joined Marine Corps. I joined the infantry. Yeah, I mean, obviously I – and then after that, I've been a firearms instructor. I still am a firearms instructor. And I do competitive pistol shooting. It's my hobby. Firearms remain to be a fairly, I would say, intrinsic part of my life. And that's how it is for a lot of people in rural Maine.

1:39:27I come from a firearms owning tradition that is based around competency and responsibility and safety. I get a chuckle out of the whole me training paramilitaries thing. In 2020, I don't know if anybody remembers, but in 2020, COVID happened. And a whole bunch of people bought a bunch of guns. People who had never owned guns before. All these like left-wingers, progressives, Democrats, everybody's like the sky, the world is falling apart. LGBT. As someone who has spent a long time working with firearms professionally, I saw a bunch of people who, frankly, I was like, you should not own a gun. And if you're going to own a gun, you need to understand how to own a gun.

1:40:12And so I taught, and there are a lot of people, I would say, on the left or progressive spaces who see gun culture as really scary. Like, they don't want to go to gun shops. They don't want to hang out with people that usually teach firearms. And so I taught a essentially an introduction to firearms course for a bunch of first time gun owners, some of which had come through the SRA, which is I mean, it's also funny. The SRA was like an online meme that turned meetups. People are like, it's like the left-wing NRA. I'm like, I mean, okay. Not in my experience. It was mostly just a bunch of people posting at Discord servers, but like, whatever.

1:41:01I would do that again. I mean, if people, I'm a firm, guns are tools and they're incredibly dangerous. And they are not to be viewed as toys. They are not to be viewed as extensions of like your masculinity. They're not going to they're not going to make you inherently safe. In fact, having them makes you far less safe. Having a gun in your house increases the likelihood of gun violence in your house, essentially exponentially, because if it wasn't there, it wouldn't happen. So I'm a firm believer that if people in a country that is awash in guns like ours, if you are going to be around firearms in any way, You need to get competent professional training in how to use them.

1:41:43And that was what I was trying to do. And I will not walk that back. I think teaching people how to safely handle firearms is a good thing. That's awesome. Speaking of discord and old post, this is from Sirota554. For Graham, one of the posts that came out from the referred to yourself as a communist. My question as a communist myself is do you still consider yourself a communist and if not, why not? No, and I'll be honest. I've never considered myself a communist. Arguing with people on the internet and calling oneself a communist to piss them off is something I used to do. Copy that. Copy that.

1:42:22I mean, there isn't the – of course – I'm advocating for universal health care and like the ability of working people to organize and build unions. Of course somebody is going to call me a communist. So I used to just make jokes about this stuff long before. I mean, if you read the threads, by the way, it's fairly obvious I'm being a sarcastic dude, but whatever. Graham, I don't want you to read my old post I've deleted. So we'll leave it there on that one. This one comes from Firas Abouzade. Graham, you said you wouldn't support Chuck Schumer for a Democrat leader of the Senate. Is there anyone you would endorse more broadly?

1:42:58What current senators do you admire, respect or see yourself working closely with? Should you be elected? I honestly, I like I've thought about this. I don't know who I would want to push for leadership because it's going to depend on kind of the general feeling. I will say. I have an immense amount of respect for Chris Van Hollen. I think he understands his role in the Senate in ways that that I look up to, which is that you have structural power, but you also have secondary. I think Bernie understands this, too. And Elizabeth Warren as well. like there is a secondary power there's the power that comes from you being visible as a senator like when chris van holland went down to el salvador to interview kilmar abrigo garcia he got to do that because he's a u.s senator if he was anybody else he would not have been able to do that and bring visibility onto that and i think he understands his role in the senate in a way that I would like to see more senators understand it.

1:43:56You have to bring almost an element of activism to it as well if you're going to utilize the role in all of its power. And so I think that that's, so I have an immense amount of respect for him, immense amount of respect for Senator Warren, for, I mean, Senator Martin Heinrich has been a real, real cheerleader for me throughout this whole thing, incredibly supportive. There is a, yeah, I mean, I could just keep going down the list. Ed Markey, Peter Welch, like there's a, but. You got some guys. There's some guys there. But it's a. Van Hollen's been important on Gaza also using that visibility as well.

1:44:43He understood as well. He could go do what he did. If he was not a U.S. senator, nobody would have cared if he went and walked the line. but you know he's a senator so they so they have to okay our last and most important question from the ama this is from sciatica man was right oh yeah uh was ryan grim a good bartender tipper okay oh you actually remember serving ryan this is great yeah we have we have incredible we have we've connected over our our mutual tune-in time so tune-in is the best it's a great bar well ryan and i are also uh we're chesapeake bay people so we have some connection to the the mollusk the pro mollusk community someday i want to come back on and just talk about aquaculture but that's a whole one we would love that yes sager had an I was at an oyster bar at his wedding, and the oysterman sniped at me one time.

1:45:44And it soured me on oysterman. Oh, no. Well, hopefully. I will say this. Maybe next year when the weather turns, you should come up. I'll take you out on the oyster farm. And we can rebuild some trust with the bivalve mallish community. So that sounds awesome. That would be the best breaking points ever. Awesome. We'll all go. So, no, Maryland has done a great job funding aquaculture to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, but could use federal help for sure. I mean, I'm a firm believer, frankly, that using aquaculture projects as environmental rehab projects is highly underutilized. There's a lot of potential there.

1:46:25But we also, frankly, we don't have like a big lobbying wing, so we don't get anything. Now, you were on David Sirota's podcast last night. People should go and watch that one. That was, I think it was instructive. And you were asked this, but I wanted to ask again for our audience as well, because this is something that people are very curious about. One of the more disturbing Reddit posts that people have circulated talks about, it's a question, if you could fight in previous wars, you know, what would you do? and you talk about kind of the joy almost of combat. And I think, so can you talk about like how you got into a mindset where you believed that and whether you still share that mindset, whether you're in touch with it and how that relates to your current posture towards American imperialism and wars in general?

1:47:22Because we're talking about people getting killed. Um, I viewed myself for a long time as a professional soldier. It was, it, it, it was my identity. I was very, I was a very competent soldier. Um, I was, I saw a fairly significant amount of combat. Um, I also, and I mean, it's, and I have, this is a weird, I'm, I still work on, I'm going to work on this till I die. I think I still have these, I have a very complicated relationship with my time in combat because I, I think it was all for nothing. I think the horror and the violence that I took part in was completely pointless. And yet I still have this element of me that when I was engaging in it, I found infantry combat very exhilarating.

1:48:13I found infantry combat, I found my proficiency in being an effective soldier in combat as something that I viewed, I was very proud of it. And I, in some ways, enjoyed it. But I want to make it clear, people, I think, I never enjoyed or relished in killing. Ever. But it was more like the professional challenge of other people are trying to kill you And then you have to make decisions and be effective in your weapon systems, be effective in your leadership in order to survive and then like win. And that was how I always viewed it. And the thing that I connect with now is that when I look back through history, I see a lot of people who, like me, engaged in wars of imperialism, wars of colonialism, who that experience in many ways, shapes, and forms turned them into dedicated opponents to it.

1:49:28One of the reasons I am in such opposition to this stuff now, I know how easy it is as a young person who wants to go do this kind of thing for whatever reason, how easy it is to be taken in by it. And that's why we shouldn't do it. because there will always be young men and women who in their youth are going to be taken into being part of something bigger, finding meaning in struggle and suffering and all that stuff. And if that's going to happen, that should never be taken advantage of by a political apparatus, which is exactly what happened. It's what happened to me. And I struggle with it.

1:50:12I'm going to struggle with this until the day I die. I don't think there's an answer in here because I will always I will always find some connection and some I don't know feelings of self-worth in like how good of a soldier I was but I also think it was all pointless and it's yeah and I'm doing better with it now I mean for a number of years there I mean it sent me into a dark place because I couldn't square the two and I still can't square them But I think, frankly, developing a more like structural critique has allowed me some like I'm like, oh, yeah, right. I did this for the service of something I was not in charge of.

1:50:57And that kind of I'm not trying to get myself off the hook. It's just that there is a way of describing it where I don't have to feel like I don't I no longer require it to have meant anything. It doesn't mean like I know it no longer has to have value to me. I think it was valueless and I'm OK with that. one of the uh generals who participated in a lot of those small wars that you mentioned was one of my personal heroes unsurprisingly yeah so have you read wars of racket what what was your reaction to it no no no and the spedley spedley butler's been a hero of mine for a long time um and you know his his support for the bonus army his time uh his obviously his time ratting out the business plot i mean i'm a big a big spedley butler fan But Smedley Butler got there because of his combat record.

1:51:45You know, it's, I think it is, I don't want to. That's interesting. Yeah. Right. Yeah, he participated in some horrifying war crimes. Everybody should go read Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz. Great book. Ryan has a good podcast on Smedley Butler back from. It was with actually the author of Gangsters of Capitalism. Great book. Jonathan Katz. that's right all right well on that note i think uh we're all set graham thank you for giving us uh so much of your time today being open to answering all of our questions and we'll continue to follow your race yeah happy halloween and you know we'll just let you get back to your very quiet idyllic actually today today and tomorrow i get to go out on the on my boat so things get pretty nice for a bit.

1:52:38Yeah. Nice. Awesome. That's awesome. All right, Graham. Great connecting with you. Thank you so much for answering all our questions. Thank you. Seriously. I appreciate it. All right. All right, folks. That's that. Any, any reactions before we split? I know, Crystal, you got to run. I almost, I almost wish we had more time. There's, because there's so like American politics pushes the conversation constantly away from material conditions. And I hate when we even participate in it, but people really want to know, and I want to know what his response is on a lot of these personal questions. But we spend so much time talking about the person, we don't get enough time to talk about the policy.

1:53:27And I guess we understand where he is on the policy spectrum, so maybe that's less important to suss out. But I don't, yeah, that's just a general observation about the state of. And I often think it's helpful to have like good, decent personal conversations as your frame of reference for what decisions somebody will make in a policy sense going forward. Because a lot of times people will say, well, if that bill came to my desk, I'd do this, this, and that. And then they have a horde of lobbyists descending on them. And it turns out they're John Fetterman. So, yeah, I think sometimes it's when you're not having like a gotcha back and forth, you actually get a good sense of what the person will be like in Congress, the Senate.

1:54:07Yeah, I agree with that. I'm just very struck by, you know, the similarities I see between him, between Richard Ojeda, between Anthony Aguilar. You know, I mean, I think about Anthony, like, had just retired. And then he's like, it's similar thing. Like, somebody hits him up on Facebook, like, hey, you want to go, like, give out food in Gaza? And, you know, he's at the time, he's just settling back into civilian life. And it's like, okay, this is pretty good paycheck. And seems like I'd be doing some good and just goes over. And that's how you end up as this person who clearly is a very moral and courageous, like both physically and like ideologically courageous person going and working for this like monstrosity of an organization in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

1:54:51So, you know, I think if you've if you've known people who have not had the desk jobs like a J.D. Vance or, you know, a Pete Buttigieg or whatever, but who were in the shit, right, who were doing the ugliest parts of war, who were used as pawns in these, you know, horrifying chess games that our country has been playing around the world with catastrophic outcomes. Dems, I think you're going to his story is going to actually make a lot of sense to you because there are a lot of parallels with the guys that I've known who have been in similar situations. I don't think Dems know what they have on their hands with Dan Osborne and Graham Plattner.

1:55:27I don't think Republicans know what Dems have on their hands with Dan Osborne and Graham Plattner. And I know Dan's running as an independent, but you just talk to Graham and you realize he has this fluency. Like when Griffin asked him about people getting worried about being Fetterman, he answered that without asking, what do you mean Fetterman? which just about any other senatorial candidate would be like, explain. And if you explain it, they might get it. But he just has this fluency and speaks like a regular person. And that's what you, in this media environment, desperately need. And on top of that, he has this crazy background that he's perfectly open and honest about.

1:56:02He's just sort of like, sorry, but like the perfect podcast era candidate. What did you think of his— Because he's all of his background to explain. You know what I mean? And he's open about it. So like all of the background that the consultants think is going to destroy him ends up being something that it's an opportunity for him to have normal conversations about and look like a dimensional human being. And I don't think people understand in D.C. that actually is effective now in a way that it's not that he's going to have problems if he goes up against Susan Collins. Of course, some of that stuff will be a problem, but it also gives him this opportunity to sit down and have long form conversations that someone up in Maine is going to watch.

1:56:41And so like, oh, actually, this guy isn't the scary person, the caricature. All right, guys, I'm going to, sorry, I'm going to jump. Yeah, but I'll see y 'all later. Bye, Crystal. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. I have one more question for either Griffin or Emily. Like one of the fascinating under-discussed or almost undiscussed elements of the race is this, there's this dynamic where people say, well, maybe Graham is actually too far left, you know for a swing state like like maine it that does not factor in that janet mills launched her campaign on and is running her campaign on uh the least popular issue that democrats currently have which is you know trans athletes and sports her she launched her campaign on uh what was her slogan i'll see you in court like the fact that she fought trump over trans question, the trans athlete question.

1:57:38So on the one hand, you have people saying Graham's too far left. But if, if just objectively speaking, if the thing you're concerned about is that somebody has an out of the kind of, you know, way out their position. Yeah. On an 80-20 issue. Yeah. Like Mills is actually, ironically, even though she's centrist, coded and centrist on everything else and certainly a corporate centrist. On the thing that's 80-20, she's out, she's out there. Well, and so what so the question that is like, what do you think of Graham's response on that from the right? Like, how will the right hear what he said about both immigration and the trans sports question?

1:58:16Yeah, I mean, I think if he's up against Susan Collins, that'll be interesting. Against Janet Mills. I mean, this is for him. It gives them a great like when Bernie explains that often these identity issues are used as a shield by corporate elites. like Janet Mills so that they don't have to talk. Janet Mills is like the perfect example of that. You're talking ad nauseum about this particular issue, even though 80-20 in Maine, people are like, just stop. And, you know, just like, stop. And yet she's talking and taking the unpopular position because she is still stuck in 2020 when she believes that signaling on the cultural issues is actually how you buy the goodwill and earn the goodwill of Democratic primary voters.

1:59:06And this is not the case anymore when you're in a head-to-head with somebody who has the burning line. So I obviously completely disagree with what Graham said because I think the Obama administration nationalized the issue by using the Education Department to have dear colleague letters that threatens federal school funding if you don't let people compete in opposite-sex sports, go in opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms and the like. Like, so as long as you have Title IX on the books, there's no real like local solution to this question of like civil rights if a woman should have to be in a women's shelter with a man.

1:59:38Like that is a serious question and it is a material question. And that's where I disagree often with Bernie. And I wonder if privately he would disagree with it too. That's a kitchen table issue that is – it's not healthcare, although it has healthcare implications. But like when people are putting their heads on the pillow at night, that is something that like genuinely they care about if their kids and their schools are tied up in this and all of that. So I think it could like I would expect to see that SRA picture everywhere if he's up against Susan Collins just because it's so I really appreciate what he said about that.

2:00:09Like you should be when when people who shouldn't have firearms are trying to arm up and like LARP and militias. I think that's awesome. Like he is the type of person who should be training them up. Like, it's awesome for him to go in there and say, I'm going to teach you how to do this. Right. But that picture is going to be everywhere. That will definitely dog him. I don't know what you guys think. And Ryan, when you say it's an 80-20 issue, that sounds like, oh, we need to talk about this then. We need to reverse course. But it's also it's not like a top five issue for people. Is it even a top 10 issue for people in Maine?

2:00:40Well, I think it's an issue of trust. But let's say whenever. Well, if someone. Yeah, exactly. But like if someone were to rank like their mains top five issues, is that even in the top five? And then I guess my other question is like, are we basically just trying to say, like, don't worry, we're not woke now. You're never going to like not be woke if you're like in the Democratic Party. Like so I think like you're kind of just walking into a terrain where you're never going to be as, you know, based or on the trans issue as the Republicans. So you're always going to kind of lose the issue. So at that point, if it's not a top five issue, I don't think it's an always like I think, you know, this this is a new issue.

2:01:24And we live in a world set up for a binary. And now we have a spectrum and a non-binary. And so how do how do we integrate those two things is not a settled question yet. So, but it's also not a question that, A, I believe like a Democrat candidate will beat a Republican on. So like why fight in that territory when it's not a top five issue for Mainers? I think it's important to people. It's a top five issue? No, no. I think here's what it is. It's a litmus test issue for people in terms of whether they trust a candidate when it comes up, right? So it's not like people are going to the polls. I think some people do go to the polls.

2:02:03It's not everyone, but maybe it's even like 10 % of people are like, I'm voting on the fact that Janet Mills sent our school district spiraling into chaos because everyone was yelling at each other over this policy. And I don't think it's right, blah, blah. But I think if people see this as a common sense question, should a, which most people do, to Ryan's 80-20 point, should a, you know, 18-year-old boy be competing in this track, which has been a huge issue in New England, competing in this track race with this girl who's going to lose out in scholarships, potentially, whatever, and they see someone say something on either side, it just loses trust in that person.

2:02:40I'm not saying it's what they vote on, but I do think because it's such a big topic of conversation, it's seen as a litmus test for whether you're trustworthy and common sense. I understand that. I understand that. And my argument is I don't think it loses. I don't think it's like a deal breaker trust issue. Like, OK, like, yeah, maybe I disagree with him on the trans stuff, but I agree with him on housing. I agree with him on all the other things he wants to do for Maine. Like, it doesn't seem like a deal breaker. And in fact, it seems like the more you play into that issue that, in my opinion, you'll never win against a Republican, then why why why fight that battle?

2:03:41I mean, we'll see. For others, Kamala is like not for you. And people kind of ran with that and said it's all about the trans issue. I'm just saying I don't think a Democrat can be like on their hands and knees being like, I promise I'm not woke, guys. Like that just doesn't work. Here's what would be worse for Graham. It would be worse for him to suddenly flip flop on trans issues because that also makes you look untrustworthy. that also makes you look like the consultants got to me and now I was this leftist who was at the SRA and I'm like, ah, never mind. So I think it's a really tough balance for him to strike.

2:04:19But I also think there's some wisdom to him saying, I'm not throwing immigrants under the bus. I'm not throwing trans kids under the bus. I think he has to have a good answer. And you can see him working that in real time with the local answer. And that's going to be, but it's going to be tough. I think there's like, I don't know, I see what you're saying, Griffin. That like, you'll never, Susan Collins is always going to be able to say what she's going to be able to say on that. Right, yeah. Then we're going to have to figure something out. Like, we've got to get to a place where everybody's comfortable and people's rights are respected, you know, and spaces are respected.

2:04:55Because like, obviously, and everybody, like basically everybody agrees you can't, like, you're not going to just let a guy walk into a women's room at a gym by claiming outside the door that he's a woman. Nobody would allow that. So it's like, okay, if we're not allowing that. Like Hunter Schaefer? Like nobody will allow that. So if we don't allow that, then okay, where are we then? Like what are the actual rules here? We need some rules. Like we've got a new situation that we're dealing with. What are the rules here? And as a society, we've got to figure them out. Democrats can't just keep saying, well, don't worry about it.

2:05:35There are so many trans people, though, that put completely, like, unless you were told, like a purist female. And you would get eyebrows raised if Hunter Schaefer walked into the men's room. It's pretty different with kids, though. I think Republicans lose the upper hand when you're talking about adults with the public. And in a state like Maine, which is not Alabama, it is, as Graham invoked, very libertarian. And so I think that's part of the wisdom in talking about it, is maybe you can get Susan Collins to start talking about that sort of thing. But when it comes to kids, that's a totally different question.

2:06:09And I think that's what most of the conversation, if I'm looking at local media in Maine, that's mostly what the conversation has been about high schools and the like. I'm an advocate of the new paradigm. My new paradigm is dark woke, where it's like, yeah, we believe in these issues and we're going to give you housing. And how are we going to pay for it? We're going to melt down all of the high school swimming trophies. And that's how we're paying for it. Like like that to me is a far stronger way to go for for the candidates. And then like I do think like maybe there's some like large like federal stuff that could get worked out along the lines of like how we made gay marriage equal or what have you.

2:06:48But I don't think that a candidate needs to be like, fuck, I got to solve this question in my individual race in Maine. That's just my personal take. I'm going to answer. All right. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you all. Folks, we are releasing this full two hour episode for the public. Normally we paywall the first half of the show. And then you but you guys are going to see the whole second half because we had Graham today. um so if you do want to ask people like Graham questions in the future yes here's your picture exactly if you all those questions today came from our breaking points members you can sign up today to uh help our reporting help us do all these extra shows all these extra interviews go to breakingpoints.com we've got a monthly membership we've got a yearly membership and it helps us do what we're doing here every day so we thank you all for the support and happy Halloween bye-bye someone else say something Halloween no one's stressing out don't do a Platiner costume it's not going to be funny it's not going to work for you take your shirt off and get a stencil don't do it well I have not seen any Platiner costumes yet but the day is young folks we'll see you on Monday bye-bye this is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human