Dem Senate candidate with Nazi chest tattoo went to elite boarding school—claims to be ‘working-class Mainer’

A 1999 edition of the Ellsworth American obtained by the Free Beacon stated, "Graham Platner is enrolled as a first-year student at the Hotchkiss School, located in Lakeville, Conn." The school is located in northwestern Connecticut.

It is unclear how long he attended the school, as a 2002 edition of the Maine paper stated that he was one of four students located in Sullivan, Maine who was attending the private John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, around an hour away. The 2002 piece listed Platner as a junior at the Bangor school who had grown used to the lengthy commute "after three years."

"What I like best is just the education," Platner told the paper at the time. "Being a private school, you get much more attention."

To attend Hotchkiss in 2025, tuition costs upwards of $75,000 per year. Among those who graduated from Hotchkiss are Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, news anchor Chris Wallace, former CIA Director Porter Goss, and MacKenzie Scott Bezos, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

At the time of the 2002 paper, to attend John Baptist it cost $6,500 per year for those students who are not eligible for free tuition. Those eligible for free tuition had to live in towns that did not have high schools, and Sullivan, where Platner lived with his mother, had a public high school.

At John Baptist, he won an award for "Most Likely to Start a Revolution." A yearbook photo obtained by the Free Beacon of Platner winning the award shows him holding "a piece of paper calling to 'Free' Chechnya, Kosovo, and 'Palestine.’"

In 2002, a little over a year after 9/11, Platner also penned an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News arguing that "one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter" and argued that in the media, "every terrorist is portrayed as evil."

Platner is the son of Bronson Platner, a prominent Maine attorney, and the grandson of Warren Platner, who built the headquarters for the Ford Foundation as an architect.

In recent weeks, Platner has received criticism for past Reddit posts in which he described himself as a communist and claimed to have an "antifa supersoldier" label on his armor. He claimed that he made the posts after returning from overseas. "I got out of the Army in 2012. I had PTSD, I had depression, I had all of the things that come with serving in a war—in two wars that I eventually began to not believe in at all. It left me feeling very unmoored. It left me feeling very disillusioned, very alienated, and very isolated. And I think, like a lot of people, I went on the internet to post stupid things and get in fights and find some form of community in some way."

He has also come under fire for a tattoo on his chest, which resembles a skull symbol used by Hitler's SS. In a video posted to social media, Platner said he and fellow Marines got the matching tattoos in Croatia in 2007, saying they selected the symbol because it "looked cool." He said that the tattoo had not been flagged during various military and government-level screenings, and "the idea that I've going around with something like that utterly horrifies me." After the backlash, he got the tattoo covered up.