The Absolute Balls: Alex Thompson Again Claims a "Scoop" On Something Conservative Media Reported Months Ago

Huh. If you forgot the name Alex Thompson, one, congratulations on the efficient use of your memory cells, and two, he joined with Jake Tapper to share the B R E A K I N G news that Joe Biden had lost a step and really shouldn't have tried running for president in 2024.

He wrote this book in 2025. He really had his finger on the pulse of a corpse.

And now he's discovered -- apparently by simply reading conservative media outlets, who have reported this for months -- that Graham Platner's claims of being a "working class" "oysterman" are entirely a a fiction invented in 2024, when he decided to run for the Senate.

One might bid him a hearty welcome him to Current Day, except for the fact that he absolutely refuses to acknowledge the media outlets that reported this long ago, pretending he's got a real Shoeleather Express Scoop on his hands here.

Looks like the word has gone out to all the Narrative Tenders in political and media culture. Time to shut down Graham Platner's "working-class man" credentials. Advertisement

Most people saw through this false premise months ago. Axios decided to catch up today, now that Democrats need to pressure Herr Totenkopf to withdraw from the Senate election in Maine. Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein do a deep dive into the predicament Democrats now face after attempting to sell Platner as a MAGA-adjacent man of the people instead of the middle-class parental mooch that he is. Readers have to get halfway through the analysis to get to Axios' half-assed admission of participating in the fraud:

Starting with their launch video last August, Platner and his team billed him as an oyster farmer -- a title most of the media, including Axios at times, repeated without scrutiny.
But as early as August, he told ideologically friendly outlets that he makes little money from selling oysters and it's not how he makes a living.

Platner and his team pitched him as a "working-class Mainer" who bought his house with veterans' benefits.

"I bought my house in 2017," he posted in September 2025. "If I hadn't bought then, if I hadn't had the support of the VA, my wife and I would now be priced out of the town I grew up in, like the millions of Americans being exiled from their towns and cities."

In fact, Platner's father -- a lawyer -- loaned him $200,000 for the home.

Platner said last fall he's "never been close to money and power," but he briefly attended the elite prep school Hotchkiss in Connecticut before attending a private school in Maine.

Golly! Who could have known that? Well, anyone who read the Free Beacon more than two months ago, when Collin Anderson and Peter Hasson first reported on the details of the house purchase.

Axios also lies when it claims a "scoop" about Platner lying about why he attended an expensive private school. He claimed that the public school in his area had been de-accredited, thus requiring this Child of Non-Privilege to go to expensive private school.

But that was a lie. The public school had never been de-accredited. Platner just went there because... he was the rich-bitch son of a lawyer.

Should Alex Thompson get credit for this "scoop"? No, as Ed Morrissey writes -- the Maine Monitor reported that five weeks ago, and they didn't claim it was a scoop even five weeks ago.

Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze

Alex Thompson has made a lot of money reporting things that everyone already knew about and acting like it's breaking news.

I can't wait until Alex Thompson teams with Jake Tapper to tell us, next year, that the entire Platner storyline was an op created by the leftwing media in close consultation with the Democrat Socialists of America.

I have written before about how the myth of Graham Platner's "working man" populism was created, despite the fact that he was a child of privilege, lied constantly about his background and even his "job" as an oysterman. He was a creation of a propaganda machine, primarily driven by The New York Times and the Condé Nast media empire.

National Review did a deep dive into how Platner was plucked out of nowhere and turned into a working-class political star.

The phrase "it's an op" -- meaning an influence operation -- is often, though not always, a marker of paranoia, a tendency towards conspiracy theories, or a belief in forces that are unseen and cannot yet be proven to exist.

Still, from the very start of SS-tattooed Democrat Graham Platner's campaign for Senate, something seemed odd. The New York Times is not in the habit of writing a largely glowing profile of every long-shot, little-known Democrat who announces a bid for Senate. Platner was the harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine, population 1,246.

Yet the Times wrote its profile of Platner before he officially announced his campaign, in August.

In September, The New Yorker wrote its own 3,400-word profile of Platner, emphasizing how he "devoured books on military history." (But remember, he insists he never recognized the tattoo on his chest as a symbol of the Nazi SS.) Again, The New Yorker almost never writes long-detailed profiles of little-known Democratic Senate candidates one month after they announce their bid.

Then in October, GQ -- not primarily a political magazine, and not one that often spotlights candidates -- published its own large spread of Platner with lots of photos.

Then in November, the culinary magazine Bon Appetit -- again, not in the habit of covering obscure Senate candidates -- wrote another glowing profile, this one entitled, "How Graham Platner Went From Working-Class Oysterman to Maine's Zohran Mamdani."

This is Beto O'Rourke-level national coverage, right out of the gate.

CNN: Gee maybe we let Graham Platner claim "Muh PTSD" as an excuse a few times too many.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:20 PM

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