Career activist Ben Chin has never managed a campaign or held a real job. Like his boss, he has a history of disparaging Maine voters.
Graham Platner, the Nazi-adjacent Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Maine, recently hired a new campaign manager. The role was vacant because his old campaign manager suddenly quit last month, along with several other top aides. It would appear that Platner’s ability to attract top talent has been hampered by a series of scandals involving a Nazi tattoo and old Reddit posts disparaging black people, rural Americans, police officers, homosexuals, and rape victims.
At least one person wanted the job: Ben Chin, a career left-wing activist who has never managed a statewide political campaign or held a real job. He has worked his entire adult life at the Maine People’s Alliance, a Soros-funded advocacy group where all the staff bios include pronouns. Days after Chin joined Platner’s campaign, the group released a poll suggesting that Platner was the clear favorite to win the Democratic primary and the general election.
Chin started as a canvassing director in 2005 while attending Bates College—a safety school for applicants to Ivy League safety schools—and worked his way up to deputy director, a position he’s held since 2018. The Maine People’s Alliance advocates for a variety of left-wing causes, including “racial justice,” “environmental justice,” and “tribal sovereignty.” In a statement published after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the group urged its followers to support the Minnesota Freedom Fund and other organizations that have used donor funds to bail violent criminals out of jail.
Platner’s new campaign manager has at least some relevant experience—as a scandal-plagued candidate for public office. Chin ran for mayor of Lewiston, the state’s second-largest city, in 2015 and 2017. He lost both times to a Republican opponent, failing to win support for his platform of massive tax increases. By exploiting his connections to the Soros-funded activist community, Chin easily set the fundraising record for municipal elections in Maine during his first mayoral campaign. It wasn’t enough to defeat the GOP incumbent, Robert Macdonald, who promised to keep taxes low and proposed launching a website listing the names of welfare recipients; he cruised to reelection by 6 percentage points.
Chin’s second mayoral campaign was far more dramatic. Days before the election, a local website published a series of internal campaign emails leaked by a concerned “insider.” The emails showed Chin denouncing voters as “racists” and “assholes” who “complain” about taxes. He joked with staff about waging chemical warfare on residents, threatening to sprinkle “magic Norwegian dust” on them so they would “beg to have their taxes raised.” Chin narrowly lost a run-off against Shane Bouchard, a GOP member of the Lewiston City Council. Bouchard resigned as mayor two years later after Heather Berube, a former Chin staffer, told the city council she leaked the emails while having an affair with Bouchard.
Platner has also been exposed for denouncing Maine’s white residents as “racist” and “stupid.” So he has at least one thing in common with his new campaign manager. It’s not yet known whether Chin, like Platner, has ever gotten a Nazi skull tattooed on his chest. Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald, was not a fan of the candidate’s ink and didn’t buy his story about not understanding the significance of the SS insignia. “Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest,” wrote McDonald, who resigned when Platner’s offensive Reddit posts were uncovered. “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff … he knows damn well what it means.” Platner’s finance director, Ronald Holmes, resigned soon after, explaining that his “standards as a campaign professional no longer fully aligned with those of the campaign.”
Chin was presumably forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement before taking the job. McDonald said the Platner campaign offered her $15,000 to sign one, but she declined. Since Chin took over the campaign earlier this month, Platner has endorsed increasingly radical positions on the stump. Over the weekend, for example, the candidate called for “stacking” the U.S. Supreme Court with liberal justices, and demanded the “impeachment and removal of at least two” conservative justices.
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