they scouted BASED platner to execute their BASED vision for a socialism that's cool and BASED

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5872251&forum_id=2most#49923343)

@jewishinsider

Daniel Moraff was a longtime DSA member, including acting as a local and national DSA organizer and leader in the mid-to-late 2010s, though he said his membership lapsed in 2019 because his local chapter became too focused on internal matters.

He argued in a now-deleted 2017 article that the best way for socialists to gain political power and achieve elective office would be by running in Democratic primaries.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5872251&forum_id=2most#49926156)

wow. you're telling me this for the first time.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5872251&forum_id=2most#49926167)

By Chadwick Moore

Published June 5, 2026, 6:50 a.m. ET

Graham Platner has done a better job of hiding his privileged roots than the Nazi tattoo on his chest — a move which is by design.

The embattled Maine candidate for US Senate is vocal about his disabled-war-veteran, rugged-oyster-farmer, “working-class” persona — and less so about his attendance at an $80,000-a-year boarding school, his lawyer father, or his major architect grandfather.

That’s because he’s been coached on how to present himself, molded to present a specific image — and, in a sense, manufactured.

The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.

And for his champagne socialist handlers, the more scandals that engulf Platner and the more centrist outrage he can stoke, the better, since it gets more stories written and drowns out his opponent in November, incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

“For all we know, they’re leaking this stuff because they want to get more attention,” a former candidate who hired the same team behind Platner a few years ago told The Post.

That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancée, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.

The pair had originally met while working for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for Senate in Nebraska, and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the Keystone State congressional delegation since 2023 and part of the DSA “Squad,” alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/06/www-instagram-com-danielezramoraff-129734747.jpg?quality=75&strip=all

In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico.

It remains to be seen if those skeletons were worse than Platner’s. Williams did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Moraff — who has his own Dark Forest consulting firm — and Fan had first gotten wind of Platner through the local DSA network, where he had been active in the local offshoot group Acadia Action and had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine.

They entered Ironbound, Platner’s mother’s restaurant, just a few miles from where he lives in Sullivan and made contact. After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate.

“Daniel looks to work for candidates who are non-conventional, willing to go against the status quo. That’s what he aligns with, the type of folks that don’t live their life with the idea they’re going to run for office one day,” said the pair’s ex-candidate, who lost their election and asked not to be named.

Moraff cut his political chops in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he had moved after an undergraduate degree in engineering at Brown University. He became a prominent leader in the local DSA chapter, which underwent rapid growth after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 and advocates for aggressive action.

His efforts fundamentally remade the Democratic Party in Pittsburgh, local politico Erin Koper told The Post.

“The DSA now is in every corner of local politics. They have been putting up candidates, getting them elected to county council, city council, state rep seats,” said Koper, who ran for city council as a Republican last year.

She claimed city council meetings suddenly got flooded with “90 percent” DSA members hounding officials, a process which continues to this day.

Moraff’s ideas were hatched as early as 2017, when he penned a now-deleted essay in the progressive magazine In These Times titled “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries,” where he argued that socialists should run as Democrats rather than as independents or third-party candidates.

“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists,” he wrote.

Moraff’s first big win happened when he helped get the fervently anti-Israel Lee elected to the Pennsylvania State House in 2018, serving as her campaign manager. Lee went on to be elected to Congress four years later.

“The local Democratic committee, which typically leaned pretty traditional Democrat, has been taken over by progressive politics. You can’t even be a moderate now, [the DSA] will completely ruin your political career if you’re a traditional Democrat,” Koper added.

Moraff next foresaw that his movement needed white, working-class men, who were rapidly being lost to Trump and the Republican Party.

He and Lee traveled to Nebraska, where they claim to have “stumbled” across Navy veteran and former labor union boss Osborn in his garage.

The Boston-based pair put their socialist theories to the test by putting up Osborn — also a Nebraska National Guardsman and industrial mechanic — as an independent candidate in the deep red state in 2024, accompanied by a political action committee literally called the “Working Class Heroes Fund.”

He narrowly lost to incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) but, still backed by Moraff and Lee, he is running again this November against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), with the latest polls showing a neck-and-neck race.

Osborn’s campaign has been under scrutiny for paying family members, including his wife.

His wife, Megan Osborn, and her consulting companies have more than $278,000. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.

Moraff and Lee also teamed up with Nathan Sage in Iowa, mounting a longshot bid to become the first Democrat since 2008 to win a Senate race in the Hawkeye State.

In a campaign video about himself, he told viewers he grew up in a trailer, worked as a mechanic and was deployed twice to serve with the Marines in the Iraq War.

“The economy is rigged, and those in power don’t give a damn,” Sage, who is now executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, said in the video, adding: “They’re the ones doing it.” Sage dropped out of the race in February. Attempts to reach him by The Post for this article were not answered.

When placed in the context of Platner’s rise, this playbook sounds familiar. However, unlike the other candidates, the Maine hopeful has dominated national headlines in recent weeks, after scandals started to compound, including revelations that he made Reddit posts that downplayed sexual assault, defended US soldiers desecrating Taliban corpses, and alluded to familiarity with prostitutes.

“Everyday people don’t want the perfect candidate these days, right? They want someone who makes mistakes and owns up to them,” said the ex-candidate.

The revelations seem to be more than Moraff and Lee can handle alone, and the DSA network kicked into gear, with another figure, Morris Katz, stepping up as Platner’s adviser.

Katz is often cited as one of the main figures behind the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — one of the DSA’ s biggest recent wins, propelled to office by a stream of videos relatable to Gen Z, for which Katz took much of the credit.

At just 27, Katz appears hardwired for the attention economy and to thrive on the controversies around Platner. He is also linked to the Pennsylvania DSA scene through the Fight agency he works for, which is based in the state and boasts in his bio how he “has never backed away from a fight.”

In a report published in Maine’s Bangor Daily News, messages show Katz threatening to accuse a former staffer, who left Platner’s campaign over his growing scandals, of spreading “explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”

Last week, Platner’s people went into overdrive after his extramarital messages were exposed, resulting in an awkward video made by his wife, Amy Gertner, bizarrely claiming that the messages were a distraction from Platner’s policies. It later emerged that, like Osborn’s wife, she is also on the payroll, receiving $30,000 since September last year as a salaried staffer.

Katz was also explosive in his response, posting to social media: “It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”

It’s anyone’s guess whether Platner will go down as a product of chutzpah or gobsmacking incompetence as chatter swirls in Washington circles of even bigger scandals to be exposed before November. On Thursday, he had a closed-door meeting with senior Democrats, where he pleaded his case to stay in the race.

Were it not for his implosion, comparisons could likely be drawn between Platner and the rise of another unconventional Democratic senator, John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

Famed hoodie wearer Fetterman was one of the most talked-about success stories of the 2022 election cycle, narrowly beating celebrity Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz (now administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).

Curiously, Fetterman’s campaign was helped by political consultant Rebecca Katz, who is no relation to Morris, but does work alongside him, running the Fight agency.

However, Fetterman — who became the senior senator from Pennsylvania in 2025 — has since parted ways with both the agency and a large swath of the seemingly ever-radicalizing Democratic Party.

While prominent politicians like Sanders and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have made excuses for Platner, the Pennsylvanian pulled no punches.

“When I was growing up, if someone had a clear Nazi tattoo on them, you probably could conclude that they’re a Nazi sympathizer,” Fetterman told CNN Thursday, adding, “What kind of a creeper has been on … a platform like Kik, and send a dozen explicit kinds of messages and who knows what else?”

https://nypost.com/2026/06/05/us-news/meet-the-champagne-socialist-duo-who-groomed-rich-kid-graham-platner-into-working-class-candidate/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5872251&forum_id=2most#49926175)