Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts Implores Voters to Elect Graham Platner to the Senate and Likeminded Politicans to Change the Direction of Trumpism at the Saturday, April 18, 2026 Rally in Portland.
A Message Delivered at the OCTOBER 18, 2025 NO KINGS Rally in Portland.
New reporting this morning in “The New York Times” from Ben Rhodes, the former national security advisor to President Barack Obama, argues that Graham Platner’s “visceral and moral reckoning” over the cost of war — at home and abroad — should guide the Democratic Party’s way forward and offers Americans the “only way to truly dismantle the forever war.”
After serving four combat tours overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq and fighting in some of the most violent war zones — Graham has been outspoken against “forever wars” that send more young Americans off to die while defense contractors buy another yacht.
At a time when Washington, DC continues to pour billions into another endless war and trillions into an already bloated defense budget, Rhode’s piece underscores both the personal and political consequences of war through the lens of Platner’s experience as a veteran and as a Mainer back at home.
“Americans have a dysfunctional relationship with 21st-century wars. Most of us do not fight in them, see the carnage or live with their physical and psychological ruins. Yet we cannot heal our own nation unless we reckon with their monstrous futility.
“For Graham Platner, that reckoning began when he was a 20-year-old infantryman in Iraq. His company was constructing a patrol base near Falluja. To build it, they hired locals who often brought their kinds to the work site. One day, a mortar round fired by insurgents landed where they were congregated. Therre can be no more senseless death than losing a chld, a reality Mr. Platner had to confront as he administered first aid and then encountered distraught parents at a casualty collection point. He still remembers the sight, smell and feel of those lost children, as well as the anguish in their parents’ eyes.”
The piece goes on to say: “Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine,” he told me. punctuating his point with an obscenity. “I don’t want other young Aericans to go through what I’ve been through. And I don’t want to send other young Americans to inflict this horror that I had to inflict on people.”
According to Mr. Rhodes, Mr Platner “decried party leaders who focus on President Trump’s failure to seek congresstional authorization. There’s a big difference between saying the war shouldn’t be happening because it is bad and saying the war shouldn’t be happening because they did’t ask permission. He lamented the tendency to leaven statements against the war with lengthy condemnations of the Iranian regime that lay the ideological and propaganda basis for what Mr. Trump is doing.
“There’s this thing I often think about,” Mr. Platner said, recalling the incident near Falluja. “Those kids were killed because we were spending money to build dthis base thatd probably doesn’t exist anymore.” His voice slipped into the present tense as he put himself back into the moment when the mothers arrived to pick up the remains, his own life in front of him like a storm cloud.” How horrifically wasteful is this……..?”
The above is an excerpt of a much longer article which concludes with: “This is why we must listen to voices like Mr. Platner’s. The kind of visceral and moral recknoning he advocates is the only way to truly dismantle the forever war, change our priorities and detoxify our country. To save ourselves, we must stop this cycle of violence. We must find meaning not in our capacity to kill or control others, but in each other.”
“Senator Susan Collins, a card carrying MAGA member, has repeatedly supported the War in Iran. That’s why she needs to be replaced by Graham Platner in November,” says this blogger.