I’m not particularly enthralled by Graham Platner. He strikes me as the kind of charismatic, misogynistic guy with awful judgement that you keep begging your friend to break up with. I’m also not thrilled about nascent attempts within the online left to elevate him as the standard-bearer of socialist politics (before he’s even won a general election). That said, the information environment around his campaign is so poisoned and degraded that it’s sometimes hard to parse what’s a smear and what’s something we should take seriously.

Unsurprisingly, conservative media’s aggressive opposition campaign is making things much worse. They were always going to oppose someone with Platner’s politics, but his manifestly terrible decisions and behavior is generating some truly gleeful and monomaniacal responses. Check out this deranged opening paragraph from an op-ed in the Washington Examiner:

The mad and bad Roman emperor, Caligula, made his horse a senator. So the scope for mad and bad political choices is wide. After winning the Democratic primary in Maine on Tuesday, essentially unopposed, Graham Platner is feeling his oats. And he might gallop all the way to the U.S. Senate in November, despite being manifestly unsuitable for the job. It would be a mad and bad decision by the Pine Tree State’s voters to send him there.