Maine Democrats Silent as AFL-CIO Threatens Firing Squads for #NeverPlatner Democrats
It's just a joke, the humorless prig claims. But when will Maine Democrats realize their party has been hijacked for revolutionaries, extremists, and communists?
Oh, Andy. Sweet, perpetually triggered Andy O’Brien—the face of the Maine AFL-CIO, the man who most adores Graham Platner (but not in a gay way), and the guy who turned “labor spokesman” into a full-time gig as a leftist sh*tposter.
This week, our boy took one look at a perfectly reasonable Democratic strategist’s column in The Hill—written by Laurie Watkins, who had the unmitigated gall to say maybe her party shouldn’t whitewash character concerns around alleged abuser Graham Platner just because he’s carrying the D label—and fired off the rhetorical equivalent of loading a Mosin-Nagant.
“First up against the wall when the revolution comes,” he posted to Facebook, along with a screencap of Watkins’ blog post.
In other words, this Democrat stooge—who counts among his closest allies luminaries like Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and several publications that run his freelance ramblings—was calling for the executions by firing squad of political dissenters.
Charming stuff from a top surrogate and fanboy for Platner. Perhaps the two mama’s boys are a good fit, considering Graham is the Senate candidate who, on his pre-deletion Reddit greatest-hits album, proudly declared he “got older and became a communist,” hung with the Socialist Rifle Association crowd, and dropped gems about how an “armed working class” is a “requirement for economic justice” and that fighting fascism might require reading up on when violence is justified. Andy’s been out there canvassing, Substack-defending, and generally simping harder than a teenager at a boy-band reunion for P-Hustle. Maybe what really brings them together, apart from a dysgenic love of communism, is the desire to murder the unbelievers.
Followers of Maine politics will not be surprised to learn that no Maine Democrats condemned O’Brien’s call for political violence. No Democratic officials, at least. That’s not their style. They would expect a pile-on from Republicans were the shoe on the other foot here, and Republicans would obsequiously oblige. But Maine’s top Democratic officials and party leaders remained silent. Not even a performative “violence has no place” press release from the party that spent years treating every January 6 tourist as a budding Timothy McVeigh.
If this were a conservative spokesperson floating the same line about a NeverTrumper, we’d have hearings, cable-news panels, and a fresh “stochastic terrorism” white paper from every think tank with George Soros in the donor Rolodex. Indeed, O’Brien would be the screechiest of all the harpies howling about right-wing terrorism. But when it’s a lefty union guy cheering on the guy with the communist Reddit receipts? Crickets from the likes of Gov. Janet Mills, Sen. Angus King, Rep. Chellie Pingree, and whichever dork is running the Maine Democrats these days.
The Maine Republican Party and even U.S. Sen. Susan Collins were the only ones with the moral courage to condemn the naked call for political violence.
When will Maine Democrats realize that their party has been totally hijacked by political extremists who fantasize about violence like Andy? The Democratic Party used to stand for economic equality. Now, Maine Democrats represent the wealthy lawyers, lobbyists, and the from-away coastal elite. The old sayings about equal opportunity have been total replaced by “equity” and equality of outcomes, which necessarily means tearing down the successful, the fortunate, and the beautiful. Maine Dems read about Harrison Bergeron and imagine ways to implement that in public schools. Maine Democrats are now united by Jew hatred and a desire to abolish the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Andy O’Brien only gave voice to the threat that hangs over everyone who still calls themselves a Democrat: Obey, or else. And the “or else” is real. Refuse to toe the party line, you’ll face economic ruin and silent slander. Democrat members who buck leaders at the State House leave caucuses crying. Remember Rep. Bruce White? But the threat from Democratic extremists is more than just career homicide. Just last week, a very wealthy Democratic donor expressed grave concerns about potential threats to her physical safety that might flow from the Platneristas. Simply put, Democrats are terrified of Platner and his bioleninist cabal of extremists.
Maybe O’Brien’s post will be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back.
A few brave Democrats risked their reputations, as well as their personal safety, to condemn the AFL-CIO’s bloodlust. Jill Barkley Roy, director of the far-left 501(c)(4) Emerge Action Fund, cynically lamented that nothing would be done about O’Brien’s call for violence, but she added yet another dimension to the behavior of the AFL-CIO’s keyboard samurai: “Nothing’s ever going to be done here, but someone who’s harassed Maine women up and down the state for MONTHS is now calling for the author of the op-ed I posted earlier to be EXECUTED,” Roy posted.
“This is so beyond anything else he’s said or done, and he’s said and done a lot this cycle,” she said.
Well, that’s intriguing… If you’re reading this, Jill, politics makes strange bedfellows, and you can always drop me an email.
Although Gov. Mills was too busy to issue a comment, another member of the Mills family did chime in.
“Seems like his threatening and bullying post should be reported to law enforcement, his employer, the Platner campaign, and everyone associated with Mr. O’Brien,” said Dora Mills, the sister of Gov. Mills.
“I do not know him, but this is completely unacceptable,” she said.
Andy, bless his revolutionary little heart, contrived the perfect defense: It was just a joke! From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
Specifically, the bit about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s marketing division being “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” (And fun fact for the literary pedants: the future Encyclopedia Galactica entry notes they were the first—past tense. The purge happened off-screen.) He even appended a sheepish “(Joke!)” in a prior Substack version, like that retroactively turns bloodlust into dad humor.
Even if we grant the attribution (and color me skeptical, given the timing lands squarely on a political enemy who won’t back his crush), the excuse collapses faster than a Soviet five-year plan. The joke’s entire comedic engine is the cheerful acceptance of revolutionary violence against the insufficiently enthusiastic. It’s not “let’s roast them in the comments”; it’s “after we seize the means, these critics get the wall.” Context matters, comrade. You didn’t quote “Don’t Panic” or “a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry.” No, you went straight for the summary-execution bit and aimed it at a fellow Democrat. Nonsense defense, meet airtight rebuttal.
As a fan of Douglas Adams who has read the book and watched the movie, Hitchhiker’s never even entered my brain when I read O’Brien’s call for revolutionary violence. However, I am willing to grant that his sense of humor is as deficient as his political ideology. Instead, like most readers, I correctly interpreted his use of the term “revolution” as a reference to the violent purges that always—always—accompany communist-socialist revolutions, from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik purges to literally any firing squad that’s been organized in the wake of political upheaval.
But wait, there’s more projection in the pipeline!
Andy loves to whine that we at The Maine Wire “despise” him or are “obsessed” with him. That we’re dark-money billionaires out to silence brave truth-tellers. It’s hard for me to grasp the “dark-money” part of that when we’ve done more to disclose our donors than the Portland Press Herald, the Brunswick Times Record, the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Maine People’s Alliance, Troy Jackson’s Food & Medicine, and the host of other actual dark-money operations in which O’Brien desperately tries to find friends.
If you have a few moments of your life to waste, take a scroll through the AFL-CIO spokesperson’s social media accounts and you’ll find a man who is neurotically obsessed not just with me but with The Maine Wire generally. The guy wrote a 4,500-word hit piece on me! I never bothered reading it, but my wife told me it was fun. If obsession were a varsity sport, Andy would be captain, MVP, and the guy who shows up to practice in full kit at 3 a.m., assuming he’s ever gotten up that early in his life.
In the last three years, the AFL-CIO’s mouthpiece has tweeted about me, The Maine Wire, Maine Wire alum Ed Tomic, Jon Fetherston, and the rest of our staff dozens upon dozens of times—fresh salvos just this week alone, complete with the usual greatest hits: racists, Nazis, liars, stochastic terrorists, etc. The list of people O’Brien hasn’t called Nazis is shorter than the alternative. Which makes it all the more delicious that he’s got a homoerotic adoration for a man with a Totenkopf proudly stamped on his chest. It’s a bizarre twist that the guy who once considered himself Maine’s top “Nazi hunter” now finds himself explaining why an ex-Marine with a death camp tattoo is not, in fact, a Nazi.
Maine Nazis According to Andy O’Brien
Permit me a brief detour for educational purposes. Here’s a look at two of Andy O’Brien’s favorite dudes with Nazi tattoos. On the left is Chris Polhaus, with the image taken from the Tinder account he was using to troll for Swastika-loving babes. Polhaus is an unemployed social media extremist who endorsed Joe Biden in 2024 and has a business partner who was a fund-raising bundler for Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Polhaus and his Democrat fundraising pal pretended to start a paramilitary camp in northern Maine. I’m the only reporter in Maine who actually visited the property, and hilarity ensued… watch here. Massage tables aside, Polhaus is, for Andy, the Great Satan, the worst thing that ever happened to Maine.
Now, to avoid any confusion, the picture on the right is not Christopher Polhaus. That picture is of Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner, who is cleverly hiding his own Nazi tattoo with his selfie hand. That photo was taken from an account Platner created on the Kik app using the handle PHustle0331. PHustle is the same nickname that Platner used for his infamous Reddit account, and 0331 is the code for Platner’s Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). The Kik app, unlike Polhaus’s choice of Tinder, has no serious age verification and is therefore infamous with child advocacy groups and law enforcement as a tool sexual predators use to groom young victims. The Kik app is so ubiquitous in child sex abuse cases that it’s earned the nickname “predator’s paradise.” Just in Maine, the Kik app was used by sexual predators in a Feb. 2023 case, an Oct. 2024 case, an Aug. 2024 case, and a Sept. 2025 case.
As a helpful key for readers: The Nazi-tattooed horndog on the left is, for Mr. O’Brien, a very bad man; whereas the horndog on the right trolling the “preadator’s paradise” app in a towel is the Christ of Communism descending from his oyster farm to save us all from the vile oligarchy.
Back to O’Brien’s professed desire to put to death moderate Democrats who won’t bend the knee to one of the men in the pictures above…
O’Brien’s pathological obsession with the Maine Wire is so detached from reality and sanity that he even launched on a deranged quest to prove that one of our former writers was a Nazi. The evidence he cited was, so far as one can make sense of his foamy keyboard smashing, that the reporter followed an extremely popular account online and some unsavory characters had reposted his writing. O’Brien and his band of dirtbag leftists (like Crash Barry and his anonymous-x-account-operating wife) even went so far as to dox this reporter’s family as part of their theory that he was, in fact, a life-long, card-carrying whitesupremacistchudneonazichristofascist. The only problem was, of course, that they doxxed some random couple with no relationship whatsoever to the reporter.
Speaking of O’Brien’s obsession with harassing or putting to death his political enemies… He somehow never got around to acknowledging the Southern Poverty Law Center’s starring role in the very ecosystem of inflated “hate group” labels, donor-fueled activism, and selective blindness that props up the divisive identity grift he claims to oppose. The SPLC was literally funding the Ku Klux Klan—and even sleeping with some of them. Funny how the SPLC gets a lifetime achievement award for “fighting hate” while its own scandals, mislabeling machine, and cozy relationships with the activist outfits Andy adores sail right past his outrage meter. By the way, has anyone heard from Andy’s BFF Christopher Polhaus since USAID and the SPLC got shut down? Hmm…
Real talk, Andy—you’re a character. Union lifer cosplaying as a revolutionary intellectual while shilling for an oyster hobbyist ex-Marine with a communist origin story. It’s almost endearing, like a toothless, mangy Boston terrier convinced he’s a dire wolf. But when we’re done laughing at your antics, the question remains: How does any of this help the handful of workers in Maine who are still paying dues to the AFL-CIO?
Keep the tweets coming, champ. Keep the Substacks flowing. Keep calling us Nazis while stumping for Mr. Kik and his Totenkopf. We’ll keep reporting, keep laughing, and keep handing you the rope—metaphorically, of course. I miss the days when you made funny Temp Tales cartoons. Those just might be your best contributions to Maine. We’re left wondering where that Andy went.
So long, Andy, and thanks for all the laughs.
Okay, okay… One last thing. We here at the Maine Wire found O’Brien’s Reddit burner account a few years ago. Like his Totenkopf’d Titan, Andy likes to anonymously post to the leftist chat site. He’s so boring and has such terrible taste in music, that we mostly use it as an inside joke.
But there’s one post I just have to share…
Andy O’Brien, the very smart, very savvy and funny face of the AFL-CIO, once solicited advice from veterinarians on Reddit about whether his cats testicles could grow back “like salamanders.” Imagine the events that led up to this post. Andy, petting his cat while dashing off nasty tweets about everyone who disagrees with him on tax policy or project labor agreements, started to feel some tufts around his feline’s butthole. He felt them and felt them, and he inspected them closely. So mystified, he pulled out a flashlight and a magnifying glass. “What possible could these ball-shaped clumps be,” he wondered. Unable to solve the mystery himself, he took his quandary to Reddit, professing to the world that these balls hanging off his cats add were “kind of blowing [his] mind…”
Andy, my brother in Christ, those are dingleberries. Go wash your hands.
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As a former middle school teacher I recall kids were told "just a joke" was worth a trip to the office and a call home.
These guys are laughable but they are also scary.