On the contrary, he is consistently, militantly antifascist. If people “expect to fight fascism without a good semiautomatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” he wrote in 2018. In another, he wrote that since leaving the military, he’d become a “vegetable growing, psychedelic taking socialist,” but added, “Still got the guns though, I don’t trust the fascists to act politely.” He referred to himself, jokingly, as an “antifa supersoldier,” and was involved with the Socialist Rifle Association, a left-wing alternative to the National Rifle Association. He lionized the men who volunteered to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
These views appear consistent through much of his life. In high school, he was voted “most likely to start a revolution,” and his yearbook picture shows him holding a sign that says, “Free Kosovo Chechnya Kashmir Palestine Kurdistan Tibet.”
It’s worth pausing on the inclusion of “Palestine” here. Israel’s defenders often accuse pro-Palestinian activists of singling Israel out and ignoring human rights abuses elsewhere. But Platner, from a young age, seems to have seen the Palestinians as one oppressed people among many. His condemnation of Israel, unlike that of some of the country’s right-wing enemies, has nothing to do with its Jewish character, but with its killing and dispossession of a subject population, a stance shared by many left-wing Jews.
Israel’s champions may not want to hear it, but there’s a difference between those who revile Israel because it’s Jewish, and those who oppose it because they believe states should grant equal rights and liberties to all those under their dominion. People in the second camp are usually reliable champions of the multiracial democracy that has allowed Jews to thrive in America.
For some conservatives, there’s no contradiction between seeing Platner as both a leftist and a Nazi, since they think that Nazis were socialists. That’s mostly a canard, but even if you believe it, virtually no left-wing person does. In other words, the notion of a socialist antifa Nazi might make sense if you don’t take Platner’s politics seriously. But Platner appears to take them very seriously indeed.
