In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A while ago, I surmised that Graham Platner was never actually vetted; it was enough that he was People Like Us, preppie, Ivy-adjacent trustfunders. A detailed piece in the Washington Free Beacon profiles two of the talent scouts who promoted Platner, Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff. Katz, 27, became a bona fide Beltway celebrity after helping Zohran Mamdani defeat a profoundly unpopular sex pest in the New York City mayoral election. He helped recruit Platner to run in Maine, and made a slickly produced launch video of the unemployed business owner cosplaying as a working-class everyman. "Like Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Katz is a child of the New York cultural elite, but is fluent in the anti-elite language of progressive populism," the New York Times wrote earlier this year in a profile headlined, "He's 26 and Ready to Fix the Democrats' Strategy." Like Platner, Katz is a child of privilege who abhors capitalism, functioning societies, and opponents of te...

Via Breitbart News , Conservative activist Laura Loomer and journalist Desiree Townsend both claimed Monday that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been declared “brain dead,” citing unnamed sources. A very high level source told me Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead and machines are keeping him alive, but he is a vegetable and “never coming back.” So why is his wife @ElaineChao in China instead of by his side? Is she a Chinese CCP spy? How does the wife of one of… https://t.co/hxTHMPHZEM — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) July 6, 2026 I've always thought Mitch McConnell was brain dead even when he was alive, that's a dog bites man story. The bigger question is who is his wife, Elaine Chao, and why is she in China? We know she was Secretary of Transportation under Trump 45 and Secretary of Labor under Bush fils , but I took that as simply a payoff to Mitch. It turns out the story is much more complicated . From a 2019 piece at CNN: Transportation Secre...

The Skid Row Express (also known as the D line expansion) is set to open in LA soon. Skid row junkies will soon be able to travel from their homeless camps downtown to new homeless camps in Westwood, with convenient stops at Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills for naps, open air… pic.twitter.com/GPSGsAs9Ny — Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) July 1, 2026 Urban transit in the US is a festering sore. Ridership, especially on subway and commuter rail systems, has diminished since COVID, while transit overall is significantly less safe. Los Angeles is no exception. A recent piece in City Journal , which in 2024 broke the story of Haitians in Temporary Protrected Status, outlines the problem: Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces. Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a d...

I've got to say I'm disappointed that Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race, because having him stay on the ballot would have been just too delicious. But there's plenty of awkwardness and embarrassment yet to come. Just for starters is the Maine Democrat chair's message, embedded in Mark Halperin's 2WAY YouTube above: As you know, the Maine Democratic Party has been working around the clock to develop a process to replace our US Senate nominee that is open, inclusive, transparent, and fair. the integrity of this process is just as important as the outcome, and we are committed to ensuring that Democrats across our state can have confidence in both. Because, of course, last month's primary wasn't open, inclusive, transparent, and fair enough. She goes on, to cackles from one of Halperin's guests, We have repeatedly reiterated [sic] to Graham Platner's team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic ...

The big lesson for me in the evolving Platner saga is how easily mainstream leftists let themselves be conned. Scott Jennings claims he was in fact "vetted" : All of this whole thing is disgusting but to say that they hadn't vetted him, or that they didn't know about all this is totally false. They knew it and they signed up for it and I don't know why they're backing away from this scumbag today when they had already signed off on all that other crazy behavior. Strictly speaking, the specific Jenny Racicot allegations of sexual assault (and now sneaky behavior relative to contraception) became public only as of the past few days; they weren't general knowledge, for instance, before the Maine primary. What was actually going on was that, as I pointed out yesterday, Platner was merchandised by DSA talent spotters as though he had been vetted, and the Democrat machine and out-of-state donors took this on faith. He looked authentic, as only some...

We last looked at Graham Platner here a month ago. A link to the New York Post pointed out, 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. . . . 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. What skeleton could possibly have been worse than a credible rape allegation? As of yesterday , A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex ...

I've noted before that I've recently discovered the UK Thatcherite toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, who gets things wrong in an entertainingly stuffy way. In the video above, he congratulates the US for having what he implies is a copy of the UK constitutional system. This is the sort of comfortable patter that Winston Churchill used to ingratiate himself with Roosevelt, and the sort of thing King Charles said to the US congress not long ago in a similar effort to get the US to continue to spend money on the UK's defense. Of the events in 1776, Rees-Mogg says, at 1:40: [T]he Americans said they were English gentlemen who just happened to live in another place, and they wanted the rights of Englishmen. They wanted taxation with representation. . . . Edmund Burke pointed out that there was a precedent for people living abroad being able to to send MPs. That is to say, up until the reign of Mary Tudor, Mary I, people living in Calais had sent members to Parliament, to the House ...