The "catch & kill" story on Platner's latest scandal | Hour 1

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This oyster farm was a bunch of his richie rich buddies because he's you know, he comes off as a working class guy, but he's actually a Nepo baby who went to private schools and then took a gap year backpacking across Europe where he finally figured out that he just couldn't continue on with the one year long trip. He had to cut it short because he really wanted to go kill people. That's what he said. He wanted to go to war, and so he joined the Marines and he went to war, and some time during that service he went and got the Nazi tattoo, but claims he did not know it was a Nazi tattoo. It was just something all of the guys in his unit were getting, and he was drunk, and he was really really drunk, and he was in Croatia, one of the only countries that allowed for the Nazi symbols to be tattooed on you. But just by coincidence, they happened to be in Croatia and they got the tattoo that he totally did not know was a Nazi tattoo. Even though he has claimed to be a bit of an amateur historian, particularly military history, he can identify Swedish Nazi sympathizing regiments from World War Two era and their uniform and he praises them, and he talks about how rape victims shouldn't get drunk, so this way they wouldn't get raped, and so they should bear some responsibility. I think that's like half of the stuff I'm just going from memory. But all this week there have been rumors around the swamp up in d C. And if I know about these rumors in Charlotte, obviously all of the people working in d C. They know what the rumors are too, right, because they're they're swirling around in d C. Which may have explained why Graham Platner had that meeting this week with US senators, because Graham Platner would very much like to be the US Senator from me, He would very much like to uh to win the Democrat primary where he's you know, he's been leading everybody else except well Janet Mills, the four governor. She suspended her campaign and so now they are people like, hey, you know she's still on the ballad. We could totally vote for her, and you know, avoid any more stuff coming out about this grand Platner guy who was recruited. To run by a guy named Morris Katz. We did a deep dive into that guy, like he's nuts, also a NEPO baby, New York City born and raised, and he's behind Mara sorry zoron mom Donnie's campaign and a couple of these other Democrats, socialists and such wealthy parents. Publisher he wrote a kid's book where he talked about the various stages of young male anatomy through puberty, and talked about in the book how he was going to put pictures of his own anatomy there, but the publisher said no. I guess mommy said no, So he didn't do that. He used pictures of fruit. And anyway, that's the guy who has been pushing the Platner campaign. Let's see here then, So the rumors are swirling. He has the meeting, and in the meeting, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both ask him like, Hey, is there anything else coming out about you? And he says no, right, he says absolutely not. If it does, it's just going to be lies. If there's anything else, they're just going to be lies, right, And that's good enough for them, I guess. Although Warren aka Folca Hantis, she did say that she would have to draw the line at sexual assault, like that would be a bridge too far. That's the line, okay, So nazi tattoo, okay, sexting a year into your marriage with like anywhere. From like the number is now, I think like a dozen. They're talking about a dozen different women, right, like all of those other things. Oh, there was also the infertility treatments that he claimed he that he paid for, but actually Daddy paid for it. Also the v A loan that he said he got, and then he had to say no, I actually didn't get a VA loan. I could have got a VA loan, but actually Daddy gave me a loan. But Daddy's loan actually had a higher interest rate. So I don't know why you would take a loan from Daddy on that, unless maybe the loan wasn't supposed to be alone and you're just kind of turning it into a loan at this point, because taking a two hundred thousand dollars gift from your father to buy a house, I believe in the uh prosecutorial world, they call that the kill shot. There's just no way around, you know, no coming back from that. But anyway, Elizabeth Warren brings up this this idea that any allegations of sexual assault like that would be too much, that would be the line. Well why would she bring that up? Well, it turns out that that was the rumor swirling around DC, and now the New York Times has the story. Although the New York Times did the story in what I've seen referred to as a soft catch and kill. That's the tactic they used here, a soft catch and kill. Do you remember the catch and kill journalisming methodology? Remember they said this about Donald Trump and his pal who ran the National Inquirer, that they would get wind of a story, they would pass it on to Trump, they would catch it, and then he would pay off the woman who was making the allegations or even telling a true story whatever, pay her off to a non disclosure agreement, and then the story dies. Catch and kill. This is a soft catch and kill, as it's known in the pr hack industry. Ed Morrissey at hotier dot com says rumors have swirled all week that New York Times had a story ready to drop that would make Graham Platner's situation even worse than before. Senate Democrats must have gotten wind of it on Tuesday, as The Wall Street Journal reported, several of them began asking the presumptive Senate nominee from Maine some very pointed and specific question about his past relationships with women. Other media outlets reported that Platner left DC earlier than expected after these questions arose. With the campaign claiming that it had something to do with Platner's father, and that turned out to be a lie. He was actually headed back to Maine, where he started dialing up every ex girlfriend he's ever had and then telling them to talk to The New York Times. The New York Times had given him apparently a two hour window to respond, which I don't think is particularly fair. But they gave him a two hour window, but then graciously they extended it to twenty four hours to allow him to go and get character witnesses of these other women who. Were like, oh, he was so great. He was loving and kind and caring and everything else in order to combat the accusation of domestic violence. Because that's what this is, domestic abuse. Okay, that's what's being described in the New York Times article. But you got to go like twenty somewhad paragraphs deep to finally find out what the charge is. The headline just calls it unsettling behavior. So here's the New York Times. After a whirlwind day in Washington, Platner, the Democrat candidate, rushed home. Rumors were spreading about Platner's messy personal life after news reports that he had sent sexual messages to women while married. That was the that was the scandal from like, gosh, when was that like Monday? I want to say Monday or Tuesday or something right. Democrat senators were pressing him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were swarming staking out his hometown. Amid the turmoil, mister Plattner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was in fact a decent guy. In interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that. They described Platner as a fun and caring partner, saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after the relationship ended. But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and quote toxic relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching, and I would add, at times physically abusive. That's in your story, Katie Glueck and Lisa Larrer. You say that, but you don't say it on the first page. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. From the text line, Timoteo says, you are going too hard on Graham Platner, Pete, wait until it's too late for Democrats to replace him. Hey, look, I understand I've made this very same point. But this, like a lot of this stuff is coming from Democrats now. The stuff that we know of now is the oppo research from Democrats. These are the ones that want Platner out or want him to lose in the primary. Okay. So, and they're the ones that have been closest to him over the last you know what year or two. But the problem Platner has is that he was actually up in the swamp for a good bit of time. He was a bartender at a place called the Tune In, and he mingled with a lot of congressional staffers about twenty years ago, okay, and or fifteen years ago. And so what that means is that Republican and Democrat staffers alike, congressional aids, people know this guy, They dated him, okay, And so this is beyond Democrat containment. So the stuff I think that we're hearing about now is stuff that the Democrats want out in order to hurt his chances in the primary and give Democrats a better chance of winning in the general. I don't think the stuff that we have heard of to this point is actually from Republicans. I think they've got an entirely different OPO file that they are sitting on. I would be surprised if they don't. All right, So back to this story in the New York Times, Platner could be charming and charismatic, according to the girlfriends that he wrangled together, his ex girlfriends that he wrangled together to go talk to the New York Times to talk about how great he is. Right, but also apparently he could be demeaning to women and in at least one case, even physically threatening. A little bit more than that, he drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful. Critical accounts provided by three women interviewed by The Times, who were each in a romantic relationship with him for years, each shed light on an earlier era when he has acknowledged intense struggles, but also raised questions about his more recent years in Maine, which his campaign has presented as a period of healing and personal redemption. Yes, this is the narrative. This is a redemption arc that they are pitching to you. Right, Yeah, I did some bad things. Some stuff on read and I'm not proud. Of right, but now he has redeemed himself. He's a changed man and he's built a movement in Maine. The disclosures last week that Platner, now married, was exchanging sexual messages with women as recently as let's see he carry the two last year, yeah, last year have been complicated or sorry, have complicated the narrative about the redemption, and it has unnerved Democrats who see the main seat as key to their efforts to regain control of the Senate. And that's really what this is about. That's why everybody is like going to the mat for the guy with the net a Nazi tattoo is because they need Susan Collins to lose so they can have power. So they will overlook all of this stuff. And in the meantime, by the way, they'll be setting up the most extreme guardrail for what Democrat voters can accept in a candidate. That's the other really dangerous part of this is that like what exactly will Democrats vote for in exchange for the ring right, in exchange for the power and the worst Platner is, and people still vote for him, you are sending a message there is a permission structure being constructed right now that okay, Democrat candidate in twenty twenty eight, you have a Nazi tattoo, but you don't have all this other stuff, you'll be fine or okay, so you're sexting with a dozen girls on this app that is a quote predator's paradise because of the lack of controls, parental controls, and all of the young people that are on it, this kick app. You can be on there and sexting all of the young girls and stuff, and that's fine, just as long as you don't also have a Nazi tattoo and also be lying about all of the stuff that Planner has been lying about. Right. That's one of the other problems here with this campaign is that as Democrats keep dismissing more and more and more and more scandals, they're creating a permission structure that if you just have one or two of these things, you'll be fine. But at some point we're going to hit that guardrail. I mean, well, theoretically, I guess I assume we're going to hit a guardrail maybe at some point, but not so sure. So that brings us to Lindsey fiffilled or fifth fifilled fi fi e l D Fifield fifield. I don't know how she pronounces it. She's forty years old now. She is a Virginia conservative who has worked for right leaning groups and Republican campaigns. And so this is why the Democrats are now dismissing her. She is no Christine Blaze Ford, she is no Anita Hill, folks, because she's a Republican. You see, So she's obviously just trying to take down their good boy, you're good, good good boy, Ralph Platner, right like, that's what they're doing now all over social media. They are in full crisis control mode. And this is the reason they're attacking her is because well she's a conservative. She's actually now a stay at home mom. She doesn't really do much of anything politically anymore. She's married, she's she's got a couple kids, stayed home mom, not engaged in any of this stuff in politics, but she used to be. She recalled Platner as being cavalierly contemptuous of women's emotions and our quote weakness. I guess that's a quote from Platner. She dated him from roughly twenty thirteen to twenty fifteen. So it's like twelve years ago. She said his offensive online posts reminded her of just how much he hated women. Jenny Rassiko forty one, a main Democrat, said she dated him casually off and on between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one. She said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. Quote. When I saw the old comments that he made online, I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with. Some of the women also raise questions about his trustworthiness. Platner's in assistance that he did not know his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, said Fifilled. After all, she says he taught her the word for it. She says he would refer to it as quote, my totein cop. He called it that to her, and she has the texts and emails screenshots from that time period. She didn't know what the word meant, She didn't know what it was. How could how could he have told her that? But he didn't know what a totin cop was? So what does he say? Well, she's lying, that's it. He's just going to say he's going with the well, she's just lying about all of this. Before I go for they're into the New York Times story and I'm looking at the clock. I'm thinking, yeah, this is probably going to go into the next hour, so be. Aware of that. But before I go into more of the story from the New York Times, I want to explain. What the. A soft kill or sorry, a soft catch and kill operation is okay, And this is broken down by a man named will Upton over at The Daily Caller. He points out Graham Platner was once a fixture for many young political staffers in the Capitol City while serving as a bartender at the Tune In. The allegations that are made against him in this New York Times article are buried under mountains of campaign flack bs and then packaged as intimidating or unsettling. Normal people have another phrase for it. It's called domestic abuse. And the characterization the New York Times uses, and the one that they avoid is by design, said, the New York Times story is not journalism. It's a soft catch and kill operation. It was a favor to Plattner's campaign, a disservice to its readers, and an insult to the women who say they were hurt by him. One of the victims is my friend, this woman fulfilled. Before my journey back into journalism, I spent a long stint working in political communications and public relations. I know how to arrange a catch and kill, and more importantly, I know how to set up a soft catch and kill when a more definitive end cannot be arranged. So ideally, what he's saying is, you want to catch the story and kill it before it ever gets published. However, if that's not possible, then you do the soft catch and kill. You make it as palatable as possible. You minimize as much damage as possible. Right, he says, The term catch and kills refers to a shady practice where a PR firm or consultant works with a friendly news outlet that was pitched or maybe even just stumbled upon a negative story about a client to effectively catch and then kill the story or delay it until it no longer has impact. A soft catch and kill works similarly, though it mostly involves the publication still running the story in a timely manner, but the details are softened or buried deep in the narrative to soften the bite. The outlet can claim that it did its job, but they've given the target just enough wiggle room to survive. The Time's goal here was not to fairly give hearings to allegations against Platner. It was to play fulfilled for a sucker, give her story just enough air that the Democrat parties, cretan media and consultant class could zero in on it and crush it. And it becomes very obvious, very very obvious, with a careful read to the story and the response, The Times supposed vaunted exposeon Platner buries its lead twenty two paragraphs into the piece. By the time readers get to the allegations that should have opened the article, they had already been marched through campaign spin, euphemistic mush and ex girlfriend character witnessing. Right, and this is I've talked about the inverted pyramid, the inverted triangle, whatever. Where in print media you are taught because you are limited by space. In the old days, you were limited by the size of the newspaper, how many words you could write for a given story, and so you were trained. I was trained that you put all of the most important information in the top of the story the very first line. You start off with a trumpet sentence, as it was called to me, at least that's what I was taught. A trumpet sent in something that grabs the attention, and then you pack in a bunch of information. And that's why you see these run on sentences in newspaper print that go on for like a like a paragraph and a half. It's like, you know, guys, you could just make this fewer sentences. In radio, we do fewer sentences, but in print they just keep running on the sentence because they know once people start reading a sentence, they'll finish that sentence. So you pack as much information. That's the top part of the upside down triangle. Okay, that the triangle represents the information load in a news story. The top of the story has the most impactful, most important, most newsworthy information, and as you proceed through the article, you get less and less actual useful information because most people don't read the whole article. Most people nowadays don't even read the article. It's just a headline, right, And so by moving the most important stuff down, they know fewer people will ever see it. Next. For the first third of the New York. Times expose a They focused on women provided to the newspaper by the Platiner campaign, who of course sang the degenerate former bartender's praises, and frankly, that is all many readers will come away with, because that is about as far as their attention span lets them get into the narrative, which is the point. Prior to publication, I've been told that The Times spoke to two women who had credibly accused Platner of sexual assault. This detailed was then revealed too fifilled, likely in an effort to encourage her to divulge more of her story. Those women's allegations never make it into the story. They were effectively killed by The Times's editors and by Platner's attorneys. I am told the Platner campaign was originally given only two hours to respond, but then that was extended to twenty four hours, and I am told that this was at the behest of the New York Times editors. This is beyond malpractice, especially when the interview subjects are told otherwise. They were told about the two hour timeline, they were told when it was going to go to print. They were told all this, and then it changed the goal was to create enough doubt and ambiguity regarding Platner's disgusting behavior to let my friend Lindsay Fiffeld be smeared by Democrat Party operatives like Emma Vigeland and partisan media hacks like Crystal Ball. And that's what they've been doing. Later in the piece, he says, more telling and perhaps a tip of the hat to the nature of this soft catch and kill is the fact that numerous Democrat aligned influencers and operators or operatives were essentially flooding the zone on social media in the hours before the story was published. So somehow they knew that one of the women in the story was an activist in the conservative movement, a detail that surmisably came from The New York Times or from the Platner campaign, or both, and that this information was given to these operatives before publication. Others appear to have known details that never made it into the story. So these people got a heads up on some of the allegations and started flooding the zone on social media, and some of those details were never printed. He says, I can see the fingerprints of a soft catch and kill all over the New York Times report on Platner. As I have said, I've arranged both hard and soft catching kills in the past as a public relations hack. Make no mistake, this is what we are seeing play out here. Now. Fiffeld has gone on to the Twitter machine and has given a write up after the publication, and she talks about what the New York Times did to her in getting her to tell them her story. This is not good for the New York Times, or for Platner for that matter. RB Pundit says, remember the goal of the Platner opposition here, and I agree with this. This is so he speaks for me. Ryan speaks for me here on this, which is the goal is not to reveal the utter hypocrisy of the left. Okay, So, like I see some texts and like, you know what about Trump, that kind of thing like this is not about hypocrisy, because you've heard me say this for years now. The charge of hypocrisy carries no purchase any longer. That's not what this is about. It is to reveal that all of the leftists claims of moral superiority are a load of unmitigated horse hockey. Right. They are never to be given the benefit of the doubt on this stuff. The very same people who are today savaging this woman for coming forward with her story were the same people who were defending Christine blazy Ford, who had zero evidence of anything against Brett Kavanaugh. They claimed the moral high ground during that episode. They made all sorts of allegations. They still to this day accused Kavanov being a rapist with zero proof. Don't you believe all women? Hashtag believe all women except this one, I guess. And of course all of the Israeli women who talked about the abuses that they suffered on October seventh and while in captivity by a mass right, you don't believe them either. But like that's the point. This isn't about hypocrisy. This is about destroying your ability to pretend that you are somehow morally superior to anybody else. This is an example of it. Trolley mctroll face as I call this person on the text line because they refuse to give a name, so I just filled them in. By the way, if you don't give me a name, I just have your phone number, and so I'm not going to I'm not going to say anonymous. Like once I get a vibe on you. I'm gonna like label you as this. So this is your name now, Trolly moctroll face. I put it in our system as such, so now everybody will refer to you as that. Look how much stuff Republicans overlook to elect Donald Trump to be president and you're talking about this guy. This guy's got nothing on that scumbag Donald Trump. Right, once again, this is a what about is an argument? This is a hypocrisy argument, like, how dare you see? Now? Look, I will give mctroll face here some latitude. It'd only because I was not on the air here on WBT in twenty fifteen. However, when I was on the air in twenty fifteen in Ashville and Donald Trump came down the Golden escalator and people started talking about how much they liked him and he fights and all of this, I spent hours, hours upon hours on my show talking about that, all of the stuff that Democrats now talk about all the time. I went through all of that stuff already. I did it. I raised awareness. I told people this guy is morally like, not somebody you would want your daughter to bring home. It's just it didn't matter. And so you guys were claiming the moral superior, morally superior position. Right, you were saying, we would never elect such a scumbag. But here you are. Here you are after claiming that Republicans were just disgusting and gross for choosing Donald Trump, and here you are going to the mat for a man that I would submit is worse. Donald Trump does not have a Nazi tattoo anywhere on his body that I'm aware of. That I'm aware of. There are things Donald Trump has said and done that I think are indefensible just from a moral standpoint. I don't agree with it, and you don't have to agree with me. I don't care. That's my set of ethics. So I spent hours upon hours literally risking my job, because when you say this sort of stuff to people in an audience that really loves Donald Trump, you might lose audience and you might be out of work. But that was my opinion. That was what I went with. I would have arguments with people about it. And Democrats were claiming at the time, and they still do. They still claim, like, oh, you love Trump, You're a Trump boot licker to me, right, which again they don't know my history, but they just assume that if I'm not bashing Trump twenty four to seven, that I must be in his pocket or something, or that I love him so much, or I voted for him every time, which I did not. So here you are. You have your own test. Here, guys and gals, you got your test. What would you do if you had a Donald Trump like candidate? Here you have one. He's got all this baggage. He has said terrible things about the military. I remember when you guys were oh so outraged about the fake story turned out to be about the suckers and losers. Right, here's your chance. You got a guy up in Maine you can disavow, but you're not doing it, which tells me you never actually held the morally superior position in the first place, which, by the way, I actually knew because I know you guys, so that I knew that at the time. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecallanarshow dot com again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.