will they be brave enuff to leave them as a monument 
(#jacobin David Sirota, Branko Marcetic and Ben Burghis)
text collection of bylines
Graham Platner Could Be the Bellwether of a New US Populism
Graham Platner has traversed a long and unlikely road to become the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Maine. Can he beat longtime GOP incumbent Susan Collins and live up to the promise of his firebrand populist campaign? #sirota 30.05.26
You’re Being Lied to About Graham Platner
We read Graham Platner’s whole Reddit archive. The vilification of the Maine candidate for Senate doesn’t square with what he actually wrote in his posts. #marcetic 27.10.25
Why the Smears Against Graham Platner Didn’t Work
Opponents went all in on smearing Graham Platner as a Nazi based on a bad tattoo choice. It didn’t work. Maine voters decided they’d rather have universal health care and an end to reckless wars than a polished politician with an unblemished past. #burgis 07.05.26
Democrats Cynically Wield “Wokeness” Against Graham Platner
Establishment Democrats spent a full year complaining the Left forced them to be “woke.” But then a left populist, Graham Platner, threatened to win in Maine, so they went right back to trying to cancel someone over old internet posts. #marcetic 24.10.25
Judge Platner’s Character by How He Fights the Oligarchs
The fact that Graham Platner still holds a general election lead amid scandalous personal revelations should give us hope. Voters may be shifting to judge politicians more on their willingness to take on economic inequality and war than their private lives. #sirota 02.06.26
no amount of vetting will ever fix the structual problem of putting the cart before the horse. The fundamental strategy of horse in back, cart in front, is flawed at its very core and will never work. You won't find a magic horse that will make it work. Stop searching for magical horses, and start putting your affairs in order. First things first is to create a workers party who will lift up their own internal candidates for nomination, who are subject to party discipline and retraction.
Squishy electoralist leftists often think the critique we issue from their left is that their chosen candidates aren't "pure" enough, so when they inevitable fail (like they always do) their supposition is that they need to go and get an even more pure magical horse this time. You fundamentally do not understand our critique of your entire method of politics and why your succ dem politics always ends up like it does in 100% of cases.
Until there is first a disciplined worker's party from which candidates emerge, electoralism will be a pointless dead end and complete waste of resources because the uncoordinated newcomers will just be subsumed into the system or unable to do anything useful and just blocked out, that's if they even had good intentions and weren't just naked opportunists or feds like this guy. Even once you do have a disciplined socialist party, you can't actually win total control via elections but it may be useful to run in them to gain influence, a foothold of power and to demonstrate the cheating nature of the establishment. A revolution will eventually be required.
And no, the DSA is not a party - nor do they require membership in it to endorse candidates and give resources to them, meaning that every single opportunist can easily grift off the resources of the DSA and there's nothing the DSA can do to enforce any kind of discipline over them.