One weird trick for getting Democrats to take bold, decisive action: Manufacture a sex crime
Graham Platner has been knifed in brutally expedited fashion, and a conclave of Democratic Party officials is already preparing to hand-pick his replacement, through an as-yet-unknown process that will mercifully bypass any inconvenient input from Maine primary voters, who had already voted for Platner in overwhelming fashion on June 9. This can be summarily discarded, however, thanks to the one thing that reliably catalyzes the Party’s apparatus into swift and decisive action: a transparently contrived rape claim. Of course. So how did this happen? The answer contains useful insights about the nature of the current Democratic coalition, with implications that go well beyond the superbly-executed takedown of Platner.
Dems had already shown during “peak MeToo” that they were willing to toss aside even some of their most leading-light figures — such as Al Franken, infamously — at the first blush of some sexual impropriety, real or imagined. And in Franken’s case, for something as trivial as a photograph of him reenacting a lame comedy skit that involved outstretching his arms in the direction of an asleep woman’s breasts, while they were aboard a US military aircraft, and while the woman was wearing a flak-jacket. One might have thought the hair-trigger frenzies that brought about this kind of goofy “peak MeToo” crossfire had substantially abated since 2017-2018. Maybe in the wider culture they have. But not so much the institutional Democratic Party. Because the mechanisms of internal party reprisal are now so well-oiled, and can be sprung into action at such blinding warp-speed, that it’s probably the only thing that gives the various Party factions any kind of collective cohesion, apart from opposing Trump. “DSA” renegades or “establishment” bogeymen — doesn’t matter, all will join the latest denunciatory crusade just as readily.
To apprehend the mechanics of the no-mercy Platner hit, we must all set our gazes on a character named Cheyenne Hunt. For it is fearless women like she who will undoubtedly charter our course to the future. An interestingly-timed July 2 puff piece by NBC News describes the lovely Ms. Hunt as a 29-year-old “progressive social media influencer” who recently became “involved in an effort” to oppose Platner. Through this “effort,” she was actively “working with multiple women who have had past personal relationships with Platner,” and providing them with “help navigating the media,” as well as “pro bono legal counsel.” These “efforts” were apparently being coordinated through some outfit of hers called “Reckoning Action,” which had just popped into existence only in “late May.” For starters, one might reasonably ask, who is funding this outfit? Dumb question. Because the thought clearly never occurred to Natasha Korecki of NBC News, much less does the journalist take any discernible steps to inquire. We’re told Ms. Hunt had initially endorsed Platner in October 2025, in her prior capacity as “executive director for Gen-Z for Change, a progressive advocacy group,” and she appears to have been greatly chastened by the experience, given that she subsequently decided to declare jihad against Platner, after rescinding her endorsement in response to the June 4 New York Times article that got this whole ball of destruction rolling. Recall the marquee findings of that blockbuster months-long investigation: that Platner had previously exhibited behaviors which several ex-girlfriends or dating acquaintances of his described years after the fact as “emotionally wrenching,” “volatile,” or even (gasp) “toxic.” This was sufficient for Ms. Hunt to loudly retract her endorsement of Platner (as if anyone should have given a shit in the first place who this person chose to “endorse,” or not, in the Maine senate race).
Ms. Hunt has clearly been hard at work since June 4, as the NBC News item foretold, because in the bombshell POLITICO article that dropped Monday afternoon — debuting the big rape claims and setting off the fierce cascade of repudiation — Cheyenne Hunt is disclosed as the woman who so skillfully made it all happen:
So there you go: the resourceful Ms. Hunt engineered this new round of what one might call “accusation escalation,” because the person whom she “connected” to POLITICO was Jenny Racicot, who had already been quoted in the NYT entry a month before, wherein the sum total of her “accusations” was that over the course of an “off-and-on relationship” with Platner, there was an episode in 2021 where he allegedly exhibited behavior she claimed to perceive as “reckless” and “unsettling” — although “she declined to elaborate” on whatever allegedly transpired. (In the meantime, she was apparently also reviewing his recently-unearthed cache of old Reddit posts, which enabled her to connect the dots and conclude that Platner “does not respect women.”) But now, with the unspecified “help” of Ms. Hunt, she was confiding to POLITICO — for a curiously-advertised “exclusive” — that she’d actually been “sexually assaulted” all along in the 2021 episode she’d cryptically referenced to the NYT, but had declined to expand on. What guidance might Jenny Racicot have received from Cheyenne Hunt in the past month, so as to best reformulate her accusations, and achieve the maximum political impact Ms. Hunt explicitly sought? We’re all left guessing. All we know is that she was reportedly upset by the reaction to the NYT article, felt obliged to support other women who’d allegedly alleged stuff, and that she’d been “working with” Cheyenne’s advocacy outfit — with its declared mission to become the hottest new launchpad for “the next generation of women having their #MeToo moment.” Of course, no sane Democrat dare mention any of these possibly mitigating details in the context of a “deeply troubling” new sexual assault claim.
Rather, the rock-solid consensus is that to even contemplate examining the accusation with any degree of critical detachment would be an act of pure wickedness, and perhaps career suicide. Nationally consequential political judgments, like Platner’s fate in Maine, should instead be outsourced to behind-the-scenes operators like Ms. Hunt, herself a failed 2024 Democratic congressional candidate, who is said to have previously “played a central role in bringing forth sexual misconduct allegations against Eric Swalwell in the California governor’s race.”
Oh yeah! Remember that whole “Eric Swalwell” thing? Seems like only yesterday. (It was April.) Just out of curiosity, what is the current status of those earlier earth-shattering allegations we are told Cheyenne Hunt played such a “central role” in “bringing forth”? You might recall a big press conference convened in Beverly Hills on April 14, 2026, and dutifully aired live by much of the pliant media, in which a woman named Lonna Drewes dramatically “came forward” to debut shocking new rape claims against Swalwell. She was seated alongside Lisa Bloom, a lawyer with a track record of accuser-representation that you’d think would be terminally blighted by the outright hoax she once attempted to orchestrate, whereby she claimed that a mystery person named “Katie Johnson” had been viciously double-raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at 12 years old. Then, without further explanation, Bloom’s explosive lawsuit outlining these claims got dropped on the eve of the 2016 election. Strangely, the past debacle seemed to give no one a second thought about Bloom swooping right back in to represent this sensational Swalwell accuser, whom Bloom had insisted would promptly provide contemporaneous corroboration for her charges… but no such corroboration appears to have ever been forthcoming. In fact, there’s been hardly a peep about any of those life-wrecking Swalwell accusations in the nearly three months since they were introduced with such fanfare — which in a matter of hours led to Swalwell’s resignation from Congress, and the House threatening instantaneous expulsion if he did not relent. Of course, Swalwell had already been bludgeoned into withdrawing from his poll-leading position in the California gubernatorial primary.
Lisa Bloom said her client Lonna Drewes had undergone “EMDR” therapy — perhaps not a quack technique in every conceivable respect, but definitely straight-up quackery when it’s alleged to have facilitated the discovery of repressed memories, such as the ones Drewes claimed to possess of being raped by Swalwell in 2018. But nevermind that, because the now-ancient Swalwell accusations have been buried in a thoroughly forgotten memory-hole, likely never to be heard of again, unless some eccentric journalistic sleuth decides to eventually undertake a lonesome followup inquest. But even then, the results would be barely noticed.
The key thing was that Cheyenne Hunt had willed into life a torrent of headline-grabbing sex crime allegations, thanks to what her website boasts is a “sophisticated command of how political narratives are won and lost in the digital era” — and then, with dazzling alacrity, the entire Democratic Party apparatus mobilized to effectuate Swalwell’s blistering impalement, and cast him into the wilderness.
**Not that this qualifier should even be necessary, but yes, I personally always found Swalwell to be objectionable on ordinary political grounds. Which doesn’t even matter here. Because wherever a (male) Democrat happens to fall on the Party’s ideological spectrum, they are liable to be nuked in this same choreographed manner, should there be any hint of a romantic/dating history that can be strategically “narrativized.”
Since everyone in the Democratic Party high command, along with their loyal media adjuncts, either has the memory of a fruit fly, or more probably, refuses to ever develop politically substantive memories in the first place, they of course burst into similarly rapid action to impale Graham Platner — who, unlike Swalwell, had just received an overwhelming electoral mandate from their own Party’s most high-engagement voters, in the state we’re breathlessly reminded will be the crucial battleground to ensure that Chuck Schumer is rightfully installed as Senate Majority Leader come 2027. Platner’s improbable rise in the Maine Democratic Primary had been so resounding that the incumbent two-term Democratic governor, Janet Mills, was forced to prematurely abort her botched candidacy, recognizing she could not compete with Platner among the Dem rank-and-file.
But then in saunters Cheyenne Hunt. Maine electorate be damned, this gal had some big professional credentials to burnish, and she had media allies waiting patiently to be operationalized. Her website declares that she had already triggered a historic “national reckoning” through her victorious Swalwell “efforts,” and she humbly takes credit for having the fortitude to “break one of the most consequential political misconduct stories in recent memory” — simply by “working from a group chat with two other women” (imagine that) from which she claims to have organized her strategic “influencing.” She also quotes herself in heroically italicized font:
And she is now determined to leverage her smashing Swalwell success to “confront misogyny and gender bias in American public life,” wherever it may rear its ugly head, and defeat the “subjugation of women.” Which she takes to be the most urgent political challenge facing 2026 America. Enemy Number One in this quest was evidently Graham Platner. Not a bad target, since the media she’s shrewdly “connecting” with is so petrified of even the slightest critical discernment toward anything Ms. Hunt can present as a momentous new “rape” claim; it’s seen as egregious and unthinkable for anyone to observe, for instance, that the statutory deadline in Maine to replace Platner on the ballot happens to be coming up in just a few days. The shrewd Ms. Hunt surely would have been mindful of the calendar:
The POLITICO article she planted was cleverly framed to suggest corroborating evidence had been uncovered that proves the 2021 rape, though if you spend approximately two minutes diligently scouring the article, no such evidence is presented. There are some ambiguous 2023 Facebook messages between Jenny Racicot and an apparent acquaintance, in which they discuss Platner; the most incriminating excerpt is when Racicot obliquely describes Platner as “consensually careless” on occasion, which if she’d intended as a euphemism for literal “rape,” should definitely be in the running for some kind of glorious euphemism-of-the-year award. Also odd is Racicot’s noticeably favorable characterization of her purported rapist: he’s “charming and funny,” she tells her Facebook correspondent, as well as “a decently intelligent person” and “not all bad.” Which would have to be in contention for the most charitable description any woman has ever made of her purported rapist.
Not to mention the standout oddities from the CNN interview that Ms. Hunt and her cohort expertly stage-managed to coincide with the big POLITICO drop, in which Racicot tells a deeply sensitive Jake Tapper that she felt she had been in a “situationship” with her rapist, offering a theory that this “situation” of theirs was emblematic of “modern dating.” Huh. She also reveals that she’s had to “recall” certain memories of the alleged 2021 rape, which she had otherwise either attempted to forget or forgotten — raising obvious “red flags” about potential “recovered memory” contamination — and furthermore, that she actually “complied” with her own rape. Huh. She divulges that she allowed her rapist to sleep in her bed for the night, and slept in bed with him herself following the rape. She explains she didn’t want to let him leave the house, because she was concerned he might get in trouble with police for drunk driving. There was apparently no thought that the police might be of assistance in apprehending her rapist — she actively did not want Platner to face any police repercussions. (The statute of limitations in Maine for sexual assault offenses is 20 years — we’ll have to see if she changes her mind.) She also said she felt “fine” after the rape, although she was confused when Platner got up and left the next morning without speaking to her first, which was a conversation she apparently desired to have with her purported rapist. Some time after the alleged incident, she says she sent Platner some followup DMs over Instagram, to which he did not reply; she was actively monitoring to see if Instagram marked the messages as “seen.” In these purported messages, she claims she had notified him that his actions that night were non-consensual. Should these messages actually exist, they could potentially be corroborative of something. Adam Wren, the POLITICO journalist responsible for the hugely impressive scoop — which he intrepidly received from Cheyenne Hunt and her “Reckoning Action” outfit — cited the purported Instagram messages when he was asked on Tuesday to clarify what corroborating evidence he’d managed to locate for the story. His answer was the purported Instagram messages — which Racicot had merely described to him. Meaning, whose accuracy or even existence he had not independently verified. This evidently counted as ample “corroboration” for the Plucky Politico, who had no trepidation about Racicot’s inability to produce the messages in question. So he just decided to accept at face value her second-hand “description” of the claimed messages, and likewise accepted at face value her explanation that the messages had mysteriously vanished. Cool.
The POLITICO article was published July 6, 2026 at 3:18pm EST. The Maine Democratic Party had already called for Platner to terminate his campaign by 5:50pm EST, in the panic-disavowal sweepstakes that was instantly launched. Ro Khanna (5:21pm EST) and Ruben Gallego (5:23pm EST) were somehow even quicker — they of course being two nationally ambitious male Democrats who, by dint of that alone, are in a constant harried race against one another to show who can rush out their statements the fastest, whenever some alleged sex problem arises. The in-house Dem podcast studio likewise leaped into action, as Jon Favreau of “Pod Save America” clocked in with his call for Platner’s elimination at 5:33pm EST. Inevitably, soon came the Grim Reaper decree from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chieftains, at 6:34pm EST, pulling the plug on Platner financially. The chair of the Democratic National Committee straggled forth at the wee hour of 7:45pm EST. Formerly ride-or-die pro-Platner pundits funneled in along the way. Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders probably did themselves no political favors by shamefully waiting till the next day to drop their anvils.
If you think this is sufficient time to rationally evaluate the relevant facts and evidence, and make a considered judgment about such reputation-immolating charges as rape — and perhaps most consequentially, proclaim that the expressed will of Maine’s primary voters ought to be voided by Party fiat, in what we’re always frantically told is the country’s most pivotal Senate race, because it’s all-hands-on-deck to overthrow the menace of Susan Collins — well, I don’t know what to tell you.
What the whole thing most vividly highlights is that once again, Dems do not have a collective action problem. At least when roused into action by youthful innovators like Cheyenne Hunt, who has accurately surmised there is no better way to stimulate the languid Party infrastructure than by contriving some lurid sex crimes. Because in that event, Democrats have shown over and over again they can be ruthlessly, coldly decisive.
Friendly reminder that I am doing this Epstein Debate on July 14 in NYC. You are invited. Yes, you.
Tracey is missing the point.
This isn't really about Platner or even the allegations. It's about the incentive structure.
Once political actors realize unadjudicated allegations can effectively nullify the outcome of a primary, they'll have every incentive to reach for that tool again.
Platner is temporary. The precedent isn't.
When in doubt, get the hammer & sickle tattoo, not the totenkopf - even if it costs extra.