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Red Sox Rage Backfires As Senate Hopeful Gets Branded A ‘Nazi’ By Barstool Boss

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Dave Portnoy
Photo Credit: Zach Catanzareti Photo, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

A Maine Democrat trying to ride Red Sox fury into a Senate race ended up sending his own pitch straight into the dirt instead.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy hijacked the conversation, branded him a Nazi and made clear he had no interest in helping turn a baseball gripe into a campaign message.

Graham Platner had tried to inject himself into growing frustration around the Boston Red Sox by releasing an ad attacking team ownership and the role of private equity.

The commercial aired during a Red Sox broadcast on NESN, but Platner later said it did not stay on the air for long.

“Private equity is taking our homes. It’s taking our hospitals. It’s taking beloved local businesses and stripping them for parts,” Platner tweeted. “And now private equity is running the Red Sox into the ground.”

He followed that by claiming the spot was yanked in the middle of the game because of who controls the network.

“Yesterday we started running this ad during the Red Sox game,” Platner added in a follow-up post. “Midway through the game the ad was taken down by the station.”

The ad itself was built to tap straight into fan anger while tying it to a larger left-wing argument about corporate power.

“Private equity is destroying our favorite baseball team, stripping them for parts,” the ad claimed.

“Private equity is buying up our homes, our sports, and our lives. I will reverse the private equity curse.”

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It ends with a line aimed squarely at unhappy Sox fans: “I approve this message because I miss Mookie Betts.”

But the baseball play did not stay about baseball for long.

The fight blew up after Portnoy shared emails from Platner’s team showing they had tried to get Barstool involved before the ad rollout.

In those messages, strategist Jeff Coote pitched Platner as a populist willing to go after Red Sox ownership and private equity interests tied to the organization.

One email described the ad as “an example of Graham’s populist streak and talking about s— people are pissed off about.”

Another pitch tried to frame the campaign around taking on “big bad John Henry.”

Portnoy was not interested in any of it. He immediately shifted the exchange away from Red Sox ownership and back onto Platner himself.

“Now this is the Nazi guy right?” Portnoy shot back. “Yeah I’d be happy to talk to him about that tattoo and him being a Nazi. I’m not as interested in his baseball takes.”

Platner’s team tried to slow things down, saying they would consider it “if we can get to a place where this is a productive convo.” That only made Portnoy come back harder.

“You reached out to a Jew to poo poo a Nazi,” Portnoy snapped. “I’m not Bernie Sanders. If your boy isn’t a Nazi and can handle me 1 on 1 in a convo set it up.”

He later took parts of the exchange public on X and added another jab of his own, writing, “And I’m still wondering why your team thought I’d want to play footsy with a guy who is a Nazi?”

That left Platner’s attempt to cash in on Red Sox anger buried under a very different story — one that had already been hanging over his campaign before Portnoy ever entered the picture.

Earlier this year, Platner came under fire over a tattoo on his chest that resembled the Nazi “Totenkopf,” or “Death’s Head,” symbol linked to the SS.

Platner denied any connection to Nazism in an interview with Pod Save America and said the tattoo came from a drunken decision while he was deployed overseas as a Marine.

“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said, claiming that he is a “lifelong opponent” of antisemitism and racism.

The tattoo uproar did not land in isolation. Archived Reddit posts tied to a deleted account known as “P-Hustle,” which Platner had previously acknowledged was his, pulled in even more scrutiny.

Those resurfaced posts included Platner describing himself as a communist, mocking a Purple Heart recipient and making anti-police remarks, turning a Senate campaign into something much uglier and far more chaotic than a standard primary fight.

One of the most explosive posts targeted U.S. soldier Pfc. Ted Daniels, who had been shot four times in Afghanistan during a 2012 firefight with the Taliban and later received a Purple Heart.

“This video never gets old,” Platner wrote in a June 2019 Reddit post about a viral video featuring Daniels.

“Dumb mother—er didn’t deserve to live,” Platner added.

He did not stop there. “At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt,” he ranted.

“Poor marksmanship on the Taliban’s part is the only reason this mouthbreather made it home, he managed to make every possible s–t decision possible when it comes to small unit combat,” Platner wrote.

When reporters confronted him, Platner refused to apologize. He first declined to answer directly, then tried to defend himself by pointing to his own record.

“I did four tours in the infantry, any attempt to say that I disrespect veterans is slanderous and offensive,” Platner responded.

Asked whether Daniels was owed an apology, Platner stayed defiant.

“Do you know how many of my friends have Purple Hearts? Do you know how many of my friends got wounded? Yeah, a lot of them, thank you.”

The blowback around Platner also spread well beyond Maine.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren took heat from a podcast host over her continued support for him.

On his show, radio host Larry O’Connor played a mashup built around Warren shouting, “my kind of man,” cutting that clip against narration of Platner’s controversies.

“Hey Elizabeth Warren, Graham Platner says that whenever he goes into a Port-a-John, he smells the blue water in there and he has to pleasure himself — how do you respond?” O’Connor said.

“That’s my kind of man!” a clip of Warren answered.

O’Connor followed with another setup. “Hey Elizabeth Warren, Graham Platner just said that [‘American Sniper’] Chris Kyle … is actually a psychopathic murderer…”

“That’s my kind of man,” the clip replayed.

“Yeah I could do this all day,” O’Connor mocked. “And I have no doubt that is in fact her kind of man.”

Platner was also singled out by Sen. John Fetterman, who used him as an example while warning that Democrats had drifted so far left they were now embracing communism.

“I think the extremism is driving it without a doubt,” Fetterman commented in an interview.

“Look at the primaries, you know, all across in the Senate and in the House and look at the kinds of people that have already been elected.”

“I mean, in Maine, for example, Graham Platner, he’s an avowed communist. He described himself as a communist. Antifa, that’s not a slur from me. That’s not a GOP kind of hit. That’s his own words, how he described that,” Fetterman continued..

Platner became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee last month when two-term Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. A June primary win would send him into a November race against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

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