Free Republic

Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner claimed that he has been able to "make a living on the sea" since leaving the armed forces during a Friday rally, an assertion his financial disclosures don’t appear to support. Platner, who is running for Senate in Maine to unseat incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins, has long identified himself as an oyster farmer and harbor master, giving a blue-collar tinge to his left-wing campaign. Financial disclosures, however, show that he brings in relatively little money from oyster farming, with reports suggesting that Platner receives the majority of his income through veteran’s disability payments. "My...

Robert Allerton Cushman III, the son of a Harvard-educated Canadian public health official, has flown under the radar as Platner casts himself as a blue-collar commercial fisherman Maine's far-left Democratic Senate nominee, Graham Platner, has leaned on his career as a "working-class" oyster farmer to cast himself as a blue-collar everyman. His Ivy League business partner—who owns the secluded island where the farm is based—is, well, anything but. Robert Cushman III is an elite New England boarding school graduate who has described his habit of drinking "foraged spring water with Redmond sea salt." He got into the oyster farming business,...

Maine's Graham Platner is hardly the most extreme Democrat candidate running for office. Graham Platner, the oyster farmer running for the U.S. Senate in Maine, was exposed last month for making a number of damning comments on social media — including posts where he apparently identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested that service members worried about being raped should buy "Kevlar underwear," and smeared all police officers as "bastards." Although he has since covered it up, Platner was also outed for having a tattoo of a skull image similar to that popularized by Adolf Hitler's...

A California family that has operated an oyster farm on the bucolic Northern California coast is fighting back after the federal government moved to kick it off of the National Park Service property where the shellfish have been legally harvested for nearly 80 years. The Drakes Bay Oyster Company faces closure and its 30 employees will be out of work if the National Park Service reclaims some 1,100 acres of an estuary as part of a plan to create a larger marine wilderness preserve at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. Owner Kevin Lunny said federal officials told him...

Supporters of a Marin County oyster farmer claimed victory Tuesday after a panel of scientists concluded that National Park Service officials made errors, selectively presented information and misrepresented facts in a series of reports about his Drakes Bay shellfish operation. The findings mark the second time in a year that the Park Service has been put under a spotlight for essentially fudging data in its attempts to show that the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. harmed the environment.