Andy O'Brien has learned his lesson
A mea culpa and an apology
Once, during a parent teacher conference, my fourth-grade teacher told my parents that she loved my sense of humor, but worried that it could get me in trouble some day because others wouldn’t get it. Well, she sure was right about that.
I’ve been thinking about her this past week after a dumb joke I made on my private Facebook page generated headlines across right-wing media, from the Maine Wire to the Washington Times and The Daily Caller. The Maine Republican Party issued a statement calling for me to be fired from my day job and even Senator Susan Collins weighed in, calling my Facebook post “just despicable,” though also admitting that she had not read it.
It all started when I opened my laptop on Monday morning and saw people sharing some rage bait about Graham Platner. It was an op-ed in The Hill titled “I’m a Democratic strategist. I won’t stay silent about Graham Platner.” I didn’t actually read the whole piece. I stopped when I read the following passage:
“Maine is not an abstract political battleground to me. My parents were born there. Much of my family still calls it home. I spent my childhood summers there, picking blueberries and strawberries, long afternoons at Stanley Pond, bean suppers at the local firehouse, and county fairs that smelled like fried dough and late August. The kind of summers that become the geography of your soul.”
The “I have a summer home in Maine, let me tell you about Maine politics and how Mainers should vote,” is a particularly annoying genre of punditry that has become a bit of running joke in Maine political circles. I should have just ignored the column and not said anything, but my social media algorithm feeds me a steady stream of content to enrage me. I kept seeing the column pop up with clipped quotes like this one from the same op-ed, implying that a Republican controlled pro-Trump Senate is preferable to Platner getting elected.
I love Maine. Which is precisely why this conversation matters to me. I want Democrats to succeed. I want thoughtful policies. I want effective leadership. I want a government that protects rights, expands opportunity, and serves ordinary people. But I also want what is best for Mainers. And sometimes those two desires exist in tension.
Perhaps that is what troubles me most about this moment: the growing expectation that we should be willing to set aside questions of character when the stakes feel high enough, for the sake of electoral victory.
I can’t do that. And I don’t think women should be asked to. Because elections come and go. Majorities rise and fall. Political fortunes change. But character remains.
I copied the “geography of your soul” quote and wrote “First up against the wall when the revolution comes!” I had intended it to just be a tongue and cheek reference to one of my favorite books The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglass Adams. Whenever Adams describes a group of people who are particularly obnoxious, useless, or out of touch with reality he defines them as “a bunch of mindless jerks who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.” I have often used that quote when describing a certain type of Washington D.C. insider pontificating about Maine politics. I used the phrase last fall in a Substack to describe D.C. political consultants who annoyed me on X. One of them jokingly said he wanted it inscribed on his tombstone.
I never, ever intended it to be taken literally. I never intended it to target Democrats who oppose Graham Platner. I especially did not mean for the statement to be aimed at women, as some have interpreted it. I deplore and condemn political violence. And despite how the right tries to spin it, my personal Facebook page is not where I post communications from my employer.
This past U.S. Senate primary has been extremely bitter and I had no intention of re-opening those wounds. I do not want to further engage in a debate that resembles the 2016 presidential primaries with all of the pitfalls around gender and class. There are some liberal-leaning women who do not support Graham Platner because of his past comments about rape and accusations of abuse by a former a girlfriend (which he fervently denies). I wrote a whole piece questioning those allegations, but it is not my place as a man to tell women that their concerns are not valid. Period. All I can say is that I take responsibility for my post and I am sorry. I sometimes make jokes that are funny to me, but not to others. Looking at the quote without any context, I can totally understand why people were alarmed and took it literally.
A lot of people initially liked my post and shared similar criticisms of the op-ed author. But a few hours later, a stranger wrote to me and asked if I literally wanted to murder Democrats who don’t support Graham Platner. I immediately deleted the Adams reference, but eagle-eyed Steve Robinson of the right-wing Maine Wire had already taken a screen shot and ran a story with the most sensational headline he could come up with, declaring that the Maine AFL-CIO called for Democrats who oppose Platner to be executed by firing squad.
This from a guy who “jokingly” asked the Trump Administration to call in an airstrike on Lewiston after it was done with the Houthis in Yemen. I quickly apologized as soon as I saw the story, but it was too late. The next thing I knew, my face was plastered all over social media as a representative for my employer, Platner and his supporters. The Governor’s sister said my threat should be reported to law enforcement, my employer, the Platner campaign and anyone associated with me. Then the threats littered with f-slurs and graphic homosexual fantasies started arriving in my email and voicemail box. Several people have told me to kill myself.
People started calling my employer and demanding that I be immediately fired. Someone found my wife’s phone number and started harassing her. She asked me to take down all the photos of our daughter from my social media for fear that my political enemies would drag her into this. The right-wing media never asked for any comment or explanation from me. They just drew it out for days, repackaging it and finding different angles to continue to make it a story. Robinson himself has obsessively posted about my deleted comment at least fifteen times to rile up his followers. He even accused me of plotting to assassinate the President, doxxing one of his reporters and even molesting my cat! No joke!
As of this writing, the Maine Wire is still talking about my deleted post and I expect that they will continue for a long time. Even when I have had a little peace this week from the constant harassment, it doesn’t last long. As soon as Robinson starts posting more lies and unhinged accusations, the death threats start coming again. A lot of MAGA dudes are sending me texts challenging me to a physical fight as if my post was aimed at them. The Maine Wire has become a tax-exempt online harassment mill resembling the notorious Kiwi Farms, thanks to generous funding from Leonard Leo and billionaire Tom Klingenstein and the blessing of the Maine Policy Institute Board of Directors. I’m just their latest target. Next week it will be a Somali business owner, a trans youth, a Black activist or a homeless person. Anything to distract people from the corrupt, war mongering kleptocracy running this country.
As a communications professional, I should have known better than to post something so stupid and hand the enemy such a gift. And as a result, I have brought all of this negative attention upon my employer and my family. For that I am deeply sorry and I promise it won’t happen again. Lesson learned.
What makes a scandal
For me, politics has always been extremely personal and it can be very hard to separate the personal from the political. I think my political awakening was in 2003 when I was living abroad and watching helplessly as friends were sent to fight a stupid war in Iraq. Overseas newspapers gave a much different perspective on the war than the American media and frequently showed graphic photos of civilian casualties. The image of 23-year old peace activist Rachel Corrie’s mangled body after being crushed by an Israeli bulldozer was on the front page of the Taipei Times in March 2023, four days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We were the same age and shared the same moral outrage to the treatment of Palestinian people. That image remains seared into my mind as a reminder of what can happen when you challenge the death machine.
I remember reading about the 2005 Haditha massacre, where U.S. Marines slaughtered 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including a 2-year old baby. Senator Susan Collins voted for that. And then she went on to support air strikes on Iran that killed 120 school girls ages 7 to 12 while they were in class. My 8-year old daughter could have been one of these girls. That to me is the real scandal. As journalist David Dayen observed recently, “Scandals are reserved for old internet comments and personal failings.” The senseless deaths of thousands of civilians overseas is merely a data point in a broader discussion of U.S. foreign policy. It’s just “collateral damage.” Dead civilians are an unfortunate reality in our never-ending quest to “protect national security.” And how dare you accuse our political leaders of war crimes?
When I returned to Maine in 2007, there were still faded yellow ribbons all over the place from the hyper patriotic war fever that swept the nation in ‘03. But no one was thrilled with the way the war was going. Across the street from my house in Lincolnville Center, my neighbor, the late Tom Sadowski, created a mini cemetery right next to the town War Memorial. He placed tombstones representing each of the thousands of U.S. troops who died in Iraq.
When I lived overseas, I had national health insurance modeled after Medicare, but I couldn’t find a job in Maine that would offer health insurance so I had to pay hundreds of dollars a month in out-of-pocket expenses for my asthma medications. I cobbled together a bunch of part-time and per diem jobs, including house painting, shoveling snow, working the front desk at a homeless shelter and working in warehouses and an auto parts manufacturing plant for $8 per hour. I got to know a lot of people who had much worse struggles than I did.
I was single and had the support of my family if I couldn’t make ends meet. Others had families of their own to support on poverty wages. After spending some time in Sweden where people are allowed the freedom to simply live without fear of going bankrupt due to medical bills or student debt, I began to see the connection between all of our tax money going into the military death machine and how poorly our government treats the working class. It still drives me into a rage when I hear right-wing conservatives putting down the poor and unemployed because I have been there and I felt that pain and shame.
I realized that the only way out of the grind of barely getting by was to borrow thousands of dollars to go back to school and get a teaching degree. Then the economy went belly up with the collapse of the U.S. housing market caused by Wall Street greed. My frustration with the lack of economic opportunities and our disastrous health care system, inspired me to run for the Maine Legislature and I won a house seat in 2008. I was in the middle of my second term when I got my teaching degree, but the economy was still crap. After submitting over a hundred applications and having over a dozen job interviews, I eventually gave up and took a job as the managing editor of The Free Press. I had been writing regular columns as a state legislator and the publisher offered me the job. It paid very little, but I was able to pursue my passion for writing.
The more I reported on former Republican Governor Paul LePage’s attacks on immigrants, people of color and poor folks, the more I wanted to get involved in politics again. So I took a job working in the labor movement where I hoped I could make a difference in helping more working-class people improve their material conditions. I hope I have.
Recent polling indicates that the millions of dollars spent by private equity to destroy Graham Platner’s candidacy is taking its toll, leading Democratic establishment voices and centrist pundits to blame Maine Democratic voters for putting the fate of our democracy on such a risky nominee. But we are merely expressing the feelings of millions of Americans who are fed up with a political establishment that is so completely captured by the wealthy and corporations that it is incapable of stopping the war machine or alleviating the suffering of millions of our own citizens.
“Our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza,” Platner has said repeatedly on the campaign trail.
That pretty much sums up my whole political philosophy. I want my tax money to be spent helping people, not killing them. Unfortunately, the political party I belong to has been complicit in the mass slaughter of people all over the world for a very long time. Platner’s candidacy is part of a broader grassroots movement to change the direction of the party and build a society based on solidarity and care for one another. I hope we don’t lose sight of that as hundreds of millions of dollars flow into our state to turn Mainers against Mainers in order to keep one man in power.
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As you said, lesson learned. And not to minimize your error, but…haven’t we all been there… Keep on keeping on, Andy. Your voice is SO important and valued.
Clearly, More British fiction needs to be taught in schools. I have seen that quote in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe “, a zany book and movie Dash and I went to see twice, wearing towels around our necks. The expression was also in a British children’s book about a Christmas cat that was one of our family’s favorites . I am so sorry this has been happening to you. We are all one mis-step or quote taken out of context from being torn apart by trolls. May the storm pass, may we all extend each other more grace, may they not succeed in taking Graham down, and may we as a culture and a nation decide to unhook or destroy the rage baiting algorithms before there is nothing left of community and joy in our oh so short lives. Be well Andy. That woman’s post was intensely annoying.