I have to hand it to the smoothgroins. They finally got their guy.

When I first started posting to Hexbear, I promised a ruthless curation of the digital landscape that would bypass the buttoned-up, ladder-climbing Harvard Law grads who have controlled our politics for decades. I told my readers we were done with the clean-cut types who harbored ambitions for political office since high school student council. I proudly declared my disdain for those real-life Barbies with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be. I wanted a candidate who was messy. I wanted authenticity.

So when Graham Platner emerged as the rough-hewn vanguard of the Maine working class, I went all in. I convinced myself that his abrasive demeanor and thirty-part threads about supply chains and tactical fleece were the necessary weapons to take on the Epstein Class. When the establishment media began pearl-clutching over his early red flags, I dismissed them as coordinated smears by lizard people creeps.

I now realize that my contrarianism mutated into a spectacular, catastrophic failure of judgment.

The discourse had reached a fever pitch, and my poster’s fatigue blinded me. I spent two straight days in the reply trenches, typing out desperate arguments about the dialectical materialism of being incredibly toxic online. I rationalized his behavior. I called his history of horrifying comments the growing pains of a proletarian hero. I actually typed the phrase “he makes a valid point if you read all the way to tweet twenty-seven” just hours before multiple terrifying sexual assault allegations dropped and the man was forced to record a hostage video reflecting on his path forward while the DSCC yanked his funding.

I thought I was standing up to the neoliberal consensus. I thought defending a guy with a notoriously messy personal life was the ultimate strike against the establishment machine. Instead, I was just staring at a glowing rectangle, alienating my comrades, and doing free PR for an absolute monster. It turns out that weaponized misogyny is not actually a working-class virtue.

Moving forward, deforestgump is implementing a strict new editorial policy. If a candidate’s entire political identity is based on being the belligerent main character of a Tuesday afternoon, I will simply close the tab. I will go outside. I will look at a tree. I will return to the important work of aggregating news that actually matters.

Please forgive me. I am deleting my threads, I am abandoning the Maine Senate race discourse, and I am ready to aggregate once more.