In a video interview with Pod Save America that aired on Monday, Platner said he and fellow marines got matching tattoos at a parlor in Split, Croatia, in 2007 while deployed overseas. He said that he wanted to address the issues himself before opponents could weaponize them, saying there isn't anything worse or different than his problematic Reddit posts that have come back to bite his campaign in recent days, and insisting that he had no knowledge of the imagery's historical associations.
On August 8, 2022, a Republican state legislator received a disturbing string of early-morning text messages from a former colleague, Jay Jones, this year's Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general ... Jones, who at the time had recently resigned from the state house after a brief stint representing Norfolk, had strong feelings about how the political class was eulogizing recently deceased former state legislator Joe Johnson Jr., a moderate Democrat with a long tenure in Virginia politics ...