Democratic socialist and anti-Zionist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has become the first New York City mayor to boycott the Israel Day Parade since its creation in 1964.

At a security briefing on Thursday for the then-upcoming parade, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, alongside Mamdani, shared details on the security measures that would be implemented in order to ensure the safety of all attendees.

‘I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that the mayor of New York City, a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel, chose not to be here.’

“This Sunday, New Yorkers will see the most extensive security plan that the NYPD has ever put together for the Salute to Israel Parade, including the largest number of officers ever assigned to that detail. Included in that security plan will be the most heavy weapons teams ever, robust camera coverage of the area, and comprehensive screening of everyone entering the parade route including spectators, vendors, participants, and the press,” Tisch said.

Despite the commissioner’s plans to march “proudly” as the honorary grand marshal, Mamdani, when asked his response to critics who say that he can still attend the parade to support Jewish New Yorkers without directly supporting the current Israeli government, replied: “I said on the campaign trail that I wouldn’t be attending the parade, and I’ve made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear.”

He also said: “I take seriously my responsibility to protect the safety and well-being of every New Yorker and every event, regardless of my attendance.”

The Israel Day Parade, formally called the Israel Day on Fifth, is the largest gathering in support of Israel in the world. It has been held annually in New York City for the past 61 years, with every mayor from Robert F. Wagner Jr. to Eric Adams having marched in it during their time in office. The parade consistently attracts tens of thousands of participants and spectators every year.

The event is also profoundly pro-American, with this year’s theme of “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists” visible in the sea of American and Israeli flags down Fifth Avenue.

Mamdani’s decision comes at a frightening time for Jewish New Yorkers. For the month of April, anti-Semitic hate crimes made up 60% of all reported incidents in the city, while numerous anti-Israel demonstrations — many of which Mamdani has supported — have been held outside synagogues and Jewish institutions.

However, it isn’t as though skipping out on a cultural celebration is a norm for Mamdani. The mayor was in attendance at this year’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, during which he compared historical Irish suffering to the “genocide” of Palestinians.

In March, Mamdani attended the Lunar New Year Parade with New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul. Last year, he appeared at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, India Day Parade, and Pakistan Independence Day Parade.

RELATED: Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses NYC Mayor Mamdani of anti-Semitism after his first day in office

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Mamdani also became the first mayor in the city’s history to address an International Workers’ Day rally, also known as May Day, on May 1.

Notable officials and figures who marched in the Israel parade on Sunday include Gov. Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), former Mayors Eric Adams (D) and Michael Bloomberg (D), Nassau County executive and Republican nominee for governor Bruce Blakeman, and Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, among many others.

“I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that the mayor of New York City, a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel, chose not to be here,” said Lawler, who has been a vocal critic of Mamdani and his administration.

Adams uploaded a video to his official Instagram account Friday publicly announcing his excitement for the parade: “As your mayor, I was proud to march in this parade for all four years I was in office, and this year will be no different. I’ll be right there, marching with tens of thousands of New Yorkers.”

The CEO of the prominent Jewish organization UJA Federation of New York, Eric Goldstein, blasted Mamdani in an open letter Friday.

“You are the first mayor in the history of New York City — home to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world — to refuse to participate in this parade because you fundamentally reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”

Goldstein claims Mamdani’s “refusal to participate this Sunday is not principally grounded in criticism of a particular Israeli government or policy” but rather rooted in a “refusal to acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”

“Your absence — and what it represents — will be long-remembered.”

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The cost of doing business today may be higher than ever, even if it involves fewer humans.

While some major U.S. companies are starting to see the vast costs of their robotic colleagues as prices soar for AI-driven operations, companies are still pushing employees to use more and more AI.

According to executives at computing companies, the cost of AI has now exceeded the typical employee salary totals.

The mantra is that even more AI usage needs to happen.

“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at chip maker Nvidia, said in early May.

The cost of AI computing, especially when it comes to coding, has come as a surprise to some companies once they start integrating it into their teams and spreading access to their engineers.

Most of the major corporations have been using Anthropic’s Claude, which is seemingly cheap when it comes to image generation, but dollar signs pile up when generating documents or computer code.

As Forbes reported, Uber ran through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. Chief technology officer at the company, Praveen Neppalli Naga, even admitted to spending $1,200 by using AI for a personal demo, with the company’s engineer cost ranging from upwards of $250 per month in usage, all the way up to $2,000 per month.

RELATED: DOJ asked to probe whether Biden officials let Microsoft off easy in exchange for cushy jobs

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Between December and March, Uber achieved a 95% usage rate among its engineers to implement AI tools and use Claude for coding.

Over at Microsoft, thousands of its developers were invited to use Claude for coding, but so were project managers, designers, and other employees.

The Verge reported that after starting in just December, the usage has become so popular that the company is making a switch and adopting Microsoft’s own Copilot model into its workflow.

The mantra shared by all of these companies is that even more AI usage needs to happen. Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta are pushing employees to keep spending tokens.

RELATED: Self-driving trucks are about controlling the roads — not making them safer

Idrees MOHAMMED/AFP/Getty Images

Uber ranked its engineers on internal leaderboards based on Claude code usage. A Meta employee reportedly made a leaderboard titled “Claudenomics” to track which workers were using Claude the most.

Fortune reported that Amazon is pushing employees to “tokenmaxx” and use as many tokens as possible.

As icing on the cake, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he believes eventually every employee at his company will work alongside 100 AI agents.

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The Democrat hoping to win a seat in the U.S. Senate from Texas for his party for the first time in decades goes to a very unorthodox, woke church.

James Talarico frequently employs religious wording and concepts to justify his far-left agenda, but his church is openly supportive of the extreme LGBTQ+ movement and funding abortion.

The far-left church calls abortion a ‘blessing’ and uses donations to fund the transportation for women to obtain abortions outside of Texas.

Talarico has even preached sermons at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, according to a Daily Wire report.

The far-left church calls abortion a “blessing” and uses donations to fund the transportation for women to obtain abortions outside of Texas. It also lists Planned Parenthood as one of the organizations that shares the church’s “vision and goals for the world.”

The church also supports Out Youth Austin, a group that runs a transgender summer camp and stocks sexually explicit books for children in its library.

Talarico has been very public about his belief that the Bible supports abortion.

“I say all this in the context of abortion, because before God comes over Mary, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary’s consent,” he said in an interview with Joe Rogan. “You cannot force someone to create … so that’s how I come down on that side of the issue.”

That reading of the Bible may not be in line with the vision and goals of traditional Christians in Texas.

The church also sides with Palestinians in Gaza by supporting an organization that lists “Zionism” along with “racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, queerphobia, transphobia, classism, and ableism.”

RELATED: Stephen Colbert melts down when CBS pulls Talarico interview just months before show ends

Talarico is running against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has had his own problems in relation to marital infidelity accusations and other various scandals. Paxton has used his office to oppose abortion in Texas.

Paxton has a slight edge over Talarico in the latest polling. If the far-left candidate is able to pull an upset, it would help tremendously toward Democrats winning control of the Senate.

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California used to be a land of promise that produced fine Americans who mocked D.C. elites, a former U.S. Marine officer says.

In the face of failed state and federal leadership in the Democratic Party, an ex-soldier has a message for inland communities.

The coastal cities and elites are supported by the inland residents, says security expert and veteran Adam Castillo.

‘I’m tired of being the butt of jokes for MAGA.’

In an interview with Blaze News, Castillo explained that he found opportunity in Myanmar after being left as an “unemployed veteran as part of that massive sequestering period by the Obama administration around 2013.”

Promises from the Barack Obama administration of finding jobs for veterans turned into nothing more than a check-box item for hiring managers, Castillo claimed, who would then say, “Hey, we we interviewed a veteran,” and move on.

Castillo ran a security company during Myanmar’s 2021 coup d’état, which taught him a valuable lesson: things can be done properly with the right leadership, even under the harshest conditions.

It is that experience that brought Castillo to believe the inland communities of California should be the focus for Republicans while the rest of the state crumbles around them.

“To be frank, who do you think supports these coastal cities? The inland desert communities, right? We’re the ones commuting to the cities to make sure they’re run, to make sure that the sanitation infrastructure is run [and] the electricity is run,” Castillo declared.

RELATED: Self-driving trucks are about controlling the roads — not making them safer

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Republicans and conservatives should start with town councils, school boards, and the like before splintering outward into state legislatures, Castillo suggested.

“When you start going inland, specifically into the deserts, this is where it gets really conservative. … They are the power of California.”

“What we need to concentrate on in terms of organization at the community level is the inland communities, not the coastal cities,” he went on.

“School board, city council, mayor, state legislator, then congressman, then senator,” Castillo said.

For the coastal elites, Castillo says the voters need to deal with the consequences of their elections for a bit longer.

“I think we just let the liberal coastal cities rot,” the former officer bluntly stated. “Honestly. They’re already rotting. So let them continue to rot. They do not represent us. They don’t even have that many representatives.”

RELATED: The left spots fake reality only when Hollywood gets hurt

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While Castillo’s remarks could be seen as divisive or jarring by some, he remained confident that a Republican governor in 2026 and beyond would set an amazing precedent in smaller communities and provide much-needed inspiration.

In the end, his belief that Californians can still recapture their glory years serves as his ongoing motivation.

“I’m tired of being the butt of jokes for other states. I’m tired of being the butt of jokes for MAGA,” he concluded.

“We’re Californians. We were better than you people,” he said of D.C. elites. “We were born better than you people. It’s about time we reclaim our seat at that power.”

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The House Armed Services Committee released its first draft of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization bill last week.

Section 224, a provision buried hundreds of pages into the $1.15 trillion defense policy legislation that outlines the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” has generated some controversy on the fringes of Capitol Hill.

‘This provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship.’

Committee member Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is among those who rushed to characterize section 224 as benign, stating that it amounts to a “security agreement” that “will allow for the US to leverage advanced Israeli technologies.”

Some, however, have expressed concerns that the initiative will effectively mean a politically consequential integration of the U.S. and Israeli militaries along with their respective industrial supports.

The legislative proposal

Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA draft would have the secretary of war designate a Pentagon official to oversee the synchronization of “cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.”

The designee would, among other things,

identify Israeli-origin or jointly developed technologies that the U.S. could integrate into its systems and programs;facilitate the transition of such technologies from research and development into procurement and acquisition pathways;establish “frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry”; andpromote “joint training exercises and information-sharing mechanisms to enhance operational readiness to deploy jointly developed technologies.”

The section clarifies that the “cooperative efforts” pursued under this technology initiative can be carried out through numerous domains including: counter-unmanned systems; anti-tunneling and subterranean threats; missile and air defense technologies; AI; directed energy; cyber warfare; biotechnology and biomanufacturing; network integration; and defense industrial base cooperation, manufacturing, and co-production.

Backlash

Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, claimed in a recent analysis for Responsible Statecraft that “if fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world.”

RELATED: White House says no worries after report claims rebuilding missile inventory used in Iran strikes will take years

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While acknowledging that the U.S. has worked closely “with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan,” Freeman said that section 224 would not only “fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future” but afford the foreign power “the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S.”

Beyond potentially setting the stage for more Israeli influence over American politics and fusing together the two nations’ military-industrial complexes at a time when the majority of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, Freeman — echoing a colleague at the Quincy Institute — suggested that the initiative will shield the relationship from public scrutiny by migrating it from a visible aid vote in Congress “into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon did not respond to Blaze News’ requests for comment.

Responding to Freeman’s report, departing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted, “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor.”

“We are a sovereign country,” Massie added in a post Rep. Van Orden suggested was the “dumbest possible take.”

Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he will introduce an amendment in committee to axe section 224. Khanna noted further that “Trump can’t kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social.”

A New Policy, the PAC founded in 2024 by a pair of Biden staffers who quit over the administration’s support for Israel, is campaigning against section 224.

“At a policy level, this provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship, shifting the leverage we currently hold because of our security assistance to Israel over to the Government of Israel who would be able to hold key [Department of Defense] capabilities hostage through the integration of Israeli technologies into the DOD supply chain,” states the PAC’s template letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Section 224 also assumes a commonality of national security interests between Israel and the U.S., which, as the current conflict with Iran clearly demonstrates, does not exist.”

Code Pink, the leftist group co-founded by former Democrat political activist Jodie Evans, has also seized upon section 224 as a cause du jour, calling upon Congress to reject “US integration with the Israeli military.”

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The Supreme Court of the United States has shut down the National Football League’s attempt to keep a major lawsuit hidden behind closed-door arbitration — which began when Brian Flores interviewed for a head coach job with the Broncos.

“This is a bizarre story — has been going on for years and years and years and years,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere comments on “Stu and Dave Do America.”

Flores’ lawsuit alleges that Broncos officials did not take him seriously as a candidate for the job because he’s African-American, as they showed up hung over and an hour late to interview him.

However, the Broncos released a statement that Flores’ allegations were not true and that he was a serious candidate.

“Now, what’s interesting about this is the reason why the background of all this is what’s called the Rooney Rule. Basically, it was an idea a while ago. They said there weren’t enough African-American coaches, and they said, ‘Hey, well, one way we can do that is force teams to interview African-American candidates for every job,’” Stu explains.

“The way they measure this and the way the complaint is sort of formed is, well, about 60%, let’s say, of the league’s players are African-Americans. So therefore, they say 60% of the coaches should be African-Americans,” he continues.

Stu points out that despite the statistics, there are wildly different skill sets used in each position.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this at all, but Andy Reid has a different build than, let’s say, [DK] Metcalf,” he says.

“It’s one of those things where you don’t need to be an incredible athlete to be a coach. So all of us whiteys go into coaching,” he adds.

Not only do the positions require different skill sets, but African-Americans are only 11% of the American population.

“They’re hiring to the best jobs available — the players — at seven times the representation of the population. That does not strike me as racist,” Stu says.

“I think they’re picking on merit because they want money and they want the best players on the field, and the best players typically wind up being African-American for whatever reason,” he adds.

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A Michigan man was caught on video attacking and attempting to kidnap a 14-year-old girl last month, and the Kentwood Police Department said in a statement that it wasn’t the only assault he allegedly committed that day.

“A 66-year-old female reported that while working in her yard between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on May 12, 2026, a male suspect stopped his vehicle, engaged her in conversation, made unwanted advances, and physically assaulted her,” police said.

‘I think he chose me because he saw me as a woman alone.’

Mary Raab, the first alleged victim, told WOOD-TV she was planting flowers by her mailbox when a man approached and told her that he was struggling because his brother had died.

“He got out and said, ‘I have had this very traumatic incident happen to me, my brother passed away, and I am in deep grief, and I do not know how to deal with it,'” Raab said.

Raab added, “I am thinking, ‘Well, this is very weird.'”

Raab said the man then asked her if he could use her restroom and wash his hands. Raab said she declined and directed him to a local gas station.

“I went to shake his hand, and then he put his arms around me and went to kiss me on the mouth, and I turned my head away, and he planted his lips between my jawbone and my neck,” Raab said.

She continued, “He made it kind of difficult to break out of his embrace.”

Raab added, “It is violating somebody’s space; why do you think you have the right to do that?”

“I think he chose me because he saw me as a woman alone. He was definitely testing me to see how vulnerable I was, and luckily I was calm enough and level-headed enough to make him go away without having anything devastating and dramatic happen,” Raab said.

At around 6:40 p.m., police officers responded to a report of an attempted kidnapping.

Video appears to show a dark-colored SUV pulling up alongside a teen before a man jumps out of the vehicle, runs toward her, and assaults her.

“A 14-year-old female reported that the suspect stopped his vehicle, approached her, physically assaulted her, and attempted to restrain her while she was walking on the sidewalk,” the statement read.

Police said the victim was able to fight off the suspect, who fled the crime scene in his vehicle.

Court records obtained by WWMT-TV noted that the girl told investigators the suspect grabbed her and told her, “I got you,” before she fought him off.

Police described the teen’s acts as “heroic.”

“That victim absolutely saved her own life that day; she did amazing things and fought hard and made that suspect jump back in the car and take off,” Kentwood Police Department Captain Tim Wierenga told WOOD.

Investigators interviewed witnesses, utilized license plate information, and obtained surveillance video from a resident. Detectives determined that the same suspect committed the assault and attempted kidnapping.

Police identified the suspect as 29-year-old John Moore and arrested him within 24 hours of the alleged crimes.

Records from the Kent County Correctional Facility show that Moore was arrested and booked on May 13. Moore is being held on $140,000 bail.

Moore was charged with unlawful imprisonment and assault and battery.

Citing records from the Kent County Sheriff’s Office, the New York Post reported that Moore also was hit with two probation violations.

“Obviously age didn’t matter to him; he was just looking for a victim,” Raab said. “But I am glad that I kept my head. I am glad I didn’t let him into my house.”

RELATED: Teen abducted from Dallas Mavericks game tells harrowing story of being sex-trafficked, raped — and how God saved her

WOOD reported that Moore had been previously arrested for being a “bathroom peeper who recorded an upskirt video” at a grocery store in September 2023.

WOOD at the time reported that a woman was in a restroom stall of the store when she noticed Moore “peering down at her from the next stall over.”

Surveillance cameras also caught Moore recording an upskirt video in the store’s common area and “crouching down behind the victim” to position his cell phone to record up the shopper’s dress, according to WOOD.

In 2025, Moore allegedly sexually assaulted women at a different grocery store.

Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker told WOOD that Moore walked around the store telling female customers they had spiders on their backs and then grabbed their buttocks.

Three women reported that Moore assaulted them, Becker said.

Moore was sentenced to time served; he had already spent six months in jail. Moore also was given three years of probation and ordered to register as a sex offender.

Moore’s public defender at a hearing called him “kind” and “gentle,” WOOD reported.

“He’s kind, and he’s gentle, and he’s patient,” attorney Laura Joyce said of Moore. “And I don’t think these crimes are reflective of the person that he is.”

“I think that he’s had a reckoning while he’s been in jail regarding some potential substance abuse issues that he has to handle,” Joyce added.

Those who witnessed suspicious activity related to the case or the suspect are urged to contact the Kentwood Police Department at 616-656-6580 or send an anonymous tip through Silent Observer at 616-774-2345.

The Kentwood Police Department did not immediately respond to Blaze News‘ request for comment.

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New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly unveiled housing agenda called Fix the City represents a dramatic expansion of government power over private property — honing in on “the worst landlords in New York City” as a target.

“When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards,” he explained.

“Stewards that include community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves,” he added.

“Pat Gray Unleashed” executive producer Keith Malinak is shocked to hear the cheers from the crowd during Mamdani’s speech, calling them “good little communists.”

“Wow, so they’re going to redistribute wealth. They’re going to take the property from the landowner and give it to the tenant,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments.

Mamdani also recently quoted former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, telling a crowd, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

He quickly caveated, “If anything, my friends, it seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess.”

However, Gray doesn’t see it the same way as Mamdani.

“It’s worse than I imagined, I think. It’s even worse,” he says. “And it’s unabashed. And it’s unashamed. He’s just fully embracing Marxism.”

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Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee hoping to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, has in recent months polled relatively well and enjoyed the support of fellow travelers in D.C. despite a series of scandals — including one scandal that prompted multiple members of his campaign to jump ship.

Platner has managed, for instance, to maintain the support of Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton (Mass.), Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Sen. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), even after it was revealed he previously identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested that service members worried about being raped should buy “Kevlar underwear,” smeared all police officers as “bastards,” mocked Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and adorned himself with an apparent “totenkopf” tattoo reminiscent of the skull image popularized by Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel elite guard.

‘He is an issue.’

While Platner’s campaign has always been plagued by controversy, it appears to finally have become too much for some Democrats to bear — especially after it was revealed that the married candidate sent at least six women sexually explicit texts.

Amy Gertner — Platner’s wife since 2023 — discovered the trove of debauched extramarital texts, then brought them to the attention of her husband’s Senate campaign during the vetting process last year, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“The United States Senate is not a training ground for redemption,” Genevieve McDonald, the former Democratic state representative who resigned as political director of Platner’s campaign in October, told the Times. “It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity.”

McDonald claimed that Platner sent sexually graphic texts to as many as a dozen women.

After current and former campaign officials confirmed the exchanges to the Times, Platner’s campaign confirmed to Politico that the candidate had indeed sent the texts.

RELATED: Squad-endorsed candidate once reportedly volunteered with group tied to al-Qaeda and testified for terrorist ‘blind cleric’

Graeme Sloan/Getty Images

Morris Katz — a strategist for Platner’s campaign who wrote that he wanted to use images of his penis in a 2020 children’s book — said of the reports about his boss’ wandering eye, “It’s no one’s f**king business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”

Gertner — who receives money from the campaign for serving as its volunteer coordinator — tried on Saturday to turn her husband’s scandal on the media, noting in a video statement shared online by Platner, “It makes me really angry, disappointed, and I find it really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on.”

After insinuating that questions about Platner’s trustworthiness and fidelity aren’t relevant to the race, Gertner said that she and her husband went to marriage counseling and that she doesn’t “want a perfect marriage.”

Like Gertner, Rep. Ro Khanna reaffirmed his support for Platner, stating on Saturday that he was proud of Collins’ challenger “for having a vision for a new deal for our time.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), however, adopted a different tone, telling ABC News when asked on Sunday whether Platner might be jeopardizing Senate control for the Democrats, “Yes, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer.”

Levar Stoney, the former Democratic mayor of Richmond, Virginia, similarly knocked Platner, writing, “I can’t help but think that if this candidate were a person of color or a woman, my party would be asking them to consider stepping aside immediately. A Nazi tattoo! Now this. I want Democrats to take back the Senate — but not like this.”

Prior to the revelations about Platner’s sexting exploits, some Democrats were already airing their concerns about his candidacy.

“I think when we’re talking about moral clarity and what we want to see from Democrats, I think he is an issue,” former Biden press office chief of staff Yemisi Egbewole, told Fox News’ Bill Melugin last week.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) also denounced Platner last week, telling CNN, “I’ve been clear about Graham Platner. I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying.”

“I hope Maine voters agree with me,” continued Auchincloss. “I think it would be a mistake for the Democratic Party to think that Graham Platner’s brand of the Democratic Party is what wins us durable majorities throughout this country.”

Over the weekend, the Maine Wire reported that Platner appeared to have an account on the messaging application Kik — long a cesspool for perverts and child exploitation — with the username “phustle0331.”

CNN later confirmed that the account, which features a photo of a partially naked individual with tattoos identical to those sported by the Democratic candidate, belongs to Platner, the same person Sen. Warren said last month was her “kind of man.”

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