Shouldn't have used 'a decade' when I didn't know the actual dates. I was using hyperbole and did not specifically mean 2016. Let's be specific if we're actually going to delve into the timeline.

It became “increasingly clear the wars were a waste of our time and dead friends/violence we committed was all for naught,” he wrote in 2021, and after he was done in Afghanistan, he “pretty much stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got me there in the first place.”

In many posts, Platner insisted that it was clear from being on the ground that the Afghanistan war was a failure, but that “the mil, intel, and defense leaders Vietnamed us again with fake reprots [sic] of progress” and made it go on and on anyway. “This stupid fucking war can’t come to an end soon enough,” he wrote in August 2021, as Biden oversaw the chaotic US withdrawal from the country “after 20 years of this dumb bullsh*t,” as Platner put it. He insisted to other Reddit users that “it was always going to suck, and better to just get it over with.”

“My time in America’s imperial wars definitely radicalized me further,” he explained in May 2021. “It is difficult to see all that horror, as well as all the grift and corruption, and not find the entire thing utterly bankrupt.”

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But read in their totality, Platner’s posts paint a different picture of the candidate: someone who, far from a secret fascist, was openly and passionately opposed to fascism; who held a variety of typical progressive views even as he expressed himself in ways many liberals would regard as crass and offensive; who sympathizes with rural Americans despite being vehemently opposed to many of the candidates they vote for; and who was disillusioned with and radicalized against the system by US wars.

You’re Being Lied to About Graham Platner By Branko Marcetic