By: Charles C. W. Cooke – nationalreview.com – October 16, 2025

I am prepared to share my foolproof technique for free.

CNN reports that Graham Platner, who hopes to be Maine’s next senator, has a record of declaring himself a “communist,” of describing “white rural America” as “racist and stupid,” and of calling all cops “bastards.” The comments were made on Reddit, going back to 2021.

I have developed a strategy to avoid being caught saying that I hate all cops, am a communist, or believe that all white, rural Americans are racist idiots, and, in my infinite benevolence, I would like to share it with Platner — and others — for free. My strategy is that I don’t say those things in the first place. The technique is actually quite simple. In some circumstances, it involves me not placing my hands on a keyboard and typing those sentiments out; in others, it involves not saying them aloud. When practiced concurrently with another useful strategy — not believing any of those things in the first place — it is almost foolproof.

Better still, the approach works across all parts of our political spectrum. As Politico reported this week:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

This, too, is easy to avoid. One merely has to not say — or, preferably, not think — that black people are “monkeys,” or make ugly comments about gas chambers, or talk sympathetically about the “Hitler aesthetic.” One doesn’t need any special equipment to achieve this. Nor are there many complicated steps in the process. Anyone can do it.

Contrary to some suggestions, this method does not outlaw jokes — including jokes about Hitler. Indeed, if my chats ever leaked, you’d definitely find a few jokes about Hitler. It’s just that they’d be at Hitler’s expense. Growing up in Britain, it was pretty normal to makes jokes about Hitler. We had TV shows, such as Dad’s Army and Allo Allo, that did so every week. Our grandparents poked fun at the man at every opportunity. And all English kids knew the following ditty, which is sung to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March:

Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is rather sim’lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.

The mistake that these Republican operatives made — and once you see it, it seems so obvious! — is that, instead of joking about Hitler, they wrote approvingly of him and his views. Therein lies a subtle, but important, difference that, once understood, can be put into practice immediately.

My technique is broad in scope. It would also, for example, have proved useful to Jay Jones, who wishes to be the next attorney general of Virginia. As Audrey Fahlberg noted two weeks ago, Jones recently texted a fellow lawmaker that he desired to go to the funerals of some of his colleagues “to piss on their graves,” that he wished to shoot his political opponents, and that he hoped his rivals’ children would die. Responding to the leaking of these messages, Jones said that “like all people, I’ve sent text messages that I regret.” But this isn’t quite right. If Jones had used my technique — that is, if he had simply not fantasized about pissing on his colleagues’ graves, murdering politicians, or killing children to advance his political aims — he’d never have got himself into this mess in the first place.

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Source: How Not to Be Caught Saying Hideous Things: A Primer | National Review