Gas Prices Surge Ahead of Memorial Day, Platner Faces New Reddit Scandal | NY POSTcast

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]The promise of a long holiday weekend on the horizon is usually a good thing, but if you're hitting the road for Memorial Day weekend, you might want to check your bank account first or look into carpooling perhaps. A website that tracks gasbuddy.com is predicting the national average for a gallon of gas will be $4.48 this holiday weekend. Now that's slightly off recent highs, but it's a lot more than last Memorial Day's $3.14.

[00:00:25]And gasbuddy thinks the future looks bleak. By the dog days of summer they forecast an average of $4.80 a gallon and prices could creep closer to the all-time record of $5.03 a gallon set during the summer of 2022.

[00:00:40]Yay! The current price spike is of course a global reaction to the war in Iran and the continued shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. Gasbuddy cautioned that if the waterway doesn't reopen, 2026 prices could even surpass that 2022 record. Lucky us.

[00:00:57]Maine's [music] Democratic Senate hopeful is Garam Platner. This guy's closet is full of skeletons and they are walking out like they are on parade this campaign season. There's his Nazi tattoo and his prolifically cringey Reddit posts that are the gift that keeps on giving for his Republican opposition.

[00:01:16]Now the latest problematic post that has been unearthed is Platner's reaction to a war video. It shows an American soldier in Afghanistan taking fire from the Taliban as a diversion in order to help his squadmates get to safety. The soldier who put himself way for the good of others was injured in the act and awarded a Purple Heart, but Platner commenting on the video called the soldier a and I quote "dumb mother effer who didn't deserve to live." With Maine's Senate seat a potential key pick up for Democrats, it is a wonder how the heck this guy got this far and what else might be uncovered between now and November. The Post's politics reporter Ryan King has been following Platner's rise and potential fall and filled me in on how this is all shaping up. Gideon Platner obviously um entered the Democrat primary as an outsider. He was this oyster farmer, um former marine, and really caught fire with the progressive base. Uh but throughout the primary process, we saw that he had a bunch of controversies um under his belt. Um particularly uh this Reddit account that he mass deleted his posts from. People have been able to um archive uh what he had previously posted and uncover it, and there were some wild comments, uh things like him defending uh soldiers peeing on dead Taliban bodies, um things like him making fun of an American soldier who went out in the open to try to distract uh the Taliban from um his fellow uh troops to protect them. Um he was mocking that uh soldier for doing that. Um he's also suggested that rural uh voters are just racists. Um he's called himself a communist. There's so many different things. Obviously, that didn't um tank him in the Democratic primary, but now he's got to face general election voters in Maine, and it's going to be really interesting. The Maine Senate seat is the one that Democrats had seen as their greatest pick up opportunity. It's really Maine and North Carolina, uh but Maine has proven to be difficult for them because Susan Collins has been really resilient there. So, now Gideon Platner, this candidate that many Democrat operatives thought was pretty weak and had some vulnerabilities because of this history um on his Reddit feed um and through to because of controversy over the Nazi tattoo, which he claims he didn't realize was a Nazi tattoo. Um all that they feel is going to give them a lot of baggage in this really critical race that could determine uh the balance of power in the Senate. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had what is being described as a dramatic call this week about Iran. Netanyahu is reportedly over it when it comes to trying to get things done with diplomacy and was pressing Trump to resume military strikes. While neither the White House nor Netanyahu's office shared details of what was discussed on the call, President Trump did say this.

[00:04:19]He's fine. He'll do whatever I want him to do. He's very very good man.

[00:04:25]He'll do whatever I want him to do.

[00:04:26]Trump is keeping what he wants Netanyahu to do close to the vest. At the urging of Gulf state leaders, Trump just days ago called off planned attacks on Iran that would have ended the six week ceasefire. But as the president said earlier this week, We may have to give him another big hit. I'm not sure yet.

[00:04:42]Uh, you'll know very soon. Meanwhile, the Post dug into reports from the New York Times that US and Israeli officials explored a shocking plan to bring back far-right hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a transitional leader. Now, experts the Post spoke to say that there are a lot of holes in that story despite Washington and Jerusalem refusing to deny the plan. The biggest red flag, given that Israeli leadership was reportedly in on the plan, Ahmadinejad was famously anti-Israeli even saying while he was president quote, "Israel must be wiped out of the map of the world." It seems unlikely that any plan to reinstall him even as a puppet went anywhere.

[00:05:21]For more on these stories and everything else you could possibly want to know, check out the New York Post in print or online. And don't forget, like and subscribe to the New York Postcast wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. I promise, you'll be glad you did.

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