- The death of Lindsey Graham, conservative opportunist, and perhaps closet gay;
- The only damage in the reflecting pool is from Trump’s limousine entourage;
- Item from Facebook about America and Finland;
- Another item about how America is opting out of the world order it built;
- And an item about how our perception of truth changes with the fading of print literacy.
A perfect example of how conservatives politicians are motivated by opportunism, and not principle.
NY Times, Peter Baker, yesterday (though in today’s print paper): How Lindsey Graham’s Journey From Trump Critic to Ally Made Him a Power Player, subtitled “He initially called Donald Trump a ‘kook’ who was ‘unfit for office,’ only to join the new president’s Mar-a-Lago circle. ‘I’m still in the game,’ Mr. Graham once explained of his much-analyzed turnabout.” [gift link]
Senator Lindsey Graham was sitting in the back of a Thai restaurant on Capitol Hill one evening a few years ago after the last votes of the day, tucking into his chicken satay and trying to explain how he had gone from one of President Trump’s most scathing critics to one of his closest allies.
It had been a head-spinning transformation. When Mr. Trump first took the national stage, Mr. Graham denounced him as a “kook” who was “unfit for office.” Then after Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Graham was at his side on the golf course and going on television to say how outrageous it was for anyone to call him “some kind of a kook not fit to be president.”
Mr. Graham made no apologies for his shift. This was politics. “I’ve just made a conscious decision — you know, I’m still in the game,” Mr. Graham explained to me that night as he sipped a glass of wine. “There’s no way to get around Trump. He’s the most important figure in the Republican Party now — not me, not John McCain, not George W. Bush. Donald Trump. Let’s play the hand we’re dealt.”
Also, Graham never married and was widely suspected of being gay, and/or kinky, but kept in the closet and of course supported the Republican party line against LGBTQ+ rights.
Advocate, John Casey, today: Lindsey Graham may have lived deep in the closet. He made others suffer for it, subtitled “The stories about the late Republican senator’s sexuality may multiply after his death. None of them changes who he chose to be, writes John Casey”
There are, of course, a-sexuals in the world. (See: Heartstopper.) Yet:
In the days since Graham’s death, at least a couple of claims have already surfaced and resurfaced and been picked up by outlets covering the story, including an account from a trans woman alleging a paid, off-the-record relationship with the senator, and an older claim in 2020, from porn performer Sean Harding describing Graham as a known quantity within D.C.’s male escort circuit.
Neither has been independently verified. Neither may ever be. And if history is any guide, they won’t be the last. We may see an avalanche of stories, but only those with receipts, both literally and figuratively, should get a second look.
This is the part where I have to be careful, because I want to be honest about something: many of us want this to be true.
Graham spent a career voting against our marriages, our healthcare, and our right to exist while cultivating relationships with men that reporters and colleagues gossiped about for years without ever nailing down.
Which means we have to be extra careful about believing what we want to believe, without evidence.
But wanting a story to be true is exactly the condition under which we should be most careful about believing it. Rumor doesn’t become fact because we’ve convinced ourselves it’s true, and it doesn’t become fact because the person it’s about can no longer answer for himself.
If anything, that’s when it deserves more scrutiny, not less. Now there’s no rebuttal possible, no lawyer, no “To the extent that it matters…” on the record.
To put it bluntly, a dead man is the easiest person in the world to accuse.
Recalling JFK and Marilyn Monroe. J. Edgar Hoover. Eddie Long (a conservative megachurch pastor). Then the writer recalls whether it matters if Graham was gay or not, and considering the battles gays have fought over the decades, concludes,
By those measures, Lindsey Graham doesn’t deserve to be called gay, even if he was.
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And I can’t help noting this.
CNN, today: Trump says Reflecting Pool has been drained and will be ‘put back into service soon’
They drained it again. No huge gash in the pool lining. Only tire tracks, from when Trump drove his entourage through.
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Cute item from Facebook.
Richard Kadrey, from Jesse Case, today: Richard Kadrey’s post
The news is always like: “America has banned wheelchair ramps because they weren’t in the Bible. Finland has made ice cream free.”
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Two think pieces from Big Think today.
This is not news.
Big Think, Jen Kirby, 9 Jul 2026: America is opting out of the world order it built, subtitled “With the U.S. stepping away from international organizations en masse, the groups are being forced to find a new balance.”
Key Takeaways
- The Trump administration is withdrawing the U.S. from dozens of international organizations and, more broadly, the multilateral system it helped build.
- Some of these exits may free institutions to act without American obstruction, but they can also disrupt funding, technical cooperation, and long-standing relationships.
- The longer the U.S. stays out, the more influence it cedes to other countries — and the harder it may be to return to its former position in the global order.
I would say this is all about conservative retreat from a global order that threatens their indefensible religious values.
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This may be news.
Big Think, Andrey Mir, 9 Jul 2026: As print literacy fades, our perception of truth is warping, subtitled “The printing press gave us objective truth. Social media made truth tribal again. AI could make it something else entirely.”
Well– obviously the printing press didn’t give us objective truth. It only gave a claim at truth that we could all agree on was there in print.
Key Takeaways
- Every dominant medium reshapes what people mean by “truth,” from tribal orality’s situational truth to print culture’s objective truth to digital media’s viral truth.
- As society moves away from print literacy, it is also moving away from the habits and conditions that once made shared, objective reality easier to sustain.
- AI may accelerate this shift by producing language increasingly detached from direct reality, making truth harder to verify and more dependent on human efforts to stay grounded.
Sure, but throughout history, people have had qualms about new media. Greek scrolls would inhibit the memories of students to truly understand texts by memorization. And so on and on. Every medium changes the way we understand things.
Before literacy, people’s perception of truth was grounded in “lived experience,” tribal or individual. Facts were defined situationally, tested by outcomes, and stored in personal and collective memory. Collective memory was more durable than any individual’s, but it still bent toward what people needed to be true. With no external record to hold it fixed, the past could quietly reshape itself to fit the present.
Arguably, modern media provides a vast access to information that was never possible in past ages. What effect does that have? Good and bad. It brings access to the accumulated knowledge of human history. It also spreads conspiracy theories and misinformation. It supercharges the trends of human nature.
