Lindsey Graham Is Dies at 71.
Plus: the feds subpoenaed four Times reporters over Trump's Qatari jet, and no, press freedom isn't dying. And the glossies spent the weekend sanding "abolish capitalism" down to a nicer workweek.
It’s Monday!
I just want to thank everyone who’s stuck around and subscribed since I changed up the format. And I’m grateful for all the sweet notes of encouragement and appreciation that have landed in my inbox since the switch. They mean more than you know.
In a time when people are this divided, and the news gets drilled down to simple talking points, I’m proud to run a newsletter that steps back and looks at the bigger picture, so you come away actually understanding what’s happening in the cycle instead of a soundbite someone handed you.
And I want this to be a conversation, not a monologue. If there’s a point you agree with, disagree with, or just see from a different angle, leave it in the comments. I read them, and some of the sharpest perspectives around here come from you.
Let’s get into the news.
In today’s Read:
Lindsey Graham died Saturday at 71. You’re about to read two completely different obituaries of the same man, and the real news is the seat.
Armed agents showed up at reporters’ front doors over a story about the Qatari jet Trump’s own Secret Service won’t fully trust. I have no love for the Times. This is still the authoritarian move.
The New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post spent last weekend sanding “we want to replace capitalism” down to childcare and free buses. The socialists themselves are the ones telling you the truth.
Quick Rundown: the FBI fires the analysts who wouldn’t work Georgia 2020, Walz’s pardoned child rapist gets deported anyway, Democratic governors yank their Guard out of D.C., Trump calls the Iran ceasefire “over,” Missouri drowns, and more.
Lindsey Graham Is Dead at 71.
The Story.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., died Saturday night at 71, hours after returning from a trip to Ukraine. His office said the preliminary cause was an aortic dissection, a rupture of the aorta tied to hardened arteries.
Graham won his Senate seat in 2002, chaired Judiciary and then Armed Services, was John McCain’s closest friend in the chamber, and traveled the globe for two decades pushing a hawkish foreign policy. He also went from calling Trump a “kook” in 2016 to one of his most reliable allies. Under South Carolina law, GOP Gov. Henry McMaster appoints a replacement to serve until a special election, which now lands on this November’s ballot.
The Left's read. Two lanes. The mainstream obituaries are measured but lead with the same frame: NBC's runs "his evolution from a fiery critic of President Donald Trump to one of his staunchest allies," the flip from McCain maverick to MAGA loyalist. The blog left skips the politesse. Crooks and Liars ran a piece titled "A Proper Obituary for Lindsey Graham" saying he leaves "no great accomplishments, only a legacy of cruelty and cowardice," and Mock Paper Scissors ran a matching hit the same day.
The Right’s read. Tributes. Trump called him “a true American Patriot.” Zelensky called him “a true defender of freedom.” The right-side obituaries center the statesman, the Judiciary chairman who helped seat three Supreme Court justices, the friend who carried McCain’s torch into war zones.
What both sides are skipping. Two things get buried under the eulogy fight. First, the seat. McMaster hands it to an appointee within days, and a special election gets stacked onto an already-loaded November ballot in a state nobody was watching. Second, the honest middle nobody wants on the day a man dies: Graham genuinely was both men. The one who called Trump a kook and the one who golfed with him a year later. Pretending he was only the patriot or only the coward misses the thing that actually made him effective, which was always knowing which way the wind was blowing.
Lindsey Graham grew up in one room behind his parents’ bar and pool hall in Central, South Carolina. He lost his mother at 20 and his father fifteen months later, and at an age when most of us are stressing over a class schedule, he became the guardian of his 13-year-old sister, adopted her, and put himself through school. Whatever you think of the senator, the man built himself from a back room in a bar to one of the leading foreign-policy voices in the country, and carried his little sister the whole way. That’s not nothing. That’s most of everything.
Now the honest appraisal, because I’m not going to canonize him. Graham earned a lot of the criticism he got, and I’ll name the one that’s mine: he was too war-happy, too quick to want American troops nearer to every fire on the map. That instinct is a big piece of why a chunk of us on the right stopped trusting the McCain wing years ago.
And hold this right next to it, because it’s just as true. The man was a dog with a bone on American strength and national security, and in a Senate that’s gone tribal to the point of uselessness, he was one of the last people in it who could actually move a bill. He’d fight you on the floor at noon and share a meal with you at seven, and mean both. His relationship with Trump is the example: he called the guy a kook, then found a way to work with him, and the sanctions bill he finally muscled through two days before he died is what that skill produces. He was also willing to shift his positions as his constituents shifted theirs, which the tribal crowd calls flip-flopping and the rest of us usually call listening.
And when Brett Kavanaugh was getting torched in that 2018 hearing, Graham stood up and threw the punch nobody else on that committee had the spine to throw. People still remember where they were for that one.
Here’s the part the obituaries keep leaving out: the man was actually funny, which is rarer in that building than competence. Back in 2015, Graham called Trump a “jackass,” and Trump read his personal cell number out to a crowd in Bluffton. Graham didn’t sulk. He put out a video calmly executing the phone every way a person can, meat cleaver, blender, golf club, a toaster oven with Bagel Bites, then tossed the wreckage and deadpanned that “if all else fails, you can always give your number to The Donald.” He’d grin for a selfie next to a protester screaming after him. Self-deprecation is a survival skill, and he had it in a party that mostly forgot how to laugh at itself.
Most outlets are going with a signal framing. Open Crooks and Liars and Graham is “cruelty and cowardice.” Open a conservative site, and he’s a patriot and a statesman. Like with every human, it’s not that simple. He was McCain’s shadow and Trump’s ally, a hawk who wanted every war and a legislator who could still cut a deal in a building that’s forgotten how. The progressive version calls his Trump turn cowardice. I’d call it the rarest skill left in that chamber. The press doesn’t invent a lie about Lindsey Graham. It picks which true half to run, based on what its readers already want to feel, and hands you that half as the whole man.
The actual news, the part that changes something this week, is the seat. Henry McMaster is about to appoint a United States senator, and a special election just dropped onto November’s ballot out of a clear sky. The fight over who fills that chair is the story that outlives the news cycle.
Watch who McMaster names, because an appointee running as a quasi-incumbent reshapes the whole board. And watch the calendar, because a surprise Senate race in a red state in a midterm year tends to get decided before most people notice it started.
Rest in peace to the man who raised his sister and never stopped picking fights.
Worth flagging.
The minute the news broke, social media did what it does now: half the internet decided he was assassinated. Israel did it. Iran did it. Russia did it. Ukraine did it. The theories wrote themselves, because he’d just come back from Kyiv and was about to pass a sanctions bill Moscow hated.
Then the FBI turned up at his house to assist local police, which is normal process on the sudden death of a sitting senator with no indication of foul play, and Kash Patel’s clumsy public comment about it poured gas on the fire. Here are the facts. The man was 71. He died of an aortic dissection, the same sudden killer that took John Ritter at 54. Toxicology is still pending, which is routine, so anybody telling you it’s confirmed one way or the other is guessing. These things happen, they happen fast, and they feel even more shocking because you’re always in the middle of “about to do something” when they hit. He was about to pass a bill. That’s not a plot. That’s how sudden death works.
And a smaller one. Nancy Mace marked the man’s death by posting a Godfather clip, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in,” floating herself for his seat before the funeral had a date. Nancy, nobody is pulling you back in. You came fifth in your own governor’s primary last month, at about 12%. Sit down. This one isn’t about you.
The Feds Turned Up at Four Reporters’ Doors. We Need to Talk About the Plane.
The Story.
On Friday, July 10, federal agents delivered grand jury subpoenas to four New York Times journalists, Eric Lipton, Julian Barnes, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, ordering them to testify before a grand jury in the Southern District of New York. They're witnesses in a leak investigation into how the information got out. Not one of them is charged, indicted, or arrested. What set it off: the Times reported, citing multiple briefed officials and two named former Air Force officials, that the new $400 million Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 lacks the antimissile countermeasures the old Air Force One carried, that the defensive systems aren't even visible on the new jet, and that the Secret Service was worried enough to make Trump swap back to the old plane leaving Turkey, which shares a border with Iran. CBS, CNN, and Forbes have all since confirmed the swap.
The Left’s read. The free-press line. Times lawyer David McCraw calls agents on a reporter’s doorstep something that “should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution,” and PBS and CNN frame the home deliveries as intimidation aimed at newsgathering itself. The Times says it will fight.
The Right’s read. The national-security line. Fox and the pro-administration sites frame it as a serious breach: somebody inside the government handed the defensive gaps of the president’s plane to a newspaper during live strikes on Iran, and a grand jury is exactly the tool to find out who.
What both sides are skipping. Two things. First, the plane really is a hole, and that stops being arguable once you read the actual reporting, which is stuffed with detail: no visible countermeasures, former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on the record saying he’s “surprised to see this plane used outside the U.S.” with Iran in the picture. Second, subpoenaing reporters in a leak case is not some Trump invention. It’s a bipartisan, decades-old practice, and the “press freedom is dying” alarm arrives selectively. Obama’s DOJ secretly seized two months of AP phone records across 20 reporters and labeled Fox’s James Rosen a “possible co-conspirator,” and the Supreme Court’s Branzburg ruling says reporters get no special pass to skip a grand jury. Both “lines” skip that these reporters are witnesses, not defendants.
Let me start where the story actually starts, and it isn’t a reporter’s doorbell. It’s the plane. Get it together, Don.
Here’s the honest part Republicans need to hear. Trump wanted a flashier ride, said so out loud, called the old plane not impressive enough for international trips, and pushed to rush a donated Qatari 747 into service before the retrofit could give it the defenses a real Air Force One carries. Then he flew it to Turkey, which borders the country we were bombing that same week. You can maybe make a case for flying the less-armored plane from D.C. to a rally in Wisconsin. You cannot make it for a trip that parks you next door to Iran, and his own Secret Service agreed, because they made him switch planes to get out of there. Like it or not, that jet is a security problem. And a hole in the president’s plane isn’t only his risk. It’s the staff, the agents, the press pool, and the office itself. That’s a national security problem for the whole country.
So is it also a problem that the Times printed a detailed inventory of what the plane can’t defend against? Yes. I read the piece. It names the missing countermeasures, quotes former Air Force brass, walks through where the defensive systems sit on the old jet and where they’re gone on this one. That’s a lot of sensitive material to hand an enemy in the middle of a shooting war, and wanting to know who inside the government spilled it is fair.
Now the part the press really wants you to skip. Is any of this an attack on the freedom of the press? No. Not close.
Nobody at the Times is charged. Nobody’s indicted. Nobody’s arrested. Four reporters got subpoenas to testify to a grand jury in the Southern District of New York about how national security information got out, and a subpoena is a subpoena whether it comes by mail or in an agent’s hand. The target is the source, not the byline. And this play is old, and it’s bipartisan, which is the receipt the “democracy dies in darkness” crowd never wants pulled out. Obama’s Justice Department secretly grabbed two months of phone records from 20 Associated Press reporters and tagged Fox’s James Rosen a possible criminal co-conspirator for doing his job. James Risen fought a leak subpoena for years. Judith Miller, of this same New York Times, sat in a cell for 85 days rather than give a grand jury a name. The Supreme Court settled the law itself back in 1972: reporters get no special pass to ignore a grand jury. So spare me the fainting couch. Where was the shock to the conscience when a Democratic DOJ ran this exact play, quietly, with gag orders so the reporters didn’t even know their records were gone?
Here’s the media lesson, and it’s the whole reason this newsletter exists. The press had two lines loaded before the facts landed, “attack on the free press” or “national security breach,” and it grabbed the one that flatters it. Both lines skip the two things that are true at the same time: the plane is a genuine hole that never should have flown overseas, and the subpoena is a routine, bipartisan leak tool aimed at the leaker, not the reporters. You’re allowed to be annoyed at all of it. Just don’t let anyone sell you a witness subpoena as a tank rolling into the newsroom.
Watch whether the DOJ ever actually names a leaker, or whether this stays aimed at the reporters and quietly dies the way the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal versions just did when those papers pushed back. Watch whether one outlet running the “press freedom” line today so much as mentions that Obama’s DOJ did worse. And watch the plane, because the question that started all of this, whether the thing is safe to fly the president abroad, still doesn’t have an answer.
The jet is the story. The subpoena is the distraction. Get a plane that can defend itself, Don, and there’s nothing to leak.
The Press Spent the Weekend Turning “Abolish Capitalism” Into a Vibe.
The Story.
As DSA-backed candidates swept 2026 primaries and Zohran Mamdani turned the New York mayor’s office into a national launchpad, the big outlets rolled out a wave of “what is a democratic socialist, really?” coverage. The New York Times Magazine ran the marquee version last weekend: Jia Lynn Yang’s “How American Socialism Changed, and Stormed the Democratic Party.” The Washington Post’s business desk ran “What’s the difference between Democrats and democratic socialists?” TIME, MSNBC, and Semafor ran their own. Meanwhile, the DSA itself hit 120,000-plus members on July 4, up from around 6,000 in 2015, and its own platform, “Workers Deserve More!”, says the goal in plain text: “we fight for the abolition of capitalism,” social ownership of all major industry.
The Left’s read. Two moves, one soft and one softer. The Times Magazine aestheticizes: Yang casts socialism as “more of a spirit than a single ideology,” a movement of “astute critics” who are “always imagining other ways to live,” historically “better at critiquing the system than reshaping it.” The Post concedes the goal in a single sentence, Democrats want to “reform” capitalism while the DSA wants to “replace it,” then spends the rest of the piece softening what “replace” means, a 32-hour workweek and social housing framed as the same direction as Democrats, “the socialists just want to go further.”
The Right’s read. City Journal, the Daily Signal, and RealClearPolitics read the same platform and take it at its word: this is an anti-capitalist program, the “democratic” is packaging, and the friendly explainers are laundering it. HotAir even ran a mocking headline crediting the Post for admitting, once, that the DSA wants to destroy capitalism.
What both sides are skipping. Here’s the cleanest fact in the whole story: the socialists are more honest about the goal than the liberal outlets explaining them to you. The Intercept titles its coverage “There’s a New Democratic Machine. It’s Unabashedly Socialist.” Jacobin says the ambition to end capitalism runs straight through the group’s founders. The DSA’s own homepage calls capitalism a system “designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us.” The Post reduces that to policy. The Times reduces it to poetry. And Yang hands you the rebuttal to her own frame without flagging it, reporting a record 38% of Americans now want to move away from capitalism, membership up twentyfold in a decade, roughly 150 DSA candidates this cycle. People aren’t flooding into a spirit.
I’ve been saying this one for months: Democratic socialism is branding. You put the word “democratic” in front of “socialism” to soft-pedal where the whole thing is actually headed, which is socialism sliding toward the centralized control of the means of production, and that last part has a different name. It’s not a slur to say it. It’s the platform. Go read it.
The DCCC Chair Has Laid the Welcome Mat to a Socialist Takeover
Meet Rep. Suzan DelBene, the woman in charge of electing House Democrats, on tape, ceding the Democrat party to the socialists winning its primaries:
Here’s a tip for reading any movement. Skip the explainer written to make you comfortable and go straight to the group’s own website. The DSA says, on its own homepage, that it “fights for the abolition of capitalism.” The Intercept, cheerfully, calls the project “unabashedly socialist.” Then open the New York Times Magazine and watch Jia Lynn Yang turn all of that into a “spirit,” a movement of gentle “astute critics” who are “always imagining other ways to live.” Lovely. It’s also the recruiting pitch with the word “abolition” quietly removed.
I told you a while back that not a single major outlet was digging into the roots, the sources, the actual beliefs of the DSA, that the legacy press would rather rebrand them as plain “progressive Democrats” than report what they’ve said out loud. The move is to explain it away. The Post gets closest, it prints “replace it” in one sentence. Then it spends the next thousand words assuring you “replace” mostly means a shorter workweek and some public housing, and it passes along the DSA’s own repositioning, from “firebrands” to “independent-minded public servants,” like that’s a neutral observation instead of the spin it is.
Let me be fair, because the cross-check requires it. Not every liberal outlet did this. Jonathan Chait wrote a whole Atlantic essay warning that the DSA had become illiberal and dogmatic, and Jacobin lit him up for it.
So when I say the press is downplaying this, I mean a specific genre, the reassuring explainer, not every writer with a byline. Name Chait. He did the work.
And understand what I’m actually mad about, because it isn’t the DSA being honest. When the DSA tells me it wants to abolish capitalism, that’s them being straight, and I can argue with straight all day long. Mamdani is a political snake and hack, and he’ll tell you it’s all “pragmatic delivery,” free buses and childcare, but at least his own party’s platform says the quiet part in writing. What I mind is the friendly press insisting they don’t mean the thing they’ve printed, in black and white; that is what really ticks me off.
Watch whether a single legacy outlet quotes the DSA’s own “abolition of capitalism” line instead of a candidate’s softer paraphrase. Watch the races that tell you how far past blue cities this reaches, Oliver Larkin against Jared Moskowitz in Florida, Francesca Hong for governor in Wisconsin. And watch the rebrand language, “public servants,” “pragmatic,” “sewer socialists,” migrate from the candidates’ mouths into the reporters’ own copy.
Believe the socialists. On this one, they’re the only people in the room telling you the truth.
The FBI fired the two analysts who wouldn’t work the Georgia 2020 probe. Two Atlanta-based intelligence analysts, a married couple, were escorted out last week after refusing to join the bureau’s reopened investigation of Georgia’s 2020 election, saying it didn’t meet FBI and DOJ policy. It sits on top of a bigger move: the FBI has directed roughly 260 analysts nationwide to the Fulton County probe, each assigned an estimated 708 records checks on a July 17 deadline, described in memos as a priority for Director Kash Patel.
Walz pardoned a man who raped a 10-year-old. ICE deported him anyway. DHS announced Friday it removed Tou Lue Vang to Laos, weeks after Minnesota’s Clemency Review Commission pardoned him, a move that had cleared his path to stay. Vang was convicted in 2006 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for repeatedly assaulting a girl starting when she was 10, and once offered her $10 to stay quiet.
Democratic governors are pulling their National Guard out of D.C. Minnesota’s Tim Walz withdrew his roughly 100 troops early on Saturday after they were spotted on “presence patrols” in neighborhoods far from the National Mall, and Maryland’s Wes Moore is bringing his home this week. Pressure is building on Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, whose 162 troops are slated to stay through Aug. 31.
Trump says the Iran ceasefire is “over.” After Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked a Cyprus-flagged container ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump declared the truce dead and the U.S. hit roughly 90 targets across Iran, a third round of strikes in a week. The same day, the White House formally told Congress, under the War Powers Resolution, that it considers hostilities to have ended. Both messages went out inside 24 hours.
Missouri drowned over the weekend. Catastrophic flash flooding forced a state of emergency and hundreds of water rescues, including more than 160 teenagers pulled from Camp Taum Sauk in Reynolds County, and a woman, Faith Gregory, was found dead two miles downstream from her home. Flood watches spread Sunday from Tennessee into the Carolinas while the Intermountain West baked past 110 degrees.
Trump gave Ukraine a Patriot license and threatened Russia’s economy. At the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump said the U.S. will grant Ukraine a production license to build its own Patriot interceptors and threatened 100% secondary tariffs on Russia absent a deal. The catch: standing up domestic production takes months, and Ukraine needs the interceptors now.
The Charlie Kirk case won’t get a ruling until September. Tyler Robinson’s five-day preliminary hearing wrapped, and rather than rule on whether the case goes to trial, Judge Tony Graf set oral arguments for Sept. 1. The defense spent the final day attacking the ballistics rather than the confession.
DOJ is appealing rather than unredacting the Epstein files. After a federal judge ordered the department to unredact more documents or explain why it can’t, Acting AG Todd Blanche declined, said releasing more would harm victims, offered to show a judge material privately, and said the department will appeal. It has published 3.5 million pages and is still holding back roughly 2.5 million more.
Gunfire tore through a Toronto street festival. Two men were killed and four people wounded Saturday evening when shooting broke out near the Salsa on St. Clair festival, in what police describe as a targeted exchange between two people rather than an attack on the crowd.
Did you learn something? Understand something better? If so, share this one with a friend who needs the cross-check.
That’s The Read. See you Wednesday.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.
I will not malign Lindsey Graham. He was a politician, and good at it. His personal life choices are admirable. But I take issue with your characterization of his behavior as our Senator. As a SC constituent, I would not say he was good at listening. He was good at agreeing with us when our vote to elect him mattered and he’d often do the opposite once elected. Many, many Republicans in SC disliked him strongly for his Warhawk tendencies and his disingenuousness. But I still wish him to RIP, and pray for his family.
Graham was up for reelection so the special election which needs to happen in 6 weeks or so is actually to decide who is on the ballot in November. The governor can appoint someone to be a senator in the meantime.