This Week, Death Took Lindsey Graham's Body. Trump Took His Soul Long Before That. We All Know That Grief.

This Week, Death Took Lindsey Graham's Body. Trump Took His Soul Long Before That. We All Know That Grief.

Lindsey Graham is dead, and it gives me no joy. This is not a celebration; it is a lament. The moment any human being leaves this planet, it is almost always an occasion to mourn. When death arrives, it is a permanent interruption, an unexpected or unwanted end to a complIcated life in progress. There is an incompleteness that comes: work left undone, plans abandoned, journeys ceased. In nearly every case, in the wake of someone’s passing, so many possibilities die as well. This is no different. Lindsey Graham has passed away, and regardless of our politics, today we should grieve over the loss of the man and the leader he might have been, had he never crossed paths with Donald Trump. It is a day to wonder how he could have altered this nation for the better, the good he might have authored in the lofty position he occupied. It is a day to rewind through one person’s very public story and watch how a soul can be sold off in a thousand tiny moral transactions long before their body expires. Lindsey Graham’s moral collapse over the last decade has been staggering to witness: In 2015, he called Donald Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" and a “jackass” who did not deserve to be President. In 2016, he said of the Republican Party, “If we nominate Donald Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it.”In 2021, following the January 6th assault on our Capitol, Graham seemingly cut ties with Trump, commenting, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” And in June of 2026, just weeks before his sudden death, at a victory speech that preserved his Senate seat, Lindsey Graham gushed, "I want to thank the big guy, God, Trump comes later. Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're going to start with him.” That, in itself, should merit profound grieving across this nation. It’s difficult for younger people to understand how Lindsey Graham was viewed before Trump’s arrival. He was largely regarded as a reasonable, level-headed politician, always willing and capable of collaboration across the aisle. For those nearly twenty-five years prior, he forged friendships, built alliances, and crafted compromises in ways that became all but impossible for him in his final years. While campaigning in 2015, Graham famously said of Joe Biden: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.” I grieve the death of that man; the one capable of seeing the humanity across the aisle, the one who was human first, politician second. Every one of us should. I think, deep down, we all do, because we know what it feels like to lose someone long before they die. We all have Lindsey Grahams in our lives: people whose humanity we have watched erode since the escalator descent of a morally vacant career criminal a decade ago. We’ve all looked on in helpless disbelief as their bedrock values began to shift, their hard moral lines were erased and redrawn, and their once soft hearts became calloused and closed. We have all had someone we love die a shell of who they once were, because of their allegiance to a serial grifter whose cultic hold slowly poisoned them. That’s why his death hits close to home. Lindsey Graham’s ethical implosion is perhaps more understandable than that of the people in our lives, as his proximity to Trump’s power (or the fear of that power being weaponized against him) was likely too great a temptation to withstand. The kind of wealth and influence he had access to probably seemed well worth the moral compromises and severed ties. For our family members and former friends, it’s much harder to make sense of how it’s all happened; how they were seduced and duped into such a sycophantic tribal allegiance to a man they’d have openly condemned a decade ago. That transformation isn’t as easy to unpack, and many of us will spend the rest of our lives wondering who the people we love might have been. This week, death took Lindsey Graham’s body. Trump took his soul and the man he might have been long ago. For most of us, that kind of grief feels all too familiar. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

ICE Is A Cancer Upon This Nation, And The Good People Here Should Not Tolerate It.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.Renee Good.Alex Pretti.Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez.These are merely the murdered whose names we know, the ones they could not conceal or cover over. They are four, once-in-history, never-to-be-repeated human beings assassinated by empowered sociopaths who feel no accountability to the laws of this land or of any higher laws. And for each of these, there are thousands upon thousands of human beings whose stories have been invaded, whose bodies have been violated, whose hearts have been stopped. They are the unseen fathers, favorite aunts, grandmothers, and older brothers brutalized in secret, abducted under the cover of darkness, pulled from their vehicles, viciously assaulted, raped, shackled like animals, and certainly worse. They are human beings living alongside all of us, who in these very moments are being held without charges, imprisoned without cause, denied due process, representation, healthcare, meals, and human decency—and not to make us safer, not to address illegal immigration, not for anything but to satisfy the bloodlust of racists and bigots.This should be the final straw for us, America. Compassionate human beings should not tolerate this. People who claim to be pro-life should be brought to tears. Those espousing family values should be fully incensed. Anyone with children of their own whom they love should be sick to their stomachs. Men and women of every faith should be unequivocally condemning this. People of conscience and morality should be unable to sleep. Good people ought to be fully heartbroken. This is a sharp line in the sand, and we all have to make our choice in this moment. There is no neutral middle ground here; no hedging or justifying or entertaining of both sides. There is no valid human opinion that makes this OK. You either permit the brutality or you don’t.You either make peace with the madness or you push back hard against it.You either assign equal value to people or you don’t.You either hear the cries of a child pleading for her family and realize we’ve lost the plot, or you declare this is the story you’re comfortable co-writing. I don’t want to hear about your politics; this is about your heart. What I.C.E. is doing under the guidance of this Administration is a human rights violation unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. It is a direct assault upon the very bedrock of the human experience. It intentionally traumatizes people by violently severing the absolute most precious tether there is in this life: to safety in one’s own skin. To willingly and repeatedly violate people under the guise of legitimate government is an act of abuse on the most horrifying of scales; one that illustrates the inhumanity of the perpetrator and the dehumanization of their victims. There is no difference between this moment and all the others we see in the rearview mirror of history and look back upon in disgust. Our complacency is the same.Our apathy is the same.Our silence is the same.Our culpability is the same. This isn’t about the laws of the land (though even those are being ignored), it is about those higher laws: of human dignity, of an elemental regard for life, of a basic level of empathy. If we cannot come together around such things, we have no business pretending we’re a civilized nation. If we can’t transcend our theology and our politics to defend the most vulnerable among us, we forfeit our morality altogether. A country that endures this kind of disregard for human life does not deserve people to stand when its anthem is sung.It merits no allegiance from decent people.It discards its pretense of welcoming the poor and tired.It abdicates any moral high ground in the world.A country that allows this kind of cruelty cannot claim greatness, and worse, it jettisons its goodness.It cannot imagine that it is a place of liberty or equality or justice. America, we are in the glaring spotlight of History in these moments. We are crafting our legacy in real time. If we abide this, if we rationalize it away, if we ignore it, if we turn our heads from it, then we deserve the terrible place we’re creating, the moral cancer our children inherit, and the hell that is waiting for us. We need to come to our collective senses, to inhale deeply and then clearly speak in one voice, the words that will allow us to heal this shared sickness and be the best of ourselves: What I.C.E is doing to brown-skinned people is a crime.It’s a sin.It’s intentionally cruel.It is blatantly inhumane.It’s not pro-life.It’s not Christian.It’s not making America great. It is evil by any measure decent people use. And the good people here should not tolerate it a single second longer. SUPPORT THESE ORGANIZATIONS:Freedom for Immigrants [https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/] - Advocate for the abolition of immigration detention: Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) [https://www.ilrc.org/] - Legal tools & policy advocacy Immigrant Justice Network [https://immigrantjusticenetwork.org/] - Coalition pushing for systemic reform: National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) [https://www.immigrantjustice.org/] - Legal services & defense: Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) [https://www.chirla.org/] - Advocacy, rapid response & legal supports: CASA [https://wearecasa.org/]- National immigrant community power organization: UndocuBlack Network [https://www.undocublack.org/] - Advocates for Black immigrants: United We Dream [https://unitedwedream.org/] - Immigrant youth advocacy network: Unión del Barrio [https://uniondelbarrio.org/] - Latino-focused immigrant justice activism: The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

What Kind of People Would Allow A Genocide? Turns Out, The American Kind.

There’s a story we all tell ourselves about the kind of people we are. It’s a narrative we’ve spent a lifetime compiling. In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best. That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly. Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices. We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin. And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?” We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded. From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators. With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch. And yet, there is Gaza. Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the comforting fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye. Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her (as are immigrant populations in the US). They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance. It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse. We have access to America's and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding. And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose. One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen. And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Graham Platner Reminds The Left Who We Don't Want To Be

This sucks. There’s no way around it. Politically speaking, for those of us on the Left, losing a candidate who carried the Democrats’ hopes of finally unseating Susan Collins in Maine and shifting the balance of power in the Senate this late in the game and in this manner is devastating. There’s no spin here that can make this good news, at least not in the political arena. But from a human perspective, this is where we should be today as a movement and a people. This is where we have to be if we’re going to prevail as a civilized society, if we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the ever-deepening moral cesspool across the aisle that has grieved and infuriated us. We cannot allow power to become the end by which all means are defensible, and Platner’s campaign, had it proceeded, was in danger of beginning our collective slide into the abyss. We could easily have started down the steep and greased path toward becoming a people who choose the immediate intoxication of a political victory over the far more difficult and costly long game of staying human. As a growing list of troubling revelations about Platner surfaced in recent months, a concerning number of people on the Left began to do exactly what we’ve spent a decade lamenting about the Right: minimize the severity, engage in whataboutism, move the goalposts, and talk about the importance of “the win” over everything else. We know where that all leads, the way that cancer moves through the bloodstream, how ambition devours people from the inside, how it paves the road to a deeper excavation into the depths of inhumanity. Over the past ten years, we’ve watched in disbelief as tens of millions of our family members, friends, and neighbors have abandoned every alleged conviction and denied every professed value in order to engineer the ascension of a useful monster. They’ve shelved their morals, denied their religion, and imprisoned their better angels to secure a presidency. They’ve gained a world of SCOTUS seats and legislative carte blanche and lost their collective souls, and we’ve rightly condemned it. On the Left, there’s a sickening deva vu, as we’ve seen this movie before: a promising political candidate or sitting lawmaker voluntarily withdrawing or succumbing to public pressure to do so—all while the other side makes concessions, holds their noses, and banks more political victories. That cannot be who we become, no matter how we want to justify it, no matter how much good we aspire to do with the political capital we’re chasing, regardless of the story we tell ourselves of our lofty aspirations. We can’t say that we believe women up until the point at which believing women becomes politically costly. We can’t loudly crusade against a voting bloc for covering for a serial predator and then bear with the sexual sins of candidates who can lead us to the promised land of Congressional control. We can’t claim or hold moral high ground over the Right if we find ourselves ignoring the red flags, dismissing lawlessness, or turning a blind eye to brutality as they have become so comfortable doing. And while we don’t want to fall into a purity politics that sets an impossible standard for the people we choose to represent us, we can and should have dealbreakers, red lines that we simply refuse to cross because if we don’t, we will become exactly like the people we’re trying to dislodge from power right now. Given his past, Graham Platner should never have chosen to run in the first place, and there were disgraceful failures in the vetting process that should have disqualified him before his campaign ever began. Those are matters for another time But today is a good day to remind ourselves that these moments always feel like losses, but in the most important ways, they aren’t. As the Democrats scramble to choose his replacement and try to salvage a victory in Maine, progressives, liberals, and moderates who are crestfallen today need to remember that in the loftier spaces that transcend politics, this is still a win. Choosing not to align with indecency always is. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Fox News Poisoned America And Killed The Goodness In People We Love

Hatred is a slow poison. Once it finds its way into the bloodstream, it gradually begins destroying a human being from the inside out. It does its work almost imperceptibly, driving out critical thinking, eradicating empathy, and hardening the heart. Since October 7, 1996, hundreds of millions of the people we love and live alongside have been hourly exposed to a corrosive, cancerous toxin that has rendered them shells of the people they were before. We all have the stories of the people we’ve lost and the moments we realized they’d been polluted. A couple of years ago, my family and I walked into an older relative’s house unannounced. They’d been expecting us that day from out of town, but we’d arrived thirty minutes earlier than we’d planned, so we knocked lightly and walked in. The small TV on the kitchen counter was playing Fox News. When one of them came down the stairs, almost in the middle of greeting us, our relative walked hurriedly over to the sink, grabbed the remote, and turned off the TV, looking like a teenager caught watching porn by their parents. Suddenly, everything made sense. All the dots connected. Over the last couple of years, we’d noticed this couple changing. They’d become more and more outspoken on things like immigration and women’s reproductive rights and police shootings, surprising us with the intolerance and cruelty of off-the-cuff comments that seemed out of character for them. We questioned whether we were just being overly sensitive or projecting our fears onto them. But after the surprise peek into their viewing habits, it was clear: they were merely following the script. They’d been pulled into the false story. The indoctrination had begun. The poison had taken hold. Now, we could rewind over the previous months and see all the alarmist talking points in their words at family gatherings and on social media: open borders letting in floods of dark-skinned rapists, baby-killing Democrats coming to take their guns, terrorist Muslims bringing our demise, Transgender perverts lurking in public restrooms, and violent black men threatening police at traffic stops. Their growing tolerance for cruelty suddenly made sense. Their social media feeds became increasingly littered with fictional horror stories about vaccine dangers, LGBTQ people converting their children, space lasers, and immigrants eating pets: the kind of garbage they’d have easily spotted and rejected before. The moral alteration in an unthinkable expanse of people who call this place home has been stunning in its velocity and stomach-turning in its depths, and the worst part is that we can’t reach them in the ways reasonable human beings can be reached. Before Fox News, Franklin Graham, and MAGA propaganda, we could meet the people around us on the common ground of our shared faith in Jesus, our respect for the Constitution, the clarity of objective truth, or shared compassion for vulnerable people. Now, they no longer have use or tolerance for such things. The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ counter-cultural, counterintuitive manifesto of humility, gentleness, and love, has been replaced by venomous, incendiary Sean Hannity supremacist propaganda and Laura Ingraham white fear porn. The barrier-breaking, table-expanding hospitality of Christ has morphed into sneering Trump rally rant rhetoric about violent illegals and foreign predators, and callous “build that wall” refrains. These people used to know better. They were good-hearted, generous human beings who aspired to love their neighbors. They flatly rejected bigotry and defended vulnerable communities. They were people I could count on for rational, level-headed decency. They once instantly recognized men like Donald Trump as the antithesis of Jesus. But this is what happens when decent, intelligent people become radicalized: they get polluted by the things they watch and the sermons they sit through and the nonsense they read, and they surround themselves with an echo chamber made of equally deluded, equally terrified people, until one day they are the hateful extremists that they always used to warn you about. Those of us who’ve lost people we love to this curated pestilence should file a class-action suit against Fox News and Rupert Murdoch for thirty years of malpractice and murder: for the relationships they’ve destroyed, the deaths they’ve been complicit in, the betrayal of the public trust, and for purposefully killing the goodness in human beings who will never be who they might have been otherwise. We’ll never know exactly how our nation or the people around us would be different had this venom never been allowed into our systems, but it would have been a hell of a lot more compassionate, loving, and equitable. It would be a whole lot closer to anything resembling greatness—or better yet, goodness. It’s infuriating to know that right now, in nursing home common rooms, in car repair waiting rooms, on kitchen countertop TVs, and in the palms of their hands, they are being unrelentingly eaten alive, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it and rescue them. I still love my relatives, my former church members, my high school friends, and my neighbors, but I grieve what has happened to them. I lament the poisoning of their once-soft hearts, the way Jesus has been all but squeezed out of their religion. I fear that they’ll never fully recover from the corrosive narrative that has been continually injected into their brains about the world and about disparate people and about the expansive, lavish, audacious love Jesus calls us to extend. I only hope these moms and ministers and nurses and schoolteachers and football coaches and favorite relatives get a truer story or meet someone who wakes them up, or that they rediscover Jesus enough that they change the channel, turn off the TV, escape this hateful cult, and find the truth that truly sets them free: Donald Trump is filth. Hatred is a waste. Empathy is the antidote.The world is bigger than America.We are our brother’s keeper.Kindness is the better path.If they’re going to join a cult, I wish it were that kind. In the comments, share your stories of the ways Fox News poisoned someone you love, fractured your relationships, or polluted our Republic. The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe [https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]