Mostly peaceful warmonger
Lindsey Graham, 1955-2026
AFFIDAVIT
I, No1, being of sound mind and more than once demonstrating poor judgement, do hereby depose and state:
I do not know what killed Lindsey Graham.
Neither do you.
Neither does anybody currently telling you, and their confidence in their theory is - as is tradition - inversely relative to their evidence.
What follows contains dragons. At least five, which are of course mutually exclusive and every one of which has been fed today by somebody with a blue checkmark and a podcast.
I am letting them out anyway, because pretending a dragon is not in the room has never once caused a dragon to not be in the room.
The FBI has announced it is “assisting local authorities”. It has not said with what. I am therefore, technically, better informed than nobody and worse informed than the Bureau, which puts me exactly where every commentator on earth is this morning, except I’m being honest about it.
Take from this what you want. I have already taken what I want, and what I want is a drink.
Signed, this Sunday, somewhere in Europe, with the coffee going cold.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide, as you may recall, spent centuries listing Earth under a single word: harmless. After fifteen years of field research the entry was revised, at enormous expense, to mostly harmless.
Graham’s entry would read: mostly peaceful.
Because he was - in the strictest possible sense - never violent.
He never fired a shot in anger.
He never kicked a door.
Never dug a grave.
Never carried anybody’s son out of a building.
Never once was confronted with the consequences of his actions.
He was mostly peaceful in exactly the way a protest in, say, Kenosha (WI) can be.
The fires were always somewhere else, he always had a delegation, there was always a photographer, and the flight home was always business class with a bed.
What he had instead was conviction. Held with the purity that would be admirable in almost any other field.
In 2002 he diagnosed Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction from a stuffy chamber several thousand miles from any inspector. We all know how that turned out.
In 2015 he described Donald Trump as a race-baiting bigot, a kook, and unfit for office.
But by this year he was on television offering to send your sons and daughters to fight for a foreign country on that same man’s instruction. Oh, and let’s move all our stuff to Israel. Dropping bombs seemed to give him a whole different perspective on a person.
In 2022 he went on air and asked whether there was somebody in Putin’s circle to take him out…
A sitting United States senator, live, publicly commissioning a political assassination. Moscow issued an international arrest warrant, which Lindsey wore as a badge of honour, and which, incidentally, is still open.
A month before Operation Epic Fury he urged the President to kill Ali Khamenei.
Three weeks ago, on the exact programme he was booked on this morning, he explained what came next when the Iran deal collapsed: America would take the Strait of Hormuz by force (how’s that going?). America would charge every ship a fee (how’s that going?). And if Iran contested it: we will obliterate them (how’s that going?).
Ukraine he described as “the best money we have ever spent”. A statement that might have been entirely defensible, provided he never specified what was purchased.
So: For forty years, in a country far far away from any sudden explosions, sat a man, insisting, on camera, repeatedly, that you can change the direction of a war by killing people, by dropping more bombs to ‘minimise casualties’.
And then he dies of a heart attack. Although, admittedly, that would require a heart, and THAT is the most contested claim in this entire opinion.
The entire planet immediately concluded that somebody must have removed him. In general, the universe does not normally show its working so clearly. Usually you’ll have to wait for a generation and read a book about it.
Let’s start with the official narrative. I’ll just give it as-is. As bureaucratic as I can:
On Thursday, Lindsey Graham turned 71. On Friday he was in Kyiv for the tenth time, touring a drone plant, posing in front of tanks, telling reporters it was time to turn up the heat on Putin, and announcing that after three years of pushing, the White House had finally green-lit his sanctions bill: 500% tariffs on anybody buying Russian oil. He shook Zelensky’s hand. Zelensky posted the photographs. Graham telephoned CBS twice to say what a big day it was, and booked himself onto Face the Nation for Sunday morning.
He flew home. At about seven on Saturday evening he called the President to talk about the SAVE America Act and to mention he was a little tired.
At half past eight, a 911 call went out from a house on Capitol Hill. Chest pains. Then cardiac arrest. Then CPR.
Let’s keep it at that he never made the interview. I wasn’t waiting anyhow.
So far so good. Nothing obviously wrong with it. Which is precisely the problem. We live in a century where ‘nothing being obviously wrong’ is by and of itself considered suspicious, and honestly? given the last twenty years, that’s not an entirely unreasonable position.
So let me sum up the theories surrounding his death. For his death is quite absurd, and has the final word. So let’s forget about the sin - of laughing about the dead - give the audience a grin. Enjoy it. It might be your last chance anyhow.
Theory number uno: There exists online this theory called “the Zelensky Curse”.
The thesis is that proximity to the Ukrainian president is medically and professionally inadvisable.
When he visits a city, it is said the city will fall.
Stand next to him at a press conference and your government will collapse.
It’s a ledger with numerous entries. I’ve no clue what number Lindsey is on this list. But it has been attributed to Kamala’s loss (our gain - although in retrospect…), it has been attributed to a US defence secretary who received a cancer diagnosis days after a Kyiv visit, an entire French government, and, and I want to be scrupulously fair here, several people who simply lost elections in the normal way that people lose elections.
At first I heard it on Simplicius, but that was just before the fall of some city. Seems the curse moved on to people. Graham shook his hand on Friday. He has since passed on. He is no more, ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life, he rests - hopefully not - in peace. He’ll be pushing up daisies fairly soon. He is now for all matters earthly: an ex-Graham.
And if for nothing else, this has been a dramatic improvement in throughput for the curse. It used to require a siege, now it’s challenging Prime on same-day delivery.
I mention this only - not because I believe it but - because within about eight hours this was the third most popular explanation on Twitter.
Theory number two: Russia poisoned him.
However, this would require the Kremlin to be simultaneously so competent that it left no trace whatsoever in a body that was on a slab within hours.
And so catastrophically stupid that it did the job forty-eight hours AFTER a photographed, GPS-tagged, internationally broadcast state visit… Kinda like saying “WE WERE HERE”.
It would also require Moscow to choose this precise moment, after that bill had already cleared. A hit of exquisite spycraft, timed to accomplish… well… absolutely nothing.
Ten out of ten for the poison. Zero for bothering to read a calendar.
Theory three: he never came home.
He was killed in Kyiv, at the drone plant, possibly alongside a quantity of unnamed NATO officers, which will receive completely unrelated accidents like drowning in a swamp while hiking.
I promised dragons, and as this one is the most pervasive one, let’s take this entirely serious and check what it’d take.
For starters, you’d need a strike. Kinda obvious one would think.
Then, a corpse in a condition presentable to the family. Tricky if he got a sudden case of Iskanderism.
A plane, and nobody asking who’s in the casket. Doable with “chain of command” and “shut up or give me your badge” culture…
Then a scripted 911 call, cooperating paramedics performing CPR on a man who has been stiff since Friday, a police scanner broadcasting your cover story live to every journalist in Washington with a receiver, a hospital, a family statement, and finally a President of the United States going on CNN the following morning to improvise a phone call that never happened, complete with the detail that his friend had said he was tired from the flight.
Don’t they have luxury beds in those jets?
Anyway, this would assume that the US administration is able to have an act of state deception flawlessly executed on short notice. That’s the same government that couldn’t keep the location of an aircraft carrier off Strava. Or the same one that shot down its own fighters.
But yes, why not. With the right incentives. Sure.
Especially for something so sensitive, anything’s possible I guess.
Theory four is for Iran.
Last week, mourners at Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral carried placards through Tehran bearing Graham’s face inside a targeting reticle.
Five days.
-a few rough auto-translated parts, but you’ll get the drift.-
On Sunday morning an Iranian state television host congratulated the Iranian people on the death of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had, the host explained, been sent to hell.
A former Fox producer promptly demanded a full federal investigation, evidence to follow at some unspecified later date.
And the FBI announced it was making every necessary resource available, without specifying available for what exactly. I guess they investigate arteries too now. As long as it doesn’t involve pipe bombs and stuff I guess?
Theory five is Mossad, and I have an A and a B for you.
Flavour one: they did it.
Flavour two: they faked it.
Either way, if this is true, I guess his handlers are now going through his harddrive now to delete a few files. And I’m not talking about his porn collection.
What for do the Israelis want to kill their biggest champion? I’ve no clue, but there are people online that could tell you this in the greatest detail.
I am not one of them as I consider myself logical.
Theory six, which seems to pop up in the replies but nowhere else, holds that Zelensky poisoned him to frame Russia.
Same thinking goes again as with the Mossad framing. Why would you kill your single most reliable Republican benefactor, on the day he delivered the bill, as a favour to the country funding the war against it?
It is maybe the least plausible theory available. But yeah, as long as it sounds good, right?
Going for seven: the domestic one.
Somebody is quietly clearing out the Senate’s remaining architects of forever war, one (cardiac) arrest at a time.
Of course having your House and Senate stuffed with geriatrics is bound to produce a few of those either way, but Graham seems to have been struggling with blood pressure since his forties. So there’s at least some continuity to that.
Either way this theory has a bit of a bite as in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, 84, has been hospitalised since June 14. Also cardiac arrest. Also some 911 call. No diagnosis as far as I know.
His office has now spent four weeks reissuing an identical statement explaining that the senator continues to improve and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters. Which you could equally write about a filing cabinet.
He is not dead. He is just resting.
His wife stayed in China, because his condition did not warrant her return. Laura Loomer says he is brain dead. She didn’t specify since when.
So to show McConnel wasn’t the only one, three senior Republicans went public within hours of one another, on the same Tuesday, each describing a lengthy and substantive telephone conversation covering national security, Iran, Ukraine, the Senate calendar, and a little Senate history, and each independently reporting that his voice sounded strong.
All confirming that a man sounded well on the phone. There is a name for that genre. (I’ll give a hint: it’s not Press Release)
Two hawks. Two hearts. Two homes. One pretty quiet month.
The internet is having a field day.
They used to call them the three amigos: McCain, Lieberman, Graham.
Inseparable. On every delegation. At every hearing. And most importantly for this thesis: behind every intervention for twenty years.
McCain in 2018, brain tumour, 81.
Lieberman in 2024, a fall, 82.
Graham now, 71, his heart.
As the theory goes, somebody is working through a list.
Lindsey Graham got a lot on the last day of his life:
A birthday
A trip he wanted
A three-year win, delivered
A phone call with the most powerful man on earth
An ambulance that actually came
Paramedics who tried
A hospital
A family who were told, who asked for privacy, and who will receive it
An obituary in every newspaper on the planet before the sun came up
Netanyahu weighing the funeral
Von der Leyen calling it a great void - she’s one talking.
Rutte, Zelensky, Trump, all of them, on the record, within hours
Objectively, that is a good death.
Fast, at home, at the summit, with everybody he ever wanted to impress saying so before the body was cold.
It is precisely the death he spent thirty years explaining that other people did not deserve.
There are thousands of Palestinians and Iranians who did NOT get an ambulance, countless of them children.
There is an Iraqi generation that never got a phone call from a president.
There are thousands of ships and seafarers still sitting in the Gulf.
There are the farmers who lost a planting season to a fertiliser shortage nobody voted for, and the 318 million people who were at crisis hunger before the first missile flew and are now, in the language of the people who do this professionally, a growth market.
None of them were told.
None of them had their privacy respected.
None of them got the courtesy of a name in a newspaper.
He championed the strategy.
Other people supplied the bodies.
That’s more of a job description than an accusation. And credit where it’s due: he never pretended otherwise.
He was running for a fifth term.
Seventy-one years old, four terms down, a war on, and he had filed to go again.
He fully intended to be there for the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. Because he believed the thing only works if he is in the room.
And the bill, his great sanctions bill? The one he flew into a war zone to announce? Blumenthal said on Friday they had the votes. Graham said it was going to become law.
And now he is dead, and it still has the votes. It goes to Thune, it goes to the House, it moves or it doesn’t, and the arithmetic this morning is exactly what it was on Thursday.
Lindsey Graham believed, publicly, repeatedly, for four decades, that you could stop a war by removing one man from it.
But his bill still has the votes.
Cosmic sarcasm at its best.
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Good riddance.
Another theory is he got his booster Covid shot earlier in the week.
Professor Putin in the library with the lead pipe.
Case solved.