CSW

July 12, 2026 Lindsey Graham died last night. He was seventy one years old, and his office called it a brief and sudden illness. This morning my phone was full of reactions, and most of them were not grief. They were disbelief. He was just in Ukraine. Maybe the Russians got to him. It is possible. Graham had made plenty of enemies as a stalwart defender of both Ukraine and Israel, and I will not pretend otherwise. But he was also seventy one, living in a fallen world, the sam

FROM CONFUSION TO CLARITY By Clayton S. Wood June 18, 2026 As what we assume are accurate summaries of the MOU began to emerge, a brilliant friend told me he was looking forward to reading my view. I said, “If Iran is a very good boy, it gets a pony. I do not believe the IRGC knows how to be a very good boy for long, and everyone reading the MOU is furious about the idea that it might get the pony anyway.” I want to unpack what I mean by that. Many voices I respect are yellin

By Clayton S. Wood 6/15/26 A friend of mine, Michael Smith, is a gifted writer. He shared something on Facebook recently that set off this entire examination. He had spent a morning reading the Substack of a Howard University journalism professor named Stacey Patton, who had written a piece in the wake of Karmelo Anthony's murder conviction, blaming the dead boy's father for his son's death. Austin Metcalf was seventeen years old when he was stabbed at a track meet in Frisco,