I woke up like everyone else this morning and saw the news all over the place that Lindsey Graham died. I didn’t want to write about it, because everyone else is covering it quite well, but then I came across this bullshit post by Julie Roginsky:
Needless to say, it triggered me a bit. So, I restacked it and responded with this:
To which she responded with:
Cue menopausal rage.
I had to take a minute before I responded. Because here was this influential woman with 180,000 subscribers, decades as a Democratic strategist, the verified checkmark and the whole apparatus that comes with it, spouting abhorrent bullshit into the ether about how the rest of us are keyboard warriors who have never done a goddamn thing that is actually a heavy lift. Huh…
Lindsey Graham died Saturday night and before the tributes even finished loading, Julie Roginsky was on Substack telling everyone how to feel about it. Not just offering her grief — that would have been fine, grief is allowed, grief is human. No. She opened by scolding the platform for its toxicity and closed with a dare: Let that sink in before you come at me with your righteous indignation.
Well, don’t threaten me with a good time, bitch.
After I took a stroll in my garden to gather my thoughts, I responded with this:
Roginsky waved bipartisan legislation in my face like she had some kind of gotcha and all it did was prove my point even further.
That’s not my righteous indignation. That’s his record. Every word of it is documented, most of it on video, none of it disputed by Julie who staunchly defended him and shamed all of us in the same fucking breath. She called him a coward and largely an awful human being, her words, not mine, and then demanded we mourn him anyway. How toxic of her, amirite? Gimme a break.
But what got me the most is when she prayed at me without understanding who I am or what I survived.
When I laid out that record, she didn’t answer it. She escalated.
“I pray that you never get sexually harassed or assaulted at work, and that no one you care about does either.” Wow, get fucked Julie.
She assumed I was untouched. She assumed wrong. I survived childhood rape and LOADS of sexual assault as an adult. Most women have. One in four, but the numbers are probably much more than is reported. But, she should know that. Right? I have written about surviving domestic violence and sexual assault in depth. And I had to read a “professional communicator” — a woman who has built an entire public identity around protecting women who speak up about workplace abuse — reach for sexual violence as leverage in a comment thread. Because I criticized a senator’s voting record and her choosing to defend him.
I know Roginsky’s history. She sued Roger Ailes. She co-founded an organization dedicated to ending the silencing of workers. That work is real and I won’t pretend otherwise. But that is exactly what makes this worse, not better. She knows precisely what it costs a woman to carry this. She knows what it does when someone invokes it against you. And she reached for it anyway, casually, to win an argument, against someone she’d decided was a “nobody.”
That’s what proximity to power does to people. It doesn’t just compromise your politics. It teaches you that the people below you are props.
Influence is not neutral. When you have 180,000 people reading you, your bullshit doesn’t dissipate. It metastasizes. It becomes the reasonable take. It becomes what the sensible people think. And what Roginsky asked her audience to think, hours after Graham died, was that his record doesn’t count because she got legislation out of him. That judging a powerful man by his documented actions is toxicity, while shaming strangers and invoking their hypothetical rapes is civility. That access is a credential and criticism is a character flaw.
This is how bad ideas get laundered in America. Not by the cranks. By the credentialed. The cranks we can spot. It’s the strategists, the contributors, the people who were in the room — they’re the ones who convert their proximity into authority and their authority into your silence. She said it almost verbatim, ‘I did the heavy lift, you did nothing, so sit down.’ Lucky for me I don’t give a good goddamn what this bitch has to say. And I truly hope her 180,000 subscribers hold her accountable for being a twat.
We have been trained to treat proximity to powerful men as a qualification. She worked with him. She stood next to the Senate podium. She got the bills passed. All true. But proximity to bad powerful men is not the same thing as integrity, and it is sure as hell not the same thing as accountability. You can share a podium with a man and still tell the truth about him. What you cannot do — what I will not let slide, from her or anyone — is converting their access into our amnesia.
Because the trade she’s defending isn’t really about Graham. Graham is dead. He is beyond her defense and beyond my judgment. What she’s defending is the trade she made. The years of standing next to men like him, the deals, the calculated silences, the career built in those rooms. She needs the rest of us to validate that trade, and when we won’t, we’re toxic.
No. The record is the only real thing in this entire exchange. Not her predictions about what Putin does next. Not her fortune-telling about NATO. Not her prayers about my body. The record. And the record is available to every single one of us, no podium required, no access necessary. That’s what actually terrifies the access class about this platform… the receipts are democratized now. The heavy lift of accountability no longer requires their permission.
My only ask is that we refuse to let this influence prevail. It looks like calling it out, every time, no matter how many subscribers the person has. It looks like refusing to grade powerful people on the curve of their best day. It looks like remembering that a checkmark is not a character reference, and that the people most invested in telling you the room was complicated are usually the ones who got paid to be in it.
If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.
No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.
☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman
Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
Giving a Graham a pass on being on the right side of a handful of moments is on par with respecting Benito Mussolini for ensuring that the trains ran on time.
I'm glad you stand up against people who are punching down