Volume 5, Issue 14: Calling All Cars

"I'm sure God must have his reasons but sometimes you have to wonder."

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In the wake of the horrific murder of nursing student Laken Riley while out on a run in February, a tragedy that happened about half a mile from my house and which I wrote about here, her father Jason Riley spoke at the Georgia State Capitol at the occasion of the passing of a resolution honoring his daughter’s memory. (This should not be confused with The Laken Riley Act, a federal bill specifically focused on requiring ICE to detain illegal/undocumented immigrants who have been previously charged with crimes.) Jason Riley and his family had previously accepted former President Donald Trump’s invitation to attend a rally he held in Rome shortly after his daughter’s murder, meeting with Trump beforehand, and when he was at the Capitol, Jason Riley spoke specifically to Trump’s message.

“God gave me a beautiful daughter to father, protect, provide for and nurture,” Jason Riley said. “A man with an evil heart stole her heart. He was in the country and in this state illegally. My vision for every senator in this chamber is that you protect citizens from this illegal invasion.”

I have friends in Athens, who were heartbroken and terrorized by Laken Riley’s murder and also appalled by Trump’s rhetoric about “invasions” and “vermin,” who were disappointed and frustrated by Jason Riley’s comments. And while I wouldn’t say I agree with the focus of those comments, I personally don’t think any I or anybody else has any business telling anyone who has dealt with such a tragedy how they should mourn or how they should deal with that mourning. I cannot fathom what that family has been through—losing a child is the worst thing a person can experience—and am of the belief that however they respond to such a horror is understandable and not for anyone to question. If the Riley family had gone screaming through the streets naked for months on end, I could not blame them. It’s the most awful thing imaginable. Jason Riley can, and should, say what he wants. And as a decent society, we owe it to him and the rest of his family not to toss their tragedy into the gaping forever culture war maw of our personal politics. I do not think Trump should use that family or that tragedy as political pawns, but I also do not think those who oppose Trump should use them that way either. If Jason Riley had said, “this has nothing to do with illegal immigration,” no one should be pointing to such a statement as unassailable proof that their position is right either. Let the man and his family mourn. Let them do what they need to do. There’s no wrong way. I cannot speak to how they deal with their pain without knowing it myself.

That’s what I think. You might disagree. That’s OK. You’re an entirely different person than I am; we probably disagree on lots of things. It does not mean we cannot share this earth and find all sorts of other things that we agree upon, and it also does not mean that either one of us is somehow a lesser person than the other. It does not have to be a red line between us.

But there are red lines. There are lines of fundamental human decency that only the truly cruel and obscene would cross. And I bring up the Jason Riley story specifically to note one that happened this week.

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On Friday, March 22, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a woman named Ruby Garcia was murdered by her boyfriend. The full police report has not been released, but it appears that they were having an argument in his car, and the man shot her multiple times and dumped her body on the shoulder of the expressway; she was found the next morning. That man, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, turned himself in two days later, after he spent an evening at a church that welcomed him in as a stranger, a kindness that reportedly led him to call the police and confess his crime. The reason this crime has made national news is not because it’s another example of male violence against women, of course; it’s because Ortiz-Vite is an illegal/undocumented immigrant, albeit one who, unlike the man accused of killing Laken Riley, has lived his entire in the Grand Rapids area.

Now, I’m not particularly interested in getting into an extended argument about immigration here—though I do feel obliged to point out that it was Trump himself who shut down a bill to address the current border situation, and also that it’s distressing to realize that if, say, Garcia would have been illegal/undocumented and Ortiz-Vite had been a legal immigrant, few outside of Grand Rapids would have heard or cared about this story in the slightest despite the fact that yet another man killed yet another woman—because it’s what happened next that speaks to the moral red line.

As he did the Laken Riley tragedy in Georgia, former President Trump decided to use Garcia’s murder for his political gain. He organized a campaign event in Michigan (totally coincidentally a swing state in the upcoming election), and, according to his campaign, his people invited Garcia’s family, like Riley’s family before them, to come to the rally and meet with him beforehand.

But this is where the story turns. The Garcia family, when the fact that Ortiz-Vite was an illegal/undocumented immigrant began to circulate among conservative media, released a statement that they did not want her death to be used for political purposes—anyone’s political purposes. They wanted to continue to mourn her in private and made it clear that they would not be showing up at any rallies or speaking with any candidates about her. This was about their loss, not the outside world’s attempts to attach their politics to it. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, and they’re deep in the midst of it. These were the wishes of the mourning family, and that’s that: Allowing them to grieve in private is the literal least any of us of could do, or anyone should expect.

Imagine, then, the Garcia family’s shock when, as they were watching Trump’s rally in their hometown, he took to the stage and said, out of nowhere:

“[Garcia] had the most contagious laughter, and when she walked into a room, she lit up that room,” Trump said. “I’ve heard that from so many people. I spoke to some of her family.”

There are two things particularly dreadful about this. First, he clearly just quoted directly from Garcia’s very short public obituary, which specifically mentions both Garcia’s contagious laughter and her ability to light up a room, and claimed that individual people had given him that information about her. That’s bad.

But the worse part, of course, is that he claims he “spoke to some of her family” when he knew he hadn’t. The family wished to stay private, something he also knew. He just didn’t care.

Upon seeing his comments, they decided they could remain private no longer.

“He did not speak with any of us,” said Mavi Garcia, Ruby’s sister, who was designated by her family as their public spokesperson in the wake of Trump’s speech. “So it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV.”

It is one thing to politicize a tragedy: Trump is not the first politician to do that and he will not be the last. It is another to go against the wishes of a family and to drag them into your political battles. But it is something else entirely, truly unthinkable, a betrayal of how humans are supposed to treat each other, the acknowledgment of our shared status as human beings on this planet, to not only defy their wishes for you not to use their pain for your political gain but also to make up conversations with them that you did not have.

It is monstrous. I wouldn’t allow someone who did something like that to step foot in my home, let alone lead my country.

I know no one wants to talk about politics. I don’t want to talk about politics either. But this isn’t about politics. This is about fundamental human decency, how you respect the grieving and honor the lost. This is about what we owe to each other. If someone in my own life treated someone who had just lost one of their loved ones like this, in any capacity, it would be difficult not to find it unforgivable—a piece of information about their inner life and soul that I could not unlearn. To do it on a national stage—and to refuse to acknowledge the lie, or that it might have just been an honest mistake—is ghastly. These are the actions of a deranged person. To use his own term, these are the actions of an animal.

The thing about Trump is everything has his own thing about him. He’s like a Rorschach test: You can learn a lot about a person by what offends them most about him. For some it’s the sexism, or the racism. Some find him a violent bully who withers at actual physical confrontation; others are appalled by his lazy stupidity; I know guys who are most repulsed by the fact that he never pays his contractors. There’s always something.

I think this one, out of so many, might be mine.

These stories pile, and compile, and stack on top of one another, to the point that it is impossible for even the most obsessive to keep track of them all, let alone rational people understandably exhausted with election year politics already, trying to ignore as much of this as they can. The Garcia story and its aftermath has barely made a ripple in the public consciousness; it garnered one small mention in a 600-word sidebar on page A17 of The New York Times five days ago and has vanished since. I do get why people do not want to think about all this. That we’ll be dealing with this, non-stop, for the next seven months, makes me want to double over.

But if we don’t deal with it in seven months, we’re going to be dealing with it a lot longer. This is not about whether Joe Biden is a good President or a bad President, or whether he has done a good or bad job on the border, or the economy, or Gaza. We can engage in good faith discussions about social issues, and tax cuts, and the environment, and foreign policy, and all that affects us and the generations that come after us. Those are all questions and debates that we can have, and will have, or at least should be having. But this is something else. This is about whether or not someone who is driven entirely by anger, spite and retribution, someone will regularly and unrepentantly breaks foundational aspects of the social contract, who will lie and lie and lie and lie, who thinks absolutely nothing of dragging a grieving family who has explicitly asked to mourn in private into public life and create out of whole cloth conversations he never had with them … it is about whether that person could possibly be put forward as the public face of any sort of sane nation.

I do not expect us all to follow every poll, or knock on every door, or watch every political program. It will be the summer soon. We will go outside and enjoy spending time with our loved ones, to enjoy our blessings, to concentrate on the little things that matter the most, and we should. But I do expect us to be able to recognize a monster in our midst. And point him out as exactly that. Because that’s what he is. It cannot be said enough.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. My New Weekly Baseball Column, MLB.com. I need a catchy name for this, but it’s meant to be a smaller takeoff of Zach Lowe’s great “Ten Things I Think I Think” NBA pieces on ESPN. Let’s see how it works. It was also pointed out to me, after this ran, that Ben Clemens has been doing something similar on Fangraphs for a while now. You should read that too.

2. Your Final Four Rootability Rankings, New York. Men’s and women’s this year, and surely moving forward.

3. Opening Weekend Takeaways For All 30 Teams, MLB.com. Watched a lot of baseball last weekend, like all good people should.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I wrapped up the first weekend of the Cardinals. They’ve played a lot better since.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“There Is More Good Than Evil in This Country,” Alex Kotlowitz, The Atlantic. This is a very hopeful and moving review of a new book called “The Unclaimed,” which reconstructs the life stories of several Angelenos whose bodies went unclaimed after their death. I am absolutely going to read this book.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Because the Night,” Garbage and Screaming Females. “Because the Night” is one of those songs that is never, ever bad; I sometimes wonder if we should make bands cover it every show, like their national anthem, just to see what they do with it. This is a particularly fun version, with Garbage and the Screaming Females, a band I love so much I used them as the inspiration for Allie’s band in The Time Has Come.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Got out to my first game this week and saw Mike Trout hit two homers. Good for the soul, that.

Also, that was totally a foul in the Iowa-Connecticut game last night.

Be safe out there, and have a great weekend.

Best,
Will