Volume 6, Issue 6: World Gone Wrong

"How can I live here, baby, Lord, and feel at ease?"

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.

How are you doing this? How are you out and about? How are you keeping it together?

How are you—how are we, how are any of us?—supposed to walk around right now, just going about our lives, drinking coffee, taking the kids to basketball practice, watching “Jeopardy!” doing laundry, getting back to work after a long holiday, all the everyday normal life shit?

Life is extremely hard. It’s hard being a parent, a spouse, an employee, a boss, a sibling, a son, a daughter, a dog owner, a citizen, a person just puttering around the planet trying to keep their head on straight. It is hard, it has always been hard, life is difficult, that we are all still out there plugging away day after day is amazing, we do not credit ourselves nearly enough for just keeping our heads screwed on straight and not having everything spin wildly out of control. By doing it any of it, you’re doing great.

But to do all of the things that you have to do to be a person who is alive and the world while all of this is happening …. I mean, we’re really supposed to go gather our tax returns and make dentist appointments and help our kids with their math … in all this?

We all have our breaking points. I wonder if this week was mine. I wonder if it was yours too.

I mean, how is one reasonably expected to navigate a world in which:

• Masked, heavily armed, mostly untrained government henchmen, out on venal a assignment built on the most fevered social media fantasies of the most deranged of addled shitposters, roam peaceful streets with the explicit purpose of spreading terror and destroying lives.

• After dropping off her six-year-old son at school—a six-year-old boy, her son, she’d just been in the car with him, he had just been sitting right there, with his mom—a woman can be shot three times, point blank, on a public street, an act witnessed by dozens of people and chronicled by dozens of phones, including one wielded in the right hand of the man who shot her while firing the gun in his left, a phone that captures him (or someone near him, but seemingly him) calling her a “fucking bitch” a millisecond after he shot her three times.

• This man, who, it really cannot be repeated enough, has no reason to be there and was in fact sent there to “solve” imaginary problems dreamed up by a circular, frothing mad media ecosystem, can kill her, right there, she died, she died right there, she could have survived but the doctor who was standing nearby and begged to come help her was not allowed to by the men who had no reason to be there and had just shot and killed her.

• This incident has happened multiple times before—it would happen in Portland the next day, under circumstances that can be generously described as “dubious”—but because this one was caught on camera, we are able to all see, clearly, obviously, what happened, in all of its horror, something that would seemingly lead to outcry and introspection as to what, exactly, the fuck we are all doing here.

• Rather than launch an investigation—or, at the very least, have a single goddamned second of quiet and respect and maybe even a little spiritual repose in the immediate wake of an unfathomable tragedy—the response of the people in the federal government that sent those men there for no reason is not just to lie outrageously, to command us to reject what we very obviously saw right in front of us, but is in fact to not only denigrate the mother who was just shot three times on a public street right after she dropped her son off at school, but mock her for having “pronouns in her bio” and being a “domestic terrorist” and a “rioter.”

• It is made increasingly, blatantly, grab-you-by-your-lapels-and-scream-it-in-your-face clear that this will happen again, and they will tell the same lies about it again, and if you do not watch your back, if you do not get in line, when this happens again, it will happen to you.

We’re supposed to just go back about business now? Go get your oil changed? Put out the recycling and trash on Monday morning? Watch the fucking Golden Globes?

It can break you. I am trying very hard for it not to break me. I am not sure I have been all that successful.

How are you doing this?

*************

One of the most trickiest aspects of this particular moment in American history is trying to find any possible context for it.

On one hand, obviously, there isn’t. Four years after leading a violent coup against the government he had been elected to lead, Donald Trump—in what becomes more apparent every day was the stupidest, downright suicidal thing a populace has ever done to itself—was re-elected and has subsequently dismantled the very foundation of American democracy and, in many ways, the post-WWII world order. There has never been a time in our history in which our leaders have been so brazenly, unapologetically corrupt, so cheerfully nihilist and cruel, so blatantly racist, so openly venal and soulless, so … well, all the things we see on a daily basis, all that washes upon us and over us and through us, shocking us and then numbing us and then somehow shocking us again. To live in America right now—to actually see what is happening and to know that it is all being done in your name, that the taxes you’ll be filing in the next couple of months are explicitly paying for all of this, that the world is viewing this and will never treat anyone involved with this country the same again, and nor should they, that this sure feels like a pivot moment in history that we and those who see us will be living with for the rest of us their lives—is to live in a state of constant disgust. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg called this moment our “long Lord of the Flies” moment. Garrett Graff this week enumerated all the ways we feel the “physical weight of Trumpism,” every day:

To me, there’s actually a simple explanation for that heaviness: It’s the weight of the shift from “zero to non-zero.” There are so many aspects of our daily life that we’d never had to weigh before; so many new possible horrors that we have to carry in our minds each day. We forget how much of the basic fabric of our country has been altered in the space of just a year, how many of our freedoms have been impinged, and how many things we took for granted that now we can’t.

It makes you want to throw up. It really does. It did so before Wednesday. It does so every day.

But also: Well, we’re not the first generation to think this, no? To think this might be the end? To feel like all is lost? My parents lived through Vietnam, and Watergate, and the Bay of Pigs; their parents lived through World War II and the dropping of the atomic bomb; their parents and grandparents before them lived through the Depression and World War I and pandemics and even the Civil War. There is always misery and there is always peril and there is always the sense that the world is on the precipice of spinning out of control and perhaps breaking apart entirely. Is it that this particular moment is that unusual? Is now so special? Or is that it always feels we’re in danger of imploding? That that fear is a constant?

Then again: It has never been this, and it has never been him. We’ve never had such a loathsome, narcissistic, truly demented person as our President before, one surrounded by soulless opportunists whose jobs exist solely to appease him and cater to his mad rantings. Waking up to the Venezuelan invasion last week plunged everyone back into all of it, even before Wednesday, and while part of it is that it was the worst possible way to break in a new year that one had almost started to feel optimistic about, I suspect the bigger issue is just how truly idiotic the whole thing is, how little planning had been done in the wake of the operation, how shambolic the response has been, how we have no idea what happens next, how no one appears to have thought through much of this at all. As moronic and infuriating as, say, making up a bunch of bullshit about January 6 might be, the damage is self-contained there; that’s in many ways just them being high on their own disinfo supply, the sort of people who run a war operation by searching “Venezuela” on Twitter, something that we have gotten (sadly) used to and something that, if we make it through this (big “if” of course), can be worked toward reversing. But the invasion—the fact that we are openly stating that we can just take whatever we want, that there is no nod to any sort of great global good, that we are already rattling to do this in Greenland and Cuba and god knows wherever else—was an open admission, an open boast even, that we are the bad guys. Now, maybe you think we’ve always been the bad guys. I don’t, but it’s the sort of thing one can have a reasonable discussion about. But to openly proclaim “we are just taking what we want, fuck off,” to not even bother pretending otherwise, feels irreversible. It feels like the destruction of something that we will never be able to repair. It does feel like the end of something.

It feels like that every day.

But then again: I’m sure we’ve said that before too.

One of the fundamental promises of America—or myths, depending on your perspective—has always that it was a place in which the world was supposed to always be better for your children than it was for you. This was certainly the way that my parents, and I believe many others, saw it: They would work 60-70 hours a week, on their feet all day every day, saving every penny they could, so that they could send their children to college (or a better life) and those children could have a job where they didn’t have to do go through all that—so those children could go and do and see things that had not been available to their parents. My parents’ fathers fought in World War II for the country, but also for their kids: So the world would be better for them, so they might not have to fight themselves. And on back and on back it goes. Now, it (obviously) has not always turned out this way through the generations, but that was the inherent goal: Make the world better for your kids, however you can.

I do not know how I can reasonably say that the world is going to be in any way better for my kids than it was for me. The problems they are going to inherit are so vast, and so constantly multiplying, that I’m not sure even their grandchildren are going to be able to make a dent in them. That the world has gotten so much worse—and has done so directly during their lifetime, in many ways almost immediately as they started to grow up—is the central source of anxiety in my life. I want the world to be better for everyone, including myself, but, no offense, I don’t love everyone else as much as I love them: That they are happy and safe and able to follow their dreams and maximize the possibilities of their lives on this earth is the central organizing principle of my life, and has been since they were born. But now they will be entering a world in which their country is an active villain on the global stage, with an economy that teeters on the edge and is increasingly built only to enrich the exact sort of person I don’t want them to be, on the cusp of constant war and the technological abyss … oh, and don’t forget this planet may end up being uninhabitable for their own children anyway.

But I bet my parents, and their parents, and their parents, often found themselves looking around the world they lived in and feeling a very similar despair. Maybe they were even right.

And yet here we still are.

It feels like we are living through a fulcrum moment in history. But then again they are all fulcrum moments in history. I find myself often worrying that the world I was hoping we’d be able to hand over to our children, to my children, is crumbling all around us. I look around and see many reasons that worry is justified—to say the least. But I also wonder if I would have that worry no matter what was happening: It is, after all, my kids—their my central worry of everything. It sure would be rotten luck if the collapse of the American experiment were happening at the exact moment I need it to work, and hold on, the most. But that might well be what’s happening. But again: My parents must have felt that way at some point too.

I want the world to be better for my kids. I want it to be better for all of us. But maybe it never is. Maybe it never was. And they’ll have to figure out how to navigate that just like every generation does. Perhaps my best hope for them is that, in 20 years or so, they will be fretting that the world may be falling apart for their children just like I am fretting now. That they will look back at their childhoods with the perceived innocence, and initial hope, that I look back at mine. That they made it through this intact, and still believing.

That every parent feels like the world is getting worse for their children says a lot of about the world. But it may say just as much about parenthood.

But then again, we’re all just coping. We’re all in a constant state of shock. We’re all just trying to make it through. How do you do laundry? How do you watch reality television? How do you do it? How do any of us? Has it always been like this? Will it always be like this?

I have regularly told myself, truly believed even, that this ghastly period will eventually end, that we will get through it, that we will someday tell stories of how we lived through it. I didn’t know how it would end. I just believed it would.

May we be so lucky. May we make it long enough to find out.

*********

Yes: It has been a very hard week.

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

1. Man, the Freaking PATRIOTS Again?, The Washington Post. Oh, sure, just have a Drake Maye.

2. What Makes a Championship Coach?, The Athletic. Looks a lot like Curt Cignetti, all told.

3. The Next Ten Teams To Win a World Series, MLB.com. We switched this one up a bit this year.

4. I Wrote About Bill Connelly’s Excellent Book Forward Progress, WSJ.com. Buy it, Bill’s great.

5. The First Power Rankings of 2026, MLB.com. The Cardinals have surely never started the season this low in my lifetime.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, it’s still Dorkfest week, it’s forever Dorkfest week.

Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s and Friday’s show.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we’ll wrap up the season the day after the CFP Title Game.

Also, you can hear me on NPR’s Weekend Edition this weekend, talking about Winter Olympic sports movies.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Physical Weight of Trumpism,” Garrett Graff, Doomsday Scenario. Really can’t recommend this piece enough.

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! I am finally all caught up on these! (For now.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Blood in My Eyes,” Bob Dylan. I really do turn to Dylan in the toughest times, consistently, for decades now.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

I was at the Peach Bowl last night. It was not close!

Have a great weekend, all. Please be safe.

Best,
Will