Volume 6, Issue 7: Tempest

"Sooner or later you'll make a mistake, I'll put you in a chain that you never can break."

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My younger son Wynn is a sixth grader on his middle school basketball team. Wynn’s a year younger than most kids in his class, and he’s not the scion of retired NBA All-Stars, and he’s a sixth grader in a league of eighth graders, so he’s small: The smallest kid on the team. How small?

This small:

Excellent post position, Wynn Dog.

I was honestly surprised he made it onto the roster at all, but I was proud that he did, and he has loved it. He rarely plays, but when he does, he plays hard, and just as important, he has fully embraced what it means to be on a team, to be a teammate, to hang out all week with a bunch of kids from different backgrounds whom he otherwise likely wouldn’t cross paths with in his daily life, to come together with them in pursuit of a common goal. It has been good for him. It has been good for all of them.

Our middle school, thanks to an increase in public funding voted on by our community, just went through a massive renovation, one that has taken two full years. My older son, who’s in the eighth grade and now just one semester away from high school, entered school right when the renovation was starting and thus spent sixth grade, essentially, in a trailer, with construction banging and clattering all around him. This year, we have seen the results. On Wednesday night, my son’s basketball played its final game of the season, in our new gym. It looks terrific. They did an outstanding job. It was money well spent.

This was a hole in the ground 20 months ago.

And there we all gathered. Players jumped up and rooted for their teammates. Parents taped their kids on their phones. Coaches (and dads, mostly) yelled at the refs. My wife volunteered at the concession stand. My dad, wearing his orange Illini sweatshirt, came to watch his grandson. Wynn’s older brother milled around with his fellow teenage buddies, calling each other brah and grunting. Cheerleaders stomped their feet on the bleachers and did chants. One of them, during a timeout, did a series of backflips that took her entirely from one end of the gym to the other, as the crowd rose and cheered louder for each one, culminating in a final flourish that brought all of us to our feet. She heard it and smiled very wide.

After the game was over, everybody milled around, congratulating each other on a great season, not really wanting to leave, not quite ready to move onto the next thing, to say goodbye. But there will be a next thing, a new season, a new sport, new interests, new horizons, the next step, seventh grade, eighth grade, high school, prom, graduation, all of it. This is normal. This is how it is supposed to work.

How lucky we were to get to have this. It was not long ago, it was really just yesterday, that all of this was upended, that we had a whole two years when nothing was normal, when kids didn’t get to have basketball games, or dances, or any sort of gatherings at all. You still see remnants of this. Teachers I talk to regularly tell me how they see differences in the kids in their classes, today, because of the pandemic, things they’d never seen before, from little things (kids who missed first grade don’t know how to hold pens, for example) to the big things (social anxiety, increased dependence on devices, difficult connecting with other kids, loneliness). We had a global disaster, in these kids’ lives, not long ago, when we were trying to all keep them normal. Their lives got turned upside down right when they could least afford to. It was hard for everyone, whether they had kids or not. But there isn’t a parent who will ever forget that fear: Is this gonna mess up my kid forever? How do I get them through this?

It felt like we were never gonna get it back. But we did. We got back to our normal life. Normal life, such as it is, comes with all its perils and heartbreaks and tragedies and troubles. Life is hard. But all we can ask for, and all we have fought for, is to have the opportunity to give these kids some normal parameters, to have basketball games, and dances, and cheerleaders doing flips as a gym full of people scream for them … to give these kids a chance. To clear out as much as we can so they can find their own path. To get as much of the hard stuff out of the way as we can.

We got back there. I try to remember how scary it was, how much fear I had for my kids, how I worried I’d never be able to find a normal for them. So I find myself grateful for these basketball games, for these morning carpool dropoffs, for these renovated schools, for these parent-teacher conferences, for these sleepovers, for all of it. It’s all a gift.

And it’s a gift that has to be cherished. And protected.

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

Did you know that Minneapolis public schools were closed Thursday and Friday? And that St. Paul public schools will be closed this coming Tuesday and Wednesday? They are closing the schools to prepare for the addition of a hybrid learning option for the rest of the semester. There are few words that raise the hair on the back of the necks of parents who lived through the last few years like “hybrid learning.” But they are going to do it for the rest of the semester, a semester that just started, a semester that is a whole chunk out of all of these kids’ lives, proms, graduation—perhaps the last few months of their actual childhood.

This is what school—school—looks like in Minneapolis right now:

@mprnews

MPR News on Instagram: "Minneapolis Public Schools on Jan. 7 ca…

This is not happening because of a pandemic, or a natural disaster, or even, god forbid, a school shooting, which was everyone’s previous American Schools Nightmare Scenario. This is happening because of the American government. This is happening because this federal administration has declared war on the Twin Cities and, increasingly, the entire state of Minnesota itself. Over something that is not real. Over something they have made up on their phones.

“In recent weeks, we have been navigating difficult times and emotions,” a St. Paul school emailed families this week. “We recognize the grief, confusion, and fear present in our community. We acknowledge that not everyone feels safe right now. Some families and staff fear leaving their homes, driving to school or work, or participating in school activities fully because of federal immigration agents in our area.”

It needs to be made explicit: This fear is a fear of our own government. We have reached the point when we are the nomenclature Minnesota Strong—a construction typically used to describe how a metro area comes together in the wake of a natural disaster (Joplin Strong), a terrorist attack (Boston Strong) or a school shooting (Newtown Strong)—is now being used because thousands of masked, untrained goons have been sent to brutalize American citizens.

There is no other way to put it. I thought Damon Linker in his newsletter Notes From the Middleground named it correctly:

Only now—in the past few weeks—has the true shape, and vast scope, of what’s happening come into focus. Not just undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes; not just undocumented immigrants who have overstayed visas; not just the foreign-born parents of children born in this country who are American citizens; but anyone, adult or child, suspected of protecting or harboring sympathy for any of the above; or who dares to protest their deportation, or film the actions of an ICE officer; or who even finds him- or herself driving down a street where an ICE raid is taking place—all of these people, and in a deep-blue American city that could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, have been expelled from the protected circle of those who enjoy recourse to the law.

Armed agents of the state can detain and inflict violence—sometimes deadly violence—on anyone with impunity. Federal authorities will not investigate alleged acts of lawbreaking or even cooperate with local and state authorities who wish to do so. Indeed, elected officials at the highest levels of government will unhesitatingly lie about, mock, and denigrate victims of this violence while defending and justifying all of it, as if anyone thrown to the ground, beaten, kicked, dragged, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, deafened by flash-bang grenades, and even shot in the face and killed axiomatically deserved what they got.

But don’t listen to chin-strokers like him, or me. Listen to people who are on the ground, living this every day. Who are seeing things like this, every day.

Here is an email a Minneapolis parent sent out to his friends and family this week:

They are swarming our neighborhoods in unmarked cars; pulling people over at random; arresting and detaining people with no warrants or cause or justification other than being brown or black; intimidating people with assault weapons in their cars, at the local Target, and at nearly every immigrant-owned business; bashing out people’s windows after traffic stops and dragging them out of their cars; knocking on doors indiscriminately and asking people for documents or to turn on their neighbors…. [I]t wasn’t real to me until I was seeing it up close and personal. Students of mine crying in my room because they’re scared to come to school. Students not showing up in the first place. Students getting pulled over for no reason and being told their car needed to be searched. Coming to work at a school every day where parents need to surround the premises in case they need to document a student or staff member being assaulted by a paramilitary force and whisked away to a detention center that our elected officials are not allowed to visit.

Here’s one of you, a subscriber to this newsletter, who lives in the Twin Cities:

My wife teaches middle school art in a nearby suburb. The past few weeks have been really hard on her. Her school has students whose fathers have been kidnapped by ICE. Some of the students have not returned since they had a parent taken. One girl did come back, my wife said, and the girl has been completely out of it since returning. Just living in a daze. The joyful girl is gone, maybe forever. Her trauma is ongoing.

There are other victims, too, even if nobody in their family has been kidnapped yet. Today, my wife learned that one of her star students, a Russian boy, will no longer be attending school because of safety concerns. My wife is sad and mad that our federal government, our own fucking government, is now hindering these innocent children’s ability to get an education.

A lot of things are out of control here right now, and I feel so badly for anyone with brown or black skin, anyone who is from another country, anyone who is vulnerable in the eyes of ICE and Trump and his entire cult. This is going to leave a lifetime of wounds for the kids especially, even the kids whose families are still here. They’re hiding now. People are organizing grocery drop offs and delivering essentials to these families who are too afraid to step foot outside. Restaurants are shutting down to protect the safety of their workers. The Minneapolis school system canceled classes last week to protect children from the federal government. Think about that.

ICE will claim that they’re going after only the murderers and rapists, which of course is bullshit. They kidnapped a special-education assistant as she left her job at a school. They’ve taken the kids who work at Target and bring the bags out to your vehicle when you order pickup. They set up shop in the parking lot of a Mexican grocery store and harrassed anyone with brown skin who was entering the store. They even tricked a worker at a little coffee shop called Crumbs & Coffee -- you know, the type of place where “the worst of the worst” work -- by posing as customers, coming back into the store to say that they hit the worker’s parked car, and then arresting the worker when he fell for it and went with them to the parking lot.

(I received many of these stories this week, but I found this the most illustrative. You can find more stories from readers in our chat from earlier this week.)

Look at the overwhelming force that has landed on the Twin Cities:

This cannot be repeated enough: This is not about a real thing. This started because of a right-wing viral social media video about a daycare fraud that was uncovered years ago (and has in fact resulted in multiple arrests and convictions). This pretense of Immigrants Screwing You has allowed the President and those surrounding him to use the Twin Cities as, to quote CNN’s Stephen Collinson, “a petri dish for his hardline immigration policies, zeal for militarized law enforcement tactics and attempts to use immigration as a cudgel to crush progressive values in cities that reject his strongman leadership.” There is no problem here they are trying to solve. That is not the point. The point is to cause the problem. The point is disrupt, to control, to destroy.

And this is why every single person I talk to in Minneapolis—one of the driving forces behind their fortitude, I’ve found—is pushing so hard in resistance: Because if they don’t make a stand now, if they don’t stop this, it will be coming to your town next.

I do not like talking about politics. It’s not because I don’t have my own beliefs: Like everyone on the planet, I have my own viewpoint on this stuff. I don’t like talking about politics because people generally do not want to listen, precisely because they have also their own viewpoint on this stuff, and very little of what I say is going to persuade them one way or another. It is disturbing how similar trying to describe Trump’s inherent abhorrence to a Trump supporter is to trying to talk a Red Sox fan into being a Yankees fan. All of this is increasingly, perhaps overwhelmingly, tribal. Believe you me: I’d rather be talking about the NFL playoffs, or quoting the new Chuck Klosterman book, or ranking Kelly Reichardt movies.

But I do not understand how not to talk about this—how not everyone is talking about it, all the time. People often say that they try to ignore politics because they do not think it actually affects their lives. That is an impossible thing to say now. This is a fundamental destruction of the foundation of the very American democratic process, but it’s also—more than it is anything else—immoral, cruel and evil. I do not know how to call it anything else. These are the bad guys.

And it is disrupting and destroying lives, like a natural disaster, like a school shooting, like a pandemic. It is breaking us, but it also in danger of destroying the future for a whole generation of kids—the people were supposed to be protecting, the people we’re supposed to be doing all of this for. I look at what we’ve been through, and I am grateful for what we are able to have—that we made it through. But we are not protecting it. We are ruining it. It was Chicago, and California, and Washington DC. Now it is Minneapolis. But the plan is for this all just to be the beginning.

I do not know what happens next. But it’s terrifying, and it feels irresponsible not to foreground what’s happening right in front of our face. What else can I do? All I can is to try to be strong and to support those who need the support the most. I don’t know if it’s enough. It’s surely not. You can’t help but feel inadequate, even powerless. But I know that’s what they want. And so I’m grateful for everyone who is fighting in every way they can. And trying to just get through this—so it doesn’t get worse.

I want to talk about baseball and movies and happy things. But I don’t know how to talk about anything else right now. Sorry.

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

1. Where Did All These Indiana Fans Come From? The Athletic. This was a fun one, it was pretty cool to get to be in Atlanta for the Peach Bowl and all those Indiana fans last week.

2. Division Winners, Ranked by Likelihood to Repeat, MLB.com. Busy baseball week, which I appreciated.

3. Takeaways From the Kyle Tucker Deal, MLB.com. As you can see here.

4. Takeaways From the Nolan Arenado Deal, MLB.com. And here.

5. Takeaways From the Alex Bregman-Cubs Deal, MLB.com. And also here.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we’re back, previewing the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and belatedly discussing “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

Morning Lineup, I did Friday’s show.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we’ll wrap up the season the day after the CFP Title Game, which is to say, Tuesday.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Son King of Hollywood,” Reeves Wiedeman, New York. Ha, what a read.

Also, this Jill Filipovic piece was strong.

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

“Emotional Rescue,” The Rolling Stones. Ralph Fiennes has an all-timer of a dance sequence in the new 28 Years Later movie that I do not want to spoil for you—but the movie is excellent, and the scene even has a nice nod to the late Rob Reiner—and it also reminded me of this fantastic scene in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash. Ralph Fiennes is a really good dancer!

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 am sorry to be a downer lately. I am trying to remain positive in my daily life! I’m thinking of maybe starting a Keaton Wagler appreciation newsletter. That might help!

Be safe out there. Please.

Best,
Will