i love it when you accidentally meet eyes with a stranger in public and you flash a quick polite smile and they look at you like they wish you were dead in a ditch
leftist media discussion: “While this show said "trans rights” directly without any ambiguity, one plot element of this children’s show could be considered morally questionable after 25 degrees of separation, so the author must be a heckin fascist"
right wing media discussion: “Well it happened. The reboot of Female Protagonist Fights Unsubtle Allegory for Capitalism That I Was Too Young to Notice as a Kid -our last bastion of apolitical entertainment- has gone woke because they made a supporting character black”
centrist media discussion: “did you see the latest episode of Sword Hero Cleanses the Undesirables on crunchyroll? best show of the year imo”
hey man everyone loved how convenient and easily forgettable you were on earth. u were the least inconvenient person out there. my buddy told me you were super helpful and nice and didn’t take up any space and just slid away from their mind as soon as they stopped looking at you. it was really impressive how little of an impression you made on anyone. sucks that it didn’t save you man.
Once, in the early part of his career, the man had gotten to travel to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and had sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, what the fuck dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!”
The prospect of travel excited this applicant. And in fact over and over the DHS agents at the fair emphasized how it was the best part of their job.
A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she had had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team.
A CBP agent in Arizona said his favorite part of the job was riding horses through the mountains. The staff of the EMT Hazardous Agent Mitigation & Medical Emergency Response team (Hammer) said that he traveled with his ambulance all over the world, loading it into massive C17 airplanes and then sleeping beside it midair. He said it was “almost like camping.”
The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people.
ALT
