Young people ... are joining up to save the future
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This was originally a writing advice blog. While the advice still exists, nowadays I use this platform to share painful truths about the military. The things I say will make you angry, and that's good. Get angry.
One thing that deeply irritates me is the way some American leftists talk about U.S veterans and imperial violence, because beneath all the Marxist language there is often this unspoken assumption that the rest of the world is supposed to emotionally process American empire in a way that is convenient for Americans. It's specifically the discourse surrounding the tactical necessity of American military veterans and it represents a profound distortion of both historical Marxist theory and contemporary material realities.
This argument typically manifests as a defense of U.S. service members against the "unprincipled" or "moralistic" anger of Global South populations, who are frequently chastised for alienating a demographic that American leftists claim will provide vital "military expertise" when "the revolution" inevitably arrives.
The argument usually goes something like this:
1. Veterans are working class.
2. Lenin argued communists must organize among soldiers.
3. Therefore hostility toward U.S veterans is politically immature, āmoralistic,ā or anti-materialist and "un-marxist" because soldiers can become revolutionary subjects and their military expertise will be necessary āwhen the revolution comes.ā
To legitimize this position, chauvinistic elements within the Western left frequently weaponize Vladimir Leninās writings on the radicalization of Tsarist soldiers during the Russian Revolution. However, this theoretical transposition collapses under rigorous analysis, relying on a false equivalence that ignores the vastly different class structures, material incentives, and geopolitical positions of the 20th-century Russian conscript versus the 21st-century American volunteer soldier.
āWhen Lenin wrote about the necessity of agitating among Tsarist soldiers, he was analyzing a peasant army composed of millions of intensely exploited, involuntarily conscripted laborers who were being meat-grinded in a catastrophic imperialist war. For the Tsarist soldier, "peace, land, and bread" were immediate, existential class demands that aligned perfectly with the Bolshevik platform. The Tsarist soldier was not a beneficiary of empire; he was its victim, forced at gunpoint to die for a monarchy that denied his family basic agrarian rights.
This distinction matters enormously.
Leninās argument was not:
āsoldiers are inherently progressive.ā
Nor was it:
ācolonized people must suppress hostility toward occupying forces.ā
Nor even:
āall criticism of soldiers alienates the masses.ā
The Bolshevik position was that communist movements cannot afford to abandon armed sections of the population entirely to reactionary politics, especially during periods where state legitimacy is weakening.
āIn stark contrast, the contemporary U.S. military is a highly professionalized, all-volunteer force that functions as the enforcement arm of global capital. The American soldier is not a peasant conscript but a contractual employee of the imperial core. While the "poverty draft" is often cited to argue that enlistment is entirely coercive, this framing obscures the specific class character of the U.S. veteran. Enlistment in the U.S. military is fundamentally an investment in upward class mobility within the imperial system. It is a transaction where individuals trade a period of service to the empire in exchange for a highly coveted bundle of social democracy: guaranteed healthcare, fully funded higher education, housing subsidies, and preferential hiring in state apparatuses.
āConsequently, the political consciousness of the American veteran class is not defined by revolutionary potential, but by a perpetual cycle of grievance rooted in unfulfilled imperial promises. The material reality of the veteran experience is a chronic struggle against the bureaucratic failures of the state; such as the inefficiencies of the Department of Veterans Affairs, rather than an awakening to the systemic evils of imperialism. Their radicalism, when it exists, is almost exclusively reactionary; it is an anger that the state has broken its contract with them, demanding the compensation they feel they rightfully earned by subjugating the Global South. This grievance-based politics does not threaten the capitalist state; it is entirely siphoned back into the existing political apparatus. The veteran class is ritualistically invoked every four years by both bourgeois political parties as a symbolic prop to legitimize American nationalism, promised reform, and then promptly discarded until the next election cycle. Their primary collective orientation is the preservation of their unique benefits, which are directly funded by the value extracted from the very Global South populations American leftists order them not to alienate.
āFurthermore, the leftist claim that the domestic movement requires the "military expertise" of veterans for a looming revolution is a fantasy untethered from material conditions.
What revolution exactly?
Where is this revolution supposed to occur?
Under what conditions?
Emerging from what mass base?
Against what degree of state legitimacy?
Following what economic rupture?
With what organizational infrastructure?
With what relationship to organized labor, racialized surplus populations, migrants, or the global south?
Under what conceivable circumstances is a synchronized, armed proletarian uprising manifesting within the heavily militarized, heavily surveilled heart of the global hegemon?
The United States lacks both the vanguard organization and the broad-based class consciousness required to orchestrate a structural overthrow of capital. By centering the veteran as an indispensable tactical asset, American leftists reveal a deeply romanticized, militaristic understanding of revolutionary change that prioritizes combat aesthetics over actual mass organizing.
āThe ultimate irony of this position lies in its profound historical and ongoing betrayal of internationalism. The very "military expertise" that Western leftists fetishize is a euphemism for the operational knowledge acquired by executing counter-insurgency warfare, drone strikes, and resource theft across the Global South. The American veteran class is expertly trained not to launch revolutions, but to systematically crush them wherever they emerge in the periphery. To demand that victims of U.S. imperialism suppress their rage under the guise of "Marxist discipline" so that Western leftists can hoard imperial managers for a hypothetical domestic uprising is a textbook display of social-chauvinism. It subordinates the real, material suffering of the global proletariat to the theoretical convenience of leftists residing safely within the metropole.
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I know this is a deeply American thing to say but I am begging everyone to stay the fuck away from military recruiters. Especially high school kids. You are going to be seeing an unholy amount of them in schools or around schools or literally anywhere kids are known to congregate. THIS INCLUDES ALL FORMS OF ROTC. Stay the fuck away from military recruiters. As someone whoās familiar with entirely too many branches through entirely too many friends and family, including my partner, recruiters are authorized to say literally any fucking thing they think will make you sign on that line. They cannot and will not deliver on those promises. They need bodies for the war theyāre pretending is only now starting up again. Thatās all you are. A body. Stay the FUCK away from the military.
Veteran here, can confirm that you can get "failure to adapt"ed practically just by asking for it. It's even easier if you're still in basic or AIT. You may face some harassment, but that's leagues better than being a killing tool.
Whenever America starts a war with a nuclear power everyone starts yelling about WW3 and it's only just occurred to me that when Americans say 'WW3' they are at least partially expressing an anxiety that this time their government's blind aggression might have hit somebody who'll actually hit back.
I was gonna say 'like WW2' but then rapidly remembered that neither of the existing world wars involved like. much of any direct damage to civilian populations either because America's eternal wars haven't touched its own soil since like the 1860s. except for Pearl Harbour, which was literally One Attack in the whole of WW2 (and which was also primarily targeting a military base. and was in a colonized nation far from the mainland USA). I am not kidding if you look up 'attacks on American soil' every single thing since 1900 except individual attacks (Pearl Harbour and 9/11, basically plus a couple of border skirmishes with Mexico) is like 'America was attacked In The Gulf States' or 'America was attacked In Asia'. like mate where is the US? you can't count attacks on military bases as 'attacks on US soil' unless you need to bulk out the list which. look at the history.
Like imo one of the reasons the US is so comfortable being leisurely belligerent against Literally Any Country In The World is that it's been literally well over a century since the fight actually came to them. why WOULD the US government stop being blindly aggressive when the only costs are financial?
and instead of being primarily concerned about like. the actual thousands of people who are actually gonna die in these strikes. every time the US's unprovoked aggression hits a nuclear state of a state with a measure of international heft, the loudest concern from Americans is OH NO WHAT IF THIS ONE'S WW3
because. war is so abstract and foreign. because it's spent 150 years constantly happening Over There and only involving Americans who are in the military. foreign wars don't register as a threat because they're NOT a threat to Americans (the only Real People) and the way in which they're frightening is the abstract possibility that the other party might at some point bring America actually into the war. which has basically never happened so it's this vast unknown threat.
(the UK btw is also not immune to this but it's a wee bit different. our economy was permanently crippled by direct damage in WW2 and the Irish republicans got a lot of hits in so there's still some memory that War Has Consequences. but by and large we still approach war as something that Happens Elsewhere and are scandalised by the idea it might directly affect us at home. this is still a fairly abstracted and fictionalised threat to us which we treat as More Worrying than the actual bombings currently happening, but I just don't think it's as completely abstracted as the American relationship to foreign wars)
The Black Tom explosion in 1916 was a German terrorist attack on US soil and resulted in 7 deaths, hundreds of injuries, about half a billion dollars in adjusted damages, and complete annihilation of an island in New Jersey.
SEVEN. SEVEN DEATHS. A CENTURY AGO. is the 'war has come to US soil' you wanted to pull?
Preliminary figures today (4 March) is 787 Iranians killed since 28 February. so forgive me if I say you're proving my point pretty effectively.
similarly yes you are correct WWII was a nuclear war. so far the only one. a war in which the US made the decision to kill over 200,000 people Over There on a different continent and then spent the next 80 years making sure nobody else would be able to either retaliate or do anything similar. And the American (and Western) relationship to nuclear arms remains primarily not 'Jesus Christ I cannot believe America killed close to a quarter of a million people in a civilian centre with one set of orders' but 'oh noooooo what if this means we have to mitigate our aggression in case they do something like this BACK TO US'.
so. again. my point. war in the American cultural imagination remains an abstract thing that THEY do to OTHER PEOPLE where the concept of any enemy action reaching people in civilian centres is so completely abstracted it just becomes a boogeyman and apparently we should still be talking about the 7 American civilians that were killed in a war that claimed in the region of 6-13 million civilian lives in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Seven. Fuck me. I thought I was being needlessly shitty when I wrote this post but you have really helped clarify that this actually is how warped American perspectives on civilian casualties are.
I was supposed to give a speech to over a thousand people today at a labor rally, but the rally was planned mostly around white union organizers who have not been to ICE recently or maybe ever. I say this because they planned this as follows: a Rally, with a march to ICE, followed by a second half of a Rally, the second half of which was to include my speech, which seemingly was the only speech to include a Salvadoran migrant speaker.
I was not originally invited to speak, but heard last minute that someone else had fallen ill and was giving up their slot, and begged white organizers through the grape vine to let me speak as a Salvadoran migrant and union steward who came to the US at age 7.
I have long been soured of going to so many rallies and felt alienated that they were allegedly for or about my people, but that no one had thought people /like/ me exist - we are still here! There are migrants in your work spaces and neighborhoods and organizations, we have stories and labor songs and speeches to share, we are marxists and labor organizers and have reasons to speak out too.
But seldom if ever do you hear our music or faces or voices near the banners. Instead of Tigres Del Norte we heard Bella Ciao, and none of the singers knew the Italian words or bothered to even translate them, so they sang nanananananana, instead of the powerful lyrics that maybe meant something once to someone somewhere. Instead of Somos MĆ”s Americanos we heard Donāt Worry, Be Happy.
Instead of a Salvadoran woman who wanted to speak to the American union workers about the Banana workers unions, we heard from a dozen white people about democracy, and justice, and the constitution, and no one was warned about what would happen if they marched down the street from the park to the ICE facility. They fully expected everyone to come back and complete the second half of the rally.
Instead, marchers with their dogs and children were tear-gassed to hell and back the second they dared get close to the facility, maybe at best 1/3rd of the marchers returned while the rest were bottlenecked towards ICE. There was little to no water to treat the untrained protestors. I returned to the rally quickly realizing I could not get caught up at ICE, knowing who I am and what awaits me.
When I got back a chorus of smiling white faces sang a silly song like a Christmas carol with their heads bobbling, reading the lyrics from some handed out papers. White people with upside down flags cheered. Then a black woman in overalls abruptly got on the mic and said āWell thank you everyone but we have to close the program early because people are getting tear-gassed, please get home to safety righty away,ā - and I swore I couldnāt believe my ears.
They had brought us all here, marched all these people down to the ICE facility, and expected us all to march back without encountering teargas? And then when some people had made it back they had them sing a little jingle but turned the one migrant away? I begged them to let me speak for the three minutes I had allotted, noting that I had put myself in serious danger to come out here today. That I needed to be heard just this once, and that all the white people had their fair turn to say many unrelated things, and to sing many unrelated songs.
She said, āyou donāt understand, there are children down here,ā and I had to say āyou donāt understand, there are children in the camps.ā
And she tried again, āyes but the gas is spreading,ā and I said āyes we have been down here being gassed for six months, donāt you understand?ā
She blinked twice and told me they just had to break down. I watched from the sidelines as they continued to blare Caribbean Blue and smooth jazz while people filtered out, stood around talking, chatting - finally I said, āplease let me speak, you still have speakers going, itās been 20 minutes,ā and the DJ, a white elderly man in a sweater vest who had a strict āonly the classicsā policy that seems to actually mean āno hip hop and no curse words,ā - barked at me that he had to break down and to help him take down his canopy. I am no maid, so I did not listen. He then turned to my comrades and told them to take his canopy down, which they did not. Then turned to his two other labor organizers who were not paying attention, and they took a leg of the canopy and moved it somewhere without breaking it down.
And one looked at me and said quietly, āitās okay, take that bullhorn no one will notice,ā and we took it and ran.
And we ran to a firetruck which I climbed, and I gave the speech, which was in fact more than 3 minutes, sorry not sorry, to a crowd of workers who were slowly pouring out from the ice facility, some stopping, some going, some who heard me, some who didnāt. And I gave it there and it was the only speech most of these people will ever hear from a migrant in all of this, and I think that is tragic. But I firmly believe that had I not given it, had I not climbed the truck, had I not taken the mic, some people would have never heard this story at all. And I think very much you should hear it. And I hope you will share it, if you have the chance. And I hope I get to tell it again, someday, to people who actually listen, to the masses who came to actually support immigrants, and not just to the dredges after theyāve been gassed and are running for shelter while Iām coughing myself.
Transcribed for accessibility + added links for context, but please still watch/listen to the speech if possible. A live speech really resonates.
Begin transcription.
Olivia: I came to the United States when I was 7 years old. And I became a citizen when I was 20. But I am on this stage to ask: if you will give me 3 minutes of your time, *cough* I will give you 300 years of American History that has been taken from you.
There are five crops that changed the world as we know it.
Bananas. Coffee. Tobacco. Sugar. And Cotton.
First grown by slaves in the New World, these crops all happened to also grow in a little bean-shaped country that my parents lived in near the Caribbean called Cuzcatlan, āThe Land of Precious Things.ā It would be renamed El Salvador in the 1800ās.Ā
But the precious things remained after the name changed. And the people were captured, and they were forced to work for pennies on the dollar to dredge the precious things from the soil, and the sea, and the mountains, and the sand. Cuzcatlan was not precious just to us, you see. It was coveted by the Americans. And once they saw our jewels, they would never be satisfied again.Ā
The people suffered. And how we suffered! Dying in the fields, raped by their masters, buried in the shining black volcanic sands, their blood fertilizing the crops.
Of Bananas. Coffee. Sugar. Cotton. And Tobacco.
Until one day, the people of Cuzcatlan said, āWe can bear it no more.ā And they broke their shovels in half, and they plunged the stems into their masters, and they rode through the streets on their mastersā Spanish horses, and they cried out that Cuzcatlan would no longer belong to the American companies that demanded their precious things without paying precious prices. Perhaps, soon, those business leaders would learn to negotiate for the labor and crops they so needed.
And the Americans? The Americans could not stand it! They would not abide such a story be told. And so you never heard it! The American companies, and all of their corporate masters came down on Cuzcatlan, with a fury seldom seen before.Ā They killed everyone.
Instead, you heard a story about āCommunistsā and āTerroristsā in Central America, spreading a disease that would destroy your country and families. You heard a story that we have no good will towards you. That we wanted you to starve, that we were lazy, and formed gangs, and were lawless, and wore weapons to sell you drugs and fund terrorism.Ā
But you never heard the story of Cuzcatlan, because it was a sad story, and sad stories do not sell fruit, and coffee, and cigarettes!
No, they came to my country, and they wiped out entire villages. The Archbishop, Don Remar - er, Don Romero, himself, was shot by the military during his Sunday Mass, for having dared to wonder whether the workers deserved some mercy. Assassinated for having dared to wonder, and he was left bleeding on the pulpit, even as worshipers bowed their heads.Ā
EVERYBODY was KILLED.Ā
EVERYBODY!
The women, with their children still in their arms. Anyone looking for cover; people who found cover, people who didnāt. People who worked, and people who had no jobs. Communists. Catholics. Those who didnāt know how to read, those who didnāt know what labor rights were. Simple folks. Smart folks.Ā
And they didnāt stop there. They went through the countryside, and they killed everyone they thought was hiding labor organizers or communists sympathizers. Banana union men and women, who they labeled terrorists.
And in one village, we still only speak about in whispers, called āEl Mozote.ā The Americans tied women and children to trees, and they threw their babies in the air, and they shot them. Everyone was killed, to send one message, and that is: āA union is a threat to the American Empire. Not one union man or woman will hide in your village, or any other. And if you hid one here, now or ever, you will never breathe to hide one again."
And I tell you this because I am you from the future. You and I, all of you, are very much alike. You worked very hard to ply the precious things you have from the ground, the sky, the water, and the aether. You all wrote stories, you filed insurance policies, you taught children, you rung people up, you made sure whatever sorry system they had worked, not because you believed in it, not because you wanted it, but because it was all you could do.Ā
And in exchange, they offered you cheap bananas. Coffee. Sugar. Tobacco. Bananas.
But I will tell you a secret. They were never cheap. They were precious. And so are you.Ā
And they stole you, and they stole us, and they stole it all, and they told you: if you look the other way, you get to be satisfied and at least well-fed.
But who can afford the luxuries of cigarettes or vapes or groceries anymore? Even that is being taken from you. And even if you have them, your food or your small pleasures wonāt satisfy you. Not more than knowing the truth about Cuzcatlan, not more than knowing the truth about El Salvador. Today, where our precious land once stood, they built a concentration camp called CECOT. And not just for our precious things, our people, but yours. Your citizens, your dissenters, your unwanted disappeared into the hole that America built.Ā
And what will we do when they start building incinerators at the camps? What will you do when they open up mass graves?Ā
For our people, the most precious gift of all: do not take my warning lightly. The story of Cuzcatlan is not just from the past. It is from the future. The workers face the same enemy, and the enemy never had your interest in mind. From the moment they had you, the plan was to have a worker. From the moment you existed, it was to create another soldier against the people of Cuzcatlan and the rest of the world. You were a commodity to them.Ā
But we have written you a new future. One in which we no longer point guns at each other. One in which our billionaires fear the land of precious people from learning they are no longer precious things.Ā
Turn to me now! And tell me you will not forget the last three minutes. You will never again be ignorant of this story. And you will not let it happen here. You will close the camps. You will destroy ICE.
Spectator: Yeah!
Olivia: You would rather have seasonal bananas or never see one again than have it covered in blood.Ā
Spectators: Thatās right! Yeah!Ā
Olivia: You would rather trade fairly with other union workers than kill your fellow man, wouldnāt you?Ā
Spectators: Yes!
Olivia: Tell me you love me, and that our fates are tied! Tell me youāll stop them from dragging me down from this place, and Iāll never let them do to you what they did to us. I promise. El pueblo unidoā¦
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Stranger Things season 1: beneath the superficial image of āpeace and prosperityā in 1980s small-town America, there was the painful legacy of countless atrocities committed by the American government in the name of āfreedom.ā
Stranger Things season 4: evil Russians (not Soviets) have sent our All-American Hero to the gulags which apparently still exist in the 1980s and itās up to us to save him šŗšøš¦ š«”
Thereās probably a term that already exists for this but if there isnāt Iām gonna call it āRamboficationā in honor of its probably most well known instance: Rambo First Blood was about a soldier, John Rambo (thatās his actual name Iām not doing a bit), returning home from the Vietnam war, so traumatized by war that he brought the war home with him to a small town, unable to adapt to life without strict military discipline and hierarchy. Subsequent Rambo movies were about how John Rambo was the only supersoldier tough enough and patriotic enough to kill faceless hordes of dastardly foreign commies.
Ergo, āRamboficationā is the process of a series starting with a relatively nuanced or subversive narrative before its sequels become a shallow embrace of the very narrative it originally subverted. It happens surprisingly often!
What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We're all finding out.
(This article is behind a paywall, so hit yon readmore for the full text)
January 13, 2026
The plan was never to become an ICE agent.
The plan, when I went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Career Expo in Texas last August, was to learn what it was like toĀ applyĀ to be an ICE agent. Who wouldnāt be curious? The event promised on-the-spot hiring for would-be deportation officers: Walk in unemployed, walk out with a sweet $50k signing bonus, a retirement account, and a license to brutalize the countryās most vulnerable residents without consequenceāall while wrapped in the warm glow of patriotism.
The catch, however, is that thereās only one āLaura Jedeedā with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the countryās general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trumpās unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and youāll find articles with titles like āWhat I Saw in LA Wasnāt an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riotā and āInside Mike Johnsonās Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.ā Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier onĀ AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.
In short, I figuredāat least back thenāthat my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICEās application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.
The ICE expo in the Dallas area, where my application journey began, required attendees to register for a specific time slot, presumably to prevent throngs of eager patriots from flooding the event and overwhelming the recruiters. But when I showed up at 9 a.m., the flood was notably absent: there was no line to check in and no line to go through security. I walked down nearly empty hallways, past a nearly empty drug testing station, and into the event proper, where a man directed me to a line to wait in for an interview. I took my spot at the end; there were only six people ahead of me.
While I waited, I looked around the ESports Stadium Arlingtonāan enormous blacked-out event space optimized for video game tournaments that has a capacity of 2,500. During my visit, there couldnāt have been more than 150 people there.
Hopeful hires stood in tiny groups or found seats in the endless rows of cheap folding chairs that faced a stage ripped straight fromĀ Tron. Everything was bright-blue and lit-up and sci-fi-future angular. Above the monolithic platform hung three large monitors. The side monitors displayed static propaganda posters that urged the viewer to DEFEND THE HOMELAND and JOIN ICE TODAY, while the large central monitor played two short videos on loop: about 10 minutes of propaganda footage, again and again and again.
The expo event was part of ICEās massive recruitment campaign for the foot soldiers it needs to execute the administrationās dream of a deportation campaign large enough to shift Americaās demographic balance back whiteward. Youāve probably seen evidence of it yourself: ICEās āDefend the homelandā propaganda is ubiquitous enough to be the Uncle Sam āI Want Youā poster of our day, though somewhere in there our nation lost the plot about the correct posture toward Nazis.
When Donald Trump took office,Ā ICE numbered approximately 10,000. Despite this eventās lackluster attendance, their recruitment push is reportedly going well; the agency reported 12,000 new recruits in 2025, which means the agency has more new recruits than old hands. Thatās the kind of growth that changes the culture of an agency.
Many of ICEās critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugsāJan. 6 insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc.āfor a domestic security force loyal to the president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier: ICEās recruitment push is so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea whoās joining the agencyās ranks. Weāre all, collectively, in the dark about whom the state is arming, tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into Americaās streets.
And we are all, collectively, discovering just how deadly of an arrangement that really is.
At the end of my brief interview, the recruiter mentioned I could talk to a current deportation officer about what the job would be like. There was no line to talk to a deportation officer (did I mention how empty the place was?) and so I walked up, introduced myself to one of them, and asked about day-to-day duties.
I shouldnāt expect to hit the streets right away, the agent told me. Odds were good Iād get a support position firstāsomething like the Criminal Alien Program office. āLetās say a local police officer arrests someone out in the field for a DUI. Extremely common. Or beating their wife or whateverāall the typical crimes they commit,ā he said. (The ātheyā here being āundocumented immigrants,ā and while itās extremely difficult to measure, evidence suggests that ātheyā actuallyĀ commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens.)
If the cops suspect theyāre dealing with an immigrant who doesnāt have permanent legal status, they alert ICE, whose agents conduct interviews and run record checks.
If this preliminary investigation suggests that status, the person ends up in the Criminal Alien Program office for processingāwhich is where I would come in. āWhat you see on TV, with us arresting people and doing all kinds of crazy things, thatās maybe 10 percent. The other 90 percent is essentially doing a bunch of paperwork,ā the agent said. āIt takes a lot to remove somebody from the United States. Some people are subject to due process.ā
The officer ran down other departments I might end up in: Prosecutions, Removal Coordination Unit, or Detention. The point being that I should not expect to be a badass street officer on Day 1. āI have so many guys that come over to me, theyāre like, āIām gonna put cuffs on somebody. Iām gonna arrest somebody.ā Well, you need to master this first and then weāll see about getting you on the field.ā
I told him that I was fine with office workāwith my analyst background, it seemed like a better fit for my skill set anyway. His attitude shift was subtle, but instant and unmistakable; this was the wrong attitude and the wrong answer. āJust to be upfront, the goal is to put as many guns and badges out in the field as possible,ā he said.
The agent then told me a bit about his own background. Like me, he enlisted straight out of high school, then got out and vowed to get as far away from the violence of the military as possible. Like a lot of veterans, he had trouble assimilating into the civilian world. āAfter about six months, I was like, āThese people arenāt like me. I want to be around like-minded people.ā ā He found his way into law enforcement. That was well over a decade agoāheās on his way to a very comfortable retirement, and he enjoys the work. āI like that instant gratification ofĀ Hey, that guy committed this crime, these X, Y, and Z, heās not even supposed to be here,ā he said.
I do not agree with his framing, but have no trouble understanding the appeal. Hell, itās why I enlisted in the first place. Thankfully, Afghanistan beat it out of me. If I believed what he believed, I would surely do the same thing heās doing.
I thanked him for the information and time, shook his hand, and took a seat on one of those uncomfortable folding chairs. I had a few hours before my flight back to New York City, and it made more sense to hang out than to flee the building and get good and airport drunk, regardless of how desperately I would have preferred the latter. Instead, I settled in to do what everyone does at the DMV: check my phone and people-watch. The aspiring officers fall broadly into three categories: thick-necked law enforcement types who look like they do steroids but donāt know how to work out, bearded spec-ops wannabes who look like they take steroids andĀ doĀ know how to work out, and dorks. Pencil-necked misfits. I couldnāt tell whether there were more white or Hispanic people waiting for their email, but it was close. A few Black applicants rounded out the overwhelmingly male group.
Iād been sitting around for about an hour when the video suddenly stopped and a bearded man in a black suit stepped onto the stage. He did not introduce himselfāwe were, I gathered, supposed to already know who he wasābut it became clear heās a senior agent of some sort. āI figured it would be best if I break up the same video youāve been watching for the last four hours,ā he said, and offered to answer any questions we might have.
One person asked about work/life balance, which the agent said is possible but not the route heās chosen. Someone else wanted to know about travel opportunities and he talked about the many places heās gone as part of the job.
Every other question during the 45 minutes the agent stood onstage pertained to the hiring process or what we could expect in training. Law enforcement types seemed especially concerned about the painful parts: Would they have to get pepper sprayed again? Would they have to get shot with a taser if theyād already qualified? Yes and probably not, respectively. The agent took the opportunity to gush about ICEās new state-of-the-art semi-automatic tasers and brand-new pepper-ball guns. āItās mostly very liberal citiesāSan Francisco, Los Angelesāwhere groups will come and try to stop ICE officers from arresting somebody. Theyāre like, āWeāre going to form a human wall against you,ā ā he said. āWhen they do that, you can just pop āem up. Let them disperse and cry about it.ā
When, during a moment of protracted silence, the agent threatened to put the video back on if no one had questions, I asked about harassment and doxing. āWe will prosecute people to the fullest extent of the law,ā he assured me, āand then people like myself will go on TV and publicly talk about how that person is now in prison to dissuade other people from doing it.ā
As empty as the place had been when Iād arrived, it was even emptier by the time the senior agent ended the Q&A. Somebody vastly overestimated the number of Americans willing to take a job brutalizing and disappearing hard-working men and womenāeven with a potential $50K bonus, even in this economy.
That may have something to do with what happened to me next.
I completely missed the email when it came. Iād kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but Iād grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.
āPlease note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,ā the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps Iād need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driverās license information, an affidavit that Iāve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: āIf you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.ā
As I mentioned, Iād missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.
And that might have been where this all endedāan unread message sinking to the bottom of my inboxāif not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. āThank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,ā it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) āPlease complete your required pre-employment drug test.ā
The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadnāt smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, Iād waste a small piece of ICEās gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me Iād failed.
Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, soĀ impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.
Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent meānot the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit,Ā none of itāICE had apparently offered me a job.
According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was āEODāāEntered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to āOnboardingā and a helpful pop-up appeared. āYour EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!ā
I clicked through to my application tracking page. Theyād sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. āWelcome to Ice. ⦠Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.ā
By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.
Perhaps, if Iād accepted, they would have demanded my pre-employment paperwork, done a basic screening, realized their mistake, and fired me immediately. And yet, the pending and upcoming tasks list suggested a very different outcome. My physical fitness test had been initiated on Oct. 6, it said: three days in the future. My medical check had apparently beenĀ completedĀ on Oct. 6.
The portal also listed my background check as completed on Oct. 6. Had I preemptively passed? Was ICE seriously going to let me start training without finding out the first thing about me? I reached out to ICE for an explanation, but never heard back.
The only thing left for me to do was press the green āAcceptā button on the home page. And maybe I should have. Maybe no one would have ever checked my name and I could have written the story of a lifetime. Or maybe the agency infamous for brutalizing and disappearing people with no regard for the law or basic human rights would have figured out exactly who I am while I was in one of their facilities with no way to escape. Iām not actually a domestic terrorist sent straight from Antifa headquarters, but to a paranoid fascist regime increasingly high on their own supply, I sure look like one on paper. Self-preservation won out.
I hit āDecline,ā closed my browser, and took a long, deep breath.
What are we to make ofĀ all this? To be clear, I barely applied to ICE. I skipped the steps of the application process that would have clued the agency in on my lack of fitness for the position. I made no effort to hide my public loathing of the agency, what it stands for, and the administration that runs it. And they offered me the job anyway.
Itās possible that Iām an aberrationāperhaps I experienced some kind of computer glitch that affected my application and no one elseās. But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment.
With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agentsā identities, itāll be extremely difficult for us to know.
Thereās a temptation to take some comfort in ICEās sloppiness. Thereās a real argument here that an agency so inept in its recruitment will also be inept at training people and carrying out its mission. Weāre seeing some very sloppy police work from ICE, including an inability to do basic things likeĀ throw someone down and cuff them. On some level, all of this is a reminder that their takeover is neither total nor inevitable.
But if they missed the fact that I was an anti-ICE journalist who didnāt fill out her paperwork, what else might they be missing? How many convicted domestic abusers are being given guns and sent into other peopleās homes? How many people with ties to white supremacist organizations are indiscriminately targeting minorities on principle, regardless of immigration status? How many rapists and pedophiles are working in ICE detention centers with direct and unsupervised access to a population that will be neither believed nor missed? How are we to trust ICEās allegedly thorough investigations of the people they detain and deport when they canāt even keep their HR paperwork straight?
And if theyāre not going to screen me out, what hope is there of figuring out which recruit might one day turn into a trigger-happy agent who would forget that law enforcement officers are trained not to stand in front of vehicles, get jumpy, and shoot a 37-year-old woman to death on the streets of Minneapolis?
Thatās exactly what happened last week, and why Renee Good will never have a 38thĀ birthday, and why her children will never again be hugged by their mother.
By all appearances, the only thing ICE is screening for is a desire to work for ICE: a very specific kind of person perfectly suited for the kind of mission creep we are currently seeing. Goodās murder is not an isolated incident;Ā the American Civil Liberties UnionĀ reports a nationwide trend of ICE pointing guns at, brutalizing, and even detaining citizens who stop to film them. A Minneapolis pastor who protested ICE by chanting āWe are not afraidā wasĀ detained at gunpointĀ by an agent who reportedly asked him: āAre you afraid now?ā
jfc the US hasn't been at war 10 minutes and braindead american lefties are wheeling out the support our troops shit. read the fucking room
no one knows better than the soldiers-turned-commies ive known that there is no hope in expecting class consciousness to develop among US military personnel, you all have no idea just how much these ppl are reactionaries among the reactionary. if there's any hope for armed communist struggle in the US it's going to have to be self-taught militias, these men are the fucking wehrmacht
It's simply vomit inducing to learn that the "the US military is the largest polluter in the world" factoid only refers to the on-paper oil purchases of the US military and does not take into account all the myriad of other ways it pollutes, poisons, and actively destroys the Earth. It is polluting far past the point of it even being quantifiable. There is truly no greater threat to the whole globe, no greater evil, than the USA and its military.
It is year 2001. I see on the news that the local Seoul municipal government had to spend its own money cleaning up the oil spill at the Yongan Army Garrison. It was known for 10 years, apprently. When I was entering middle school in 2006, the United States forces in Korea claimed that it was fixed, but the pollution worsened. My parents protested against the base's presence in 2002 after the US military killed two high school students walking home from school and the killers were acquitted. In 2025, you will see people on websites like Reddit that so badly wants to acquit the two civilian murderers while painting the Korean people rising up to protest against the occupiers as "political hijacking of a tragedy."
In december 2012, fresh off my first semester off from a university in the USA, I am visiting my grand aunt in Niigata. On the TV, there's a panel show discussing the US proposed military's removal of 9,000 marines, an agreement that was reached in april. As of 2024, it hasn't fully happened. In 2024, however, I do see on the TV that the presidential hopeful Kamala Harris secured the release of a yank soldier that ran over 2 Japanese civilians with his car from jail. One of the leading news casters in the mainstream USA network TV calls this a great victory for justice.
In 2019, I am starting my second MA in OŹ»ahu in HawaiŹ»i. I lived 20 minutes by drive (45 minutes with traffic but let's not get into that) away from University of HawaiŹ»i at MÄnoa in Aiea, but only 5 minutes from a military base, at a distant relative's basement-garage-apartment. There were some weeks where I was unable to use the tap water because the US military base would have its fuel leak directly into the springs where we got our water. In 2025, the only people ever indicted were 2 civilians for 1 of such incidents.
Starting my PhD program in Upstate New York in 2022, I am talking to one of my PhD advisors. She got into academia because she was from Guam and her people, despite the land being owned by the USA, has no political say in what goes on on the island. She talks about the fuel dumping that happens in Guam. We both share a sigh and a knowing nod.
Everywhere the United States' military goes, it leaves behind a trail of suffering that it will simply not address. It leaves a deep scar in every local community and the only people that the military ever demands responsibility from are the civilians they're occupying, not ever themselves.
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It would be great if people would watch the whole video and form their own opinions, but since I'm seeing a lot of sharing of just this sort of thing
I thought I'd give some extra context.
This video takes place immediately after Trump and Mamdani have had a private discussion. I'm unaware of the contents of that discussion.
Around 3:04 in the above video:
Reporter: Mr. Mamdani, it sounds like you've had a productive discussion. But just days ago, you referred to President Trump as a "despot who had betrayed the country." You said that you'd be his worst nightmare, and accused him of having a fascist agenda. Are you planning to retract any of these remarks in order to improve your relationship?
Mamdani: I think both President Trump and I... we are clear about our positions and our views. And what I really appreciate about the president is that the meeting that we had focused not on places of disagreement - which there are many - and also focused on the shared purpose that we had in serving New Yorkers. And frankly, that is something that could transform the lives of 8 and a half million people who are currently struggling under a Cost of Living crisis with one in four living in poverty. And the meeting came back, again and again, to what it could look like to lift those New Yorkers out of struggle, and start to deliver them a city that they could do more than just struggle to afford it, but actually start to live in it.
Trump: And I've been called much worse than a despot, so, it's not that insulting. I think he'll change his mind after we get to work.
After Trump's quip is a series of unrelated questions.
Mamdani neither confirms his previous statements nor makes any accusations. If Mamdani does believe that Trump is a despot or a fascist, he shows nothing but willingness to work with him at this point in the video.
After a few more questions, we reach 11:27.
Reporter: I want to ask the Mayor Elect about a House Resolution which has passed overwhelmingly to condemn socialism. Including 86 Democrats, all of House Dem leadership, and the minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, despite his endorsement of you. What's your reaction to that?
Mamdani: I have to be honest with you: I focus very little on resolutions. Frankly, I've been focusing on -
The reporter's interruption is muffled. The YouTube CC claims it's "On socialism." I hear: "Do you condemn socialism?" (11:47-11:48)
Mamdani: I understand. I think the focus is on the work at hand. I can tell you that I am someone who is a Democratic Socialist. I've been very open about that. And I know there might be differences about ideology, but the place of agreement is the work that needs to be done to make New York City affordable.
Same reporter: And I want to clarify your answer to Steven Nelson when he asked about your comment calling the president "a fascist," and your answer was, "Both President Trump and I have been clear about our positions and our views." Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?
(12:17)
Mamdani: I've spoken about -
Trump, interrupting: That's okay. You can just say yes. Okay?
Mamdani, smiling and nodding, causing others to begin laughing: Okay, alright. Yeah.
Trump: It's easier. It's easier than explaining. I don't mind. (00:12:24, when Trump taps Mamdani on the shoulder.)
After this, nothing is said and the topic shifts to Ukraine.
However - and this is only tangentially related, but I think important ...
21:29
Same reporter as previously transcribed segment: Mr. President, I was wondering if you could clear up some confusion around a Washington Post report. There was this explosive report that the Coast Guard is no longer going to characterize swastikas and nooses as hate symbols. DHS called that a "lie," and "fake news," can you clear up...?"
Trump: I don't know anything about it. When was this written?
Reporter: I think yesterday.
Quick interruption. This is the article she's referencing in question.
It's referring to what appeared to be a proposed update in Coast Guard policy regarding hate symbols. It would have read: "Potentially divisive symbols and flags include, but are not limited to, the following: a noose, a swastika..." and so on.
The sticking point was the phrasing "potentially divisive," leaving room for interpretation rather than clearly designating these things as hate symbols.
Recently the Trump administration began rolling back "DEI" language and the various branches began reevaluating their policies in favor of weeding out "overly general language." in doing so, they created a drafted policy that contained overly general language.
Time reports:
Copp, the Post reporter, added in another X post later Thursday that āthe Coast Guard published a new policy, dated Nov. 20, that re-establishes that it specifically sees swastikas and nooses as hate symbols - not as just āpotentially divisiveā and states that they are expressly prohibited. Importantly, it says the new guidance published tonight would supersede any other policies out there."
Back to the video.
21:49
Trump: Well, look, the Coast Guard's an incredible group of people. I know them very well. We just ordered a lot of new coast guard cutters. Beautiful. The most magnificent ship. They look like yachts with lots of guns on them. So, I don't know. I haven't seen any report like that. But certainly we want them to remain a great force, and they are.
End transcript and enter my thoughts.
I don't like the way Mamdani handled this at all. He's eager to work with the man he calls a tyrannical fascist if it means potentially giving the people he personally cares about a marginally better standard of living. Couldn't make even one genuine criticism standing next to the man.
Everyone asks why Trump likes Mamdani so much; it's because Zohran Mamdani is the highest profile socialist in American politics right now, and he will calmly stand next to Trump, smile, laugh, and say that they had a very productive discussion wherein they discovered they actually "have a lot of things in common." Then he'll redirect a question about Israel to being about making New York affordable.
This video, this reaction, this climate... it's all quite a lot right now. I hope people remember to dig deeper. i'm still thinking.
at the beginning of the genocide i used to make a lot of posts encouraging people to speak up and thanking people for speaking up, because i know a lot of people were intimidated by manufactured complexity about the middle east, and a lot of people were scared of repercussions. and then i stopped, because it started to feel really dehumanizing to be thanking allies for the bare minimum, and because i was tired, and because i was distracted by the scope of loss
but now i've noticed that as things have gotten worse, as so many of the things we asked you to speak up before they happened have come to pass, people are actually less likely to talk about palestine than they were ten months ago. now that it's palestine and lebanon, now that it's genocide and carnage, now that it's clear that the rule of law really doesn't apply equally no matter how much people protest and how much evidence they compile, now that people are criminalizing free speech and actively inviting authoritarianism simply to curb protest on palestine, i've noticed a withdrawal that isn't just exhaustion, but also disillusionment. and unfortunately this has left the onus on the most vulnerable to continue to be the most visible
so let me get back to it. yes, it is the bare minimum and it is small. yes, it can be more complicated now with an election you care about coming up soon. yes, things are very bleak. but i've said it before. this isn't a short term process. this is the long haul. there is no button that ends a genocide, there is only a lever we are all collectively pulling together.
the least and most you can do is speak up. i will give you concrete examples: when you see a post that dehumanizes arabs, a post that ignores genocide, a post that justifies massacres, you actually should object to that. it's not nothing. this is the rhetoric that allows these wars to continue, as poisonous as overt warmongering is covert normalizing with warmongering, is ignoring the genocide in gaza and the massacres in lebanon, and all the other overreaches of the US war machine. when you see people being unfairly targeted for being pro-palestine, you should still support them. when you see the things you loveāmovies, celebrities, literature, publishers, companiesāsupporting genocide, normalizing israeli war crimes, ignoring the sheer amount of suffering in the world, ignoring the wars happening with your taxes, you should still speak up against them. this isn't something you stop doing. this is now something you live with, the way you live with every other principle you hold dear, whether it comes to racism, to homophobia, to kindness, to cruelty, to keeping libraries open, to keeping children alive.
if you remember that this is injustice, then you have a role. your role is to remind people. they haven't forgotten that they are committing injustice, they're hoping you have. and the least you can do, the very least you can do, is remind them that you haven't.
Turns out we got so many Volunteers lately that our funds can't keep up!
If you aren't familiar with Crips for Esims, you can read more about the initiative on the Disability Visibility Project here. And recently, they have even gotten added to the donation page for the original eSims for Gaza movement.
I've written a little bit about my positive experience volunteering for this group here. They're all good folks who are doing the best we can. Every little bit really does directly translate into more esims sent to people in Gaza.
Crips for eSims for Gaza is a collaboration between Jane Shi, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alice Wong.Ā
I forget exactly where I saw the initial post asking for volunteers, but on July 10th, I reached out to the listed email. Jane, the organizer, got back to me right away and within an hour I was added in their discord.
Up until this point, I had been maintaining an average 8 ESims myself, so I already had experience checking in on them on a daily basis. The folks there helped me onboard with the spreadsheets for keeping track, and now it's very easy for me to catalog new ones I buy and record daily data usage. The whole process takes me maybe 20-40 minutes a day depending now on how many ESims actually need to be topped off.
Jane has been very up front with lots of the group's information, with frequent announcements about the groups current funds and amounts of daily ESims sent out. She and the others have been super helpful with getting funds to us when needed, and I've almost never had to actually spend any of my own money for any of this.
In the time that I've been volunteering, they figured out how to run a Business account with the Nomad ESim company. Which means that now and then they can just send 15 or so ESims my way, and I just catalog them and send the QRcodes towards Mirna and the Connecting Gaza folks. No more wasting time with the purchasing process, while getting a bit of a bulk discount on top of that.
We also share updates on whatever brand of ESims are most needed. When folks on the ground tell us that one network doesn't seem reliable, we are able to switch over for a while until either the networking issue is fixed, or we all pressure customer service enough to replace them for us.
There's also lots of complaining about new UI updates an general website bugs. There's surprisingly a lot of them and it's good to know other folks are getting info from customer service when things go wrong.
In August they made a meme channel
Anyways....
Lets get into some stats for myself. In 2 months (July 10- Sept12) I have:
Send off 171 ESims
Maintained around 60 active ones
Topped up these active ESims 139 times
Spend over $6400 donated dollars
I have multiple power users who have burned through close to 100GB. 2 of them have broken 200GB. These are most likely being used as hot spots.
Why am I sharing all of this? Mostly to show how easy it has been to make a marginal difference. I have helped at least 60 people stay connected with the outside world in just 2 months. Probably more if we assume some of the power users becoming hotspots for other folks. This is 20-40 minutes of my time a day, and I honestly regret not signing up to do this sooner.
I was specifically limiting myself to this workload because I wanted to test the waters. Those stats was me specifically not wanting to push myself and see what impact a normal person could make with 20 minutes a day. At this point I think I will be taking more advantage of Nomad's Tuesday discounts to really bulk up my numbers. It's pretty easy to buy 15 or so every Tuesday, and then send em over.
If you would like to join us in this endeavor, please reach out to Jane at cripsforesimsforgaza(at)gmail
We are specifically looking for people in European time zones, since a lot of us are in the Americas and that's quite a difference between us and Gaza. If not, that's no problem!
If you can't participate, that's totally fine, but please donate what you can! Folks like you are the ones who keep us going!
I hope this information has been useful in some way. Like I said, I wish I had heard about this group sooner, with how easy it has been to do. I can track my direct impact of what my daily time is doing for folks, and seeing the data be used up a little bit more day by day gives me hope for everyone in Gaza.
Thank you for your time.
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A woman was fined in France (Lyon) because she was wearing a Kuffiya. The said it was because she was āplanning to attend an illegal protestā Except there was no protest⦠they also mocked her because she hasnāt been in France for a long time so in a stressful situation she used English instead of French.
Now that didnāt surprise me at all cause last week I got fined for the same reason too. Except not only there was no protest but I live in a small town who hasnāt had a protest since 2018 and NEVER had an anti racist protest in its history. (People like me just go to the biggest city in the area for this kind of protests)
But the person who filmed the police got fined too⦠because they had a WATERMELON PINS. They also said it was for āplanning to attend an illegal protestā but again no protest. Getting fined for a fucking watermelon pin.
This is what we mean when we say solidarity with Palestinians is criminalized. This is just a fucking pin. This is Western freedom of speech for yāall.
You can contest against the fine once you receive it. Personally thatās what I plan to do for mine.
Here is a link explaining the process to contest such a fine in France.
In the past it happened to me. I may or I may have not been actually attending an illegal protest but the fine happened after the end of that protest I may have attended. So I argued that I wasnāt attending any protest and it worked. They just ignored my letter for a year (which means they dropped the fine).
This time given how much they want to criminalize solidarity with Palestinians I donāt think a simple letter would cut it they most likely want to make an example out of people getting fined and I think some proof like a video could be necessary. The girls I mentioned in my post do have videos but while they werenāt going to a protest and there was no protest planned that ended up not being allowed, it happened in a big city known for its antiracist and pro Palestine protests (as well as its white supremacist militia) so the cops could argue that they planned to go a wild protestā¦
Long story short thereās ways to contest the fine but it can be long and thereās not guarantee. But honestly if they are willing to pay and can afford it itās actually worth a shot to complain. They can donate the money instead (135ā¬) and by the time the complain is handled even if the answer is negative they will have their next pay check to pay the fine.
A lot of the restrictions being put on protests in various parts of the EU right now will not stand up to the test of a court room and they're not designed to.
They're designed to intimidate people, to provide grounds for arrest, and to get people stuck in long and stressful court procedures, which is energy that they can't spend on something else.
From the state's perspective, who cares if these rules get struck down a year down the line? They've already achieved their goal.
This is just one of the endless examples of the states not playing by their own so-called 'rules based order' when it suits them.
Last year during Leiden Canal Pride the cops violently beat members of an anticapitalist LGBTQIA+ group and arrested two of them, for daring to try to hang this banner from a pedestrian bridge. [link]
I don't remember a year in the last decade when the Dutch cops DIDN'T beat up anti-capitalism and anti-racist queers at Pride.
It's almost like an annual tradition at this point: Protest for your rights as a queer person at Pride, get beat up by a 'pink' cop, AGAIN.
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