The recruiter for the air marshals told a crowd of applicants they shouldn’t bother applying if they were fat. “No one likes a fat cop,” she said. She drank Pink Monster Ultra Rosá and had multiple dreamcatcher forearm tattoos.
“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”
There was the young, taciturn southerner managing a batting cage near New Orleans, and the pimply youth from Kentucky, churning out Yahoo Finance content for twenty dollars an hour. Both said they were tired and bored. The latter said his father had been in ICE, but he “didn’t really know what he did.”
The last applicant I spoke to said he didn’t care much about the politics of ICE—it was just that he thought his taxes shouldn’t be used to buy school supplies for “illegal alien children.” What he was really interested in, he said, was parlaying his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs. “My classmates came up in the same environment as me,” he said, “but now they’re off posting photographs of Lamborghinis on Instagram, standing on balconies of waterfront apartments.”
His dad had also been in ICE and had broken down the doors of a Queens family that had just sat down to dinner when he stormed in. They all happened to be wearing Obama shirts and hats and were eating off of Obama dishware. 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 motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust.
n+1 doing solid reporter work 
“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”
literally turning yourself into the imperialist boomerang because you never got to do the imperialism you were trained for in the army
It’s something we joke about on hexbear, and here they are earnestly saying it.
Never thought ‘wanting to use my tacticool gear’ would be said out loud by a dipshit
I’ve never seen theory manifest itself in reality in such a stark manner, makes the head spin
The mass of US special forces will cause a military coup as soon as their power is under threat. That’s part of the unspoken part about both parties unconditional support for the expansion of the military budget, they’re trying to insulate themselves from the inevitable coup conditions that they have created.
“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”
smartest boot
Back at the convention the next morning, a Border Patrol agent was walking the agency’s emotional support dog around the conference perimeter. Her name was Willow, her handler said, and she was 5 years old.
She was giant and soft, with impeccable fur, and had already flown to sixteen different countries. She belonged to a special, docile German breed called the Leonburger and her job was to confer warmth to Border Patrol agents on the verge of committing suicide. She would work as long as she wanted to work and was hungry for lunch, the handler said.
Willow should quit her job without giving notice.
“Our agents are experiencing the exact same things the SS were when carrying out the Holocaust. Clearly we need to provide them with support animals instead of not being the 2025 version of the SS.”
liberate willow
the Leonburger
Americans pondering the most comforting dog breed:
Say the line, Paulo Freire!
When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.Daddy, when I grow up I want to be a faceless goon that elicits zero sympathy when the protagonist tosses me out the back of a plane
it’s peripheral to the point, but not completely tangential: holy shit, the short term rental market/inventory/exploiters need to be instantly purged and recouperated.
every single one of those places should be seized for public housing with ZERO recourse by the current “owner” and if they complain about it, they get the fucking wall.
all landlords are trash, but the short terms ones are literal hot garbage and should be priority targets in the first days of the insurrection, right along side the rat & mold infested converted-motel owners, and the section 8/HUD parasites. they are all people who looked at the system and realized they could turbo charge the exploitation available to someone controlling a critical resource.
Landlords should be locked in a mold-infested room until they fucking die, hopefully the spores make them go crazy and kill each other
They’ll all just turn into J.K. Rowling.
For every landleech there’s five white males in their 20s who aspire to be landleeches
They all happened to be wearing Obama shirts and hats and were eating off of Obama dishware
This sounds bizarre like some fever dream, and how is it relevant to the story? Brown people are taking over through Obamna or what?
Obama brought in all the illegals so they would vote blue and now they worship him for it, Obama being the #1 illegal immigrant of all time as we know
That Foucalt kid is outside throwing that damn boomerang around again.
this was fever-inducing to read. in a frighteningly familiar way, but i couldn’t remember what for.
then i realised: another n+1 article from a year ago about a techbro conference: An Age of Hyperabundance.
This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.
A Star Wars TV show about someone who becomes a stormtrooper, and we learn that they’re all incoherent chuds like this.
