atmiger224

[atmiger224]

The Conductor (2018)

[atmiger224]

[atmiger224]

i’m so appreciative to suzanne for reframing the rebellion from the original trilogy as a “they saw their moment and took it” type situation and showing us that they’ve been trying, over and over, with so many failed attempts, to break the arena and incite a rebellion for decades. in this current political climate never giving up hope is so essential. haymitch wasn’t the first nor the last, and they kept going even when it seemed completely futile, and that’s what counts, and what ultimately saves them all.

[atmiger224]

THE ERA OF VANISHING HAS BEGUN

They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.

Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.

She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.

Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.

They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.

A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS

Alireza Doroudi is gone too.

He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.

ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.

Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.

Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.

These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.

They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.

WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME

While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.

In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.

In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.

And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.

This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.

THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME

Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.

This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.

They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.

The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.

This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.

They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.

SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.

There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.

ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.

They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.

We cannot let them win.

This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.

This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.

Let the record show:

They took people.

And we did not look away.

We saw it.

We named it.

We raised hell.

And we did not stop.

(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)

[atmiger224]

"The Good War on Terror" written by Christopher Hayes.

I will be producing a print 'zine of this in the coming months. Join my Monthly 'Zine Club to get the first copies automatically sent your way!

[atmiger224]

Denzel Washington enters the class - The Great Debaters

[atmiger224]

Top comment on reddit:

People DO NOT RECOGNIZE what the Department of Education does for America.

Federal student aid including grants, loans and work study programs -- without this, millions would never be able to get a degree which the majority of the highest paying jobs are still necessary to obtain.

Tracking student education progress, assessing community needs, and conducting research on how to improve education so we do better as a nation to teach.

Enforcement of Section 504 (equality in access), Section 508 (physical and digital access) of the Rehabilitation act in schools, universities, and other centers of learning; and also carries out audits and enforcement on behalf of the Department of Justice.

Enforces sexual harassment, gender equality, and race/ethnicity equality policies in centers of education.

Oversees vocational and technical rehabilitation, continuing education, and community training opportunities. (Got a veteran who needs job training? Have an adult who needs to change careers? Have someone who needs their GED? Wanna learn how to read good and do other stuff too? The DoE funds and coordinates all that.)

Help people from other countries learn English.

Offers grants for low-income schools

Everything around accessibility and education, from funding jobs, to buying equipment, to guaranteeing access at a policy level, to providing opportunities to help people who are disadvantaged educationally from their disability catch-up.

[atmiger224]

Several documentaries publically treating Luigi Mangione as guilty before his trial even started got released over the past 2 months.

Here's the billion dollar companies behind them.

[atmiger224]

GLEN POWELL and DAISY EDGAR-JONES TWISTERS (2024)

[atmiger224]

[atmiger224]

rip jake peralta and shawn spencer you would have loved each other

[atmiger224]

Agent Cody Banks: I’m a Cool Teenage Spy!!! I work for the CIA!! Sometimes I have to sneak off and go rogue because my handlers don’t trust a child to deal with grown up problems :((( But everything turns out alright in the end :). I get to kick ass, save the world, and run off into the sunset with Hillary Duff! SICK AF SPY GADGETS!!!

Alex Rider: MI6 has stolen my childhood. I’m an indentured servant to the government. Every single adult in my life has been complicit in my abuse, neglect, and reckless endangerment. I was groomed to be the perfect spy by the man who has raised me since infancy. I have survived torture and assassination attempts. Everyday I grapple with the blood that stains my hands as I try to hold on to the shreds of my innocence. Sick AF spy gadgets

[atmiger224]

the peak of "wouldn't it be awesome to be a child soldier? JUST KIDDING! it would be incredibly fucked up. anyway here's the main character getting eaten by wolves" is the alex rider series, which takes the wish fulfilment premise of being a teenage spy and then makes it explicitly clear from day one that alex is being blackmailed into acting as a spy for adults who have neither love nor even basic care for him and will let his life fall apart the moment he says no. coincidentally it's due to this career that alex is both an orphan and without a guardian in the first place; spying led directly to both his parents' and uncle's deaths. alex is repeatedly traumatised and nearly killed in increasingly horrifying manners, and it becomes clear that the only way for him to protect himself is to keep throwing himself in danger; he hates this and is completely aware that the only person he trusts could be ripped away from him at any moment and that his social life and academic standing is being ripped to shreds the longer he continues living his double life. the kicker is that he was raised in, perhaps intentionally moulded for, this lifestyle and the longer he continues it the harder he finds it to leave; he's essentially addicted to life-and-death situations and almost doesn't want to keep coming back to it. he turns to the other side only to turn that his bosses' enemies are just as bad as they are; at the age of just thirteen he finds himself completely alone in the world. and it slaps both as a thriller series and a deconstruction of the horrific violence both literal and structural that undergirds alex's life and job and the ethics of using a literal child to do your bidding as the lines between work and home life blur beyond recognition