(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 to apply to be an ICE agent. Who wouldn’t 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 country’s most vulnerable residents without consequence—all while wrapped in the warm glow of patriotism.
At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.
The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” 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 country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on 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.
You know technology literacy is dying because I saw this meme with 76k likes
F11 the full screen button? You’re scared of the full screen button? F10?? It opens the menu bar???
Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document 😖
If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I’m glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don’t ever feel bad for not knowing something, but ☝️ don’t ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you
Never stop learning+ Never stop sharing what you learned
i’m begging you guys to start pirating shit from streaming platforms. there are so many websites where you can stream that shit for free, here’s a quick HOW TO:
1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online
2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the “Complaint” links
3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the ‘find’ function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don’t post its url on social media)
4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you’re looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)
In conclusion, if you do this often enough you will start recognizing the most dependable websites, and you can just bookmark those instead. (note: this is completely separate from torrenting, which is also a beautiful thing but requires different software and a vpn)
you can also download the media in question (look for a “download” button built into the video window, or use a browser extension such as Video DownloadHelper.)
if the “Complaint” links are not visible for you:
Option 1: try the DuckDuckGo search engine instead (bonus: dedicated to privacy! doesn’t track your data!)
Option 2: go directly to LumenDatabase.org (the website that collects the complaints–and therefore the removed links) and search for the title you want. look for results titled “DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Google” featuring the media you’re looking for. Proceed to Step 3 (above).
personally, i’m a huge fan of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH. they keep their links up to date and they also rank them, basically. they also have all kinds of little pages explaining how to safely pirate shit.
^^^^what they said. I’m surprised people are still reblogging this post now that google’s flushed itself down the toilet. so here is your
2026 UPDATE:
just go to r/FreeMediaHeckYeah and r/Piracy. it’s easier, more reliable, and will take care of all your piracy needs!
they say you can’t pour from an empty cup but i’ve been doing it my whole life and aside from all of these mysterious ailments it’s working out great for me
America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
They’re a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what you’re allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. They’re a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassan’s (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
It’s more nuanced than “cult” or “not cult” and doesn’t make false equivalences between groups
It’s versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
It focuses on what’s important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those members’ experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.
this is saved on my desktop with the title ‘Every D&D Campaign Ever’
This is genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The lack of music is amazing
Oh, aye, it is truly a disgrace that, when asked what genre our D&D game is, we say pretentious shit like “fantasy” or “epic fantasy” or “sword & sorcery”, instead of honestly replying, “slapstick”.
