Raptured
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People on social media warned of an rapture that never came. They never do. Or maybe it did, but it took ten people who were really, really, really, good. Either way, the streets remain quieter than usual. It's because America is in the midst of a slow rapture. Empty taco stands with the grills still running. An abandoned frutas cart on a neighborhood sidewalk. A delivery truck abandoned on a city street. No god is to blame for their disappearance. Just cowardly masked ICE and CBP agents taking people off the streets.
Once detained, they disappear further into the bearucratic abyss of processing, detentions, transfers, and deportation. Families struggle to get ahold of their loved ones. 1,800 migrants are missing from an inhumane state-run migrant detention camp in Florida. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is hoping to build more of them across the country.
In Chicago, ICE and other federal police agencies raided an entire apartment complex. They detained at least 40 immigrants who were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night. Entire families, some with their babies, were detained outside, where their citizenship was verified by police. They’ll kick down your doors, destroy your property, detain you, and make you show them your papers. The Chicago Sun-Times followed up on what happened that night. Here’s a quote from the story that’ll make your blood boil.
Watson said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers, she said.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Watson. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
Watson said she went into the building to help one of the residents and was shocked by what she saw.
“Stuff was everywhere,” said Watson. “You could see people’s birth certificates, and papers thrown all over. Water was leaking into the hallway. It was wicked crazy.”
How's that one Clash song go? About kicking down your front door?
Last week I was invited to a radio interview for the Social Primate show. I got to rant about the police, their militarization, and protests. Despite my fears, I didn’t cuss on air.
It was great to touch on the intersection of capitalism and surveillance technology. The privacy concerns are valid, but a larger problem is the necessity of crime to generate a profit. There is no incentive to truly lower crime because it would render the technology (and policing) useless. Neither stop crime; they just respond to it.
Cities are dumping millions into buying the technology and more guns instead of using the money to address the roots of crime. Underinvestiment in communities creates the conditions of crime, which in turn justifies the need for more policing and more prisons. Defunding schools or community violence interruption programs is good for business and job security for police.
Rather than repeat myself, you can listen to it here. Or here:
Towards the end, I talk about hope. An informed hope. One that acknowledges the horrors of the world and the work that lies ahead. We're in the Bad Times, and it's not going to get better any time soon.
But there is another side to it: that hope is also informed by the real-life examples of resistance and care. The mass efforts of mutual aid following the fires in Los Angeles or the rapid response network to warn of ICE in our communities show that when we come together, we can build a better world.
As I say in the podcast, the government relies on fear and power to justify its existence. You send troops into cities when you're insecure in your power. You attack journalists because you know what they'll expose is different from the propaganda flooding social media and the news.
They're scared. They know that, by creating a community and taking care of each other, we invalidate their power and necessity. They don't want us to find out that we don’t need their permission or to rely on them for our freedom; we only need each other.
My headspace going into the interview was influenced by burning through Andor the past two weeks. I highly recommend it. The focus on the rebellion’s radical politics, though imperfect, is a far more interesting backdrop than the Jedi space wizard storylines they've churned out over the years. And yes, the politics of resistance are deafened a bit by the fact that Disney is a capitalist conglomerate that exists to extract money from people’s nostalgia. No ethical consumption under capitalism, yada yada yada. But never in my mind did I think Star Wars would feature people making IEDs or a space communism-lite storyline.
Nor did I imagine it'd have a manifesto like Nemik's. It reads like it came from a mix of Mao's Red Book and an insurrectionary anarchist zine. It's corny to get your politics from Star Wars, but this speech feels pertanient right now.
The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.
Remember this.
Try.
Remember, this is what we're up against. Let it radicalize you, but not paralyze you. Try.
Suddenly: tremendous amount of gas and pepper balls fill the road. People running, canisters exploding.
— unraveled (@unraveledpress.com) 2025-09-28T01:40:08.529Z
Or take it from Curtis Evans, the Marine who was photographed walking through tear gas with an American flag outside the Broadview detention center.
"Pain only hurts."
Nicholas Slayton
If you appreciated this story or any of my other work, you can buy me a coffee, a Diet Coke, or cover a handful of public records requests.
