On Thursday morning, Donald Trump swung by DC's annual National Prayer Breakfast to give a speech to a room full of high-profile religious leaders about the importance of faith, family, and the, uh—hold on, let me check my notes here... Yep, that's correct: The great American achievement that was the "abolition of civil rights."

“Since the founding of our nation, many of our greatest strides—from gaining our independence, to abolition of civil rights, to extending the vote for women—have been led by people of faith and started in prayer," Trump said, clearly failing to read his teleprompter correctly. "When we open our hearts to faith, we fill our hearts with love."

Yes, this really happened. See for yourself:

Obviously, Trump didn't actually mean to praise the longstanding American tradition of denying people their fundamental rights. Trump was was reportedly supposed to credit faith leaders for "the abolition of slavery and civil rights," according to David Frum, and this is just another example
of him mixing up his words at very inopportune moments. But it's a whopper of a mix-up, considering some of the moves he's made in his presidency.

Let's take a quick stroll back through Trump's tenure in the White House, shall we? There was his xenophobic travel ban, the Education Department's dissolution of protections for transgender students, and, of course, the time he refused to speak out against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, instead claiming "many sides" were to blame for the violence at Unite the Right. Meanwhile, reports of hate crimes have skyrocketed since he took office, and he's still locked in a battle to bar transgender troops from the military.

Trump may not have meant to praise the erosion of civil rights in his speech, but he's been quietly and not-so-quietly hammering away at them from the get-go, lending that particular slip-of-the-tongue an ironic, deeply fucked tinge of truth. Maybe the guy should stick to shit-talking Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Prayer Breakfast speeches from now on—at least he's never managed to mess that one up.

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The next time you worry about your local bodega cat this winter, just remember that cats are indestructible. They basically take care of themselves—roaming from nook to nook, indoor to outdoor, surviving on the Fancy Feast that a random cat-lover leaves on their patio, and generally taking zero shit from anyone. Apparently some cats are so resilient, so bafflingly impervious to what would kill an ordinary house pet, they can survive being frozen solid in subzero temperatures.

According to ABC News, a cat named Fluffy was found in a snowbank with her fur completely caked in ice on January 31, right around the time the polar vortex hit the US. Fluffy's owners live in Kalispell, Montana, which was rocked by more than 15 inches of snow in January and temperatures that dipped below 0 degrees. She was rushed to the Animal Clinic of Kalispell, where veterinarian Jevon Clark tried to take her temperature, but couldn't even manage to: It was so low, it wouldn't register on a thermometer. Worried the cold might kill her, the clinic rushed Fluffy to an emergency animal hospital.

"I’ve never seen this. I’ve been in practice for almost 24 years and she was actually caked in ice, like those ice balls were caked on her all the way around her—360 degrees all the way around her," Clark told local NBC affiliate KULR8.

"She was essentially frozen," Andrea Dutter, the animal clinic's executive director, told CNN.

Miraculously, the veterinarians managed to defrost Fluffy from despondent catsicle to "recovered" and "completely normal," according to a Facebook post from the clinic. Using a combination of warm water, hair dyers, heated towels, and a heated kennel, they were able to save Fluffy's life, according to CNN.

The owners don't know how Fluffy wound up frozen in that snowbank, though it might have to do with an injury that kept her from getting to a warmer perch. According to CNN, she's mostly an outdoor cat that the owners "acquired" when they moved in—but maybe it's time to keep Fluffy inside for a while.

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The crime that returned John* to Tonga began in a harshly lit gas station, somewhere on Las Vegas’ Sahara Avenue. He told the story while reclining on the grass fringing Nuku’alofa’s waterfront, just down the road from the Royal Palace. A thickly humid breeze ruffled the palm trees above, and a couple of discolored mutts, teats swollen following recent litters, patrolled the grass scavenging for the fried chicken that sat between us. Boys paddled in the shallows offshore.

John, 31, was shirtless in the heat, black hair gathered into a loose ponytail, a bandage wrapped around his left forefinger. A couple of his teeth were missing, and a big scar dissected his forehead. The word ‘CRIPS’ was tattooed in a crescent over his stomach, the letters ‘T’ and ‘C’ on each of his forearms. He had been just eight months old when his family moved from Tonga, New Zealand to Salt Lake City, a stronghold of the Tongan Crip Gang, the TCG. His entire family was in the gang, and he says his own initiation was automatic. “We knew we were Crips from I can’t remember how far back.”

He tossed a bone in the direction of the dogs, then licked his fingers. He had been staying with his sister in Las Vegas. “The youngster I was running with, I already gave him a pistol right, so we had one apiece. We went to his house and his grandfather ended up seeing him with a gun so his grandfather smacked him around a bit, you know, smacked him around and cussed him out—why is he running around with a gun, he can barely wipe his own ass.”

This kid—a year or two younger than then-15-year-old John—was embarrassed, and had a point to prove. John sourced him another pistol, and they stopped for gas. “I went to the back to grab us a beer. When I turned around and looked to the front, he already had the gun to the cashier’s head. I guess he had it in his mind to rob the place… I went straight to the candy aisle and started pouring all the candy into my shirt, and I started to walk out.” But he didn’t like the way their victim had been “laughing at the little homie. So I put the gun to his head and told him to hurry up and put everything in a bag. He gave us the small bills.” The kids were too unworldly to know the big notes were kept at the bottom of the drawer.

Then, a block up the road, they had a realization. “I was like, ‘Ah shit, you know what, we going to jail, we forgot to snatch the video tape… we gonna go to jail, we might as well make it worth it.’ We stopped at every single gas station up Sahara Avenue and robbed all of them. Once we got to the suburbs, we started robbing houses.”

They fled the city, as surveillance footage of their crimes played on the news, arriving in another TCG redoubt in Los Angeles. They found violence there, too. “We ended up chompin’ a couple of Blood niggas on the railroad tracks… then we got into a shootout. After that I told him, ‘Let’s go back to Vegas. We better off getting caught up for robbery than murder, right?’”

They returned to his friend’s family home in Las Vegas. John was, by now, dating his accomplice’s sister. Her mother, he says, didn’t approve, and she called the cops. “I woke up that morning and went down to grab a smoke and the police were already waiting outside. They surrounded the whole house, snatched us up.”

“I didn’t even know I wasn’t American until they deported me. Until immigration came to get me.”

He was charged as an adult and did 12 years in prison. When his sentence was served, he was taken straight from the lockup to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. “I didn’t even know I wasn’t American until they deported me. Until immigration came to get me.” By every metric—except for the one that in this particular case matters—he is American, and arriving in Tonga, accompanied by a couple of US Marshalls, was like going back in time: showering from a pipe, flushing the toilet with a bucket of water. John will never be allowed back into the States. Four years since he arrived, he still hasn’t adjusted to life in Tonga; he calls his situation “the forever no.”

He learned to speak Tongan by drinking with locals, but his relationship with his family—traversing a cultural divide and complicated by the stigma of his former life—is strained. “I know they talk about me behind my back.” He says most Tongans judge deportees for having fucked up their opportunities for good and prosperous lives in the developed nations they were deported from, and resent them for it. The rest, he says, just figure all deportees are rapists and murderers and steer well clear.

Graffiti on the street.

When we spoke, Kalisi Tohifolau was Tonga’s Acting Deputy Police Commissioner. Her office, near Nuku’alofa’s dusty central market, was covered in towering stacks of paper, which occasionally threatened to topple over as she dug through them to find statistics as we talked.

She prefers the term “returnees” to describe those Tongans who were never granted citizenship in the countries they migrated to, and were subsequently deported after serving prison sentences. A 2011 UNESCO report titled Return[ed] to Paradise interviewed 56 such returnees to Tonga and Samoa—80 percent of respondents flagged a lack of connection to the local culture as a primary concern. Reintegration into a country, Tohifolau says, is difficult for people, like John, whose connection to their families in Tonga has been severed.

In 2017, she said, there were 77 “criminal returnees” (as opposed to overstayers) from all countries, and in 2016 there had been 104. Most deportees arrive from the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Between 2010 and November 2018, New Zealand deported 57 Tongan citizens after completion of their sentences. In 2017 it was reported that 400 deportees had been returned to Tonga in the preceding five years. A government official told VICE that the total number of deportees living in Tonga could be as high as 1000. In a poor country of just under 110,000 people, these are significant numbers, especially when considered against the resources available and the violence of the crimes some deportees committed abroad. “We are seeing more serious prisoners coming back—child sex offenders, drug traffickers, robbers,” Tohifolau says.

Recidivism, she says, is rife, and “a big worry for Tonga.” The severity of the individual returnee’s criminal history, Tohifolau says, is the major factor that will determine how a deportee will fare on their return to the Pacific nation. She told the story of a man deported from New Zealand for manslaughter. Within six months, he’d committed the same crime in Tonga. “It doesn’t matter where they came from, it just depends on their previous convictions.”

Violent criminals with little or no connection to the country are unlikely to suddenly go straight when cut adrift in a strange place. “What we find, a lot of them, there’s not really much connection with the local family, and [sometimes] they’re not welcome in that family so they just go back into looking for other criminals and keep communicating with syndicates back where they came from.” Many will return to the kind of life—the crime, the drugs—that got them deported in the first place.

Methamphetamine has flooded the small country. The Kingdom’s Women and Children Crisis Centre has made an urgent plea for Tonga’s leaders to address the problem after a spate of meth-related suicides and domestic abuse, and 1 NEWS reports that in the midst of a “meth epidemic” dealers are targeting children. Over the 2018/19 holiday period, Tongan Police made 20 drug arrests, seizing guns, cash, meth, and ammo. In the first half of 2018, Tohifolau told me, police had already exceeded the entire number of meth arrests of the year before.

For Tohifolau, the two issues—criminal deportees and the rise of drugs like meth—are intertwined. With the US once again increasing the number of deportations—in 2018, more than 256,000 people were deported from the States, the highest number since the end of the Obama administration—it means more worry for Tohifolau and Tonga. “I think most of the serious drug offenders are deportees from America… Some of these offenders are locals, but the most serious ones are mostly deportees.”

'Uli Prescott at home.

Talia’uli Prescott—’Uli for short—introduced himself as a “motherfucking gangster.” He counted off the time: he’d been back in Tonga for one month and nine days. We met him at an old friend’s house, down a Nuku’alofa back street. Dusk gathered as we talked, bats were rising from the trees and children wheeling past on bicycles.

He’s a big man with a soft voice, ‘K’ and ‘C’—for ‘King Cobras’—tattooed in capital letters on each of his forearms and a turret of facial hair jutting from his chin. After being sent from Tonga to St. Paul’s College in Auckland as a 13-year-old, he tried to go straight, but he said that there was a “little man inside me with the drum, beating loud” and he gravitated toward the gang. “It’s a very good family. When you don’t have your own, they give you one. When you have your own, they support that one.”

He was deported back to Tonga after serving a sentence for a crime that involved “guns and violence.” It was a gang fight. “It came down to one fella eh. I came out on top. He was in a coma in the hospital for quite some time. When I think about it now, it’s a very stupid thing to do.”

He arrived in the country with his “criminal record and a piece of paper with my name on it”. His brother picked him up from the airport, and he’s since sourced a job at the wharf. He still framed his future in the gang paradigm that had been the defining element of his adult life. “The only thing I can do here is change, but in a healthy environment. What I know, you can’t just deal drugs to be a gangster; you can do other things to be a gangster.”

Night had fallen, fireflies lit the light streaming from inside. A children’s choir, preparing to practice for their church service the next morning had assembled cross-legged on the woven mat under portraits of Queen Elizabeth II. “My whole world used to be like this,” ‘Uli said, motioning wide, “and now it’s just me, and that’s the only gang I need.”

I met him a couple of days later, and he’d thought about how he’d presented his life. In the dust and noise of Queen Salote Wharf, where he works, ‘Uli was wearing a fluorescent orange vest. He said he regretted his initial introduction to us as a gangster; it was an unthinking impulse, and what he really wants is for his return to Tonga to spur a life that doesn’t orbit, even mentally, around gang life. “I got to change my life to become better, be part of society. I want to have a wife and kids, and a steady job. It would be nice to have a little family to work with, instead of working with a criminal organization.”

He’d had his job at the port for just three weeks, content to take pleasure in the simple things: honest work, a crime-free existence, accruing the markers of a lawful life, like a driver’s license, which he’d never had before. The bluster of the previous conversation was gone. “Life is beautiful, if you learn how to live it.”

Sione Ngaue on his family land.

They once called him “No Good,” and a tattoo on his thigh commemorates the nickname.

Sione Ngaue was on the land his family left to him, a six-hectare [14 acre] parcel in the flat, hot Tongan hinterland. He had a knife in one hand and a burlap sack slung over his shoulder. As he marched through the neck-high grasses, he bent low to hack away the undergrowth, filling the sack with manioke, a local root vegetable. Sweat beaded on his shaved head. “When I first got here, I come in the bush and I’d scratch like heck, itching and stuff. All these centipedes would bite me, now it’s like I’m immune to it.”

Sione was four when his family moved from Tonga to Los Angeles. His first bike was given to him by the local gang—the Raymond Avenue Crips—and the first crime he remembers committing, as a nine-year-old, was stealing a Ford Pinto. When the Police caught him just down the street, he hadn’t managed to shift it out of first gear. He joined the gang and did “all the bad things,” and grew up in the juvenile system. “I have a record probably this big,” he said, his hands a foot apart. His body is a tapestry of a life lived on the wrong side of the law—pockmarked with bullet holes, defaced by scars, colored in by prison tattoos.

Sione Ngaue.

He was deported at age 44, after serving 15 years for manslaughter. He met his now wife, Ma’ata, who taught him Tongan as he helped her improve her English. He credits her not just with teaching him how to speak, but also how to be, Tongan—how to grow into the ‘TONGA’ tattoo he had inked onto his own stomach in his American prison cell, how to roast a whole pig, how to cultivate his land, how to be humble.

He’s lucky, also, for having somewhere to live: The little home his grandfather built in the traditional style, its corrugated-iron roof like a turtle’s shell, in the village of Nukunuku. He prepared an umu, a Tongan earth oven, full of the manioke he had harvested earlier, his enormous pet pig scrounging for attention, his two boys clambering up a tree for the coconuts in the foliage, Ma’ata inside preparing fish. The woodsmoke cast a haze over his lawn, and occasionally you’d catch a bar or two of the Sunday afternoon hymns floating on the breeze. “Now when I talk to my friends on Facebook, I just ask them to call me Good, stop calling me No Good. They do it, they say, ‘What’s up Good? What’s going on in Tonga?’”

"Nobody wants to hire us because they think we’re going to steal or do something bad.”

Most deportees, he says, aren’t so fortunate. Without a free place to stay, they need to rent—and for that they need to work, which is almost impossible for some. Eighty-seven percent of respondents to Return[ed] to Paradise found finding a job or another source of income one of the biggest hardships in their new lives. “We’re judged before they even get to know us,” Sione says. “We have a red ‘X’ against us so we can’t get employment. Nobody wants to hire us because they think we’re going to steal or do something bad.”

Ngaue says he made a promise to himself when he was turfed off the plane and into Tonga by the accompanying US Marshalls—walking the 20 kilometers [12 miles] from the airport into town, he swore he’d never again see the inside of a prison cell. And, to this day, he hasn't. One of his brothers still in the States is serving a life sentence, and his older brother, also a deportee, has been inside Tonga’s Hu’atolitoli Prison “five or six” times.

Sione, who learned to tattoo on the inside, supports his family with the little tattoo parlor he runs in the heart of downtown Nuku’alofa. He says he now wants to help other deportees adjust to life here as well as he eventually managed to. There’s nothing in the way of government support for deported Tongans, just the scattered goodwill of a couple of churches, and Sione wants to turn his family land into a place that could help his fellow deportees. Somewhere they could learn to grow vegetables, build themselves a little dwelling, and settle in—like Sione—to life in Tonga. “What we want to do here with the new deportees is give them a second chance at life.”

Sione Ngaue's home.

In March 2017, Tonga held its National Deportation Reintegration Conference. During his opening remarks, Deputy Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni drew attention to Tonga’s “community social net,” the family, church, and social ties that usually ensure those most vulnerable—in a poor country unable to provide much welfare—at least have their basic needs met. Deportees, he acknowledged, fall outside this informal system. “[They] have not, for the most part, grown up within these communities, and although family ties may exist, they do not guarantee access to this form of social support, health, unemployment, and a lack of income may therefore be difficult issues for deportees who face limited or no access to social networks.”

According to a confidential memorandum, obtained by VICE, recommendations that came out of the three-day event included the construction of a Reconnection Home “where deportees will meet any family members, service providers, and starting of reintegration program into the Society.” Sione remembers the promise “to raise money for the deportees to build some kind of institution that could help… they got funded, a lot of money.”

Reverend Fili Lilo of the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga is the Secretary of the National Forum of Church Leaders at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and was at that 2017 conference. We spoke under the eaves of a church hall on the waterfront outskirts of Nuku’alofa, waves tickling the shore under swaying palms. In 2005, his church established its Deportation Reconnection program, which endeavors to connect returnees with their families—to effectively loop them back into that community social net Sovaleni had spoken of at the conference’s opening.

As for the commitment to build a government facility to help deportees reintegrate into Tongan society—made at least 18 months before Lilo spoke with VICE—he said the funding was still “in process.” “We have to set up something, a policy on the offering of funding and that kind of things, but it is a process.” Acting Deputy Tohifolau had told me that finding funding in the country was a challenge, given the Kingdom’s limited resources.

Sione says he has seen these promises before, and isn’t convinced. He says there is nothing for deportees. Those who require medication aren’t getting it, and those without family land to fall back on—or without a family willing to take them in—go homeless. “Every time they accumulate money, the deportees see nothing… They bring them down here to Tonga and just let them go.” The result, he says, is that deportees “end up doing the things they did in the States to survive here in Tonga.”

“Meth is blowing up out here, it’s fucking big time.”

Half an ounce of meth sat in a yellow plastic cup on the table between us as Aisi*, a deportee, explained how the trade works in Tonga. He says he was there at one of the first big-time deals to bring large quantities of the drug into the country. “He guaranteed within three months he’d fucking flood Tonga, and that he did.”

He poked at the white crystals with a twig. He believes his is the “best shit”—imported from Mexico, he says—you can get in the country. “If you were to smoke this right here, you’d be walking up and down… Life story in 30 seconds. That’s the truth. You ever met anybody who smokes? First hit they’ll tell you their life story in 30 seconds.” In his village he estimates that, in a family of five, there are on average three meth users. In Tonga, they call it “puff.”

He doesn’t smoke himself. His motto, he said, was “up with hope, down with dope.” “But, you know, if you’re going to smoke, come to right person with the right price and you’ll get the best deal of your life.”

"If you’re in love with drugs, I’m your best friend. Because I love money.”

He feels no guilt about selling meth, even if he sees the harm it’s doing around him: girls as young as 13 selling their bodies for a hit, the breakdown of traditional family structures, the guns now common on the streets. “It’s a fair exchange for me; you get what you want, I get what I want. You know, if you’re in love with drugs, I’m your best friend because I love money.”

And he makes a lot of it. He says if he were to go straight and get a job, he’d pull in $150 or so a week; as it stands he makes $500 a day, and much more on Sundays, during which he says he’ll sell to some 200 people. “About five to midnight, easy five grand. That’s a fucking easy five grand.”

Tonga—despite what is printed on his documents—isn’t home. You get the sense he has little commitment to Tonga as a country, as an idea: it’s just the place some shadowy global bureaucracy determined he would live. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not seeing any improvements, [so] I fall back on what I used to do… Fucking killing everybody else to better myself.” He laughed ruefully. “That sounds terrible.”

He took me for a drive around the village, pointing out the houses that ran meth operations, or that used to. One house: “He actually had his own little thing going, then he tried to move from his table and sit on the high table,” he said through an ominous chuckle. We paused before lurching down the rutted mud road where his supplier lived. He was nervous about being seen cruising past with the conspicuous face of a stranger peering out from his passenger seat.

“There’s a lot of deportees out here,” he said, when I asked why this village in particular seemed so badly afflicted by meth. It won’t be long, he says, until Tonga is truly ruined by the drug he sells. “Everything is going to blow up.”

Manslaughter, armed robbery, assault. The crimes that eventually returned the Tongan deportees I met were violent, with victims left dead or suffering lifelong consequences. But these returnees had all served hefty sentences before their deportations to Tonga; they had already repaid their debt to society—at least to the societies, across the ocean, many still consider home. For some, deportation feels like a lifelong continuation of that sentence. Like crabs in a bucket was how one New Zealand deportee described how it felt to be trapped in Tonga, away from his wife and family back home.

For others, like Sione Ngaue, Tonga has been a kind of salvation. ‘Uli Prescott, still adjusting, hopes for his new life to follow a similar trajectory. His family still owns the plot of land that he remembers from childhood, and he plans to one day build himself a little house there. “This is home,” he said one evening, strolling through the empty section in the faded evening light. “It feels strange. I was gone nearly 20 years. And then come back and it still feels the same, as when I was a little kid.” He says he no longer feels like a gang member when he comes here; this piece of land connects him with a version of himself that knew nothing of the gangs and violence that came to him later in life.

And John has skirted around the edges of illegal enterprise since he’s been back in Tonga, but now has vague plans to open some kind of legitimate business: a tattoo parlor, a hair salon, a restaurant—whatever, he says, as long as he can work for himself. He doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to build a good life in the country of his birth—but he does know that America, home, will always tug uselessly at his heart. “I tell myself all the time that I like it here… I think mainly I just tell myself that because I know I can’t go back.”

*Names have been changed.

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This article originally appeared on VICE New Zealand.

The Democrats tried to put their best foot forward Tuesday night when former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams became the first black woman to deliver the party’s response to a State of the Union address. Abrams, along with other black candidates from the past midterm cycle like Florida's Andrew Gillum, represents a new wave of Democrats—unapologetic progressives who aren’t afraid to champion minorities’ issues along with other left-wing causes like gun control and Medicare for all.

But whatever shine the party earned from that powerful speech wore off the next day when Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, in an apparent attempt to get out in front of a potential scandal, announced that he had dressed up in blackface for a party as a college student in 1980. Days earlier, he had called on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, also a Democrat, to resign over a photo in his medical school yearbook page of a man in blackface standing next to someone in a Klan robe. (Northam claims neither man is him, but admitted that he did wear blackface to dress up as Michael Jackson once.)

Herring said in a letter that knowing he “contributed to the pain Virginians felt this week is the greatest shame I have ever felt.” But he’s not resigning—instead, he said, “honest conversations and discussions will make it clear whether I can or should continue to serve as attorney general." Given that he had just said Northam should resign, this was contradictory at best, and a self-serving maneuver at worst.

The fact that both incidents stem from the humor of Southern white men who were in college in the late 70s and early 80s creates an eerie feeling that other politicians in their demographic could have done similar things. As much as the Democrats would like to highlight fresh, diverse faces like Abrams, they have to contend with the continued presence of an older, mostly male, mostly white generation of politicians who can seem out of touch with the base—and might have more skeletons in their closets.

Democratic leaders know they have work to do to show minorities the party cares about their interests, not just their votes. Donald Trump may keep people of color on edge, and the black community does overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. But the 2016 presidential election exposed the growing frustration some in the black community have with the party. During the primary, a young Black Lives Matter activist interrupted a Hillary Clinton speech with a banner calling out her past tough-on-crime rhetoric. Even after she beat out Bernie Sanders for the nomination, some black activists publicly encouraged black people to stay home to protest what they viewed as the party ignoring their concerns about Clinton’s criminal justice record. And many others stayed home quietly, with an analysis by political scientists finding that the 4.4 million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but stayed home in 2016 were disproportionately black.

Democratic officials were well aware before the midterms that civil rights and community organizations felt overlooked in 2016. As National Urban League President Marc Morial told Politico, “Many people in the civil rights community not only warned [the Democrats] but advocated as far back as 2015 that the campaign and the party weren’t set up correctly, and we weren’t listened to… 2016 was an absolute disaster.” Party officials tried to course-correct this summer, with Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez repeatedly apologizing on the campaign trail. “African-Americans—our most loyal constituency—we all too frequently took for granted,” he told a largely black audience in Georgia. “That is a shame on us, folks, and for that I apologize.”

The 2018 midterms showed that the right candidates can energize black voters for Democrats. Abrams in Georgia and Gillum in Florida both spoke powerfully to black communities that felt overlooked in their states. They outperformed expectations for straight-talking, unapologetically progressive candidates, both coming within 2 percentage points of victory. Nationwide, abnormally high black turnout helped fuel a Democratic takeover of the House.

But even after hopeful signs in the midterms, an undercurrent of distrust still exists, as evidenced by Blexit, a black conservative group that uses frustration with Democrats as a rallying cry. Blexit leader Candace Owens (who told VICE she only registered as a Republican two weeks before the group’s infamous White House visit in October) rose to fame thanks to impassioned rants railing against any and all gripes she had with the Democrats like what she believes is an over emphasis on welfare instead of jobs. At the group’s DC rally, Owens said, “Black lives have never ever mattered to the Democratic Party, black votes always have. They create this narrative every four years that Republicans are racist. They try to scare us. Are we such punks we’re afraid to try something different?”

It doesn’t seem likely that black people will turn to the conservative movement en masse, even in the wake of the recent blackface scandals—Virginia State Senator Tommy Norment, one of the state’s most powerful Republicans, was an editor for a 1968 yearbook full of blackface images—but Democrats still can’t afford to be seen as false allies to the black community.

The fear some skeptics in the black community have is that some white Democrats harbor prejudices behind closed doors. They don’t want to be in bed with a partner who is hiding a Klan robe in their closet. Photos like Northam’s bring these fears to life, fears that are apparent in movies like Get Out, where the villains were white liberals tricking a black man into letting his guard down. These fears show up in the news, too. Just last month, a second black man was found dead in the West Hollywood apartment of major Democratic donor Ted Buck, who has not yet been charged with any crime. None of this proves Democrats’ policies are worse for black people than Republicans’, but events like these contribute to an atmosphere of distrust and fear.

Concerns that the party values black votes more than black issues aren’t coming from nowhere. Democrats do fight voter suppression, but that’s likely at least partly because voter suppression hurts them electorally. And even though Democrats often condemn gerrymandering as another way to disenfranchise voters, they have occasionally used gerrymandering themselves when it would advantage them to do so.

There are positive signs for black voters. Abrams was a strong choice to deliver the State of the Union response, and going into the 2020 presidential election, while a number of Democrats, from Elizabeth Warren to Beto O’Rourke, have been actively working on new ways to engage black voters, reaching out to community leaders and, importantly, getting input on their policy platforms before asking for support.

But as older Democrats start infusing more racial justice initiatives like legalizing marijuana into their messaging and policies, they run the risk of looking particularly untrustworthy when racial scandals surface or when their current stances look drastically different from their past. And those critiques aren’t exclusive to just white Democrats. The parts of the black community that held Clinton’s feet to the fire for her 90s comments about young “superpredators” are now calling out African American presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s “tough on crime” policies from when she was California's attorney general. Politicians may have genuine changes of heart, but some corners of the black community are tired of being asked to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt.

One thing the Virginia blackface scandals show is that the party needs fresh young faces now more than ever. Older white male politicians can’t change their records or past behaviors, and those pasts could come back to haunt them. Consulting black communities on campaign platforms and speaking more directly to their issues is a welcome step, but party leadership investing more in black candidates who have been tried and true progressives their whole lives is the simplest way forward. If Democrats don’t repair the relationship with some of their most important supporters, 2020 could be a repeat of 2016.

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Ahh modern Valentine's Day, when those in love with themselves, blissfully booed up, or navigating the many complex relationship dynamics that can come with trying to give your heart to someone in 2019 can feel seen. But 62 percent of Americans know what we're talking about when we say this holiday can wreak havoc on a single person.

This festival of romance has transformed greatly from its gruesome genesis in Europe centuries ago to a commercialized spectacle where we're pressured into creating grand experiences or buying oddly seasonal items to express love. It's no wonder why each year the store aisles bulge with tawdry jewelry, dead roses, and high fructose disasters for all that last minute debit card swiping on the days leading up to February 14.

However, there remains a foolproof way to avoid the frenzy of finding someone to spend the holiday with, or succumbing to the pressures of buying a gift for someone you're just pretending to love just so you're not alone: Be Your Own Valentine! Celebrating sans partner, primary or otherwise, can and should still be filled with elaborate dinners, softhearted gestures, and your dream version of Netflix and chill.

This Valentine's Day, you only need yourself to celebrate. Get that important alone time to indulge yourself in solo orgasms, fine dining, flattery, and more! Here's some images to bring some inspiration:

All photographs by Samantha Cabrera Friend and Jessica Pettway. You can see more of there stuff here.

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On Thursday, Jeff Bezos—the incredibly powerful founder of Amazon, the owner of the Washington Post, and the world's richest man—took to Medium to announce that the National Enquirer had tried to blackmail him.

Last month, following the announcement that Bezos was getting a divorce, the Enquirer published some sexts exchanged between Bezos and his alleged mistress Lauren Sanchez. According to Bezos's Medium post, the billionaire then "engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer." Earlier this month, other media outlets, including the Post itself, reported that the Enquirer's work on Bezos was rumored to be a politically motivated attack, a theory grounded in the fact that the Enquirer is owned by American Media, Inc. (AMI), whose CEO, David Pecker, is a longtime Donald Trump ally—last year AMI admitted to working to get Trump elected by paying to bury stories of women who allegedly had affairs with the reality TV star.

According to Bezos's post, titled "No thank you, Mr. Pecker," AMI responded to Bezos's investigation and the Post's coverage of the whole affair by threatening to publish what an alleged email from an AMI executive described as a "d*ck pick" along with photos that included, among others:

A shirtless Mr. Bezos holding his phone in his left hand—while wearing his wedding ring. He’s wearing either tight black cargo pants or shorts — and his semi-erect manhood is penetrating the zipper of said garment.

A full-length body selfie of Mr. Bezos wearing just a pair of tight black boxer-briefs or trunks, with his phone in his left hand — while wearing his wedding ring.

A full-length scantily-clad body shot with short trunks.

A naked selfie in a bathroom — while wearing his wedding ring. Mr. Bezos is wearing nothing but a white towel — and the top of his pubic region can be seen.

Ms. Sanchez wearing a plunging red neckline dress revealing her cleavage and a glimpse of her nether region.

Bezos went on to reproduce an email that he says is from an AMI lawyer stating that if he and his representatives release a statement "affirming that they have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AM’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces, and an agreement that they will cease referring to such a possibility," the company won't publish the photos.

This apparent effort to blackmail one of the most powerful people in the world—by threatening to publish embarrassing photos documenting an affair that already might have ended his marriage and that everyone already knows about—did not work, as evidenced by the Medium post itself.

In the wake of that post, even people who are habitual critics of Bezos and Amazon praised the move to publicly shame his alleged extortionists rather than give in. According to Bezos, many people have given in to AMI when faced with just such a choice: "Numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake," he wrote.

If true, Bezos's allegations shed light on a practice that is beyond the pale even by the traditionally not particularly nice standards of tabloid journalism—which is all the more concerning because of that tabloid's owner's close ties to the president of the United States. Of course, there were lots of takeaways from the Medium post, some of them nuanced, some of them, well:

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I'm in the Natural History Museum, looking at a model of a baby in its mother's womb. My friend Kay and I are grimacing at the swollen forehead, the tiny clamped hands, and the long pink straw it sucks its dinner through. "Imagine how disgusting it must feel to have that jiggling around inside of you," I say. "Yeah," says Kay, "it must feel like that scene in Alien when the gooey gray thing bursts out of Sigourney Weaver’s chest."

Kay and I agree on everything: how hot Jake Gyllenhaal is, how soothing Liverpudlian accents are, how we are obviously not going to give the museum a voluntary donation. Being with her is easy, like sinking into a bubble bath or stealing a boy's well-worn Reebok sweater after a night out. It's easy to forget that Kay is actually getting paid to be here—£20 [$25]-an-hour, just to pretend she cares about me. She's very good at it.

I found Kay on rentafriend.com, a website where, for a $24.95 monthly fee, you can pick someone to hang out with from a database of 621,585 people. The site was set up in 2009 after CEO Scott Rosenbaum found himself wondering why there were so many dating websites, but none for platonic relationships.

Along with Japan's rent-a-family industry and the growing amount of companies that allow you to rent-a-mourner for your own funeral, rental friends sound like the beginning of the end. But they make perfect sense in a society where overwork and social media has rendered us fragmented. A study carried out last year by the BBC found that one in three of us describe ourselves as "socially isolated," while adults typically have just two people they feel able to confide in. This isn't making us very happy: One-third of people feel lonely often or very often.

Screenshot of Kay's profile

Waiting for Kay outside South Kensington train station, I get a text: "I'm running late, sorry x." When she arrives, we hug, my nose buried in her faux fur leopard print coat. "Sorry about that," she says. I tell her not to worry—I was relieved because I was running behind as well. "That's the best feeling, when your friend is also late so you can stop rushing, or when someone bails from a night out that you never wanted to go on," Kay laughs. I instantly like her, but I'm aware I could say anything and she would probably agree with me; for the next few hours, her job is to make sure I have a good time. I momentarily consider telling her I love Piers Morgan just to see how she reacts.

We walk into the museum. In front of a taxidermy giraffe, I find out that Kay is 21 and studying Economics at Brighton University. In her spare time, she invests money on the stock market, a hobby she plans on turning into a profession after graduation. Lucky, then, that all three of her regular Rent-a-Friend clients are middle-aged men who work in finance, one of whom offers her free tutoring for her course.

Kay became a friend for hire after googling "how to make money fast" directed her to the website. She meets up with each client around once every two weeks, swapping the student life of Domino's pizza and revising lecture Powerpoints for beef carpaccio with men in Rolex watches. She normally spends around three to six hours with clients; sometimes, one sitting is all she needs to pay off her monthly rent.

Kay likens her work to that of a therapist: "So much of the time in our society, when people we care about ask, 'How are you?' we never say, 'I'm doing shitty. I'm struggling to pay my bills; my mom is annoying me.' You just say, 'Yeah, I'm good. How are you?' I get a lot of people who want to talk about problems that are going on in their lives."

I ask Kay why she thinks men are more likely to hire her out. "Women can moan to their friends, but men often don't have this same experience—there's still a huge prejudice toward men expressing emotion," she says. "Often, my clients find that they are too ashamed to be vulnerable."

It's also unsurprising that investment bankers are paying for Kay's time. Busy work schedules see them leaving the office at 11 PM and back in again at 7 AM, leaving little time for socializing. "Working in finance is depressing," says Kay. "The industry is so competitive that if you make one wrong move there are thousands of applicants ready to take your job. You're replaceable, you have no meaning."

As we wander past purple brains and diagrams of tiny veins spidering through the human arm, I find myself telling Kay about the minute details of my life: how I'm pretty sure I bruised my vagina at my first spinning class, how I eat so much salt I practically use it as a dipping sauce. I could tell I was being boring and I didn’t care. Normally when I'm around friends I'm performing, desperate to make them like me. But the fact that I was paying Kay guaranteed she was getting something concrete out of the experience. It was relaxing—a friendship without the need to impress.

Often Kay's advice felt very Oprah, which makes sense given that her favorite books are The 48 Laws of Power and The Slumflower's What a Time to Be Alone. I told her that I often don't leave my house unless it's to go to the store. "We don't spend enough time on ourselves working out what we like," she said. I told her that people always talk over me and she said that's OK because "you have two ears and one mouth for a reason, you should listen twice as much as you speak." I told her that I cried recently because I was so angry that my boyfriend didn't put his deodorant back into the bathroom draw. "When men and women date, men damage women for the next person, but women heal men for the next woman," she said, a Yoda for the Instagram generation. A more straight talking Rupi Kaur. An Urban Outfitter's coffee table book with scratchy pastel illustrations on the cover.

As time goes on, our conversation is becoming less #yasqueen and more confessional. Looking into the glassy yellow marble eyes of a Velociraptor, Kay tells me: "I don't believe that dinosaurs existed. That's one of my secrets. When I talk to people they're like, 'You're crazy.'" I ask her what else she believes in.

"That we live in a holographic universe where everything we experience is part of a simulation."

"Like the film Inception?"

"Yes. I have personally had a lot of experiences where I saw that this world is not it; there's more to life than being born, spending all your time working for money that's doesn’t even mean anything—currency is just something humans invented."

I ask her whether she can talk about these thoughts with clients or whether she has to be more reserved. "If I told a client all that it would put them off. Sometimes if I go for drinks with them I get too comfortable. Once, I was talking with a regular about Brexit and I said we should have a second referendum because a lot of the people who voted to leave are dead now. I mean, the vote took place like three years ago. He got offended. I think it was because I spoke about dead people. I thought, Oh shit, I shouldn't have opened my mouth."

We go for coffee, and over two crazily expensive vegetarian sausage rolls Kay tells me more about her past. "The guy I lost my virginity to basically hit and quit. I was heartbroken and terrified—I thought no one would ever like me because I've done this thing. Culture-wise it was a big thing for me because my parents are religious and they think that you should only have sex with the person who you're going to marry."

I like that Kay's telling me things she probably wouldn’t tell another client. I ask her if there’s a difference between rent-a-friends and real friends. "Real friends say what you don’t want to hear. People don't like being in the wrong—they think, Oh, she really had the audacity to say that? They don’t ask themselves: What is this teaching me? One time, someone was asking advice on a personal issue; I was too severe. I told him: 'If your wife is not serving your needs then you need to walk away, you deserve someone who makes you value yourself.' He became very defensive."

When you have a finance worker's salary you can pay to get what you want, but maybe that stops you from getting what you need. Someone to tell you to stop logging onto other people's Instagram accounts just to stalk your ex's spa day in Budapest. Someone to tell you that the way your spit smacks around your mouth while you chew is revolting. Someone to tell you that theming your room after your favorite sports team featuring a single bed and that poster of a tennis player scratching her ass is not a room fit to bring a lady back to. Friends set you straight, rent-a-friends can’t.

As I walk back from the bus stop to my house, Kay sends me a text: "thanks so much for today! I had so much fun x." It's difficult to tell whether she actually means it, or whether she tells all her clients personal details about herself in order to feign closeness. Either way, it made me feel less alone. As Kay heads off on the train back to home, I wonder if in the future, when she becomes a full-time investment banker, if she will be the one hiring a companion on Rent-a-Friend. Plagued by loneliness after spending late nights at the office crouched over a tub of take-out Yaki Soba, staying at work until the rims of her eyes are pink. I guess she'll just need good friends around to tell her when to stop working so hard.

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The world's shittiest toy is coming back, everybody! On Friday, Orion Pictures dropped the first trailer for the upcoming Child's Play reboot—and the thing is basically the scariest unboxing video you could possibly make.

The minute-long trailer is everything you'd expect from a new Chucky movie: Family gets new doll, doll turns evil, doll unleashes bloody reign of terror on family including somehow building an elaborate murderous contraption for the mom using only his tiny doll hands. But there are some major changes to the toy this time around—namely, that he's some kind of fucked-up Furby now.

The new clip opens with a fake commercial for Kaslan Corporation, which is apparently the tech company that built Chucky in this iteration of the story. That means that this time around, the killer doll isn't inspired to pick up a chef's knife because he's possessed by some evil spirit—he's, uh, just a malfunctioning robot or something?

The hi-tech Chucky has received some updates for this reboot—he can apparently scan the face of his unfortunate child owner, for one—and he's been rebranded with the name "BUDDI." But whatever new Wifi-enabled tricks this Chucky's got up his sleeve, Kaslan Corp has kept at least one thing the same: The little fella's still wearing the same blue overalls and striped shirt from the original films.

The new movie stars Aubrey Plaza and 2018 acting MVP Brian Tyree Henry and is produced by the team behind IT. It's the first Child's Play film to not involve the franchise creator Don Mancini, but he's currently working on a separate Chucky TV series for SyFy, so get ready for even more blood-thirsty dolls.

Child's Play is out June 21, the same day as Toy Story 4, in case you're in the mood for a double-feature about two very different kinds of sentient toys. Until then, give the surprisingly terrifying trailer a watch above.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Serial killer Bruce McArthur, who murdered eight men connected to Toronto’s gay village, has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. McArthur will be 91 when he is eligible for parole.

McArthur, 67, was sentenced Friday to eight life sentences to be served concurrently.

He pleaded guilty in late January to eight counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Selim Esen, Andrew Kinsman, Soroush Mahmaudi, Dean Lisowick, Majeed Kayhan, Skanda Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam. He carried out the murder spree between 2010 and 2017 and was arrested in January 2018.

The Crown attorney asked McArthur not be eligible for parole for 50 years—when he would be 116—while McArthur’s attorney asked the judge to grant him parole eligibility at age 91.

—as “pure evil.”

McMahon said the impact on victims’ loved ones, the vulnerability of the victims, and the nature of the crimes were aggravating factors in the decision.

"These men died a slow and painful death,” he said. He also noted the devastating impact McArthur's crimes have had on the city's LGBTQ community.

McArthur never addressed the court nor did he express remorse.

McMahon cited McArthur’s decision to plead guilty, saving everyone from having to go through a graphic trial, and his decision to waive a preliminary hearing as mitigating factors. He also said the chances of McArthur being granted parole at 91 were very remote. McMahon said if McArthur had been younger, he would have accepted the prosecution’s submission of 50 years before the chance for parole.

According to an agreed statement of facts, McArthur met most of his victims under sexual pretenses, communicating with many of them via dating apps. He killed them using ligature strangulation, with a rope, often in his bedroom.

McArthur also staged his victims after the murders, posing them in a fur coat with a cigar in between their lips. He kept photographs of his victims as well as some of their possessions, for his own “perverted sexual gratification,” Justice McMahon said.

Police had photos of Kinsman posed naked on top of a fur coat, with a rope around his neck that was attached to a bar wrapped in tape. That bar was used to increase pressure during strangulation.

After carrying out the killings, McArthur, a landscaper, dismembered most of his victims and buried them in large garden planters. He kept a duffle bag with rope, a bungee cord, duct tape, syringes, zip ties, and a surgical glove in his room. He also stashed a fur coat in his car.

McArthur was eventually caught when police arrived at his door after seeing him take a man called John into his apartment. McArthur had handcuffed John to his bed and had been attempting to tape his mouth shut.

“John would have been the ninth victim of Mr. McArthur,” Justice McMahon said in court.

During McArthur’s sentencing hearing, Crown prosecutor Michael Cantlon said McArthur exploited “vulnerabilities” when choosing his victims. Six of the eight weren’t originally from Canada, coming either as immigrants or refugees. Lisowick was at times homeless, while Kanagaratnam had unsuccessfully attempted to seek asylum in Canada.

Last week, the family members and friends of McArthur’s victims shared in court statements expressing their grief and anguish.

Phil Werren, a friend of Skanda Navaratnam said, "it took me several years to come to terms with this loss. I believed for years that he had simply disappeared. But secretly, I worried that he had been killed."

Andrew Kinsman’s sister Patricia expressed the “shock and disgust” she felt upon seeing her brother’s remains. “A wonderful man gone from the world. Murdered by him. We never say his name.”

—with files from Rachel Browne

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Mixing drugs is not a good idea. Most recently, Lil Peep's fatal cocktail of Xanax and fentanyl—along with cocaine and a slew of other opioids—was a reminder of what can go wrong when we treat our bodies like science experiments. However, in 2019, with marathon nights out not uncommon, and rollover house parties picking up where they leave off, it may now be more novel if only one drug is used over the course of a session.

Cue the increased popularity of "flipping"—taking two or more substances (one usually a hallucinogen, one usually MDMA) at timed intervals to synergies their effects. A brief etymology explainer: When you take a psychedelic like shrooms, you trip. When you take MDMA, you roll, so a trip plus a roll equals a flip. Thanks to the dark net, substances like DMT and 2C-B—drugs that are integral to some flips, but hard to find on the street—are more readily available, while the popularity of drug talk on message-boards like Reddit has allowed many to discover these flips, hype them up, and ultimately tick them off their lists like saucer-eyed stamp collectors.

Again, mixing drugs is not a good idea. In fact, it's often an actively bad one. But for those who are going to do it anyway, it's important to have as much knowledge about what you're putting in your body as possible. "Testing remains important for those with a trusted supply and much experience," says Guy Jones, Technical Lead at Reagent Tests UK, that sells an "MDMA and Psychedelics multipack" testing kit. "Even if someone in the supply chain is testing, they might not be willing to flush something they just spent hundreds of dollars on [if it seems off]. Experience isn't enough, either—over the last two years we've seen a lot of N-Ethylpentylone [which can cause temporary psychosis] causing problems precisely because the crystalline chunks look exactly like MDMA."

I spoke to some of these "flippers" to find out whether there's more to this phenomenon than simply young men and women wanting to get as fucked up as they possibly can.

Photo: VICE

Kitty Flipping: MDMA and Ketamine

I realize that, in the UK, this combination is better known as a "Saturday night," but there is supposedly some artistry to the flip beyond indiscriminately pouring both powders into your face. Users avoid doing any ket until they're up on the MDMA, as—they say—it dampens the high. Besides that apparent downside, dangers of MDMA use include heatstroke, hyponatremia (drinking too much water, potentially fatal), and neurotoxicity (damage to serotonin production), while dangers of ketamine use include stomach cramps and bladder problems.

Stevan, 28 from Montenegro, describes his recent kitty flip as such: "As I laid down on [my friend's] mattress, my sense of self escaped my head. Colors were pastel, as if someone drew the room with crayons. When I focused on the ceiling light it seemed like the moon." Stevan says he felt himself float over his body and that, soon, the hallucinations became more stark: "Whatever random thought I'd get, I could visually present it in front of me, more real than any lucid dream I've ever had."

Nexus Flipping: MDMA and 2C-B

2C-B is a psychedelic available in powder and pill form—about £7 [$9] each—and is often described as the midpoint between MDMA and LSD. Though invented in the 1970s, it has recently surged in popularity, particularly among clubbers, due to how the visuals interact with lights. Like every psychedelic, hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) is a danger of high 2C-B doses, meaning its effects are felt long after it has left the body.

The aim of nexus flipping is to extend the euphoria of the MDMA, which is done by taking the 2C-B just as you begin to come down. Then, 45 minutes later, you're back up again—with the enhanced visuals of the psychedelic.

Ricky, 19 from Melbourne, Australia, remembers this feeling acutely: "The true beauty of the nexus flip is the transition between two amazing head-spaces. I felt really good emotionally [because of the MDMA], and at the same time felt the electricity of the 2C-B." Between the two drugs, Ricky says, he peaked for about six to seven hours. "Music sounded absolutely orgasmic, bodily sensations were out of this world. It was a ten out of ten experience."

Photo: VICE

Candyflipping: LSD and MDMA

The most popular flip worldwide, along with the oldest, candyflipping has been a thing since the 1990s. Usually described as having life-changing properties (good and bad) it can often heal or fuck you up, depending on the amount you take. Users like to take the MDMA about four hours after the LSD, riding the acid's peak before cranking up the elation.

One big problem is the number of posters on message boards like Reddit whose first time doing acid is while candyflipping. This is obviously ill-advised, yet tallies with online drug culture's move toward extremes. Indeed, in an environment where Xanax "bartards" get mythologized and "psychonauts" compete over who's had the biggest ego death, a regular old acid trip does seem a little pedestrian.

Along with hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, dangers of LSD use include "bad" trips, full of fear and paranoia, and the exacerbation of existing mental health problems.

Jack, 17, from Bristol, England, remembers the LSD wearing off when he took the MDMA: "However, as soon as [my friend and I] did MDMA, my visuals went back to where they were when I was peaking." Jack dropped the acid before a rave several weeks ago, at 7 PM. "We stayed up until 6 AM but I was so stimulated I couldn’t sleep. I was still tripping at 8 AM, so that was crazy. I also had some auditory hallucinations, hearing music from the rave again and again."

Hippie Flipping: Psilocybin Mushrooms and MDMA

Even more intense than candyflipping because shrooms are more intense than acid.

Robert, 40 from Wisconsin, is older than everyone else I interview. Unlike the others, who discovered it online, Robert heard about flipping from a coworker. "I was 37 or 38 when I did my first hippie flip," he says. "I wasn't as open with my partner about my psychedelic use back then, so I waited for her to go to bed, then took the shrooms."

After following up with the MDMA, Robert says he laid down in the spare room: "I felt enveloped in the most amazing feeling. It was like connecting with everything I touched and, of course, any body aches I had were completely gone. Most of what I remember after that is just rolling around in bed feeling so wonderful, like the universe was giving me a bearhug for a couple of hours, before drifting off to sleep."

Obviously, the dangers of LSD use also apply to shrooms—and you can multiply those a couple of times over when considering the following:

Jedi Flipping: LSD, Psilocybin Mushrooms, and MDMA

Don't Jedi flip unless you're OK with the possibility of spending the rest of your life wearing tie-dye hoodies and having a hint of PTSD.

David, a 20-year-old from York, says of his experience, "My vision was blanketed in warm and intricate visuals. I noticed vastly enhanced tracers—like, my friend sat down after getting a drink and I saw [him] sit down five more times after his body had landed."

The peak of the Jedi flip came when David left his apartment so that his friends could smoke: "Walking through the white corridors, everything took on a purple hue. The walls and ceiling began to expand and contract vertically and horizontally, as though being blown up and deflated like a concrete balloon." In terms of body high, David says, "what I could focus on was intensely euphoric, a mix between the relaxation of the mushrooms and the stimulation of the LSD and MDMA. It was a unique physical experience, I noticed—when the visuals weren't taking my attention away from it."

The rise of flipping seems reflective of an online drug culture that's as much about flexing as it is harm reduction. At the same time, flipping may also be the culmination of a commonly held belief among users that, if substances take you deep but don't kill you, they make you a better person. Ask a couple of the people I spoke to and they'll tell you tales of self-improvement—of heavy drug use helping them with "depression and anxiety" and to quit "dead-end" jobs. Ask most of them, though, and that's merely their longterm goal, while their short-term goals range from wanting to "create memories" and "get fucked up."

Perhaps it doesn't matter whether flipping is some elaborate form of therapy or simply poly-drug hedonism with a clever name. More relevant is that, in future, as people feel more oppressed by things like poverty and mental illness—and as dark net dealing and message boards become even bigger parts of drug culture—the thirst for flipping will inevitably only increase.

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Drivers on Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood were recently greeted by an advertisement plastered over the side of a building: On it, a towering blonde woman in her underwear is kneeling to feed a goat, next to the slogan “Nice Grass.” A pun intended on many levels, this campaign is for the Ignite Cannabis Company, officially launched last year by Instagram celebrity and entrepreneur Dan Bilzerian.

Best known for posing with guns and half-naked women, Bilzerian has nearly 26 million Instagram followers, a measure of fame he’s earned by touting a lavish, bro-centric lifestyle. He’s adopted a similar MO when it comes to branding Ignite—rolling out an Instagram account flooded with women in thongs and lingerie and a “Spokesmodel Search” for ten ladies to represent the company at events including parties at the “Ignite estates.” (The brand’s kickoff soiree last year included Chris Brown, Tyga, and a security guard with an AR-15, according to a BroBible writeup.)

Ignite’s advertising campaign—popping up across California in the form of massive outdoor advertisements—features women in bikinis or lingerie accompanied by sexual puns (and the occasional goat). This has not been met with universal praise.

“Honestly, shame on them,” said Olivia Mannix, co-founder and CEO of Denver-based marketing firm Cannabrand. “It’s not only putting a damper on the cannabis industry, but it’s putting a damper on the women’s movement and women’s rights.”

Mannix isn’t alone in her sentiment. To many within the cannabis industry, Ignite’s advertising approach is a symbol of the old guard, as well as a sexist, misogynistic vibe that contemporary brands and industry leaders are working hard to move past.

To those outside the business, Ignite’s ads are simply offensive. In September in Modesto, California, parents pushed for removal of an Ignite billboard one called “derogatory,” which featured a close-up of two girls’ butts wearing branded bikinis with the tagline “Best Buds.”

These type of “sexed-out connotations” are slowly being phased out in cannabis as legalization and greater public awareness of the drug’s medical capabilities expand consumer demographics from the stereotypical “stoner” to the mainstream soccer mom baby boomer or senior citizen, said Mannix. As a result, many companies are adapting to be more inclusive, appeal to a wider range of customers, and ultimately help cannabis as an industry overcome decades of stigma.

“Why would we want to revert to old norms? It’s absolutely ridiculous. I don’t even know how they’re (Ignite) still in business,” she said.

(VICE made multiple attempts to reach Ignite for comment on this story and were told via Facebook that the request had been forwarded to the “appropriate person,” but we have not received any further response.)

The exploitative marketing and imagery of brands like Ignite are indicative of the “misogyny and harassment” that takes place within the cannabis industry as well, especially for women of color like herself, said Lilly Cabral, co-owner of luxury cannabis chocolate brand Calivolve.

The industry has long been dominated by straight white men—with women, the LGBTQ people, and people of color facing high barriers to entry. Women have long been marginalized in marijuana, subject to sexual harassment and assault, viewed as anomalies at industry events and often hired as promo girls whose primary job is to look pretty and sell product. In a 2014 op-ed in the Cannabist, one female industry veteran recounted the all-too-common “lingering touches or too-tight hugs” from male counterparts, as well as the dismissive off-hand comments that run rampant at events, including: “Are you working at this booth because you’re pretty or because you know what you’re talking about?”

By continuing to use sexually explicit imagery and messaging in advertising, brands like Ignite aren’t only perpetuating the perception that weed is “sub-par” or “low-brow,” but minimizing the power that women have in the industry as a whole, said Cabral.

“Cannabis is not gender specific,” she said. “This is not a male-dominated product. It’s a product that women use. Gay people use. Non-binary people use.”

Ethics and social responsibility aside, it also makes financial sense to appeal to cannabis’s increasingly diverse consumer base, which is made up of a growing—and aging—female contingent. According to data gathered by BDS Analytics in 2017, 44 percent of cannabis consumers were female and the average age of smokers across California, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado was 42, Dope Magazine reported.

Female-focused industries like beauty, health, and wellness are surging in popularity and yielding massive new market potential. Cannabis is part of that trend too—look no further than the success of brands such as Beboe, an upscale cannabis company, and media outlets like Gossamer, a glossy magazine, said Kate Miller, co-founder of Miss Grass. That cannabis-centric media and e-commerce site has built its whole business model around appealing to female cannabis consumers—from the casual to the connoisseur—in an “authentic way,” said Anna Duckworth, Miss Grass's other co-founder.

“The cannabis industry as a whole has sort of overlooked this modern woman consumer for a long time,” she said.

The Miss Grass founders said it’s their responsibility, along with other cannabis brands and leaders in the industry, to help build the type of community they want to see moving forward. This means not only creating content that covers everything from self-care to scientific research, but standing up to companies like Bilzerian’s.

Bilzerian is far from being the only offender in cannabis advertising, but his pre-existing notoriety and loud commercial presence has garnered a lot of attention. (Not to mention his ongoing outpouring of tweets that include lines like, “When u got money everyone wanna fuck you, I only complain when it’s guys” and “It’s slightly shocking how’s [sic] few girls have thank you in their vocabulary these days, its seems as if they believe their vagina is proper payment for everything.")

His persona is only amplified by restrictions placed on cannabis advertising, which has compelled many moneyed cannabis brands like Bilzerian’s to dump significant funds into billboard campaigns, Miller explained. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is a federal agency, and with cannabis still illegal at the national level, the FCC’s murky policies surrounding the legality of cannabis advertising results in most TV and radio stations declining any such ads. (One exception was a spot for a law firm specializing in cannabis issues.)

Even social media channels such as Instagram and YouTube continue to disable cannabis accounts for violating their “terms of service,” pushing some companies to go old-school and opt for outdoors advertising. California delivery service Eaze, for example, is utilizing billboards throughout the state to advertise its service. However, with basic blue billboards and slogans like, “Marijuana delivered. For pesky hangovers” and, “Hello marijuana. Goodbye stress,” its campaign sexuality-free.

While Miller is concerned about the large imprint of Ignite’s ads on passersby in Los Angeles, her co-founder is confident that Bilzerian’s “bullshit campaign” won’t make a dent in the overall forward momentum of cannabis. He’s the exception, not the rule.

“I’m not worried about Dan Bilzerian setting a precedent for how the cannabis industry is at all,” Duckworth said. “I think he’s digging his own grave swiftly at the moment."

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Last week, in its latest sweeping announcement preceded by little or no community discussion, Amazon made another move in America’s largest city. Only this time it wasn’t into a new neighborhood, but into the classroom.

The company, which has reportedly considered bailing on its much-hyped HQ2 project in NYC amid local blowback, announced it would fund computer-science classes in 130 local public high schools. It also promised to offer a new cloud computing training and certificate in colleges across the region.

The pledge looked, on its face, like a generous one from the richest company in the world. But in keeping with the tech world’s reputation for swooping in from on high to engineer social change, according to the New York Times, the plan wasn’t even coordinated with the city Department of Education.

Leaving the rollout (and the future of the HQ2 project) aside, experts said a powerful company getting involved in public education represented both a significant risk and a possible boon—one that could provide jobs and opportunity but also serve to perpetuate inequality long endemic to America’s tech world. In other words, this initiative may provide a mere glimpse of the promise of upward mobility, while pushing some of the city’s most vulnerable to serve as guinea pigs in the latest scheme marrying Big Tech and the public sector.

“It’s usually the government that forms the workforce through local public school,” said Sharon Zukin, a sociology professor at the City of New York Graduate Center who has studied how young people are trained for tech work. “But the public school system is struggling to fulfill a historic need, so companies are stepping in.”

In the case of Amazon, this will happen in two different ways, according to a spokesperson. The first is a program through its philanthropic arm called Amazon Future Engineers, which was intended to focus on lower-income schools. The company worked with Edhesive, an education technology and curriculum company, to develop computer-science programs and enlist teachers to carry them out. Students were to be equipped with Amazon branded materials and free access to the Amazon Web Services Cloud for their coding projects. (A spokesperson at the New York City Department of Education confirmed Amazon had not joined its existing computer-science initiatives, and instead directly reached out to schools.)

The second, cloud computing initiative for college students, was to be carried out as part of Amazon’s AWS Educate training programs. These were to be more directly geared toward fulfilling current computing jobs, including some likely to crop up the next half of this year in New York, a spokesperson told VICE. Schools were poised to voluntarily collaborate with the program to roll out the courses.

These programs aren't just charity of course: They stood to serve Amazon itself in various ways—the most obvious, perhaps, being PR. “Such efforts build goodwill, and may show a hard-edge company participating in a human way in the community—something consumers and politicians want to see,” said Mark Muro, a Brookings Institute senior fellow focused on the tech sector and inclusive economies. (The company spokesperson for the Future Engineers program said the program had nothing to do with Amazon's HQ2 plans, or the backlash to it, although they did argue it was a good move for their potential new home.)

More generously, these programs could also serve to cultivate the workforce America needs, and will continue to need, as tech monopolizes more cities. “No matter how many people live in New York, we don’t have enough people to fill all the jobs that are potentially being created,” Zukin said. RIght now, most of New York’s tech sector employs non-New Yorkers, she added.

What’s not clear is if the programs will be able to make a real dent in the larger tech industry’s stark lack of diversity and income inequality issues. In 2014, whites comprised 83.3 percent of executive positions in tech, while 68.5 percent of the industry's total workforce was white, according to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. These philanthropic programs can often times only offer a specific skill set, Zukin noted, one that could become obsolete via automation or otherwise.

"The best kind of training is... training of all of your mental faculties for facing any kind of tech futures," she said.

Otherwise, kids who go through the these programs may still find themselves trumped by students from the private universities or elite communities where tech leaders still find many of their highest earners. And while those trained in cloud computing or other basic computer-science skills might be able to comprise a meaningful tier of employment, the dynamic that results could perpetuate the stratified workforce—and attendant housing and other problems—tech companies have already fed in many cities.

“There’s no doubt that for all of the corporate inclusion efforts and diversity goals and hundreds of millions put into them, the fundamental issue remains: it’s still difficult for many people to access tech skills, but also a kind of brogrammer culture in these big tech companies,” Muro said. “And that is going to take stringent long term efforts to unwind.”

These Amazon programs are also competing with nimble coding programs, such as General Assembly and Flatiron, which carefully select students and keep close ties to the companies where they try to find them placement. Slow-moving, bureaucratic public institutions, Zukin said, will have a hard time competing.

It’s too early to know what impact Amazon’s programs will have on the future of tech. A company spokesperson told me the future engineer programs were piloted for one year before rolling out across the country starting in November, with the largest cluster of schools in New York. But looking at how other tech companies have attempted to engage in public education offers some clues as to how things could veer off-course.

In New York, students in Brooklyn protested a Facebook-affiliated education program toward the end of last year, suggesting it was less engaging than their traditional curriculum. To make matters worse, parents worried about the program, called Summit Education, aggregating student data.

Leonie Haimson, who co-writes a blog on student privacy, pointed out that the Gates Foundation had similar issues with its $100 million education initiative, which was called out for potentially misusing student data. Both benefactors, and their contractors, disputed the idea that privacy was invaded or data was endangered. (An Amazon spokesperson said they didn’t foresee the same issues since their program is operated by Edhesive).

While Haimson said she didn’t have enough information on the Amazon program yet, she was wary because the company seemed to do awful little to engage the public school system and parents before announcing these programs.

At the HQ2 public hearing last week, many Queens residents showed up to make the same case. Whenever the topic of schools came up—Amazon was also planning to build at least one public school near its Long Island City headquarters, should the project go ahead—some in the crowd jeered and booed. City Council members, meanwhile, asked for more details, frustrated with the behind-closed-door process that brought Amazon to the city in the first place.

Muro was more optimistic. With a looming need for tech jobs ahead of us, he said, the Amazon programs being embedded in all levels of education could offer a “digital pathway” to good employment.

“Right now the number of people enrolled in computer science in high school is pretty abysmal given the size of the economy,” he said. “One certainly can applaud these investments.”

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If you're in the market for a cozy new home where you can raise a family while simultaneously living out your darkest BDSM fantasies in a fully-furnished fuck dungeon, look no further—we've got you covered.

On Friday morning, Twitter user Dan McQuade stumbled across a truly remarkable listing for a five-bedroom, 2.5 bath house outside of Philadelphia. It looked like your standard suburban home, until you got about halfway through the photo gallery. Please, accompany us on this journey:

Naturally, the listing for the place—advertised as "50 shades of Maple Glen"—immediately went viral. It's not every day you get to see some staged real estate photos that include whips, a pillory, and a goddamn wooden star where you can tie (and/or be tied by) your significant other. The house is going for $750,000, which seems like a great deal when you consider the only slightly-used BDSM wonderland included in the asking price.

Of course, the listing specified that the terrifying sex chamber "can be converted back to a typical suburban basement" if you're not into kink or, who knows, want to bring in your own arsenal of erotic weaponry when you move in.

The current owners also have the place up for rent on Airbnb, in case you aren't in the market for a home, but still want to take the fuck room for a spin—and the house even has its own Instagram page, Maison XS, with photos helpfully tagged with things like "#bdsm," "#daddy," and "#SUBMISSIVEwomenDoitBetter."

Unfortunately, whoever put the house on Redfin decided to go back and change the whole thing once the listing went viral, for some reason. Gone are the 50 Shades references and the extensive photos of the BDSM chamber; the only hint at the illicit pleasures that lie within its walls is a vaguely cryptic line about it being a "one of a kind suburban home."

Questions abound: Namely, why did the real estate listing change after it went viral? Wouldn't an agent welcome the publicity? What the fuck is happening?

More importantly, why aren't the home's current owners taking all their BDSM gear with them? Could they be in the middle of some messy divorce, and all that sex stuff reminds them too much of the periodically painful love they once shared? Or did they just get bored of their old whips and harnesses and decide they needed to overhaul their fuck pad?

Also: Who's the poor house cleaner who has to scrub down the sex swing between Airbnb visits? We need answers. So, so, so many answers.

Update (2/8): We're sorry to report that the sex house is no longer available on AirBnB.

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In a Skype call a few months back, I asked L. Ron Hubbard to talk me through his tattoos.

“I have a cross of Scientology here,” he said, gesturing to his right arm. “And the actual Scientology symbol here,” gesturing to his left. “I have the infinity [symbol] on my forehead, which was a coverup of something else I got in prison.”

When I asked what the infinity symbol—a nod to the Scientological belief that our souls are infinite—is covering up, he said, “Let’s just say I was a member of a certain prison gang at one time.” (He would not specify which.)

This particular L. Ron Hubbard is, obviously, not the L. Ron Hubbard who wrote sci-fi novels, founded Scientology, and died in 1986. This L. Ron Hubbard is 31 years old, lives in a small town in Washington State, and claims to be that other L. Ron Hubbard, but in a new body. Though this L. Ron Hubbard’s drivers license identifies him as Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, it has only done so since 2017. Up until that point, he went by Justin Alan Craig.

(I’m going to refer to the new, still-alive L. Ron Hubbard as Lafayette, and the deceased one as L. Ron Hubbard so you don’t have to do the same mental cartwheels I did every time I referred to the old L. Ron Hubbard while speaking to the new L. Ron Hubbard.)

The Church of Scientology says that most Scientologists remember past lives. Hubbard himself claimed to have lived previous existences as British imperialist and mogul Cecil Rhodes, a tax collector in ancient Rome, and an alien race car driver in a distant galactic civilization. In the late 1960s, his followers were so convinced by his tales of past lives, Hubbard was reportedly able to lead an expedition to dig up treasure he’d buried during previous existences (no treasure was found). The church allegedly maintains offices and a mansion for Hubbard to use upon his return.

Lafayette says he was first introduced to Scientology while in prison ten years ago, after another inmate gave him a copy of Dianetics, one of the foundational texts of Scientology. “I spent like, 12 straight hours reading that,” he said. “Went to sleep, got up, and read it the next day, and then I ended up reading it about eight more times.”

That prison stint was one of many. “There’s pretty much nothing I wasn’t in prison for,” said Lafayette when I asked him about his crimes. “Except I never committed a sex offense [and] I never abused a child.” The Scientology watchdog blog the Underground Bunker was more specific, reporting that he racked up charges for auto theft, shoplifting, attempted carjacking, battery, threatening a public official, and resisting arrest. If his claim of reincarnation is true, these acts would be the continuation of a crime spree started by L. Ron Hubbard, who was charged with petty theft and fraud, dabbled in bigamy, and was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in one of the largest ever infiltrations of the US government.

According to Lafayette, at the end of a prison sentence in 2015, he tried to enroll himself in courses at the Church of Scientology in Inglewood, California, but left when they tried to limit the services they would perform for him because of his criminal background. “I just walked off and said, ‘Good luck, hell or high water I’ll do this myself,’” he recalled. Over the next 18 months, he said, he started remembering things from his previous existence.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Lafayette’s claims have been met with skepticism.

When I emailed the Church of Scientology to see how it felt about Lafayette, church spokesperson Karin Pouw, wrote back: “I have never heard of Mr. Justin Alan Craig. The claims are unhinged and ludicrous. You could not be serious about running this story.” (Which I would imagine will be extremely awkward if it turns out Lafayette is telling the truth.) She did not respond to a question about Lafayette’s experience at their Inglewood church.

But not all Scientologists are affiliated with the Church of Scientology. There are people who believe the teachings of Scientology, but for various reasons do not want to associate with the big, mega-controversial organization that Tom Cruise is a part of. It’s within the world of these “independent Scientologists” that Lafayette has found some support.

Brian Cox runs the site Scientolipedia, a Scientology-resource site aimed at independent Scientologists. Last April he posted an interview with Lafayette to its YouTube channel. While the video received a lot of negative comments (“a con artist saying he's the reincarnation of one of the greatest con artists of all time? i'll give the guy credit for his giant nuts ”[sic]), Cox estimated that “maybe 33 percent” of the people who commented on the video and accompanying Facebook posts seemed to believe Lafayette’s story.

Cox, who is himself an independent Scientologist (having parted ways with the main church because he felt they were too focused on money) told me he is agnostic about Lafayette’s claim. “My impression was and still is: I don’t know,” he said.

Steve Watkins, an independent Scientologist who lives in the UK, says he also turned away from the main church after becoming frustrated with the amount of money they expected from him. “It took me years to save up for courses and then, when I paid, it was as if they made it harder than it should be,” he told me via email, adding that while he can’t definitely say Lafayette is the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard, he thinks his story “doesn't seem false.”

“[His] second date of birth and his mannerisms sort of tie-in,” he pointed out. Which is true. Lafayette was born a year and a half after Hubbard died, and speaks with the same mouth-full-of-chewed-taffy, old time-y radio voice that L. Ron Hubbard spoke with. He’s also the only person I’ve ever spoken to that’s used the word “germane.”

Watkins has been working with Lafayette over Skype, doing auditing sessions—a type of counseling that’s central to the Scientological belief system. The sessions are done regularly by believers as a way of ridding themselves of the long-term effects of trauma, with the ultimate goal of entering a state of higher consciousness. While the church of Scientology reportedly charges hundreds of dollars an hour for auditing, Lafayette has been providing his services to Watkins for free.

Lafayette has been developing a new auditing technique called the Infinity Procedure, which he describes as being a continuation of his work from his previous life. Both Cox and Wilkins told me this new technique is what stopped them from dismissing Lafayette outright.

I attempted to listen to the ten-part lecture series that Lafayette made to explain the process. But in true Scientological fashion, it was so dense with jargon I was unable to pick up even the most basic gist of it. (Sample quote: “In case you’re wondering what ‘true static’ is, the definition of ‘true static’ would essentially be synonymous with the original definition of a ‘static.’ This is not to get confused with a ‘thetan’ or ‘theta’ and ‘thought energies.’”)

So I had Cox, Wilkins, and Lafayette explain it to me in layperson’s terms. It sounded like a mix of a streamlined version of the auditing done by the main Church of Scientology and The Secret, the Oprah-endorsed book/documentary that teaches that you can have anything you want if you think about it hard enough (which is currently being adapted into a movie starring Katie Holmes). According to Lafayette, his process is different to The Secret because it’s able to grant people their wishes “in like, two to three days,” and can also give you the power to read minds and remote view. (Lafayette claims to have telepathic powers. I asked him to read my mind, and he said, “I kinda sense you’re just here, doing your job… Bit skeptical maybe, just kinda going through the motions.”)

During his explanation of his new process, Lafayette told me he had also discovered a unified field theory—a long sought-after explanation for how the various branches of physics work together. (Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life attempting to devise one).

While I didn’t see any evidence of wishes granted or fields unified during my chats with Lafayette, Watkins believes his techniques have worked for him. The week before our interview, he had a heart attack and, he says, briefly died in the back of an ambulance. “I don’t think I would have had the determination to come back, let alone be smiling, laughing, and cheerful so quickly without the work [Lafayette has] done with me,” he said. “I can literally say he’s saved my life.”

Joe Warren, an independent Scientologist in Thailand, also sang the praises of Lafayette’s technique. “The results were immediately wonderful,” he said via email. “Unlike anything I had experienced, with such ease at obtaining result.”

“L. Ron Hubbard had always proposed making things easier to achieve his aims of betterment,” he added. “He was always undercutting, making things simpler. Lafayette is truly walking in those footsteps. It is easier and the results are continuing to get better.”

Cox told me that, on several occasions, he’d given some money to Lafayette in exchange for his services. He wasn’t sure of exact amounts, but said each payment would have been for $50 or less. I asked if he thought there might be a chance Lafayette was a scammer.

“He hasn’t got much [money] out of me,” he said. “If it’s a scam, I don’t get the angle. I don’t get what he would be going for.”

But there are other benefits, beyond financial ones, to having people believe you’re L. Ron Hubbard. Whether you think Hubbard was a genius or a con artist, he was, objectively, a special person who impacted a lot of lives. And who doesn’t want to feel special and important?

I asked Lafayette what he would say to someone who thought he might be running a scam. He asked me to imagine that, in a previous lifetime, I had been a brilliant mechanical engineer. But now, in this life, I had been born into a sporty family that didn’t know anything about my inner engineering genius, and instead tried to push me into playing basketball. “You’re gonna feel out of place, you’re gonna feel foreign, you’re gonna feel alien,” he said. “You know you’re good at something, you know, but basketball?… It’s gonna mess with somebody. They’re going to be constantly angry, frustrated, maybe even depressed. They’re gonna feel out of place, they’re going to be socially inept, because, not only that, they’re in a whole entire new era than the one they were just familiar with.” This feeling, he said, is what caused him to act out in ways that repeatedly landed him in courtrooms and prison cells.

“So before realizing you were L. Ron Hubbard, did you have like, a feeling that you were out of place and were maybe very good at something and didn’t know what that was?” I asked.

“My whole entire lifetime, man,” he said. “I always had this unsettling feeling of moving towards something.”

“It was just always having a sense of moving toward something like, I’m supposed to be doing something. I’m supposed to be doing something great,” he continued. “Nothing would ever work or go right, and that was just because I wasn’t doing what I was meant to be doing. And that’s what I’m doing now.”

Tony Ortega of the Underground Bunker is less convinced that Lafayette is not a scammer. During his interview with him, he got Lafayette to refer to Hubbard’s wife Mary Sue Hubbard as Mary, before informing him that Hubbard used to call her Suzy. “I thought he was pretty mediocre as a performer and that it wasn’t very hard for me to sort of get him on his wrong foot, as far as his Hubbard performance,” said Ortega. (Lafayette claims to not remember all of the specific details of his previous life.)

I told Ortega that some of the people I’ve spoken to felt they’d had good results with Lafayette’s auditing techniques.

“Have you listened to Hubbard’s lectures?” he asked, referring to the original Hubbard. “Have you read the tech? I mean, it’s nonsense. So somebody comes along and [says] he’s got a new version of nonsense and that makes him the new LRH? OK. Fine.”

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This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Over the past several years I’ve formed relationships, experienced unforgettable moments, and seen more of the world than most will in a lifetime, all because I’m in a touring band. Still, despite all this, I tend to come home wondering how long I can keep doing it. When you struggle with your mental health, life on the road is that much harder. Being shoved into cramped vans for hours on end; having to sleep on a strangers’ floors while your air-mattress slowly deflates; exclusively eating dollar-menu fast food; coming home with slightly less money than you’d be making at a part time, minimum-wage job. You willingly throw yourself into a cycle of endless days and overnight drives, praying the driver doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel. On those nights in particular, I usually curl up, staring out the window and think, I could die tonight. So is it even worth it?

Most musicians, myself included, won’t hesitate to tell you yes, though it can come at the cost of your mental state plummeting. And when money is tight, seeking treatment isn’t always an option.

This is why Royal Mountain Records—home of METZ, Alvvays, U.S. Girls, and Mac Demarco—is taking action.

The Toronto indie-label recently announced that each band on their roster will have access to $1500, to put toward their mental health needs. Label founder and Hollerado frontman, Menno Versteeg, hopes this funding will help aid artists struggling with anything from depression, to addiction—and honestly, it’s about damn time.

“It really helps, it’s not bullshit,” Versteeg told me, explaining his experience with therapy. “It’s like, this thing that I’m doing helps. Touring is really tough and being in a band is tough therefore, a label should help the band make their job easier.”

That solution might seem like common practice in most professions, yet, with exception of unionized organizations like the American Federation of Music (where dues aren’t realistic for many artists), it’s basically unheard of in the music industry. When my band was in the process of signing our first record contract back in 2015, my father asked if the label offered benefits. Of course, I couldn’t help but laugh, while he couldn’t help but ask, "what was so funny?" At the time, the only explanation I had was that “it just doesn’t work like that.” When he asked why, all I could say was “because.” Versteeg on the other hand, thinks the answer is simple.

“You can get away with it in music,” he said. “You know, people go to work at the bank because it’s a good paying job, and I don’t want to speak out of turn, but people will do anything to be in music.” He’s right. Why offer something like health benefits if the job will get done either way?

The higher ups on the business side of the industry are often too far removed from the realities of touring or band life, which might explain why large-scale operations, with seemingly limitless resources, have failed to make these connections. When you have someone like Versteeg steering the wheel—who’s still performing, now 20 years into his touring career—it’s easier to recognize the how strenuous that lifestyle can be.

When you’re on the road, tensions run high, and patience runs thin. Naturally, it’s hard to open up to the people around you without feeling like a burden (or at the very least, a buzzkill). So in some ways, time off seems to be sacred. Eventually though, reality kicks in. If you’re even able to find consistent nine-to-five between tours, you’re lucky; if you find yourself in a position with benefits elsewhere, you’re a rarity. It’s even harder to balance when you’re on the come up. That’s why Royal Mountain’s funding is so vital.

“I realize I may never have constant income, I may never have benefits for mental health, and I do have expenses related to it,” said Ellis, an Ontario singer who signed to Royal Mountain early this year. “I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, and I see a therapist, so having that budget is like... I’m really grateful for it.”

Ellis admits to being overly open about her mental health, however, many artists can be quick to dismiss their own wellbeing. That behavior is likely a result of the extreme highs felt while performing, Versteeg suggests.

“The hour on stage, every musician will say that’s the best part of the day, you know? And that’s why you do the other parts that are hard—the late nights ,and the long drives, and the months at a time away from home,” he said. “That’s why we do it, it’s so fun.”

The problem with that, as Versteeg explained, is having to “go on stage, often when you are quite mentally unwell from touring.” It’s a feeling I’m all too familiar with—one that can make pushing on seemingly unbearable.

But Royal Mountain’s funding might be able to offer a different path for newcomers like Ellis (who are just starting to tour). “I think a lot of bands start in the industry not really knowing what they’re getting themselves into, and I think it’s just a good way to step in prepared and equipped to take on all that there is—the pressure of it all,” Ellis said.

Versteeg is still gauging what his role is beyond the funding, if at all. “I don’t want to be pushy,” he said. Yet simply saying, “Hey, this money is here if you need it,” might be enough in itself.

“I think it was nice that it was sort of no questions asked, no receipts necessary,” said Ellis.

The next step for Versteeg will be reaching out to the Ontario Music Fund, an organization who helps with tour support, recording costs, and more. “They help with all this stuff, and to me, I really hope that an organization like that realizes that [mental health funding] falls within their scope,” he said.

At the moment, it seems like stories of artists falling victim to addiction and suicide seem far more prevalent than ones of recovery. In some ways they’re archetypal—the struggling musician who eventually crashes and burns. Initiatives like Royal Mountain’s have the potential to change that though. When it comes to the treatment of smaller artists, Versteeg and colleagues have raised the bar. Because this community is like any other, where when one person suffers, we all suffer. So it only makes sense to recover together. I just hope others will follow suit.

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Using public information requests, Motherboard obtained documents that verify previously unconfirmed police department contracts with the predictive policing company PredPol. The company claims to use an algorithm to predict crime in specific 500-foot by 500-foot sections of a city, so that police can patrol or surveil specific areas more heavily. But this type of surveillance technology brings with it serious potential for perpetuating bias that’s already widespread in policing, and is likely to disproportionately affect people of color. Motherboard reporter Caroline Haskins found that police departments all across the country are in contract negotiations with PredPol. In this episode of The VICE Guide To Right Now Podcast, we sit down with Haskins to learn more.

You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

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Killer Mike is full of big ideas. On his wild new Netflix show Trigger Warning With Killer Mike, the rapper-turned-public personality goes to extreme lengths to shed light on systemic issues, often leading him to off-the-wall solutions, from creating educational porn to founding a sovereign nation within the US. The episodes escalate absurdly quickly, making it hard to tell what’s real and what might be pseudo-scripted reality TV. But one of his most memorable escapades—when he starts a new religion—is apparently based on his actual, one-of-a-kind religious practices, according to a Friday BET interview.

In the episode “New Jesus,” Killer Mike is frustrated that black Christian communities are taught to worship a white Jesus. So he starts the “Church of Sleep,” centered on the radical prospect of black people finally getting to rest, as his makeshift congregation naps, reflects, and writes their own scripture. But of course, like all Killer Mike ideas, he kicks it up a notch by the end, holding a sermon in his favorite strip club, where women pole-dance while a gospel choir sings and his parishioners pass around joints.

While that particular congregation only came together for the show, Killer Mike based the Church of Sleep on his own breed of worship. After being skeptical of organized religion since he was a kid and studying religious philosophy more seriously in college, he’s invented his own rituals and prayer processes.

“I pray at an altar within my home; give gratitude to my ancestors, they're the ones that got me here. Then I do official things within that prayer,” he told BET. “I wake up and do my positive affirmations, and thank the Gods within me, and the Gods I see existing outside of me everyday.”

That goes for his children, too.

“I encourage my children to worship God within them and we take time specifically to do that," he said.”

He told BET he has a personal prayer room in his house “filled with all women figures of divinity,” including shrines to his mother and grandmother—then, because this is Killer Mike we're talking about, checked himself before things got too serious.

“I go to the strip club with my wife as often as possible," he added.

He went on to tell BET, in a surprisingly gorgeous little tangent, that he believes right before young children are taught about organized religion, they’re the most in tune with personal spirituality.

“You’re already in tune with God [before about four years old]. You’re already talking to the air. No one knows who you are talking to," he said. "You’re walking out into the grass, so that’s appreciating God to me."

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For much of America’s history, the country was literally expanding. There was always a frontier to conquer, always new land to claim (at least for white people), and the promise of America was in its never-ending growth. But now, that optimism has been replaced by the politics of scarcity and Donald Trump’s border wall. What has changed?

That’s the question at the center of a new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, out March 5 from historian Greg Grandin. He conceived of the book during the campaign, when Trump turned the wall into the preeminent symbol of his candidacy. To Grandin, the dichotomy between that wall and the mythical frontier—which represented the politics of expansion—explained a lot about Trump’s appeal and the new direction of the country. VICE recently talked to Grandin about the book and how to understand Trumpism as a break from the past.

VICE: How has the frontier functioned in American history?
Greg Grandin: If you just go back to Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and the 1830s, they were able to give white, property-less men the vote and expand political democracy without having to worry about them voting into power a labor party. There was all that worry that if you expanded the democracy to the unpropertied they'd vote for socialists. Access to the frontier was a way of avoiding that problem. If you gave them the vote, but also gave them land, then the land would act as a safety valve.

In some ways, this is the roots of the deep association between individual rights and violence against people of color, because it was founded in the country's removal policy. The displacement and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by white settlers becomes the foundation of Jacksonian democracy. Wars on the frontier create quite a bit of extremism and racism. But that can always be rolled over into the next war. As long as there was another war in the future, that extremism could be kind of vented outward.

How has that dynamic changed?
Even though the US is still, war no longer serves as the kind of ideological crusade to vent extremism outward. Trumpism is what happens when the extremism generated by war gets turned inward with no vent possible. It predates Trump, but this goes back to the Obama administration, with Trump's origins, and all the racist hysteria that was directed at Obama.

How engrained in our culture is the frontier myth, and how have we used it to avoid issues that are now so relevant?
Expansion allows for an avoidance, a great evasion, from having to deal with social questions. You can always promise a policy of endless growth and expansion. This is the height of Clintonism in 1990s: The idea that inner-city problems are going to be solved not through attacking the structural foundations of racism and exploitation at home, but through economic globalization. We can talk about race, but nobody talks about expansion, nobody talks about militarism, nobody talks about what it means that the promise of endless economic growth is no longer the way that one can respond to social demands. Looming over all of this is the reality of climate crisis. That's the real end of the road.

What do you think Trump's wall means to the American dream? Does it effectively kill it, and the endless promise our country has thrived on?
I think it’s a symbol of a certain kind of disenchantment, a disillusionment, an end to the idea of limitlessness, and end to the kind of politics that can be organized around the promise of limitlessness. The frontier stood for that promise of limitlessness, of moving forward in the world. I think the wall is in some ways an acknowledgement that it was an illusion, that there are limits. But on the other hand, it's also its own form of illusion. It promises its own kind of freedom, at least the guise of universalism, like the old multilateral order did, but a very nativist notion of freedom.

I think Trump is good at playing to the fears of his base. In the world of limits we have to hunker down and take care of our own. We can no longer have a politics or a policy that is so generous—that's the way it's presented. He's good at playing to those fears and that kind of subconscious understanding that there are limits. But on the other hand, Trump himself is kind of a symbol of impunity, that he can get away with everything, that there are no limits, right? As he said, I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody in the face, and I wouldn't lose political support.

After somebody reads your book, what do you want them to come away with?
I hope that the book helps them move beyond those kind of binary debates between race and class, or debates that either say Trump is wholly exceptional and a break with the traditions of the United States or that he’s a fulfillment of its darkest history. The way that I’d hope they would move beyond those debates is by realizing the centrality of expansion in US history, and the possibility of expansion. One of the things that makes the United States unique is that it had access to the world, and to the promise of moving out into the world, that no other nation in the 20th century had. It's a different way of thinking about US history and the current moment, this choice that a new generation is facing, between social democracy on the one hand, represented by [Bernie] Sanders and [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez, and barbarism, on the other hand, with Donald Trump.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

A friend recently told me something intriguing over a beer. According to them, I could see a four-meter [13-foot] great white shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde in an abandoned wildlife park, within an hour and a half’s drive. They then gave me the address.

It took me a few weeks to make the journey, but just before I left, a video surfaced on my feed from someone who’d seen it. YouTube promoted the video as “recommended,” and the footage had accrued millions of hits in a matter of days, which had obviously been a disaster for the shark.

In the clip, I could see someone had pried the roof off the shark’s tank, allowing some idiot to throw in a broken television. And a network of cracks had appeared on the tank’s glass where someone had gone at it with a hammer or some other blunt object. To varying degrees, I figure everyone has a killjoy dickhead somewhere inside them, but some hold themselves back better than others. And apparently, the video’s audience size had brought out the fuckwits—as well as some seriously dangerous formaldehyde fumes.

Forewarned and forearmed, my friend and I bought some painfully expensive gas-vapor respirators and some less expensive snacks, and set off.

The shark’s shed was the first thing we found—all of a two-minute walk from the property gate. We pulled open the roller door and there it was: a huge dark tank, surrounded by clutter. Since the tank had been damaged, its formaldehyde solution had turned a murky green so it was initially hard to make out the shark. But we let our eyes adjust and its shape emerged, silhouetted by light pouring through a hole in the roof. The animal was large and strange and perfectly complimented by the sound of rustling wind. A tag on the wall read “mysterious shark.”

Related:

Melbourne’s shark was never intended to become art. Initially caught in 1998 off the South Australian coast, the great white was originally preserved for display at a Victorian ecotourism center devoted to fur seals. Given that fur seals make up a significant portion of a great white’s diet, you can see the synergy.

Things fell apart in the early 2000s when the center committed to expanding its underwater display failed to follow through on its deal with the state government, leaving the shark and its tank without a suitable home. Its then-owner temporarily rehoused the shark in a small wildlife park that was devoted to the preservation of the Giant Gippsland Earthworm.

What happened next was that the earthworm park was sold in 2003, along with the shark, which was supposed to be only “temporarily” rehoused. The shark’s original owner suggested that it should be donated to the Melbourne Museum, but as it was now the legal property of the earthworm park’s new management, that failed to eventuate.

Jump forward a few years, and the state government expanded the park’s adjacent highway, and so the shark’s home went into rapid decline. A series of owners and operators displayed varying levels of enthusiasm for the site’s maintenance or paperwork, which culminated in the closure of the entire venue for displaying wildlife without a permit in 2012.

Curiously, the shark—alongside the rest of the park’s non-living attractions—were left behind. Apparently, interest from the curators at the Melbourne Museum also cooled, as the shark began to deteriorate in its forgotten tank. So then, for the next seven years, unless you were intimately connected to Melbourne’s urban exploration scene, you’d have never known that a discount Damien Hirst was sitting unseen within an easy drive of Melbourne’s city center.

Now, in a brief few months, I guess that’s changed, with the previously undisturbed shark now becoming internet-famous. That said, given that a series of vandals have been doing increasingly irreparable damage almost every week, it’s only a matter of time before this curious specimen slips wholly out of existence.

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