He is also a rapper named ShadowRapz.

Yesterday, news broke that the FBI raided the home of Deric Lostutter in April. Deric is also known as KYAnonymous, a member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous who leaked a video showing the young men who raped an unconscious teenaged girl in Steubenville, Ohio,  bragging about what they did in a disgustingly proud manner. The raid of Deric’s home was said to be in connection to the hacking of a site called RollRedRoll, a fan site for the Steubenville football team that got defaced by Anonymous during the controversy over the incident.

Even though another hacker, who goes by BatCat, has taken credit for the attack on RollRedRoll, the FBI obviously thinks that Deric is responsible or can at least provide more information on how it all went down. While he has not been officially indicted, he is expecting that to happen any day now. He could face a decade in prison if he's convicted on the charges of identify theft and conspiracy that will likely be brought against him, while the rapists he helped bring to justice will spend a fraction of that time behind bars. To find out more, I called Deric to chat with him about his current situation.

VICE: How did you end up with the YouTube video that helped convict the Steubenville rapists?
Deric Lostutter: Basically, an account was created by a resident of Steubenville who was like, "I have something for you but I don't want anything to come out about my identity," and I was like, "OK, what is it?" He was like, "It's a video of the players," and I was like, "Oh shit, give it to me," and he said, "All right, I don't want anything coming back to me," and I was like, "I don't even want to know your name, I'm just glad you didn't give it to somebody else," and he was like, "Yeah, I was afraid the cops would delete it, and it would disappear forever if I gave it to them," and I was like, "Well, I'll make sure that won't happen." 

Were you receiving a lot of tips at the time?
I was receiving a whole lot of tips—some valid, some not valid.

What was the feedback like when you finally got that video out?
It was almost instantaneous. It went viral immediately. A lot of people were disgusted, including myself, with the video's content.

Right. How did the op proceed after that?
Rallies were the main focus. Raising enough media attention so that the FBI and the Department of Justice would get involved, as they ended up doing that. That was the ultimate goal. 

Were you contacted by law enforcement at any point during the Steubenville operation?
No.

In between the raid on your home and the arrests of the rapists, what have you been up to?
I'm a hip-hop artist, so I make music and music videos, and I've been working on my next album. Hanging out on my farm, fishing, hunting, drinking beer…

Can you walk me through the allegations you're facing now?
They are accusing me of being involved in the hack of RollRedRoll.com. They haven't officially indicted me. They haven't officially tried to press charges. They are sending a target letter, meaning they are going to try to indict me in front of a grand jury. 

At what point did your identity become revealed as one of the Anons involved in Steubenville?
It was leaked online about three months prior to the raid. 

You don't think the Steubenville operation has anything to do with the raid?
The search warrant the gave me said "the hack of RollRedRoll.com, all communications relating to Batcat," which is the guy who admitted sole responsibility for the hack in the article, which again brings up the question of why the hell was I raided if this guy is publicly online taking all credit for the hacks and was the only one who committed crimes. I put the screenshot on my Twitter earlier today and on my Facebook.

Why do you think you were raided if you had nothing to do with this?
When people think Steubenville, they think KY, they don't think Batcat. And that's my downfall because they want to make an example out of who the public recognizes. They want to say, "Don't question our law enforcement, don't question our government." Just turn a blind eye. And that's not what this country was founded on—this country was founded on questioning our government and keeping it transparent. 

But if you had nothing to do with this hack, are you worried at all?
I am worried. The sad fact about the government is that they can do whatever the hell they want. You just have to shut up and take it most of the time.  But I have the best lawyer, so it eases my stress a little bit. 

What kind of advice has your lawyer been giving you about this?
The FBI told me not to tell anybody about the raid, or else I'd be charged with additional crimes like destruction of evidence, things like that. And I didn't for a while. And then I got my lawyer, and my lawyer was like, "Bullshit, you can tell anybody, that's your freedom of speech. They can't intimidate me into being silent." He's advised me to shed as much light on the case as possible because when there's light on the case, then the government isn't more apt to abuse their power. 

But if you didn't have anything to do with it, what kind of evidence could they possibly have?
Zero. 

Have they talked to you about any evidence? Have you seen any evidence?
No, they haven't talked to me at all as far as evidence finding. My lawyer is currently in the works with them in terms of getting any evidence turned over to him for review. 

What are the next steps for you then?
Next step is get my stuff back [the FBI took two laptops, some flash drives and CDs, and his brother’s XBOX]. I'm going to continue online on my account, ShadowRapz, and being an activist and a hip-hop artist—basically like KRS-One, if you've ever heard of him. 

Is there anything else you'd people to know?
Yeah, we're actually in the works of planning rallies. We're planning massive Twitter storms get it trending… All kinds of stuff. 

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

Inside Anonymous's Operation to Out Rehtaeh Parsons's Rapists

Mr. Ghostface himself.

The rap game is no country for old men. Still, 20 years after Dennis Coles first donned a hockey mask and hit it big as the Ghostface Killah of rap’s most influential group, he continues to strengthen his legacy as one of the most revered solo stylists in rap history. Equally beloved by proselytizing hip-hop purists, swag-generation streetwear bros, mouth-breathing bloggers, and stodgy old music critics, Ghostface has long parlayed his cult-hero status into mainstream notoriety. He’s appeared as himself in two episodes of 30 Rock, affected a vague accent for a much-discussed cameo in Iron Man (depressingly left on the cutting-room floor), and been immortalized as an action figure draped in a real 14-karat-gold chain.

His latest album, 12 Reasons to Die (co-created by composer and producer, Adrian Younge), is an audio movie that trades on his penchant for dizzyingly evocative bars that could easily double as true-crime fiction. After wrapping up a 49-date tour in support of the album, and nearly a month and 50 emails after our initial contact, the Wallabee Kingpin called us to drop knowledge on what he’d do if he was forced to retire from rap, the power of starting now, the (sometimes exhausting) fervor of European fans, lessons he wished he learned in the 90s, and why molly is wack.

VICE: Your latest album, 12 Reasons to Die, is an audio movie influenced by blaxploitation films, mob movies, and Italian horror films. What horror movies do you remember liking as a kid?
Ghostface Killah: I wasn’t into horror movies.

I caught your recent performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and it was great. It’s obvious you take pride in performing live. How do you feel like your performances and shows changed over the years?
Well, you know, you feel more comfortable. You’re comfortable with the songs that you’re doing. A lot of times it just depends on the vibe of what’s going on, you know what I mean. I just started working with the band again for 12 Reasons, and it’s different from having a DJ. To me it’s just a vibe. You gotta be comfortable. I’m comfortable with my music. 'Cause some days going into the crowd might not be right, the mics might not be right, and that can just throw everything off, so you’ll just be like, Let me get this shit over with.

But if you’re with it and you’re feeling it and the crowd is with you and the energy you’re giving them, they’re giving it back to you, it makes a huge difference. I just can’t say it’s an everyday thing on a regular basis you’re going to fuck around and get a good performance. I would appreciate it if I was a fan. But for me, personally, it shifts. It just depends.

You’ve been around the world for the last 20 years, from Ireland to Japan and back. Where was the place you experienced the biggest culture shock?
What you mean by culture shock?

A place where you felt weird or out of place, or you found it hard to acclimate yourself to a new place.
Everything is quite the same to me, you know what I mean. They might have a different culture, how they eatin’ and certain shit, and how they live, but as far as going on stage—it is what it is. Music and a microphone. I’ve been to all the way to Japan and Hawaii and all parts of Europe. Russia, Czechoslovakia, and all that other shit. Everything is the same. When you get overseas, it gets better for you. Because they appreciate it more than what the United States and other places I’ve been to. So I can’t even shit on them.

The only thing about going overseas is that they just want more. They want you to fuck around and be up there for three fuckin’ hours and shit.

[Laughs]
They don’t want you to stop.


Twelve Reasons to Die is now available on cassette, comic, and CD formats.

Do you remember the moment you had where you sit back and felt like, Damn. I guess we made it.
[Long silence] I don’t really have a moment like that. I remember when we got on, when we first got our record played. I remember that. That was a very, very good feeling, hearing yourself on the radio. We was living in a house together and shit. We were happy. That’s about it.

Everything else has been a day-by-day thing for us. I don’t think we take it too, too, too seriously. Especially back then when we couldn’t recognize the blessing that was going on. Even right now, we know that it’s a blessing but I don’t even think it really, really sunk in.

You seem very spiritual and peaceful. How do you stay so zen?
I’m just a regular person, like any other ordinary person is. Things is real around here, you know what I mean? God is real. You have a lot of prophets, angels, everything is real, you know. You know me, I’m a deep person, so my mind goes really, really deep. It’s like when I look into the depths of things, dealing with my spirituality and the most high, it’s serious. It’s nothing to play with, nah'mean? I try my best to be as humble as I can be. It’s very hard to try to stay humble in this world that we’re living in right now. But I don’t have a choice because I could wild out and get 25 years to life, easy.

Yeah.
I’m talking about the way I think and everything like that. It’s a process. But you gotta love the most high more than anything. Because the more love you have for that energy, it’ll stop you from a lot of the bullshit you might be getting into because you don’t fear no one but the most high. And that’s where I am in my life right now.

But I ain’t no sucker, though. I know that when it’s all said and done, we all gotta answer to the most high. And I just want my slate to be as good as it can be. Sometimes your impulse is to wild out and do the dumb shit that enters your mind based on somebody else’s ways and actions. That can get you in a lot of trouble. Or you can just chill out and let it blow past. You know, I’m just at that stage right now.

At this point in your career, you’ve had an action figure, you’ve had a book, The World According to Pretty Toney, you were a video-game character in Def Jam: Vendetta. What’s the one Ghostface product that doesn’t exist that you’d like to make?
You know, I have a few movie scripts that I wrote. I would love to see that come into play when the most high grants us with the chance. I would love that.

If you had to stop rapping, what job do you think you would you be best suited for?
That’s when I would have to be on my deen and just follow the ways. I gotta live like a prophet and just work for God. You know, just go around feeding people, and making sure that the sick is OK and things of that nature.

Is there anything that you know now about the industry that you wish you knew when you were younger in the game?
There’s a lot of things. I wish I learned to know the business better. Write as much music as you can now. To not be around certain people, you know. Hang out less with your homeboys and spend more time with business-minded motherfuckers.

But you know, you can’t dwell on that. Because now is the time to do what you gotta do. We’re not done yet. So whatever it is I wanted to do then, we can do it now. It might take you some time, but you know what, a lot of us ain’t really doing nothing with our time. Just sitting back, getting high, talking bullshit, and cracking jokes all day when you could just be focused. 'Cause now… time is just flying, yo. One year seems like six months now. It don’t seem like a whole 12 months. You just gotta not let that shit pass you by. And whatever you got going for you or you’re trying to do, you lay it out right now and even if [it doesn’t work out], you just say, “All right, fuck it, I did it. I’m just going to let everything manifest itself.”

At least you did it. And it’s like, okay, whether it comes into play or not, you can't skip it. That’s what we do a lot of times. We say some fly shit, we say we want to do shit, but we’re just fucked up. We’re wishing. Damn, I wish I would have done that. This motherfucker came out with it and now he’s rocking with it. It’s like, Yo, I had the idea, all we had to do was get in the door somewhere.

You know, we fuck up a lot of shit like that, though. But it is what it is. It’s life. Ain’t nobody perfect.

I’ve heard you talk about how you feel like younger kids in rap and outside of rap don’t have the same kind of respect that you had coming up. What’s the message that you’d like to instill in young rappers or young kids who may be out there and directionless?
I mean try to listen to the people that are—I’m not just going to say important—but listen more. When somebody tells you something, it don’t mean somebody is trying to hurt you and shit like that. It’s like a lot of times when somebody is telling you something, they’re telling you that because of what they experienced and what they went through. What is it—babies having babies and shit. These little kids are coming up 'cause their mothers were into drugs and the streets and in all the clubs. They’re young. A little motherfucker that’s 18 right now… their mom is probably 38, 40. Or whatever the case may be. They’re young. They were 18 to 20 when they had them. That’s what it is. Babies having babies, so their mentality is on some other shit. They don’t listen. They’re more disrespectful now because their parents aren't really chastising 'em no more. And even those that do try to chastise, since the kids are so much up to date now, they’ll fuck around and call the police on you.

Second of all, they don’t have God in their life. If they knew what the most high was really about, you ain’t just living here just to be here. There’s a reason why we’re here. There’s a reason for everything. But the kids don’t know that. They just think they were born free and this is what it is. Not knowing that all this is going to catch up with you in your later years.

The kids gotta learn more. They gotta listen more. Be to God more. Listen to your parents, man. Fuck that molly shit. Even the lean and all that other shit. I’m not telling you to stop it and shit, but don’t let that become your whole life. Don’t let that become you, nah'mean? Word.

Thanks a lot, Ghostface. I really appreciate it.
All right, yo. Hold it down.

Follow Jordan on Twitter: @jordanisjoso

More from Jordan Sowunmi:

No One Can Hurt Nathan Fielder’s Feelings

We Spoke To Nick Kroll about TV, Feces, and Weirdos

The Best Rap Songs About Pro Wrestling

Those of us who spend our lives in the edifying pursuit of bringing VICE to the world get to see the very tip of our spear—sharp and glimmering in the Friday evening moonlight—rip into America’s living rooms at the end of each week. We also get to see new episodes of VICE on HBO before you guys do, which totally rules. 



Our newest installment finds our undaunted correspondents in two pretty gnarly places: one far-flung, the other close to home. Here’s a little taste of what to expect tonight at 11 PM when the liquid crystals inside your television are excited by electricity and light up in unimaginably complex and rapid multicolored arrays to form moving pictures.

Chiraq

While violent crime in most metropolitan areas in the US has gone down over the last decade, Chicago has seen a frightening uptick in shootings and gang-related violence. In 2012 the city boasted the highest murder rate in the country. It’s gotten so bad there, that residents have given the Windy City a new, war-zone-inspired nickname—Chiraq. Chicago counts over 100,000 gang members organized into subgangs, factions, and cliques all vying for control over city blocks and settling disputes, either real or imagined, with a pull of the trigger. What’s more, getting handguns in the outlying suburbs is about as difficult as finding popcorn at the movies. Thomas Morton embeds with police, and with gang members in the Englewood neighborhood, to find out how things have gotten so out of control in our nation’s Second City and why most of the country is turning a blind eye to this unfolding urban nightmare.

Nigerian Oil Spills

Since oil was discovered in the West African nation of Nigeria in 1956, there have been more than 500 oil spills. The decades-worth of spilled oil in the Niger River Delta has devastated the health of local communities and ecosystems. The Shell Oil Company was found negligent in their pipeline-building practices and safety measures. But the overall structural problem of inequitable distribution of the immense amount of wealth generated by Nigeria’s sweet, sweet oil has caused many people to pirate it, refine it, and truck it around the country in an unregulated market that has its own deleterious affects. VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi travels to Nigeria and finds a hellacious illegal oil refinery deep in the mangrove-ringed jungles of the Niger River Delta.

For this week's Mahal, I got to experience the Wildstyle and Tattoo Messe, a traveling carnival of odd and extreme tattooing, circus culture, and avant-garde body art, through the lens of Clayton Patterson. Over the last few decades, whenever not documenting the Tompkin Square Police Riots other memorable Lower East Side moments, Clayton has been attending Wildstyle every year. Here is our conversation on how exactly that has come to be.

VICE: How did you get involved in documenting Wildstyle?
Clayton Patterson: As an outsider and documentary artist I was interested in Tattoo Art and Sideshow Culture. In order to document tattoos in 1986, along with artist friend Ari Roussimoff, I created the Tattoo Society of New York. Ari left the organization in 1991. Tattooing had been outlawed in 1961, and in my role as President of the TSNY I advocated for its legalization again in NYC in 1997. Giuliani was mayor and tattoo artists were afraid he was going to close all the shops. Joined by Wes Wood and Katheryn Freed, our City Councilwoman, we were able to successfully take on the challenge and win. After legalization Steve Bonge, Butch Garcia, and in the first year only, Wes Wood, created the NYC International Tattoo Convention. They hired me as the 4th person and together we organized the convention. Under Bonge and Butch’s leadership the convention continued to get better every year and is now recognized as one of the leading conventions in the world. Again by chance, in 1995, out of the blue, I received a strange phone call from Austria. An individual, by the name of Jochen Auer, said he had found a one-line entry in the book, Modern Primitives, which had me listed as the President of the Tattoo Society of New York. Jochen explained that he had this exciting new idea of creating an entertainment show that would bring together, in one place, all of the avant-garde, leading edge, creative forces that were changing the face of youth culture. He explained that this was an enormous undertaking and in order to do it right, he had to have recognized top shelf talent. He asked me if I could provide him with famous American tattoo and sideshow performers. He said the show was called Wildstyle and Tattoo Messe. He had my attention. I said sure.

Have you experienced any similarities between Wildstyle and the Lower East Side?
In America, tattooing offered a creative way to make a living because of books, magazines, conventions, and the over abundance of art school graduates who had few opportunities to make a living as an artist. Tattooing was going through a renaissance. Tattoo art was quickly morphing from an outsider, underground, working-class, art craft into a widely accepted modern art. In 1995, Wildstyle was a major, expensive gamble, and in order for it to just break even, Jochen had his work cut out for him. The Austrian tattoo scene was a few years behind America. In fact, there had never been an international tattoo convention. Piercing and body modification was just starting to come into the public consciousness and dealing with legalization issues. Beyond tattooing and piercing his dream included custom cars, trucks, motorcycles, fashion, hairstyling, body painting, jewelry, Asian art, video screenings, photography, drinks for the over and under age crowd, food, and non-stop stage performances.

What kind of acts did WIldstyle feature?
The stage shows featured incredibly beautiful Hungarian Lack and Leder dancers, for the woman, a well build Mr. Chippendale, fashion shows, sideshow performances, tattoo contests, all under the guidance of an entertaining announcer.

Was the public receptive to Wildstyle?
The first Wildstyle and Tattoo Messe show lived up to and beyond Jochen’s wildest dreams. It was a complete success. The large Messe venue was filled beyond capacity and the masses just kept coming all weekend long. The show was now ready to tour and is now heading into its 16th successful year. It was the right time, the right idea, being pulled off by the right person. To the average person in the general public tattooing and piercing were considered taboo, exotic, and mysterious, but many individuals were curious to get a first hand look and see. Do the event in a respectable and safe venue, provide world-class entertainment and vendors, keep the price as close to affordable as possible, yet high enough to cover the extensive costs and make a profit.

What kind of impact did Wildstyle have on the Tattoo and Sideshow World?
Wildstyle and Tattoo Messe did much to raise the bar of quality, education, and public acceptance in so many areas that were struggling to become recognized as legitimate art forms. Before Wildstyle and Tattoo Messe tattoo shows and conventions tended to be just for the initiated, those already in the small niche circle. By going on the road and constantly traveling town after town in Austria and Germany, Wildstyle and Tattoo Messe  introduced for the first time, to thousands and thousands of people, some of the highest quality practitioners in the field. For the artists in the different cities they were given a first hand look at artwork they would never have access to see. Those who wanted could meet the artists. In each of the different cities Jochen gave an opportunity for qualified local artists to be a part of the show. Some of the local artists joined the show. A good number of Austrian artists who stayed with the show quickly expanded their skills and soon reached the level of accomplished artists who could now go anywhere in the world and be competitive. A number of the artists who started with the show went on to become some of the most respected artists in Austria.

What's your favorite moment from Wildstyle?
I have received so many blessings by being a part of Wildstyle. Not only was I able to pass on opportunities to a good number of people, but it enriched my life in so many ways. I travelled, got paid, expanded my own world connections, I made a multitude of new friends, we produced a book http://patterson.no-art.info/books/2003_wildstyle.html, but most of all I met and became friends with Jochen Auer, and for this I will forever be grateful.

(Photos by Clayton Patterson) 

@RedAlurk 

Our guy Chris fronting the 2010 Comedy Central sitcom, Big Lake.

Young dudes have a fantasy that someday they might get famous, and if they do they’ll have all sorts of money and get tons of pussy. As someone who once flirted with fame, I want to let all of you young men know that it’s completely true.           

In 2010, I was the star of a sitcom. It came and went pretty fast. But in the months from when I was cast in the sitcom through when it was done airing, my life did change remarkably.

I had more money than I’d ever had before. It was pretty awesome to not have to stress about eating at restaurants and taking cabs. Also, a weird thing about finally having money is that once you have it, people want to give you shit for free now that you can actually afford it. Food, clothes, shoes, people just want you liking their shit since maybe you’ll like it on a talk show and other people will get to know about it. It gets weird. Once while in the dressing room of my show, I heard a knock on my door and a man entered and silently handed me a box with a brand new HD flip cam inside. He turned and walked away. I have no idea who he was or who sent me the camera.           

Everything with women changed as well. I quickly found out that when you are on television, you somehow become more physically attractive. For some reason, when I wasn’t on TV, things like having a giant head and a joint deformity that gives me shitty little claw hands were often deal breakers with women of a certain caliber. But once I was on TV, those problems faded into the background and very attractive women were not only willing to date me, they were the ones asking me out. The only work I had to put in was “have a Facebook account.” When my TV show was in production, dozens of women asked me out on Facebook. Some were shy about it; some were blatant. Some I knew, some were total strangers. But they went for it. And many of these women were admittedly way out of my fucking league.

It was fun to hang out with really pretty ladies, and it was fun to indulge in the rock star fantasy. Even though I had less time then I’d ever had, I spent more time on dates with hot girls than I ever imagined I’d get to when I was a shy, depressed kid growing up from the age of birth until the moment I got a TV show. One memorable lady from this stretch of life was super beautiful and so sexually aggressive that one time we had sex and I immediately had to go to a store to buy cleaning products that would get my own blood out of a carpet. As a child, if you told me that someday a beautiful girl in her early 20s with the elusive dark hair/blue eyes combo, a great body and a sadistic side would have blood sex with me, I never would have believed you.

I got to do things I’d never done before and haven’t done since: I attended a party on a roof that Eva Mendes was at. I got flown first class all over the country to do shit like go to Comic Con. I was in magazines and on radio shows and living the whole life.           

So I found out that the stuff I assumed about the rock star lifestyle—the money and women and free stuff and access to shit you don’t usually have—they’re all real. That fantasy does exist. It can be a reality. I’ve seen it, and I’ve lived it.

But I don’t have a drive to see it again. I got my taste of it, and then it dried up. I didn’t run off to Los Angeles to try to get on another show and get more of it. I didn’t feel panic that I was being sent back to my regular life of being poor and not having hot girls ask me out via impersonal cybernetic communication. It didn’t feel like the end of Flowers for Algernon, like I was slipping back into a less desirable life and felt cold terror at the prospect. I didn’t clamor to recreate that stretch. Why?

The trappings of that fantasy are attainable. It was easy to get the money and girls and access and stuff. But the pre-supposition we all have about that fantasy when we’re young is that those things will come to us, and living that way will make us happy.          

And it didn’t do that at all.           

No aspect of my brief and mild fame actually made me happier. I had no idea what to do with all the money I made. Upon getting my first paycheck, I bought a new pair of pants, two shirts, and for the first time in my life splurged on prescription sunglasses. That’s not exactly making it rain. I wish I was the type of person who popped bottles at clubs and took private jets and shit. The bottom line is I’m not. Having money didn’t make me less of a socially incapable loser; it just made me a socially incapable loser who wasn’t in debt.           

And the women… it was fun, don’t get me wrong. Having sex is a healthy and fun thing. Feeling desired is a great feeling. Dating people whom, months prior, you would have viewed as out of your league is exciting. But it got old fast.           

Luckily for me, this isn’t even something I’ve had to tell myself to rationalize the failure of my sitcom and the huge career hit that was. I realized that along the way. A few weeks into my flirtations with fame, I was very well aware that fame wasn’t going to transform my life. The lingering feelings that this didn’t feel right began immediately; and God handed me a specific incident that smacked me back to reality and allowed me to see my newfound fame for what it really was – gilded, hollow, and about my circumstances – but never really about me.           

Here’s the type of thing that life will hand you just so you are totally clear that you are who you are and no amount of money or sex or photo shoots will change you at your core:           

One afternoon, I was scheduled to go on a press blitz. A limo was being sent to my house in Queens. I was told to wear a whole bunch of fancy clothes. It was some glitzy ass shit, and I was going to be pampered all day. A team of publicists would be shuttling me from location to location. I was going to have my picture taken. I was going to give cute quotes to magazines. I was going to sit with an earpiece in and do a series of quick interviews for various television programs that pretend they are news shows when they deal solely with entertainment. It was going to be a fancy fucking day. I was going to be pampered. It was to be the type of day only famous people get to have.           

I got a text from my limo driver saying he was outside my apartment. I checked myself in the mirror. Form fitting suit jacket I would have made fun of someone else for wearing three months ago? Check. Haircut that looked like any other haircut I’d ever had but cost 90 more dollars? Check. I was ready to roll around in that limo to live as the rock star I had always known in my heart I could be.

I headed to my front door, took a deep breath and turned the knob so I could exit the apartment I shared with my roommate in Queens (and believe me, my rock star plans included finding my own place in a cooler neighborhood immediately). Only, the knob didn’t turn. In fact, it broke off in my hand.

I tried to re-attach it; no dice. I tried to turn the screw that was hanging out of my door; also a no-go. I pushed the door, tried to get a grip and pull it, but there was no getting around the reality that I was trapped within my own house.

I received another text from my limo driver, now asking where I was. I knew that we were on a tight schedule, and this guy was probably being asked why I wasn’t in his car already. I wrote back that I was trying to get downstairs. He wrote back “Trying?”

So while wearing my fancy clothes, and about to get into my fancy car, while living a life of wealth and women, I was faced with the grim prospect that I had to escape my own shitty apartment in Woodside. I’m not sure if I believe in God or not, but it certainly feels like a moment in my life where a higher power went out of its way to say “DON’T FORGET WHO YOU ARE. YOU ARE A GUY WHO LIVES IN QUEENS. LET THAT DOOR KNOB IN YOUR HAND REMIND YOU OF THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LIFE YOU LEAD.”

After one last desperate attempt to get the knob back on the door, I ran to my room and opened the window. I crawled onto my fire escape, hoping the dirt and rust on it wasn’t going to stain my fancy-boy clothes. I pulled the cord to drop the ladder down and climbed.         

There was a four-foot drop at the bottom of my climb. Luckily, I knew that I wasn’t going to hurt myself, because directly beneath my fire escape was the area that my entire building threw their garbage into. A pile of garbage about three bags thick was waiting to gently catch me once I let go.           

I had no other option, so I dropped legs first into the garbage of nine apartments. I waded out of it into the alley alongside my building. I stopped and brushed off the flecks of food matter that had stuck to my shoes and the lower half of my pants.           

I climbed into the back seat of the limo and the driver immediately looked into his rear view mirror and made a face—while I could flick away the garbage itself, I could only wait for the smell to dissipate on its own.           

I spent a day doing interviews talking about being on a television show with a series of interviewers who were playing their part in the weird fantasy life that is the entertainment industry. The whole day, as I spoke about the work and the life and the surprise of being at the center of a TV show, I never stopped hearing my own thoughts rattling around the back of my own brain: A few hours ago you were thigh deep in garbage. Don’t forget who you are.

These days I host a public access television show and do stand up and write essays and really enjoy my life. My previous success exposed how misguided my priorities and expectations had been. It exposed a part of myself I wound up really not liking. These days, I have no idea if success awaits me in the future. I work hard and believe in the work I do, but I don’t bank on it. But I don’t fear that success will bring out the same unlikable sides of me, because I know that it won’t change me. Not because I don’t want it to, or because I’m punk rock and want to avoid it. I just know from previous experience that success won’t change me because it can’t change me. It can change the size of the house I live in. It can change the type of car I drive. It can increase the amount of Facebook solicitations I receive and the amount of free technology handed to me by mysterious strangers. But it can’t change the fact that I dwell in the garbage pile. From my earliest days in New Jersey to now, I’m most comfortable with a broken door knob in my hand while standing knee deep in a big pile of other peoples’ trash. That’s who I am and who I’ve always been. Like it or not, it’s who I’ll always be, so I might as well like it.

@ChrisGethard
 

Previously - Why I Love My Meds

Photo by David Mesford

Jamen Shively only started smoking herb a-year-and a-half ago, but he's been making up for lost time ever since. Now an aspiring marijuana mogul, as well as a dedicated cannabis connoisseur, the 45-year-old former Microsoft executive even credits the very conception of his latest high-profile start-up venture to the enlightening influence of some top grade ganja. Specifically, a powerful sativa strain he broke out at an exploratory business meeting last November, just days after Washington state voters overwhelmingly approved pot legalization.

“I pulled out my stash, the dankest of the dank,” he recalls of that fateful occasion. “We fired up, and the concepts we generated were just incredible. Off the charts. Until the idea started to flow into creating a global juggernaut in what's going to be a trillion dollar market. We brainstormed so many different aspects of it, including the supply chain, financing, geopolitics, lobbying, genetics, even greenhouses. And it quickly became clear that we were sitting on an absolute gold mine.”

An evangelical admirer of the business book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Shively firmly believes it's better to be first to mind, than first to market. So before legalization even had a chance to take root, he began telling the press he was creating America's seminal national marijuana brand, and that his fledgling new enterprise would soon employ 10,000 people, while “minting more millionaires than Microsoft.”

“It actually becomes a virtuous cycle,” he explains to me over the phone, “the more outrageous claims I make—true claims—the more mindshare I get, and the bigger platform I have to discuss my plans. After all, what weed company is everybody talking about these days? The one run by an ex-Microsoft crackpot whose making all these outrageous claims.”

So let's take a closer look at just three claims Shively's made while promoting the Diego Pellicer brand, which he named after his great-grandfather, a 19th century hemp farmer.          

“Diego Pellicer cannabis will retail for $50 per gram.”

This is like Shively saying he wants to create the Starbucks of marijuana (which he actually has said), only his national coffee chain charges about three times as much as the country's most expensive boutique roasters. When I ask if this tremendous mark-up will be attributable to some kind of high-end shopping experience, he says no way.

“Look, dude. This isn't taking a Big Mac and wrapping it in gold foil. We're talking about value based on the inherent quality of the cannabis itself. Because when I get high, I don't want it to be a so-so high. I want an experience that's going to last several hours... We live in a country where even middle class people won't settle for anything less than the best that they can get. And what's considered top quality in the available marijuana market is nothing compared to what we're creating.”

To which, all I can say is: I really look forward to sampling some cannabis that's three times better than the best I've ever had. (And Jamen, I'll in be in Seattle mid-September.)

“Marijuana will be legal, on a federal level, in all 50 states, in two years, tops.”

I first heard Shively make this prediction during an appearance on Huffington Post Live. He even promised the show's incredulous host that if proven wrong, “I will fly you [to Seattle] first class and put you up in my home. And we will get stoned. And you will enjoy it.”

Honestly, I'm struggling for a metaphor to properly explain how unlikely it is that his prediction will come true. How about this: If President Obama held a press conference first thing tomorrow morning, and wore a weed leaf button on his lapel instead of the American flag, while introducing Willie Nelson as the new head of the DEA, I'd still have 50-state pot legalization by June 2015 as an 18-1 underdog.

“We're not going to appeal to pot smokers. Our price is too high. Which makes our target market the law abiding citizens who will be first time users.”

This particular statement only ventures into the realm of the truly absurd when coupled with the companion claim that Diego Pellicer will be the largest distributor of cannabis nationwide, by securing a 40 percent market share of both recreational and medicinal marijuana sales in every state where it's legal. All by catering to high-end customers who've never smoked pot before in their lives, but have shitloads of cash to spend on it.

Now, I'm no expert on how demographic market research is supposed to work, but it sounds to me like Jamen Shively identified his ideal customer by simply looking in the mirror. Also, I sort of doubt Starbucks built their empire by focusing on first-time coffee drinkers.

The Mexican Connection

Most recently, in search of mind share, Shively held a joint press conference with former Mexican president Vicente Fox, who eloquently expressed his hope that marijuana legalization in the United States will help diminish the prohibition-fueled violence of the international drug cartels. Though Fox has no direct stake in Diego Pellicer or any other aspect of the cannabis industry, his high profile appearance before the press only fueled speculation that the brand might eventually look to import its product from south of the border.

“The whole topic of trade with Mexico got so far overblown it's kind of funny,” Shively says now that the smoke's cleared. “My whole point from the beginning was simply that we've got this big, hemispheric problem that may require a big, hemispheric solution. So we need to keep an open mind about things we might otherwise have a knee jerk reaction against.”

An interesting and even worthwhile thought experiment, no doubt. But perhaps one best kept to a smoky back room until the Feds finally call off their War on Weed.

“He's waiving a red flag at a bull,” UCLA Professor of Public Policy Mark A. R. Kleiman responds when I ask if Shively's plans might be seen as provocative by the US Department of Justice. Colloquially known as Washington's “pot czar,” Kleiman advises the state's Liquor Control Board on how to best implement the will of the people when it comes to recreational marijuana cultivation and sales, including by creating a system that adequately addresses the federal government's frequently voiced interest in preventing the rise of large-scale, multi-state marijuana enterprises.

“So going on TV to announce the creation of your large-scale, multi-state marijuana enterprise is certainly not helpful to the cause,” he says. “Nor is it consistent with any sane business strategy. The people entering this industry will be in a very equivocal position, and I suggest they keep their heads down. Not hold a press conference with Vicente Fox.”

After stressing that he's speaking with me not as an official of the state of Washington, but strictly in his role as an academic, a blogger, and an “all around nice guy who's single and looking,” the so-called pot czar wraps our call up by saying some less than nice things about the Diego Pellicer business model .

“The only thing I can imagine is that the goal is not to sell cannabis, but to sell stock,” Kleiman speculates. “I don't have any evidence, but that would make perfect sense. But even if this is a stock promotion, somebody's either crazy or stupid. Because this guy sounds like he'd sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, while taking the Verrazano as a trade-in.”

No Risk, High Reward

Perhaps the central selling point Shively's been using to attract potential investors is that his brand offers a “risk mitigated” way to get in on the ground floor of the sure to be lucrative marijuana production and distribution market without running afoul of the authorities.

“We've taken jail out of the equation,” he says. When I ask how that's possible, given federal law, Shively describes spending a ton of money in legal fees to come up with a proprietary “deal structure” that allows him to acquire medical marijuana dispensaries and recreational pot stores across the country without creating any criminal liability.

“When it's sufficiently legal to own them outright, we will. Until then, there's a whole different way we're going to operate.”

Diego Pellicer's first such acquisition was a Seattle medical marijuana access point called the North West Patient's Resource Center that maintains a stellar reputation within the industry and among lawmakers in Washington State. CEO John Davis has been a dedicated drug law reform advocate for decades. In 2008, he shared NORML's Cannabis Activist of the Year award for his role in helping to organize Seattle Hempfest, and he currently serves as Executive Director of the Coalition for Cannabis Standards and Ethics.

When I ask about his relationship with Jamen Shively, he says they're “married,” in the business sense, just three months after meeting for the first time.

“We each had what the other needed,” Davis explains. “I know the law, policy, procedures, the political landscape, and how to properly bring to market this particular product. While Jamen can access the financing I need to build infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, Shively says he's already looking to acquire additional retail outlets in Colorado and California, as soon as he completes an ongoing $10 million round of fundraising. The head of Diego Pellicer expects absolutely no problem reaching that initial eight-figure goal, though the current state of his coffers remains confidential, right alongside the risk mitigating details of his proprietary deal structure.

Ultimately, he's looking to raise $100 million to fully fund the company. Or perhaps to buy 200,000 grams of whatever he's been smoking.

David Bienenstock is the author of Legalized It!


More about weed:

Get Rich or High Trying

High Country - Part 1

North Korea Is Stoned All the Time, Which Explains a Lot

Photo via Flickr user Dustin

This is David Roth’s last column for VICE. He’s leaving after accepting an offer to work for SB Nation. We’re bummed he’s leaving, but also excited to see what he does at his new home. Since he’s on his way out, we asked him why he thought writing about sports was worthwhile in the first place, and this is what he said.

There are problems in this world—massive, brutal institutionalized avarice; a widening and increasingly ill-tempered distance from each other and the uglinesses that follow from that; the very concept of Food Network's yowling linen-encased butter-beast Paula Deen. One problem that we do not have, though, is an insufficient amount of talking about sports. For all our individual and collective failings here on Earth, we’ve had unparalleled success in creating opportunities for ourselves and others to project and identify and parse and seethe and yell and read and cheer and boo about sports-y things. There are more than enough media venues on which one can watch strident over-enunciators pretend to be outraged about NBA players and their tattoos; there are more than enough Quease and the Gristle Man sports talk radio duos teasing the fetid, sudsy ids of their audiences. The oceans rise and the deserts creep in on us and various vital pillars wobble and fissure, but we will not starve for lack of supremely confident buttheads who’ll have ready-made, surprisingly heated answers at hand when asked whether LeBron James is a True Winner.

All this does not exactly suggest that we're capable of the sort of reasonable conversations we'd need to have in order to address the dual problems of global climate change and Paula Deen's line of signature butters. But while the conversations themselves aren't always worth savoring, caring and talking about sports are basically good things. The problem is that though sports are basically great, what's great about them are the aspects least easily argued about. If all you knew about sports was what you read or heard or saw on television, you'd have a vague sense that sports are What Brings Us Together and inherently virtuous, but also infuriating and under assault from various familiar threats—entitled youth, millionaire thugs, any number of other grumpy-uncle mutterings you can fill in yourself. There would be a sense, from watching the various pleather-y squeakers that play-fight about sports for a living on TV, that all this is Very Important. There'd be no sense of what's fun about sports, let alone worthy of exalting, or why anyone would ever want to watch.

Which is strange, actually, because convincing people to watch is not just the reason why sports media exists, but the only thing it’s there to do. I would not and should not be writing about sports if I didn't think they were a way to better understand and enjoy a complicated moment-to-moment existence—not to mention a pretty righteous excuse to tell that existence to fuck off for a couple hours, because you are watching the NBA Finals and drinking a beer. For sportswriting to mean anything, it has to be grounded in that most important thing, which is that both the writer and the reader agree that this is something worth caring about.

And when it doesn't work—when some ulcerous heel over-enunciates through some ghoulish race-trolling or some clammy disciplinarian issues a high-altitude scolding or a fatuous Human Sports Entertainment Brand vapidly reaches into the bag o’ catchphrases—it's fundamentally because the sportswriter in question has broken faith with that central agreement to not just care about this stuff, but love it at least a little, and at least enough to know that it's more complex and more interesting than any individual take on it.

You can feel the importance of that mutual appreciation and affection most acutely and unmistakably in their absence. This is where all that poker-faced kidulty partisanship and dim pomp and the other various varieties of bloat come from—a forgetting that the thing itself is engrosing enough without all the high-definition lily-gilding or raised voices, and a lack of trust that the people on the other side of the equation are smart enough to know that. Sports can work in the same way that art or music or film can—evoke the same big feelings, hint at the same big things—but they function as a business, with all the cynicism and condescension that come with that.

This is part of what makes the worst aspects of the sports discourse simultaneously so painful and so deadening: the sense that we are being sold something by someone who thinks we’re foolish, and that we need to be tricked or bullied or dazzled into buying it. The curmudgeons and partisans and bias-milkers try to bring us together around sports as our smallest and angriest selves; the leagues can only understand the real and lovely communal aspect of sports fandom as an American flag the size of a football field, with a sponsor's logo placed tastefully in the corner. The sports-centric media generally dedicates itself to telling us how important all this is, how big and buyable it is. But of course we already know that what's really great about sports is smaller, freer, truer, and more open. It's why we're there, together, in the first place, watching. We wouldn't come back if we weren't already in love.

@david_j_roth

Previously: The Joyless Joys of Bad Baseball

Journalist Tim Pool is streaming live from Istanbul today where antigovernment protests have been ongoing since Friday, May 31. What began as a campaign against the city's plans to construct a mall in a public park has escalated into a massive display of anger over the ruling party's neo-Islamist social agenda and religiously driven laws. Riot police have moved in with brutal force, using tear gas on tens of thousands of protestors. It is the largest civil uprising in the history of Turkey.

For more on the situation in Istanbul:

Watch our new documentary, Istanbul Rising

Occupiers Faced Down Cops in Istanbul's Taksim Square

Turkey Is Waging an Invisible War Against Its Dissidents 



Turkey's Weekend of Street War, Jubilation, and Bulldozer Joyrides

Mark Carson.

At the end of this month, New York will celebrate its annual gay-pride march. But the parties and marches—a moment in the year when the city asserts a stand against discrimination against LGBT people—will be shadowed with an increased police presence and tarnished by the string of recent hate crimes that prompted that presence. The most notorious of those recent crimes being the murder of 32-year-old Mark Carson last month in the city's apparently gay-friendly Greenwich Village.    

“Look at you gay faggots, you look like wrestlers,” is a snippet of the homophobic tirade aimed at Mark Carson before his killer, 33-year-old Elliot Morales, aimed his revolver at the Brooklyn resident’s cheek and shot him point-blank. The wrestler comment is a little confusing, but then so is homophobia in a supposedly progressive country where around 11.7 million people are openly gay.  

I called up New York writer and activist Darnell Moore to speak about Carson’s death, the rising homophobia in New York, and where the future lies for gay tolerance in the city. Moore is a co-managing editor of the Feminist Wire and currently a visiting scholar at the Institute on Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. He was also the inaugural Chair of the city of Newark, New Jersey’s LGBT Concerns Advisory Board and, like Mark Carson, black, gay, and from Brooklyn.

Darnell Moore.

VICE: Following Mark Carson’s death, what’s the mood right now in New York's gay community?
Darnell Moore: People are angry. Marches, rallies, and protests have been planned. Christine Quinn—our City Council president, who happens to be a lesbian—organized a rally in response about three days after Mark was murdered. It was estimated that 1,500 people attended. The day after he was murdered, residents from the neighborhood held a silent vigil on the corner. People are raising their voices. That’s generally the mood right now.

With Mark Carson being African American, do you feel especially connected to this story, being both black and gay in New York yourself?
I do. But the questions that came to mind as I stood at the rally were: Would this protest be taking place if Mark Carson wasn’t gay? What if we didn’t know his sexual identity and he was murdered in the same gay, queer part of the city? Would people still be angry? Black young men are dying all the time in New York. We’re not only dying, but we’re being stopped and frisked by police officers. We are the majority of the people being locked up within the prison system. And it seems like there doesn’t appear to be a public outcry. Moments like this really remind me that sometimes we are so invested in the sexual identity of individuals that we forget all the other parts that define them.

Yeah, it seems that when there’s a homophobic crime on a black man in New York, it receives so much more attention. For example, the Michael Sandy case in 2006.
Yes, the “gay” aspect of the victims’ identities seems to make both cases exceptional to some. Black death is mundane. It’s common. And I think that's problematic. It's problematic, one, when anybody is murdered, whether it’s a hate crime perpetrated because of someone’s sexual identity or race. Any crime that results in the death of someone should similarly provoke people. All of the folk who showed up to Mark’s memorial should also show up to a protest if any non-gay-identified black man in New York City was shot down. 

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently said that, “anti-gay hate crimes are up over 70 percent [this year].” What do you think the reason is for this rise?
Yeah, I read that. A lot of people here seem to think that has something to do with the current visibility of LGBT issues, not only in the media, but within the political arena. Same-sex marriage is a big political issue in many states. In the midst of this seemingly progressive LGBT moment, it seems like America’s anxiety around homosexuality has increased. In the same way that we saw a lot of hate and racist comments directed towards Barack Obama when he was running for office, now that LGBT people are visible in the media, homophobia is seemingly more pronounced.

But the thing is, like racism, homophobia is always present. It might be the case that we have become more attuned to it when it shows up. But a moment like this brings it much more visibly to the surface. In fact, when I was at the rally, a black brother was walking by angry. I don’t know who he was and I don’t really recall everything he said. But one thing he did say was, “This is y’all fault.” The “y’all” he was referencing to was the gay community, and I was taken aback. This is at a rally for someone who has died, and homophobia was still taking place in that place.

Do you feel noticeably more unsafe as a gay man in New York?
No, I don’t. And let me be specific—I live in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, which is a predominately black neighborhood. The home of Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, and Jay-Z—what many have referred to as “Bed-Stuy, do or die.” People have this idea that Bed-Stuy is violent, but I never feel unsafe at home. Don’t get me wrong, shit happens in Bed-Stuy. People die. However, I love my neighborhood. It’s home to so many different types of people and, yes, gay people—LGBT folk—live in the neighborhood, too. I’ve never experienced any type of homophobia in that black urban space. But let me say this. What happened to Mark Carson can happen to any of us, anywhere—including white, seemingly progressive spaces like Greenwich Village.

Yeah, it seems odd that it happened there, arguably the most LGBT-friendly area of Manhattan. 
Right. It happened in Greenwich Village, the home of “gay liberation.” Now, the fact that this happened there may say something about the perpetrator. Maybe this was the perpetrator’s MO—to start trouble and to kill someone in a space that he well knows is a safe haven to a lot of LGBT people. But it’s interesting that this type of thing happened there. Don’t get me wrong, it happens in a lot of other places, too. Sakia Gunn was a 15-year-old lesbian woman. She was black and stabbed to death in mostly black and brown Newark, New Jersey, in 2003. I remember going to Greenwich Village in my younger years because that was the place you knew you could be gay, and it was cool to be public about it without fear of being ridiculed or physically hurt.

I don’t recall the Sakia story.
That case didn’t get a lot of attention at all. Maybe because she was a woman, or because she was a young lesbian without a lot of economic privilege? I’m not trying to make it seem like this doesn’t happen in black spaces. It can happen anywhere. But again, it makes me think, Whose stories matter when this type of violence happens? Whose stories are actually showing up in the media? Which spaces matter? The lack of visibility regarding who’s represented in the telling of these stories points to a set of large dynamics we don’t think about.

Before he was shot, Mark Carson is reported to have confronted his killer Elliot Morales in regards to the homophobic remarks Morales was making toward him. Do you think Carson made the right decision?
I don’t know what I think about it. My heart is heavy. I don’t know Mark, I’ve never met him. But I hear from friends that he was the type of person who would always stand up for himself. Here was a person who was committed to living in his truth even if it meant the ending of his life. And I would hope that I would do the same. But at the same time, I don’t know if I would tell a young person in the same situation encountering someone who looked like they could hurt them to stand their ground. I think I would tell them to leave, though leaving may not guarantee survival. 

When I was younger, I used to play around and say things like, “I’m not going to get gay-bashed—I’m going to retaliate with a straight bash.” But my mind is changing. I saw a sign someone left on a makeshift memorial calling him a “gay angel.” Mark and so many others are not martyrs. Their deaths are inexcusable. I don’t want any of the young LGBT people we serve at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, or any of my LGBT friends, to have to aggress or feel like they have to fight that to survive.

 
New York gay pride. Image via

Mark Carson’s choice of clothing (a tank top and cut-off shorts) is reported to be what provoked the attack. Would you say that gay men in New York normally subscribe to a more masculine way of dressing and acting to avoid a situation like Mark Carson's?
Yes. A lot of the violence tends to be a result of some screwed up gender politics. When you see someone walking down the street, regardless of whether they don’t fit within a prescribed gender box or not, you don’t know who they’re having sex with behind closed doors. In my own life, people tend to get really provoked by what they see in terms of my gender presentation. Folk see a man walking down the street with cut off shorts, cowboy boots and a tank top, and assume that he's gay. How do we get folks to think differently about gender?

True. It was reported that Morales was imprisoned four times and had spent a total of ten years in prison. Do you think outreach work can be done in prisons to promote tolerance towards the LGBT community?
No. Many argue that prisons can be redemptive, but prisons aren't the answer. I’m not sure if that type of outreach work is going on. You can send a person to jail for a hate crime, but it doesn’t mean their thoughts will change. I’m not necessarily certain that putting a white racist behind bars is going to make him or her any less hateful to black people. And, in the same way, I don’t think that it can change a homophobe’s mind about sexuality or gender, particularly when some of the people who are working in those prisons generally maintain the same beliefs that resulted in Carson’s murder. 

So what do you see as the solution to tackling homophobia in New York? 
I think the change will come by working with our young people. And it sounds very pessimistic, but older folk are sometimes stuck in their ways. I'm interested in working with our young kids—five, four, and three years old—so they can be and think differently. I want young people to know, for example, that a boy wearing pink or playing with doll or not wanting to play sports doesn’t mean that he is less of a boy than the kid wearing blue and playing in the little league. Eventually our world will be in their hands. If I can get young people to start thinking differently, my hope is that the world will look different in the future. That’s not to say we give up on everyone else. I think that our minds can change. Mine has. I’m a gay man who thought being gay was wrong and I’ve experienced my own shift. I'm hopeful.

Follow Alexander on Twitter: @aaplerku

More horrible homophobia:

Greece's Fascist Homophobes Have God and Police on Their Side

Editing Homophobia Out of the 'Islamic Tradition'

The Ten Hottest Homophobes on the Internet

The topless protest group Femen started out in the Ukraine in 2008. Today it's a global movement, and more than 300 topless warriors have joined the naked revolution. Their fans say they're courageous, no-nonsense activists, while their critics say their tactics devalue the fight for female equality. What's inarguable is that due to those tactics, the world's media are, once again, pointing their cameras at the feminist cause.

To find out why women are flashing their tits in the name of feminism, VICE spent a weekend in Paris with Inna Shevchenko, one of Femen's founding members, and her French Femen sisters. We filmed the lead-up to one of their latest actions: pissing off a baying horde of neo-Nazi thugs.

Read more about Femen:

I Spent the Weekend Watching Topless Feminists Piss Off Neo-Nazis

Femen Are Being Attacked by Nazis and Sent to Prison

We Spoke to Femen About Their Topless Tunisian Protest

Photos via Flickr User GageSkidmore

Look, I know a lot of you think that voting’s for poor people and I get it. Politics is a gross thing that red-faced dads yell at you about on the TV, plus there’s no boobs in it and they almost never sing, so like ugh, bo-ring. With all the shit that’s gone down this week, from the Bradley Manning trial to the NSA straight up admitting their pervy “gurl I’m always around u” policy, you’d think we might start to get involved though, right? WRONG! Motherfuckers, Nixon got impeached for less than what’s happening on the reg in America right now—and we aren’t doing shit because we have way better TV shows than they had in the 70s. So, what should we do? Dig this, chummy: I think we should just call it a day. Hit the reset button. No, fuck that, we’re past hitting reset. We gotta take the cartridge of democracy out of the NES of government and blow on it with the cleansing winds of change.

The problem is, both major political parties care more about pleasing huge corporations than they do you or me. Duh. Everyone knows this. The only people who disagree are either on the board of a huge corporation or they are a sentient meatball from Lunchables. The key to fixing the USA is getting these ground beefs on our side. The only way we can stand up to the oligarchy of the super-wealthy is if we do it together. Unfortunately, they’re never gonna join our side because pot smoke killed Jesus and women are scary. What we need to do is suck it up, be big strong boys and girls, and join theirs. 

We start with the Tea Party. You know the Tea Party, right? They’re the fake grass-roots movement funded by billionaire industrialists to make racists and old people feel like they’re a part of something because being white in America isn’t enough. The Tea Party is our weapon, if we use it right. It may sound totally fucking crazy, but let's let them have America and just get out of their way. Sarah Palin for President (we can convince her to run if we promise that she can do all of her campaigning via satellite), Ted Cruz as VP, and an all Tea Party Congress. We must allow them to fail spectacularly on the biggest stage so that the steak-tit people who live in Middle America can see how shitty everything really is. The carefully placed veneer of comfort, gently massaged into place by everyone from Nixon to Obama, will be violently ripped away, and it will be GLORIOUS.

The way I see it, it’ll go down like this:

JANUARY 20, 2017: INAUGURATION DAY

President Palin is carried to the Monsanto Presents: The Only Roses That Are Still Alive Garden by a team of hunky Marines, brandishing stone tablet replicas of the Ten Commandments. She starts to read them, but gets bored. She tosses them to an aide and reminds everyone that she doesn’t need to read them because giant versions will be erected at every government building across our great country. She takes a sip of orange soda, remembering that she was supposed to say something else, before finally answering the question that’s been on everyone’s lips, what the hell is that giant thing that was built on top of the White House? With a dramatic flair, she reveals a titanic marble cross, exactly one foot taller than the Washington Monument. Her inauguration speech ends with a hologram of Reagan coming out and telling everyone how happy he is up in Heaven right now because the good guys finally won. Holo-Reagan then winks at the crowd and says “hey get a loada this!” while juggling ten brand new smartphones. Suddenly a hologram of Gorbachev appears, holding up a massive cellphone bill. The crowd loves it, they’re booing and hooting and hollering. Holo-Reagan turns to Holo-Gorby and says “Mr. Gorbachev! Tear. Up. This. Bill! That’s right, show you voted for President Bachmann and you get 50 percent off your mobile phone bill for up to three months!”

FEBRUARY 12, 2017: THE FIRST DAY OF “THE BLACKOUT”

In the few days since President Palin’s massively successful inauguration, the shit has already hit the fan. Her administration has spent all of its fiscal budget before the first month of her term is over. They’ve installed gargantuan marble crosses at every post office, laser-guided homosexuality detectors in every town, plus they upped Planned Parenthood’s budget by over 1000 percent to turn them into a network of highly-trained bureaucrats ensuring that every time an American has sex it leads to procreation. Without necessary funds, the power grid for the entire eastern seaboard shuts down. For about three hours, it looks like everything will be fine, since nobody’s smartphone has lost power. However, as the East Coast loses the ability to tweet, millions of people pour into the streets. Unsure of how to interact in person, the citizens begin looting every major chain retailer, and there are brief respites from the chaos as each person finds a new tablet or phone to distract themselves with, until they too run out of battery. Once the last device runs out of juice, the millions of confused, hungry Americans immediately resort to cannibalism.

MARCH 5, 2017: MANIFEST DESTINY 2.0

Bolstered by their fuel-efficient smart cars and crude, solar-powered weapons, The New California Militia, lead by Ed Begley Jr., finally crosses the Mississippi River. The militia, over 800,000 strong, walk into a nightmare. Those who have survived “The Blackout” have completely reverted to a feral state. However, because of their lack of organization and weaponry, they are easily picked off as the militia marches to DC. Back in California, the NWO (New Western Order) is mitigating the fallout as best they can. NWO Czar Leonardo DiCaprio, in conjunction with Anonymous, has established a network of solar and wind powered 3D printers that are constantly churning out new solar panels and, thanks to recent technological advances, a hoard of organic food. With every passing day, the militia sets up more and more entertainment centers in every major city that pacify the throng of living corpses with their messages of hope from the West... along with hours of fine comedic and dramatic programming.

MARCH 25, 2017: V.A. DAY

After a week of heavy fighting, sabotage, and morale deprivation, the New California Militia takes the White House and declares Victory in America Day. Within weeks, power is restored to the East Coast, but the damage is irreparable. A deal is struck to split America in half. The West (now known as California Plus) remains under the control of a coalition of Leo and Anonymous, while the rest (known now as Very East California) is ruled by Ed Begley and The New California Militia. An era of heretofore unimaginable peace and prosperity is ushered into the world. America can no longer meddle in the affairs of other countries while she rebuilds herself, and there is no lack of employment because both nations are too busy implementing their new infrastructure. Each year, a game of football played by giant robots determines bragging rights between the two great republics. Also, all of our dead dogs and cats come back to life and totally play with us all the time.

So, there you have it. The only surefire way to fix America. Remember in three years when you go to the voting booth: only you can ensure the future of America. Plus there will be robot football. Fuck, robot football is gonna be so great.

@ShutUpAndrosky

For more Tea Party madness:

Jewish Republicans Actually Exist in California

After Michele Bachmann, America Needs Another Outrage Machine

Dinesh D’Souza Is the Most Successful Documentarian in the World, and a Scumbag

Pim Roes with his cat.

There’s a saying among expats in Hanoi: “Vietnam is the best party in the world, so long as you don’t question the party.” The threat of the hardline communist government raining down upon you with its iron fists is enough to ensure that most just keep their heads down and continue with their office jobs, sex tourism, animal abuse, or whatever it is that they're there to do.

So when the country's leading lights made an ambitious and arguably misguided $100 million bid to oust Google as the country's primary search engine with a new company called "Cốc Cốc," expats might have felt it wise to stay out of the way. When Dutch expat Pim Roes heard about the plans, however, he didn't stand aside for these captains of Vietnamese industry. Instead, he put himself right in their way, registering the domain name www.cốccốc.com, which, unlike the official www.coccoc.com website, contains the company name with its full Vietnamese characters.

That might not mean too much quite yet, but Pim has been quick to recognize the potential for grabbing websites and domain names using Unicode (those country-specific accents and characters, to you and me). So that when Unicodes inevitably take off (as Pim is adamant they will) and these companies want to register their domains with the characters they actually use in their names, they'll have to go through Pim first.

I caught up with him to find out a little more about his domain-grabbing and how he plans to proceed with his squatting of the multi-million dollar juggernaut aiming to boot Google out of Southeast Asia. 

The homepage of Cốc Cốc, the site whose domain Pim has squatted. 

VICE: Hi, Pim. So how did this all come about?
Pim Roes: Normally, if I read anything in the news about Google launching a new service or a new movie coming out, the first thing I’ll check is if the domain name is still available. I've done it before, too. When I heard that the new James Cameron film is going to be called The Informationist, I quickly snapped up www.the-informationist.com.

Why?
Sometimes I do it for money, but it’s certain that if I don’t do it someone else will, and it’s likely to be lucrative. Sometimes they’ll threaten to sue you and then you have to decide if you want to ask for money or hand it over for free and avoid any legal trouble, so there isn’t much to lose. With Cốc Cốc, I heard about the company, checked if the domain name was available and then registered it for $8. In this case I didn’t really do it for money, I just saw that it was there and realized this would be potentially valuable—not necessarily in financial terms—so I took it.

That sounds either very clever or very stupid. Rebels haven’t done too well in Vietnam in the past…
I didn’t intend to hijack their brand name, I just recognized the significance of this particular address. I’m not really afraid of lawyers as I can always just give it back for free—I’ve had threats in the past, but I’ve always cooperated. In terms of the countries involved, I have to be careful what I say as I’m very much aware this is being recorded. With this, I’m not really standing in their way too much as most users will still go to coccoc.com, without the Unicode. But if they want to become as big as Google then they need to consider elements like this. 

So were they careless to push ahead with this huge project without safeguarding the domain name?
I wouldn’t necessarily say they were careless, as Unicodes as domain names are still a relatively new concept and only came into use in 2010. You wouldn’t expect your typical developer to know too much about them, but with the level of staff Cốc Cốc has, you’d hope the people in charge of choosing the domain name would have knowledge on the subject. It’s my prediction that in ten years' time Unicodes are going to be the innovation people will be kicking themselves for not getting involved with in the early stages, in much the same way that people regret not registering domains like pizza.com and insurance.com in the days before the internet boom. All money made from the internet comes from discovering the small improvements and ideas that people are not yet doing, so small insights can become very lucrative.

Insurance.com, AKA the only insurance domain that doesn't need opera singers or meerkats to remain popular.

Have you had any contact from Cốc Cốc so far?
I met one guy who works for them at a house party and he was pretty cool, but other than that, nothing. It’s strange, because with so many people working for them in Hanoi, I’d expect to have encountered a few more. I actually emailed them to say I was surprised to find that cốccốc.com hadn’t been registered and asked whether they’d heard of Unicodes. I told them I paid $8 for the domain name, but they could have it back for free once the transfer lock of 60 days had passed, so we’ll have to see what they say.

Right... If you don’t want money, then why did you do it?
I just did it as a small thing for a laugh, really. I shared it with my friends on Facebook to show them what I’d done and see their response. Hopefully Cốc Cốc might like me for it and thank me for the tip. I once hacked the website of a major political party and then emailed to let them know of the weak point in their site. They were really grateful and sent me a T-shirt with that country’s prime minister on it. With Cốc Cốc, I partly did it because I’d like to meet their developers and share ideas. I used to work as a developer in Dublin and there were loads of like-minded people to talk to, but there don’t seem to be many of those in Hanoi, so it would just be nice to start a dialogue.

What’s the moral position in developer circles on using other sites’ intended traffic to make money?
Lots of traffic comes through search engines rather than direct visits, so most of the sites I make focus on ensuring high rankings in search engines. People are unbelievably reliant on search engines; for a long time, the top search term on Google was actually "Google," as well as being the top term on Bing. People are so drilled in getting to search engines that they don’t actually realize they’re already on one. By that same token, it means hijacking domain names (registering sites with accents or familiar typing mistakes, "like facebookk.com," for example) isn’t too damaging to big sites, as the bulk of their visits come from search engines. 

Can you make a lot of money out of it?
Yeah, if you have enough domain names in the right places, you can make a killing. I know one guy who made it his business—he bought thousands of domain names similar to popular sites and became rich very quickly just through Adsense and affiliate marketing. I think it’s a legitimate way to make money, just as long as you don’t misuse that site by tricking the user into thinking they’re actually on Facebook and stealing their data.

What kind of sites have you created in the past?
All sorts. I’ve currently got around 50 sites, which in total attract 2.5 million visitors per month. Some of my celebrity sites listing stars’ heights or showing pictures of them without make-up are pretty popular. And then I’ve got others, such as websites listing popular baby names, which is a great one for running in multiple languages as it’s of universal interest and unlikely to attract anything controversial that might piss off advertisers. There are also the funny ones, like kick-a-ginger-day.com, which started as a joke on South Park and then gained media attention, so I bought the domain name and knocked up a website. I’ve actually sold quite a bit of merchandise on there as well.

So what advice can you give me for making internet millions?
The thing with the internet is that if you get the right domain name, you can make easy money for doing nothing. But you generally need to have years of experience in programming, as well as studying user behavior, advertising, and marketing. The people I know who are good at making money online were interested in the industry from a very young age, whereas those who study it may learn techniques but won’t necessarily have the great ideas. Money-making ideas are usually very simple, but you have to be the first person to have ever come up with them. Being first and having no competition is the best situation, then when more players come into the market you have to be the best. Be first, then be best.

Great. Thanks, Pim!

Follow Jak on Twitter: @JakPhillips

More stuff about the internet:

What the Fuck Is the Internet?

Girls and the Internet

Internet Psychonauts Try All the Drugs You Don't Want to Try 

The question of whether you believe in conspiracy theories is surprisingly tricky. You may not think that the moon landing or Beyoncé’s pregnancy was fake, you may not imagine lizards lurking behind Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney’s faces, but by now you probably know that the US government is operating a massive secret surveillance apparatus, which would sound like a paranoid fantasy if it weren’t true. And many, many Americans profess some level of credulity when it comes to some conspiracies, which at times can seem less crazy than believing that there’s never, ever, a man behind the curtain pulling strings.  

Free-floating fear and half-baked ideas about what’s really going on have been a more significant part of American history than is generally accepted, according to Jesse Walker’s thorough, meticulously researched book, The United States of Paranoia. “Pundits tend to write off political paranoia as a feature of the fringe,” he writes in his introduction. “They’re wrong. The fear of conspiracies has been a potent force across the political spectrum, from the colonial era to the present, in the establishment as well as the extremes.” He then goes on to explore what amounts to an alternate history of the US—from the Puritans’ panic over witches and colonial Americans' panics about Indians plotting in the wilderness or slaves concocting murderous rebellions to Watergate and the FBI’s often bizarre, occasionally illegal COINTELPRO operations to batshit (and sometimes ironic) theories about UFOs and the Illuminati to the fear of Satanists in the 80s to the militia movement to 9/11 Truthers to people who are paranoid about paranoid conspiracy theorists. Along the way there are fascinating tangents about now-mostly-forgotten fringe figures like John Todd, who traveled around the country in the 70s spinning insane tales to church congregations of how witches and the Illuminati controlled everything from the military to rock music. (Todd had a long history of coercing underage girls into sex, and he was finally sent to prison in 1988 for rape.)

If that sounds at all interesting, you should read the book when it comes out on August 20. I recently chatted with Jesse about conspiracies, rumor, and how people come to believe the things they do.   

VICE: You take a long historical view of conspiracy theories in America. Do you think we’re more paranoid than we used to be?
Jesse Walker: I don’t think so. I’m not quite sure how I would even measure that, given what the baseline of paranoia is. What I do think happens is that the direction of the paranoia shifts. One thing I mentioned in the book was how a lot of people started saying after Obama got elected, “Ooh, the right wing has suddenly gotten very paranoid.” In fact, in the Bush era, there were tons of right-wing conspiracy theories, it’s just that they weren’t about the government. They were aimed mostly at people outside America’s borders. With another party in power, [the right] has rediscovered some of its libertarian impulses. A lot of discussions about the United States becoming more paranoid or less paranoid just has to do with what kind of paranoia people are paying attention to.

The recent revelations about the NSA and FBI’s monitoring of cell phone metadata and internet communications make me wonder if it’s possible that the government itself is paranoid.
I can’t get into the head of the average NSA bureaucrat enacting a program. But I think that the creation of that sort of system obviously has to do with fear and paranoia. I should stress I’m using the word paranoid in a colloquial way. I should just be saying “fear.” Another problem has to do with the way “conspiracy theory” gets used, because people who use the phrase conspiracy theory disparagingly believe in all sorts of conspiracies, it’s just that they say, “Well those are true, so they don’t count.” What they really mean when they say “conspiracy theory” is, at best, “nutty conspiracy theory,” and, at worst, “conspiracy theory that feeds into an ideology that I don’t share, which I will therefore think of as nutty.” But I’ve forgotten your original question.

I wanted to know whether you thought that this surveillance was a result of institutional paranoia on the government’s part.
I wrote about moral panics in the book, and one way that sociologists distinguish moral panics from other phenomena is the residue that a moral panic leaves. A lot of times, there’s the residue of a new law, a new bureaucracy, which then have momentum of their own. The story of the growth of the FBI is the story of J. Edgar Hoover finding one wave of fear to ride after another. First it’s white slavery, then it’s Communists, then he’s told to back off the political surveillance, but when FDR is afraid of the far right he leaps onto that, and he moves into the far left. And then in the early 60s he uses the fear of the Ku Klux Klan to get liberals to sign off on things that he uses against the New Left. It’s masterful. Hoover clearly was an adept bureaucratic warrior. But he was also clearly paranoid. He imagined all sorts of conspiracies that in many cases weren’t there, and in many cases were, in his imagination, much larger and more powerful than they were in real life.

In the process of researching this book, did you get any insight into how people wind up believing what most of us would regard as really extreme, nonsensical conspiracy theories?
I hate to generalize about these kinds of things. When people talk about looking for what are the common patterns of people becoming, we’ll say for sake of a phrase, “extreme conspiracy theorists,” what they’re really looking at is how people adopt belief systems in general. There’s all sorts of conversion experiences people have that can lead them to embracing a worldview, whether it’s religious, or political, or whatever. That said, conspiracy theories have to do with our ability to see patterns. [Paranoia is] where our drive to find patterns and create narratives meets our capacity for fear, especially fear of people who, one way or another, are removed from us—whether they’re from another culture or higher or lower in the social hierarchy or they just have different politics. I find that people grab onto compelling narratives and they don’t always know how to weigh evidence very well. And I don’t just mean that in the context of conspiracy theories. I just mean that there are people who, once they’ve adopted a worldview, find it very easy to accept claims without examining them thoroughly. Everybody can fall into this.

Do you think it’s ever a good thing to be paranoid?
I don’t want to tell people to be paranoid. There are certainly plenty of times when it makes sense to be suspicious. My own framework of dealing with the world is to distrust narratives in general, because I know how easy it is to construct one. Conspiracy theorists, at large, are most compelling when they are finding holes in narratives that everyone else automatically believes without looking too carefully at them. And they’re least compelling when they’re building narratives of their own.

You have a long chapter about what you call the “ironic style” of conspiracy theorists, which refers to people who appreciate conspiracies for their own sake. Do you consider yourself one of those ironists?
I think in many ways the book is covertly, or maybe not so covertly, a case for the ironic style. It’s not just a matter of appreciating [conspiracy theories] as jokes. It’s appreciating them as world views, appreciating them as creations, appreciating them in the same way that someone who doesn’t necessarily believe in a religious faith can still enjoy the products of that faith. There are people who are like, “I want to read about conspiracy theories” in this ironic, distanced way and laugh at them. There are people who see a conspiracy tract as science fiction written by someone who didn’t realize he was writing science fiction. Then there are ironists who risk falling into paranoia. In the book, I talk about a couple people who fall down the rabbit hole because they started taking their own creations too seriously. The ironic style isn't just about humor. It's about finding metaphors and insights in the conspiracy stories people come up with whether or not those stories are true. And that's what my book is trying to do too: to go beyond just accepting or debunking a conspiracy theory and see what we can learn about America by exploring the stories that caught on.

A point I try to stress in the book is that even a conspiracy theory that says absolutely nothing true about the external world does say something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe it. One example that I mention in the book is the claim that white doctors were deliberately injecting black babies with AIDS. There’s no evidence for that. But while investigating that theory, you can’t stop there. You have to go on to ask, “Why did people believe this was true?” And in fact, there is this long history of the secretive medical mistreatment of black people, which includes the Tuskegee experiment and all sorts of other things. There were these rumors about night doctors [who would supposedly secretly experiment on African Americans] and it’s really unclear to what extent those were true. Historians who look at this are very cautious, because it’s entirely possible that hospitals were seriously abusing the rights of people from the underclass. We’re trying to piece it together from such incomplete evidence that there’s always going to be question marks. There’s a spectrum that on one end has stuff that’s accepted as historical fact and on the other contains weird fantasies. But these aren’t completely separate categories because there’s this whole realm of possibilities in between.

Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia will hit stores on August 20, but you can pre-order a copy on Amazon here.

@HCheadle

More on conspiracies and those who believe them:

Conspiracy Theorists Are Dangerous Enemies to Make

The Frenzied Conspiracy Theories of Jeff Boss

In Defense of Paranoia

Rand Paul and his wife Kelley Paul deplane in Ventura County, California. Photos by Grace Wyler

I’m in an eight-seater plane, flying over the San Joaquin Valley with Rand Paul, the Tea Party-loving, filibustering provocateur of the US Senate who is quickly climbing the shortlist of potential Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential race.

At this moment, the fiery sparkplug who demanded President Barack Obama explain his policy on drone-ing Americans and, more recently, berated his Senate colleagues for dragging Apple executives before a congressional hearing, is AWOL. Paul is tired, and a little cranky. He’s losing his voice and he thinks he ate something that disagreed with him during his meeting at eBay's offices.

We’ve just finished a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley, with stops at Facebook, Google, and meetings with deep-pocketed techno-libertarian donors. But when I ask Paul what his favorite part of the trip was, his response is “golfing,” referring to the 27 holes he played at a Half Moon Bay resort with his youngest son Robert, who is 14.

Rand Paul’s message to Facebook: give me Liberty and post it to Facebook.

By most measures, the trip has been a big success for Paul. The Kentucky Republican was well-received by tech executives—Mark Zuckerberg even flew back early from his trip to Europe to attend their meeting—and Paul has made the kind of valuable relationships he needs if he ever decides to run for president, which, at this point, seems like the plan.

So while Paul’s mood may not reflect his feelings about the trip, his fatigue is also understandable. In the three months since his 13-hour filibuster to protest Obama's drone policies, Paul has hit the pavement, wooing voters in key early primary states, trying to convince conservatives to embrace immigration reform, and even making a stop at Howard University, a historically black college that rarely gets Republican visitors. After his trip to California, Paul will return to the Senate before flying back west the following weekend for a Park City confab with Republican donors, put together by his father’s former nemesis, Mitt Romney.

Through these appearances, Paul has emerged as an unlikely leader in the Republican Party’s quest to broaden its appeal beyond white male voters. After getting routed in the last two presidential elections, the GOP seems to have finally come to the realization that it needs to win over at least a few blacks, Hispanics, and young people. Paul, it turns out, is uniquely suited to this task.

Paul’s California adventure was an early attempt to reach out to these new voters, sketching a vague outline of the weird coalition that the Kentucky Republican is trying to unite—an unlikely group of Republican misfits that includes black conservatives, rich Silicon Valley libertarians, disenchanted young Obama voters, and Bible-thumping evangelicals. 

On Paul’s first night out in California, I ran into Miles, a guy I knew in college, at a fundraiser for the Senator hosted by the Frederick Douglass Foundation, described on its website as the “largest Christ-centered, multiethnic, and Republican ministry in America.”

Miles is a 24-year-old from San Francisco, and grew up with what he describes as a “liberal background.” He spent the summer after his freshman year interning in then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington. But somewhere between his Capitol Hill internship and graduation, Miles had a political awakening.

“I didn't know what the word liberty meant—I just thought it meant generic freedom,” Miles told me. “At the time, I was making phone calls for Obama, and after he won and I saw the continuation of many Bush policies, I realized that the person at the top can change, but that they're just going to keep signing the same bills.”

Miles believes that the system is broken. He opposes what he sees as an excess of government spending, thinks the US should stop getting involved in foreign conflicts—“neocons are among the worst things to ever happen to this country”—and is particularly concerned with the Obama administration’s infringement on civil liberties.

“This type of stuff is what gets under my skin,” he said. “I wish more people would wake up to the fact that it is both parties carrying out authoritarian action like this.”

Miles said that while he doesn’t agree with Paul on everything, the Kentucky Senator “has done a good job of addressing the issues that I care about.” Libertarianism, he added, “is really the only position you can take without tacitly endorsing the system.”

As Paul’s fundraiser was winding down, I met another potential Paul convert, Frank, a teacher from Oakland, California. Frank told me that he used to teach at Oakland’s Fremont High School, but left after 12 years when one of his students was shot and killed and the funeral service was subsequently shot up by gang members.

“That was really just the last straw,” said Frank, who now teaches at a private high school in Hayward, a tony Oakland suburb.

“The difference between the education that kids are getting at Fremont and kids are getting at this private school, it’s just hurtful,” he said. “The government is just pouring money into fixing these schools, but it’s not working.”

Frank, who described himself as a liberal, said that he was curious to meet Paul, and ended up getting into an extended conversation with the senator and his wife, Kelley Paul, about education policy.

“He’s not like a normal politician,” Frank said. “He was genuinely interested in what I had to say. And it sounds like he actually wants to do something to fix education.”

It’s not surprising that voters like Frank and Miles would be attracted to Paul. Their experience with politics and government has been fucked up. That's a common trend among young voters in particular—their political awareness began with the Supreme Court’s Gore vs. Bush debacle, and since then they’ve experienced 9/11, two bloody wars (one of which was based on a lie), the meltdown of the financial system and subsequent bank bailout, ballooning student loan debt and home foreclosures, and the steady expansion of the national security state.

Amid this mess, Paul has emerged as a rare politician who is ideologically consistent, and who is at least trying to come up with solutions.

Of course, Paul is far from a perfect. His plans to slash government spending, dismantle the Department of Education, and his support for a federal union-busting bill make him an easy Tea Party caricature for liberals. Some of his statements, like his repeated calls to cut off foreign aid to Egypt and Pakistan, tend to come across as half-baked or tone-deaf.

But Paul’s ideological zeal allows people to take him or leave him. And in California, a surprising number of people seemed to opt for the former.

"He's clearly inspiring people, and he's inspiring people who have been somewhat disillusioned at times,” Trygve Olson, one of Paul’s senior advisors, told me outside of the Reagan Library, where 950 people showed up to hear Paul’s speech.

“He has a set of values and those values are clearly resonating with mainstream conservatives and Republicans, but he's also applying those values to issues and concerns that nontraditional Republicans care about,” Olson added.

Rand Paul fans wait in line for his book-signing at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Libary. 

The question for Paul now is whether he can appeal to the disparate corners of the Republican Party’s potential coalition without appearing to pander—a daunting task as he attempts to unite socially liberal techno-libertarians with the conservative Christian elements of the GOP base.

“He's probably the best chance the Republicans have in Silicon Valley to reshift the political balance,” said Craig Montouri, a Silicon Valley start-up founder who attended a private dinner with Paul in Half Moon Bay. “He's got a good base of support, but it's unclear how deep that base of support is.”

“Some of us are projecting libertarian ideas on to him,” Montouri added. “When it comes to the Bay Area, no matter how economically libertarian someone is, if they want to control what people do in our personal lives, people are going to recoil.”

The fine line that Paul has to walk on social issues was clearly drawn when we arrived in California, where the Kentucky Senator and his family were greeted by a pit crew of social conservatives, including David Lane, the evangelical mastermind behind Rick Perry’s “Response” prayer rally, and Rex Ellsass, an Ohio-based GOP operative who has made his reputation—and fortune—representing socially conservative politicians, including Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin of “legitimate rape” fame.

But Paul’s message on social issues was remarkably consistent throughout his trip to California.

“I think on the cultural issues, I'm for agreeing to disagree,” Paul told me in an interview. “I think some parts of the country are going to be more conservative than others, and I think we can accept that by bringing a federalist type of approach to these issues.

“There will be some states that will be more liberal and some states that will be more conservative, but what will unite most of us in the Republican Party will be that we want smaller government, less debt, more freedom to pursue the activities you want to pursue to succeed in life.”

Surprisingly, social conservatives who encountered Paul seemed OK with that position.

“I don't feel like I am being suckered,” said Rob McCoy, the pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel, where Paul spoke. “We disagree in some areas, but I can honestly say that he seeks to understand me—not necessarily to agree with me, but to understand me.

“I don't want a guy who is going to play to our camp—we've had that,” McCoy added. “But I've seen him speak to a lot of groups, and he's always honest in his approach."

Pastor Rob McCoy introduces Rand Paul at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California.

Paul’s lack of pandering seems to stem, in part, from the fact that he is not a natural politician—he comes across as shy, even standoffish, in social settings, and his speeches are often awkward or tone-deaf (his comparison between Guantanamo Bay and lynching, for example, tends to fall flat with black audiences). He’s a big fan of mock turtlenecks, and usually looks like he just got out of a pool. And he definitely doesn’t give off the vibe of someone who has always wanted to run for president.

While Paul will undoubtedly become more polished over time, for now, at least, his advisors see his political weirdness as an asset.

“He's unimpressed completely with people who zealously pursue power—he does what's in his heart, what he thinks is right, and people can sense that authenticity and that breath of fresh of air,” Ellsass said.

“He transcends the calculation of political, Machiavellian schemes. It creates a real optimism because its true,” he added. "There's nothing else like it in American politics. Everyone else has spent decades and decades of calculating how to get there... He is just a smart man who has had common experiences.”

But without some personal sense of Manifest Destiny, why would Paul even want to run for president? At times, including on our plane flight, it’s seems as though Paul would much rather pass on ruling the free world, and be home in Kentucky, riding his lawnmower (his favorite “gadget”), and hanging out with his super-cute wife.

On the plane, I asked Paul whether he sometimes thinks about giving it all up.

“Life's easier if you don't accept new challenges,” he responded. “I don't regret that I've been allowed to be in this position—I consider it a great honor to be part of the national debate and I really do want to shake things up and try to improve the lot for the country, and for everybody in the country.”

“I think everybody has moments when they think, 'Man, I'd like to be at home with my family and practicing medicine,’” he said. Then he laughs: “What I'd really like to do is practice medicine and do this, but that’s not so easy.”

Previously: We Interviewed Rand Paul... He's Not Quite as Annnoying as His Dad

This weekend, leaders of the eight richest countries in the world are converging in Northern Ireland. There, they will pose for the cameras, make idle chit-chat about wishing they were in Dublin so they could visit the Guinness factory, keep schtum about those pesky remnants of the Troubles, and discuss capitalism's continued dominance of the Earth.

Unsurprisingly, it’s that last bit of the annual G8 summit that tends to wind up anyone who labels themselves an anti-capitalist. And yesterday, a load of them got together in central London to publicly air their grievances ahead of the meeting.

While there will also be protests held in Northern Ireland itself, many protesters weren't sure they wanted to travel all the way to a rural golf resort just to fight a sea of cops in the only part of the UK where they're allowed to use water cannons. As well as that, extra police and judges have been drafted in to help the authorities in County Fermanagh cope with the expected increase in the number of arrests, which is only going to act as more of a turn-off.

So, to keep the flame burning, activists have called for a week of protests in London—where a lot of the companies getting rich off the misery of the poor actually—opein the lead-up to the G8 summit proper. We headed to the West End yesterday in the hope of watching some anti-capitalists kick the asses of blood-diamond magnates up and down Piccadilly. Or at least smash a few windows. 

We arrived in Soho to find the police evicting a disused former police station that had been squatted by a group of activists, some of whom had arrived from locales far outside of London. The group were using the building as their HQ, presumably because it was the most brazen fuck you to The Man they could muster. And, predictably, it was a fuck you that the police responded to by sending a ridiculous number of officers down to kick the 40 or so activists out.    

Cops forced their way in with angle grinders and reportedly smacked one activist in the mouth, splitting his lip. It all got too much for one guy up on the roof who nearly martyred himself, only to be tackled by cops before he could leap to his death.

Behind the cordon, one of the activists’ friends told any of the passing tourists and bike couriers who'd listen that this was an illegal eviction engineered to crack down on political dissent. But the lorry driver next to him didn't seem concerned with state oppression, he was just a bit furious that the whole thing was blocking the road. In his opinion, the activists should all have been arrested.

"You shouldn’t be allowed to protest these days!” he reasoned. By "these days," I assume he meant any time his route involved driving down Beak Street. Unless he was making a wider condemnation on the state of activism in 2013.

Up the road at Oxford Circus, 300 or so anti-capitalist protesters were determined to go about their day’s business despite the plight of their squatter friends. In preparation for the big day, a map of the West End's most reprehensible capitalists had been prepared, including banks, hedge funds, oil companies, corporate PR agencies, weapons manufacturers, and nightclubs that charge you $15 for a Pepsi. The map made me wonder if an anarchist group had been infiltrated by someone who makes infographics for the Guardian.

Anyway, the plan, as usual, was to go to these dens of fatcat inequity and try to disrupt them in some way. The march set off, but before anybody had a chance to even grimace in the direction of a city slicker, the police started pulling people out of the crowd to stop and search them.

The biggest crime anybody had committed so far was to walk menacingly down a street and, generally speaking, anarchists tend not to be the biggest fans of getting stopped and searched. So things got pretty chaotic very quickly.

The black bloc protesters broke into a sprint as they tried to put a safe distance between themselves and the police, causing a stampede in the process. Cops and activists played a human tug of war, using as their rope those activists who'd been trampled and caught—police trying to grapple them into their wagons, their mates trying to haul them to safety.  

People were knocked to the ground and I saw one woman faint into someone’s arms for a couple of seconds, before shouting that she'd just been, “Punched by a fucking pig,” as she came to.

Heavy-handed policing of the 2009 G20 protests in London infamously resulted in the death of Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who hadn't even been involved in the protest. That memory didn’t seem to be playing too heavily on the minds of the riot cops, as they took protesters out like bowling pins, slamming their heads into the pavement.

Those who didn’t end up eating tarmac took the opportunity to lead the police on a wild goose chase around the West End. Being at the less violent end of the activism scale, following this group mostly involved being surrounded by comedy wigs, righteous whistle-blowing (as in actual whistles, not the Ed Snowden type) and Marks & Spencer quinoa salads.

After a while, things started to die down, but then we came to a halt outside BP—one of the biggest targets on the protesters' capitalist pig map. However, everyone was a little bit tired from all the running. It was time to chillax for a sec and have a rest. You know how it is: sometimes it's better to just let the oligarchs and slum lords off with a warning and have a chat about how bad they are.

People stood around catching their breath and looking a little frustrated, listening to this guy and taking photos of him on their camera-phones as he made a quick speech about why he was opposing the G8; corporations using sweat-shop labor, destroying the environment, etc, etc.

And then we were off again, running through the streets to nowhere in particular. It was as if today’s anti-capitalist activists spent last summer glued to Mo Farah at the Olympics rather than studying Noam Chomsky in darkened New Cross squats.

Tourists looked on, shocked and appalled. Or maybe that's just the face you instinctively pull as soon as you realise you've paid $10 for tea and a croissant.

After some more running around, everyone eventually congregated at Piccadilly Circus, to bask in the glow of the huge illuminated adverts for global corporations while they held their anti-capitalist street party. Which basically involved standing around, being knackered, chatting, and listening to music.

Oh, and some awful comedy routines. This master ironist started telling everyone that his very rich boss was paying him a few grand to be there and tried to goad the protesters by telling them how poor they all are. When a couple of people thought he was being serious and shouted at him to "fuck off," I decided it was time to leave.

By the end of the day, 32 people had been arrested in a fully-formed example of extreme police overkill. Of course, that overkill was most likely calculated to kick an already limping protest movement in the balls as it continually fails to galvanize support, even as those on the bottom rung of society wallow in austerity gloom.

A financial journalist I spoke to told me the markets had continued to do what they do unhindered. The police weren’t willing to put up with any fucking about yesterday, or even the hint that you might be the kind of person who could maybe be up for some fucking about. They’ll probably be even less fun in Northern Ireland in a few days' time, when a meeting between some of the world's most powerful people needs to be policed, rather than some nonviolent activists waving placards around and having discussions in empty buildings.

Follow Simon (@simonchilds13) and Tom (@tomjohnsonuk) on Twitter, and see more of Tom's work here.

More stuff about the G8 summit and anti-capitalists:

Big Money's Obama 

This Guy Took Out a Gigantic Loan to Destroy the Financial System 

 These Boobs Kill Capital