Classic Canada. Smiling, even when losing. (We kid, we kid.) Photo via CP.

CBC television is seeing their biennial bump in audience numbers because NBC's terrible coverage of the Olympic Games has sports fans clamouring for better, again. In a somewhat ironic turn—as it's normally Canadians cheating to get the US Netflix selection—Americans are the ones firing up their VPNs to break through and access the geoblocked content on CBC's streaming service.

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

I can still clearly remember the cold shivers that ran through me when I was 14, and I heard my biology teacher—who was nearing retirement—say the word "penis" out loud. This ultimate discomfort reflects the state of sexual education in many countries, where it's basically people in their 50s explaining to teens how the penis fits in the vagina and which STIs to watch out for.

Odile Fillod, an independent researcher from France, thought it was time for a new take on the textbooks and created a printable, full-size 3D model of the clitoris. This clit is currently being exhibited at the Fab Lab in the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris—the biggest science museum in Europe. The goal of the printable clitoris is to have it distributed around schools in France to improve sex education in the country. When I spoke to her, Odile Fillod explained to me that she hoped "that the ability to print a 3D clitoris will help teachers and educators struggling to talk to students about sexuality."

French sex education begins at primary school with the general aspects of reproduction and goes into finer detail at middle school discussing STIs, physical changes coming with puberty, and the sexual organs. In high school, French kids are presented with a course on contraception. It's not much different in the UK: Younger students are taught about reproduction and sexual health, and from the age of 14, STIs and practicing safe sex are discussed. UK schools can opt out of sex and relationship education—and parents can still keep their children out of classes that teach more than the bare basics.

So the sex education curriculum is primarily based on prevention and functionality. The topic of sexual pleasure—especially for girls—is hardly ever discussed. Textbooks aren't very helpful, according to Fillod: "The clitoris is generally believed to be some kind of a small bean of one or two centimeters long, shown in diagrams." She added: "The quality of sex education in France has never been properly evaluated, but the few surveys that do exist suggest it's very poor." The Haut Conseil à l'Égalité—a French council focused on gender equality—published a rather dramatic report last June on the state of sexual education in France, which it considers as particularly sexist.

They come to that conclusion because the clitoris has the same embryological origin as the penis and works in the same way (blood rushing to it is the main component of sexual arousal)—but that doesn't mean basic sex education treats them equally. "The representations of sexuality are mostly centered on the male sexual organs," Fillod expained. "Practices that do not include an erect penis are not seen as 'real' sex. Under natural conditions an erection and ejaculation are necessary for fertilization—which brings the focus to the mechanisms of male arousal and the male orgasm. Whether a woman is excited or not or whether she has an orgasm or not plays no role in fertilization—which apparently means it can be royally ignored." Fillod also mentioned another possible reason the clitoris might be overlooked in sex education: "Anatomically, the clitoris is almost completely hidden."

Luckily, Fillod is not the only warrior from the pro-clit camp making herself heard. Art collective Les Infemmes from Nice recently created a fanzine called L'antisèche du clito ("the cheat sheet of the clit"), including pretty sweet designs like the Dracula Clit, the Punk Clit, and the Christmas Clit. So hopefully soon all biology classrooms are filled with clitoris models to handle with care, giving all students the chance to learn more about the anatomy of 50 percent of the world's population. You can print your own 3D clitoris here.

Months before a federal agency proposed a new rule threatening the profits of exploitative payday lenders across America, the industry's leaders gathered at a posh resort in the Bahamas to prepare for war.

At the March strategy session, Gil Rudolph of Greenberg Traurig, one of several law firms working with the lenders, described the coming storm this way: "It's like a tennis match. Every time you hit a ball, hopefully it comes back. Our job is to hit the ball back hard."

Most of us have a vague sense that corporate America doesn't like being told what to do, but rarely do we get a front-row seat into how the playbook for resisting federal regulation is written. VICE has obtained exclusive transcripts of this year's annual meeting of the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), the payday lending industry's trade group, at the Atlantis Paradise Island Resort. That's where lenders were taught exactly what it might take to beat back an existential threat to their business.

Payday loan customers typically borrow about $350 for a short-term deal, usually until their next paycheck. As a condition of the loan, they generally give the lender access to their bank account to extract fees of between $10 and $30 for every $100 borrowed. If borrowers can't pay the loan when it comes due, they can roll over into another loan, triggering more fees and getting trapped in what critics call a cycle of debt. The average payday or auto-title loan (where the customer uses their car as collateral) carries an annual percentage interest rate between 300 and 400 percent.

This June, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed that payday lenders can only issue loans to people they expect to actually be able to pay them back—while also meeting their other financial obligations. The number of additional loans would also be capped, and a 30-day cooling off period established to help prevent that vicious debt cycle, among other changes.

The industry decried the rule when it went public, highlighting a government simulation suggesting that 69 to 84 percent of storefront short-term payday loan volume would fall, potentially devastating their business. But the transcripts show lenders were already discussing how to prevent the rule from taking effect at the Atlantis back in March.

For starters, the industry plotted to bombard the Consumer Bureau with comments and studies suggesting regular people would be the real losers—even if their own oversized profits were obviously the focal point. "The bureau has illustrated its knee-jerk hostility to this industry," said Noel Francisco of corporate defense firm Jones Day. "So it is critical to point out the flaws... and include all of the evidence showing the enormous benefits that payday loans have to offer the consumers who use them."

Under the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA), the feds must talk to small businesses affected by their rules, in this case payday lenders, and respond to concerns. In addition, most proposed federal regulations allow the public to make comments. At the Atlantis, leaders stressed the need to deliver hundreds of thousands of such comments before the deadline on the payday rule, which is this October 7. They suggested getting employees, landlords, suppliers, bankers, neighbors, state and local politicians, and even pastors to write letters. ("We can't let them have all the ministers," said Tony Dias of Jones Day, referring to faith groups who support the feds.)

But the biggest resources for this project, according to the industry's leaders, are the customers who borrow against their future paychecks.

In a breakout session called "Take Action in the Rulemaking Process Comment Period," Dias asked lenders to "get every customer that comes into your store... to write out a handwritten letter and tell the bureau why they use the product, how they use the product, and why this will be a detriment to their financial stability." A handout given to attendees featured talking points for use in such letters, and Dias promised to send labels to every store with the proper reference number so comments could be mailed in. "We will have a team of three full-time writers in our office," to assist them, he noted. Thousands of these comments have already been submitted.

It doesn't appear lenders were encouraged to explicitly demand their customers write a letter as a condition of getting their loan, but some may have danced up against the line. There's precedent with that kind of thing, of course: In Arizona earlier this year, lawmakers received boxes of letters from borrowers claiming to support a bill that would have re-instituted high-interest payday loans eliminated in a 2008 ballot measure. When the borrowers were contacted, many said they had no idea what they were signing, and some expressed opposition to the bill.

Overwhelming the feds with comments serves three purposes, as was driven home throughout the sessions in the Bahamas. First, it puts pressure on the feds to change the rule in response to public outcry. Just as important, it sets a basis for litigation after the fact—by submitting comments contradicting the government's claims, the industry can argue that the Consumer Bureau violated the Administrative Procedures Act by instituting a rule arbitrarily, and without basing it on objective evidence.

The third and perhaps most critical goal is to delay the rule itself—that is, to keep the payday loan party going. If the agency has to wade through hundreds of thousands of comments—from homeowners to political officials and academics—to which they must respond, "then they are necessarily bogged down," as Dennis Shaul, CEO of the industry trade group, put in the Bahamas. Delay does not just force the feds to mull over the details, he added: "If the rule is delayed, operators are still continuing to be in existence and presumptively to make a profit."

It seemed like a good plan—assuming you aren't stuck in a cycle of debt.

"The industry complains about all this paperwork, these 900-page rules," Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin, who sits on the CFPB's Consumer Advisory Board, told VICE. "But by flooding with comments, they contribute to it. They're trying to make government less efficient."

Inside the Atlantis, Shaul noted with pride the various ways in which his group had already helped delay the rule: filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to divert agency resources, issuing petitions and press releases and reports that require a rebuttal, and seeking meetings with regulatory personnel to argue their side. All of that, plus the comment period, could move the final rule beyond the 2016 elections, at which point Shaul expressed hope for "wholesale changes" in regulatory personnel, perhaps leading to even longer delays. (A CFSA spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.)

Perhaps the conference's most interesting panel was called "Federal Rulemaking in 2016: What to Expect and What Alternative Products to Consider," run by Blake Sims and Justin Hosie of the consumer finance law firm Hudson Cook. This was a master class in how to exploit and manipulate regulatory loopholes.

For example, Hosie recommended that long-term installment loans could earn "similar rates of return" as the classic payday product, if structured correctly. An eight-week loan with four installment payments is effectively the same as a two-week payday loan rolled over three times, and if you add fees on top of the interest rate, borrowers could still pay over 300 percent interest on a $500 loan—even if the new rule goes into effect and gets enforced. Indeed, lenders have wasted no time beginning to experiment with these products while the rule sits in limbo. "Payday and auto title companies are already making installment loans in 26 of the 39 states where they operate," Nick Bourke, director of the small dollar loans research project at Pew Charitable Trusts, a public policy research organization, told me. "The rule makes it far too easy to make a high-cost loan."

Even if lenders abide by the humane ability-to-repay standard, there's "wiggle room" within it, Sims suggested at the resort. Customers could make themselves eligible for a loan by agreeing to cancel their cable or cellphone service, which would obviously reduce their overhead. (Of course, they could always re-up those bills once the loan got approved.) Borrowers could also find co-signers, whose income would be factored into the ability-to-repay test. And if a borrower had no co-signers, the payday lender could rent one to them, using an affiliated company inside the store to issue a guarantee of credit "offered for a fee to the consumer," Hosie said.

Other ideas included having customers pay a membership fee to access a payday storefront, recouping some of the lost profits from lower-cost loans. Or lenders could put online kiosks in stores to help people buy physical products. "If we can't give you a loan for $300, but you're going to use that for a new tire over here, we can finance the acquisition of that tire for you," as Hosie put it. That might technically be considered a form of credit, rather than a loan covered by the rule. The "product" could even be a prepaid card, Hosie noted, meaning that the consumer would essentially buy money on credit, to get around the payday loan restrictions.

The abundance of creative ways the payday industry tries to avoid regulation is no surprise given how active it's been at the state level, as a recent report from Democrats in Congress shows. "If you halt payday loans, they gravitate to title loans. If you halt title loans, they gravitate to Internet loans," Democratic US senator Jeff Merkley, who has introduced legislation to prevent loans that don't comply with state laws, told me. "It's a hell of a scheme."

The feds have launched a probe into high-cost products not covered by the pending rule, including long-term installment loans. And they have anti-evasion measures baked into the new regulation, giving the Consumer Bureau extensive powers to catch trickery. But that all depends on proper enforcement. And even if the rule works, it's likely to catch companies after they have prospered by running a train on peoples' financial lives for months or years.

"That's their business model," said Gynnie Robnett, who directs the payday lending campaign at Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of consumer groups. "And they seem determined to preserve it, any weasel-y way they can."

Follow David Dayen on Twitter.

All photos by Christopher Bethell

Hear-ye! Hear-ye! Hark! Bring out your dead! My pustule-covered spine is leaking down my leg and into my chamber pot! These are just some of the things you would expect to hear if you were living in the good old medieval times. A time when the age I am now, 23, would be described as "nearing the end." A time when men were men, hammering the living shit out of a chicken's head to make chicken's head hot pot, throwing all the good meat away because they just don't know any better. A time when you had to write your own fucking Bible with ink made from your goopy plague blood, a blackened toenail for a quill. Yep, these were the halcyon days. And it's these times, these days, that I was jumping back into at historic Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

You see, I was here to see a joust. You know jousting, right? Horses and lances, armor and helmets. It's Game of Thrones shit. But the thing is, all the jousting dudes want it to become an Olympic sport, according to English heritage. But does jousting have what it takes to enter the great sporting pantheon alongside such greats as table tennis and the throwing of the hammer? Or is it destined for history's sporting dustbin, like shin-kicking or murdering cats? Let's find out!

The weather was blistering on the Isle of Wight, a place that was recently dubbed a "poor, white ghetto" that suffers from "inbreeding" by Ofsted chairman David Hoare. While I didn't see any sister-fucking on the leafy roads of this lonely island, I did see large numbers of white people, so that part of Mr. Hoare's accusation does appear to be accurate, at least. Carisbrooke Castle, where the great joust was to take place, is located just north of the center of the island, in Newport. Carisbrooke is where Charles I was held captive in 1647, where he attempted to bargain for his life. He even tried to escape the castle in 1648, but he couldn't quite squeeze himself through the bars on the window. Queen Victoria's reclusive youngest daughter, Beatrice, also resided in the castle, though not under duress, and she didn't get her head sliced off when she left, the lucky moo. Today, though, Carisbrooke plays host to a melange of medieval treats, one of them being jousting. But before I witnessed the main event, I wanted to sample some other aspects of Dark Age life.

Everyone was in character in the small medieval town. This woman was educating all the kiddly winks about all the disgusting things people had to eat back in the day. Adjacent to her was a guy called a "poo man" who would examine people's excrement to decipher what was wrong with them (though to be honest the answer was probably almost always "extreme dysentery from eating whole uncooked rat kings").

I say everyone was in character, but this lady was extremely indifferent about every single thing that was going on around her. She was manning the crossbow game, which, for a simple pound coin of the crown, meant you could shoot a drawing of a deer or a jester or something. There were some cans arranged in a pyramid, but they were on a shelf below the targets and sat next to an animal's skull, which didn't look like I was supposed to shoot it. I asked her if I could shoot the cans. "That's what they're there for," she replied. She bummed me out a little bit. But maybe she was more in character than anyone else in the whole place? Would a medieval tradeswoman really be that psyched about sitting in pig shit all day watching people spit-roast pigeons and vomit into their shoes? I certainly wouldn't.

Dominic Sewell, pictured above, runs a company called Historic Equitation. He's a jouster. "It's a very long process of developing a number of different hobbies," he told me, on the beginnings of his jousting. "I started hanging out with some cool guys at a medieval banquet one night, swords and that kind of thing. Soon I started getting into the real historical of it all. I started riding to do this kind of thing, but not straight away. It took me five years before I was able to joust. I started becoming very serious about horses and changed my job, went to work on a stable yard and riding schools, so I could be with horses the whole time. I've been able to turn a hobby into a business, and now we've been running for five years and developing all the time, so it's a dream come true."

Dominic, along with a few other guys (and a girl), take their jousting show on the road and show the good people of England what it's all about. On the prospect of jousting being an Olympic sport, he commented: "It's going to take a long while. But it's something we're very serious about. Who knows at the end of the day. What it will do is get people off computer games and improve fitness all around."

I agree. Wearing the fucking armor that these guys have to wear and climb atop a steed will improve anyone's fitness. The giant helmet they let me try on made me fall around unbalanced like a young filly exiting crap London nightclub Mahiki at three in the morning.

The lance is also a big bugger. You can scarcely hold it forward with one arm for ten seconds before your muscles begin to shake and quiver. Josh Davies is the crew's armorer and hails from Minnesota. He told me that the armor he's built takes six to eight months to create. He also constructed his own glasses. He's quite the squire.

After a boisterous ceremony in which the characters of the joust are laid out, the good and evil precedent has been set, sunburned families, and packs of squawking children made their way to the bowling green to witness the joust. A lot of the kids were talking about Pokémon Go and shit like that, begging their moms for their phones. But all the old timers had, strangely, been made to feel youthful by the display of English heritage. Old people love England and history. It makes them feel happy and comfortable. And aside from all the disgraceful murders and crusades and colonies, English history and culture is pretty cool, if you ask me. It's good to connect with your roots, good or bad.

And so to the joust. The commentators harped on in their affected Olde English while the battlers raged at one another on horseback. There were to be eight passes by three pairs of two knights. I was ready to see some bloodshed (or at least wood-shed, or breastplate-shed).

But that's not really what jousting is about, sadly. There are all sorts of rules and shit. Judges and officials and points systems. It's not just about knocking the other guy off. In fact, it's not even about that at all. It's just about breaking your lance on the other guy's head, which half the time doesn't even touch them.

Should jousting be an Olympic sport? You know what, probably, yeah. It's boring enough to be involved, that's for sure. I can imagine if you swapped the historical fanfare for a mechanical, fencing-esque vibe, with a droll, nameless BBC commentator talking in technicality tongues, making you want to smash that red button to stick the volleyball on, it would fit right in with the other D-list sports that people like to pretend they know a lot about when they watch these things. It would have to be modernized, but then it would lose all its armor-y charms. Perhaps ridding jousting of historical accuracy and jovial role play is too great a sacrifice to make. And with skateboarding and fucking wall climbing being thrown in, who the fuck needs the Olympics anyhow? King Arthur sure didn't.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Kitfox Games

When I first played Kitfox Games's Moon Hunters, it reminded me of the 16-bit games I'd grown up with, RPGs where you had to run for your life from wildlife, or duck into caves to find treasure, or save up to buy the best weapon in the game.

But while I loved RPGs from a young age, characters who looked like me didn't exist. If I was lucky, I might get a NPC that was a sort of ambiguous, video-game brown—not explicitly black but (probably) not white. Unlike those games of my youth, though, Moon Hunters has both playable characters and NPCs that are unmistakably people of color. Best of all, there's no exoticization or fetishization of these characters, and no unnecessary explanation for why they're there. They just are.

That prompted me to ask developer Tanya X. Short a few questions about the game's diversity, guiding mythology and the reaction it received from the gaming community.

VICE: So you can choose from four different character classes at the start of Moon Hunters. My first time playing through the game, I chose the Witch, and was happy to find that she was a woman of color. I did have a moment when I thought, Why is the witch a WOC, why are we always the exotic or the mystic? But her character is well done, clothed pragmatically, has an interesting backstory that fits with the mythology you build up as you play. Did you have any concerns with how her character could be received since she's a witch and uses blood magic?
Tanya X. Short: We were briefly concerned about fundamentalists being upset about a few things in the game, but we figured we could probably handle a little criticism on that front. After all, we at least tried to be inspired by aspects of of ancient Assyrian and Sumerian traditions—we weren't literally glorifying demon-worship and necromancy, unlike, say, Diablo. There are a few themes you could say were not just pre-Biblical but maybe even anti-biblical, but they're fairly subtle and (I like to think) reasoned.

I did worry about the Witch (since she's a woman of color) being perceived as some kind of throwback stereotype of a vodun priestess or something, but we didn't really have to change much about her, honestly—she was always a spear-wielding, defined character in her own right, not a reference or callback. It probably helps that she's not the only person of color around.

There really are plenty of people of color in Moon Hunters, and it's not a big deal, they just exist. Was this by design or just how things fell into place as you developed the game?
Well, once we knew that it was inspired by ancient mythology, and a missing moon, we looked around at a few different cultures to be primarily inspired by. We had a Pinterest board, actually, where we compared inspirations from a few mythologies that would be a good fit for the game and have a lot of great reference material for us to draw from.

Our top three contenders were Theravada Buddhism, Norse myths, and ancient Mesopotamia... and of the three, I was most intrigued by the pluralism in ancient Assyria, and how a deity could be called by different names (Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte, Aphrodite) and mean different things to different people, yet still clearly share the same myths. Plus, in the video-game world, ancient Mesopotamia seemed under-examined and the most classically heroic. I mean, what is more iconic than the Epic of Gilgamesh?

What prompted you and the Kit Fox Studios team to purposefully have more diversity in the game?
Once you set something in ancient Mesopotamia, it would be bizarre to have white people take center stage. I actually feel kinda self-conscious that there's so many white people in the game, to be honest. I really wanted to capture the flavor and personality of 3000 BC around Uruk, and part of it is the food and the clothing and the architecture, but part of it is undeniably the people.

I know that the mythology in Moon Hunters was pulled from many sources, but was there anything in particular that influenced the world design of the game?
If there's one thing I feel nervous about, it's the number of sources I pulled from. Ancient Assyria doesn't actually have much recorded beyond Gilgamesh and some creation myths—so I started casting my net around Sumeria, but their stories very quickly get trampled by Greek and Roman retellings, which I mostly avoided. I do confess that I tended to pick the variant of a myth (or make my own variant) that reflects modern egalitarian values, rather than reinforcing sexist stereotypes. We deserve stories that make us question and think, even if it makes them slightly less familiar. For example, in one of the rare Greek-inspired encounters, I decided to gender-swap the Apple of Discord myth, which added a refreshing element of masculinity to an old story about vanity.

In retrospect, I really wish we had hired a Sumerian expert (ideally who was of Mesopotamian descent themselves) to consult and maybe help us find more myths. I bought a dozen books and read thousands of internet articles, but that's not the same as expertise.

Did you get any pushback during your Kickstarter or during initial release on PC for the diversity in the game?
Nope! No pushback or problems so far. Maybe the game wasn't popular enough? I have a pet theory that the Kickstarter was actually slightly more popular in the Middle East than it would have been, but it's almost impossible to prove.

Members of Kitfox Games

It seems that having a diverse team contributes to having better representation in your work. Do you agree?
Absolutely! Out of the 6 Kitfox members, we're mostly white and east Asian, but we were born in 5 different countries and speak a combined total of 5 different mother tongues. We all have different tastes, play different games, and have a variety of experience with the game industry. It's important that we all agree on a certain set of core values of respect, learning, and quality-seeking, but everything else is up for debate. I hope our diversity can continue to grow as Kitfox does, since for me, representation is only part of the issue facing our culture. Amplifying new voices from new kinds of creators is crucial to the growth of games as an art form, which is why I helped found and continue to co-direct Pixelles.

What do you hope games like Moon Hunter and others that do diversity right can teach others about the need for better representation?
Take a risk! Follow your heart! And if your heart doesn't include black and brown people, maybe take a look a little deeper?

Seriously, though, personally, I feel Moon Hunters has given me more confidence in exploring the stories that I genuinely love and am intrigued by. When I started working on the concept of Moon Hunters almost 3 years ago, I wasn't sure anyone else cared about truly ancient mythology (especially since it wasn't Greco-Roman, or Norse for that matter). I felt like a nerd, disappearing into a subject maybe nobody else really cared about.

But I've found that this modern world is about sharing your love with others and finding it reflected back at you. Our hearts each build a niche. I'm glad I took the risk and was true to myself, even if I made mistakes along the way, because everyone who connects with the game connects with me and the rest of the team. Next time, I'm going to be even braver and push even further for a world I believe in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Tanya DePass on Twitter.

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Jim Justice is presenting himself as a break from politics as usual in West Virginia. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

Jim Justice wants to make West Virginia great again. The six-foot-seven, 300-pound businessman is the state's version of Donald Trump, an outsider who stormed through the Democratic gubernatorial primaries, speaks with the cadence of a Southern preacher, and talks about broad themes that go well beyond ordinary politics. He's a huge figure, both literally and metaphorically, and appears to have a very good chance of becoming the governor of what's probably the most embattled state in the union.

This is Justice's narrative, which is hard to argue with: West Virginia is experiencing a crisis of spirit. Drug addiction is rampant. The risks of contracting hepatitis C and HIV have spiked. Around a quarter of the state's children live below the poverty line. The coal-based economy has been in free-fall for years, and recently the state has been hit by devastating floods and vicious political squabbling in the legislature. National politicians habitually ignore the state and are seen as being out of touch—a relatively unknown protest candidate took 9 percent of the Democratic primary vote—so it's unsurprising that Justice's campaign has been less about specific policies and more about restoring West Virginia's damaged sense of hard-nosed pride.

"I'll tell you the story of a man named Bob I met at the Greenbrier," Justice tells VICE, referring to a resort he owns. "He grabbed ahold of my hands with tears running down his face and said, 'I'm 87 years old, and I just wanted to thank you Mr. Justice, for making me feel proud to be a West Virginian again.' It's just like we've been depressed and beat down and are expected to know our place—which is 50th in the nation in everything coming or going. I don't buy that! The people here are too good, and there are too many opportunities."

Justice runs upward of 50 companies, and mostly made his fortune in coal, but his most impressive and visible accomplishment is arguably the revamping of the Greenbrier Resort, which he purchased after it filed for bankruptcy in 2009. At the time, it listed its debts at more than $500 million, with assets of just $100 million. Justice rehired around 650 resort employees laid off by the previous owners, gave them vacation and health benefits, and offered a 10 percent raise across the board if the hotel regained its fifth star—and the Greenbrier is, by all accounts, now a world-class resort. Justice opened the Greenbrier's doors to the people affected by the recent floods, providing free shelter and food; he points to the Greenbrier as a point of pride for the state, which he says should get far more tourism than it does.

"I believe our state spends just a fraction on the promotion of tourism that we should," Justice says. "We have so many activities for tourism where people could just flock to West Virginia. But we have to fix our roads; we have to promote ourselves better... Why in the world couldn't the next Dollywood or Disney World be in West Virginia?" As governor, he says, "I would be working to land the next theme park... or to have people come down to Harper's Ferry or the Hatfield and McCoy trail or the four-wheeler trails. People in Philadelphia and New York and Chicago—they don't have a clue what West Virginia is all about."

For now, however, the coal industry unquestionably reigns supreme in the state. The fossil fuel has long been derided by Democrats and the left as a toxic pollutant, but it's also been the backbone of the West Virginian economy. Justice, given his background and politics of the state, is not "ready to throw in the towel" on coal, but he admits the state needs to diversify its energy strategy. Natural gas, timber, and water could and need to play a bigger role in the state, and Justice thinks West Virginia could use its abundance of each to become an energy hub. (Justice has previously said that the state would mine "more coal than has ever been mined before," but he seems to have backed off that utterly ridiculous stance.)

When I spoke with him, Justice sounded the usual Democratic notes on energy policy, but in an interview with the Register-Herald, a newspaper based in Beckley, he seemed to be flirting with outright climate change denialism, saying that until we have "accurate data there's no need to blow our legs off on a concept" and that "a lot of scientists" say climate change is "smoke and mirrors." While it's not surprising a West Virginian coal baron would say something like that, those statements are still troubling.

Justice's campaign is short on science, but long on economics. To hear Justice tell it, there's nothing that can't be solved by a rising West Virginian economy. He wants to "get our coal miners back to work" while exploiting the state's other natural resources like gas, oil, timber, and water. He thinks that the state's rampant drug problem would be lessened if more people had jobs and the confidence, hope, and pride that would come with them. This is his "care theory," the feel-good-y idea that if believes in and invests in his constituents, they'll believe and invest in each other.

"You know, the boss has got to really care for the employees, and then it starts to get a little tougher," he says. "The employees really have to buy in and care for the boss, and then it goes one step even further and works to start to make it mandatory that the employees care for one another.... You got to have somebody at the top who really believes in and loves our state. And then you've got to have everyone buy in."

Justice has been criticized for being delinquent on his taxes and being sued by many people he owes money to, charges that he waves aside just as Donald Trump has done with similar allegations. Justice has also been involved with fights with environmental regulators over the state of some of his mines. But none of this has slowed him down—there isn't much reliable polling in his race against his Republican opponent, the state Senate president Bill Cole, but one Justice campaign–financed poll gave the businessman a ten-point lead.

It's a bit surprising that a Democrat would be in the lead in West Virginia, a state Trump is expected to win easily. But Justice shows what it takes to win over voters here—when they don't trust politicians, the only way to attract them is to come from outside the system.

"If at the end of the day what happens is it doesn't work out and I happen to lose, I'll of course be sad—but I'll be OK," Justice says. "But our state won't if we continue down the path of electing politicians; we will all die ranked 50th. I 100 percent believe that."

Follow Donovan Farley on Twitter.

A bayside sign post indicates a "White Area" during apartheid in South Africa, June 23, 1976. Picture by AP/ Press Association Images

This post originally appeared on _{VICE UK}.

Shortly before the end of the apartheid government, an organization calling itself the International Association for Co-operation and Development in Southern Africa—or Acoda, after the French version of its name—began holding a series of European conferences and seminars on investment in southern Africa, and particularly South Africa.

Acoda was especially active in the United Kingdom, where it quickly established a high-profile presence in the British parliament, sponsoring trips to southern Africa for MPs, arranging seminars, and hosting expensive dinners. Several Conservative MPs joined Acoda's international advisory board, including John Biffen, who served as leader of the House of Commons from 1982 to 1987; Baroness Diana Elles, a former vice president of the European Parliament and British representative to the United Nations; and Professor Jack Spence, director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).

In 1990, Baroness Elles was one of three members of the group who made a widely publicized trip to southern Africa to discuss economic investment in the region. While on the visit, the members called on the international community to drop sanctions against the South African government.

Baroness Elles told reporters that Acoda in Europe would help change the attitudes of European policymakers toward South Africa.

"There will definitely be a forward movement in the direction of a better understanding and an agreement with South Africa," she said.

Group members denied rumors that Acoda was part of a secret diplomatic initiative by Pretoria. When questioned about a possible connection to the apartheid regime, British Conservative MPs Biffen and Raison said they did not know of any links. "I was not aware of Acoda having any covert ambitions," Biffen told British newspapers.

Even today, few people who were listed as members of the group seemed to know much about its origins.

Professor Jack Spence, who has since retired from Chatham House, said he didn't know who had started the group and assumed that it was formed to deal with the economic development of post-apartheid South Africa. Spence said he couldn't remember who had invited him to join the advisory board.

As far as funding was concerned, Spence said, "I assumed that it was funded by the EU since it was based in Brussels."

But records released by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission show that the group was part of a last-ditch clandestine effort funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the apartheid government to position itself in the post-apartheid era.

The South African government documents show that the purpose of the group was to build support for overturning sanctions legislation in various countries by organizing fact-finding visits to South Africa by prominent Europeans, American businessmen, and members of the US Congress and UK parliament.

At the center of the Acoda project was Sean Leary, a former South African diplomat who masterminded Pretoria's international propaganda campaign to discredit the South West Africa People's Organization, or Swapo, in Namibia.

In London, Acoda shared the same offices in Westminster that housed Strategy Network International (SNI), a public relations firm set up by Cleary, and paid through his company, Transcontinental Consultancy, which was funded by the apartheid South African government.

The same office also housed the International Freedom Foundation, the global front group that had been set up by other South African operatives to discredit Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.

In an interview, former SNI lobbyist Steven Govier, who now runs a crime-prevention program in London, said the group was part of a global lobbying effort that also involved parallel operations in France, Germany, and the US. All of the firms were paid about $650,000 annually.

An anti-apartheid bus in London in 1989. Photo by R Barraez D'Lucca

Acoda was one of many South African white-minority government-sponsored front groups in the United Kingdom that for decades tried selling the idea of apartheid to the world.

Unlike in the United States, which requires public relations firms representing foreign interests to register with the US Department of Justice, the United Kingdom has no such system. So getting a precise amount of how much was spent in the UK is nearly impossible. Still, a review of records from archives in South Africa shows that, for decades, the South African government spent millions to brandish the country's image and stall sanctions.

They were successful, to a degree. Despite the international condemnation of the apartheid government and the imposition of sanctions by most countries, the Conservative government, led by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, didn't impose sanctions until it was forced to when US Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986.

Not only did she see South Africa as a strategic Cold War ally, but Britain was the biggest foreign investor in, and principal trading partner with, the country. Thatcher opposed sanctions, saying they would cause more harm for blacks than whites and were unlikely to pressure the government in Pretoria to change its racial policy. "So far as Britain is concerned, we believe that sanctions would only harden attitudes rather than promote progress," Thatcher said.

Although Thatcher said she believed the policy of racial separation was "unacceptable" and called for the release of Nelson Mandela, she nevertheless affirmed the UK's support for the South African government.

Thatcher and her government considered the ANC a "terrorist organization" and on numerous occasions sought to draw a link between the ANC and the Soviet Union. During one press conference, Thatcher told reporters that there was considerable Soviet influence throughout Africa and "a considerable number of the ANC leaders are communists."

Despite longtime support from Britain, the apartheid government first began its image-washing in the country in the 1970s as international pressure intensified.

One of the first projects was the Club of Ten.

The organization was supposed to be a group of British, South African, and American businessmen concerned about the biased treatment of the apartheid government in the media. But despite its name, the club was really the work of just one man, Gerald Sparrow, a 76-year-old former British judge on the International Court of Bangkok. Sparrow had first traveled to South Africa to write a book on tourism during a six-week trip sponsored by the South African Tourist Corporation and the government-owned South African Airlines.

Sparrow's Club of Ten viciously attacked critics of the apartheid regime. When the Guardian published a series of articles about the low wages earned by blacks in South Africa, the group took out ads in the Daily Telegraph, the Times and the Guardian itself, asking why the paper hadn't done the same for workers paid by British companies in India, Hong Kong, Ceylon, or other countries in Africa. Other advertisements by the club warned about Communist activity in Africa and the strategic importance of South Africa.

A sign from apartheid-era South Africa

The club also took out full-page advertisements in papers elsewhere, including the New York Times and the Washington Post in the US, the Montreal Star in Canada and major papers in West Germany, Holland, Australia, and New Zealand. The advertisements ran to as much as $16,000 in some papers. In one year alone, the club would spend about $100,000 on the political ads.

Press attention did, however, force the British Foreign Office to request a list of the group's members. Sparrow provided them with ten names, including those of Luyt, a South African fertilizer millionaire, and Lampas Nichas, a Greek immigrant to South Africa who had made a fortune selling potatoes.

Nichas even traveled to Britain on August 22, 1974, to present a R50,000 check to Sparrow at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel as proof that wealthy South Africans were behind the venture and not the government, although the money he used was supplied by the South African Department of Information.

Years later, a frustrated Gerald Sparrow resigned from the Club of Ten after a disagreement and wrote a book detailing the South African government's role in funding the group.

The book, The Ad Astra Connection, gave a detailed account of the government's attempts to buy positive publicity by placing advertisements in newspapers around the world and attacking the government's opponents. The book didn't provide the necessary documentation to back up Sparrow's allegations, but the disclosure was nevertheless damaging.

In addition to the various front groups like the Club of Ten, the South African government also beefed up its direct lobbying and spying operations in the UK in the 1970s.

In London, two MPs in the ruling Labour Party were put on the South African government's payroll. Documents do not say who the MPs were. Their job was to lobby for South Africa in the House of Commons and spy on anti-apartheid groups in the United Kingdom. Information from the two MPs was used to launch "disinformation and disruptive" campaigns against anti-apartheid groups in Britain and Holland, including creating fake mail petitions and canceling meetings, all to cause confusion among the activists.

South African agents targeted leaders of the Liberal Party. Pete Hain, a leading participant in the campaign to stop tours of the UK by all-white South African sports teams, was one of the main targets of the South African smear campaign. In 1974, a photograph of Hain circulated tying him to a bombing in South Africa. The picture, which featured a dead baby, bore the caption "A Victim of Liberal Terrorism."

A pamphlet entitled the Hidden Face of the Liberal Party was also widely circulated in an attempt to smear the party's leaders. Election documents later showed that a number of copies of the pamphlet had been entered on the expenses of Harold Gurden, a member of the Conservative Party and avid supporter of the South African government.

In a second covert offensive in Britain, called "Operation Bowler," money was funneled through a Conservative MP for the purpose of bringing British MPs to South Africa. None of the MPs knew that the money was coming from the South African government.

The South African business community also lent its considerable might to the British charm offensive.

The South Africa Foundation, a group set up in 1960 after the Sharpeville shootings, where 69 blacks were killed marching on a police station, had more than 200 members representing some of the largest companies in South Africa, including members from companies in the US, the UK, and other places in Europe with South African interests. The foundation had access to large amounts of money to help promote the country.

In Britain, the foundation teamed with the United Kingdom-South Africa Trade Association to promote trade and investment in South Africa and opposition to sanctions. It regularly sponsored trips for British politicians, journalists, and businessmen, so they could "see the country for themselves."

Well into the 1980s and 90s, even as the system of apartheid was crumbling, the South African government continued to create and fund sanction-busting groups with seemingly little connection to the white-led regime.

In addition to Acoda, one of the most prominent of these front groups was the International Freedom Foundation.

The group had first made its presence known in 1988, when anti-apartheid organizers in London staged a concert at Wembley Stadium to honor the imprisoned Nelson Mandela on his 70th birthday. During the concert, the IFF circulated flyers and fake programs that claimed the money being raised at the event would fund black terrorists in South Africa.

Ostensibly, it was just another think tank set up to provide policymakers with research and policy positions from a conservative perspective.

But behind-the-scenes, the foundation served another purpose: It was a front organization for the South African government, bankrolled as a last-gasp attempt to prolong its existence, according to investigations by Newsday and the Observer in London.

Later reports by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission would validate the investigations of the two newspapers.

More than half of the IFF's funds came from a secret South African military account, according to TRC documents. Its entire annual budget for the years 1991 and 1992 exceeded about $750,000. After Mandela had been let out of prison and the ANC was no longer banned, in late September of 1991, the South African minister of finance agreed to a one-off payment of about $520,000 to the IFF, approved by the minister of defense, "to enable the country to withdraw from the enterprise."

The IFF had been founded in 1986, against the backdrop of increasing international pressure on Western governments to take action against the apartheid government. The approach taken was that the foundation could not be used to defend the system of apartheid. Instead, it would focus on trying to discredit the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement by linking them to Communism.

An anti-apartheid protest outside South Africa House in London, in 1989. Photo by R Barraez D'Lucca

Several leading Conservative politicians in Britain were involved in the foundation's work on behalf of the South African government.

One of those was David Hoile, who was listed as a co-founder of the IFF's UK office. As vice chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students, the student organization of the British Conservative Party, during the 1980s Hoile had once worn a "Hang Nelson Mandela" badge. When the Guardian newspaper in 2001 published an investigation detailing Hoile's involvement in the anti-Mandela student campaign, he demanded that the publication retract its story.

The South African–born Hoile wrote a book, Understanding Sanctions, which was published by the IFF UK's office in 1988. In it, Hoile called sanctions against South Africa immoral and argued that they would have little effect on the South African economy. The book was one of a series published by the IFF that would question the use of sanctions to end apartheid.

Marc Gordon, a Conservative activist who worked with Hoile, was also involved in the IFF. Gordon gained notoriety when he led an IFF campaign against the anti-poverty charity Oxfam, accusing the group of using its tax-exempt status for political purposes because of its criticism of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. As a result of Gordon's efforts, Oxfam was censured by the British Charities Commission, which said the group had "prosecuted their campaign with too much vigor."

Other prominent MPs involved in the IFF included Sir George Gardiner, a right-wing politician who was a bitter critic of the ANC and an opponent of economic sanctions against South Africa. Gardiner served on the IFF's advisory board and was also a leading member of the Monday Club, which had long ties to South Africa. Gardiner's zealous support of the South African government earned him the nickname "Botha boy" from Labour Party opponents.

Another MP involved in the IFF was Andrew Hunter, a Conservative MP. Like Gardiner, Hunter had a long history of relations with South Africa and was an advocate for the recognition of the Bophuthatswana homeland. Financial disclosure documents from the British parliament show that Hunter made numerous trips to South Africa paid for by that country's government.

Hunter produced reports for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that sought to establish links between the ANC and the IRA—a subject he wrote about for IFF publications—and the ANC's support for "terrorist" operations in South Africa. This information reinforced Thatcher's belief that the ANC was a "terrorist group" and a front for communists.

Despite the disclosure of documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many of those involved in the IFF, to this day, continue to deny that it was a front for the apartheid government.

The former president of the IFF, Jack Abramoff, a disgraced lobbyist who served 43 months in prison in one of the biggest lobbying scandals in US history, told me that to the best of his knowledge the South African government never funded the IFF, despite media reports and documents from the TRC exposing the organization's link to Pretoria.

"We, and certainly I, never lobbied for the apartheid government," he said. "That is just not true. I never had anything to do with the government and anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth."

Ken Silverstein, a US-based reporter who has written extensively about Abramoff, disputed the former lobbyist's denials.

"According to my source, Abramoff was briefed by South African representatives about the nature and importance of the foundation's work," Silverstein said. "Yes, some people were duped by the IFF, but Jack was not one of them. As chairman , he understood where the money was coming from. He knew exactly who he was playing with."

Ron Nixon is the Washington correspondent for the New York Times. His book, Selling Apartheid: South Africa's Global Propaganda War, is published this week Pluto Press.

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Robert Holcomb's severe constipation may be one of the most important things to ever happen in the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Thanks to fellow inmates keeping Holcomb from the communal toilets in lock-up and his subsequent health issues, Clark County sheriff Jamey Noel was able to make changes to his jail so that no inmates will face the same potty-based intimidation that Holcomb did. And for all of this we have reality television to thank.

Holcomb was one of the eight participants in the first season of A&E's popular reality show 60 Days In, which takes innocent civilians and places them undercover in the jail. Neither the inmates nor the correctional officers know that they are really there to let Noel—and the viewers at home—know exactly what is going down behind bars when the inmates and COs think no one is watching.

"I was shocked that they were using the restrooms as a form of control for people," Noel told VICE earlier this week over the phone. "The inmates weren't complaining about it and the staff hadn't heard about it." However, when Robert left the program before his 60 days were up due to his lack of bowel movements, Noel said he noticed that lots of other inmates were suffering from the same problem, which is consistent with having to hold it in all the time. As a result, the jail now designates certain toilets as available to all inmates.

60 Days In, the second season of which kicks off Thursday, has been a hit for A&E, regularly garnering more than 1 million viewers an episode. Holcomb started off thinking that jail was a country club but finished by spending four weeks in solitary confinement and quitting the show prematurely. His mind was definitely changed. Another participant, Jeffrey Downs, left after being attacked by another inmate. Never before has the drama on a reality show been this real—or this dangerous.

While the threats and violence may get people to tune in, the nominal reason behind 60 Days In is that Noel needed to find out what was going on in his jail. He teamed up with Lucky 8 Productions, which not only recruited the subjects willing to be sent up the river but also tricked out the jail with new state-of-the-art cameras so that they could catch all the action. (The production company left the cameras in the jail so that the authorities could use them.)

After talking to the 60 Days In participants on their way out, Noel found that many of them were very anxious or depressed when leaving jail, and one subject even said she felt like doing something so that she would be put back in jail because the reentry was so difficult. Because of this, when inmates are released, the jail now provides them with information about how to contact local mental-health professionals, suicide hotlines, and other free resources to help them reintegrate more successfully. "They're not pushed out the door with no help," Noel told VICE.

"I think it's a better place for staff and inmates both now compared to what you see on the show," the sheriff said. "Overall [making 60 Days In] was a very positive experience." According to Noel, the Clark County Jail is both understaffed and underfunded, but he has been able to make changes. As a result of things that Noel has seen happen on the show, ten correctional officers were either fired for their behavior or resigned.

Monalisa Johnson, one of the participants in the show's second season, wasn't a fan of cops or correctional officers before she started this experiment, and her experience only solidified the way she feels. "When COs are given dominion over someone's life, they have to take that seriously," she told VICE. "I think because they have so much power they are abusing that, and there is no one checking their authority, and there is no one holding them accountable."

Every day, Johnson said, she wanted to quit the program because of how tired and sore she was from sleeping on a flimsy mattress on a metal bed, but she made it through her entire two-month stretch. She had a personal reason to endure: Her daughter is incarcerated and serving a ten-year sentence. She said she wanted to see what her daughter experienced in prison, and her time in the prison system has made them closer. Now Johnson's daughter opens up about her hardships because she knows her mother can sympathize and has endured them herself.

Clark County sheriff Jamey Noel

The second season was filmed shortly after the first season and before Noel could implement many of the new policies that came about from what he witnessed during season one. It was important to film the seasons close together so that other inmates and officers wouldn't suspect his undercover inmates. (Everyone was told by the production company they were filming a documentary about first-timers in jail.)

"I doubt very seriously we'll be able to continue now that it's public and season one has aired and the staff know and the inmates know, and they're suspicious of everything anyway," Noel said. "It would be impossible for me to do another season."

Maybe the production will have to move to another jail and help that sheriff improve their facility. It's going to take way more than reality television to fix what is wrong with the American prison system, but every little bit helps—even if it comes in the form of a reality TV show.

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.

60 Days In premieres Thursday, August 18, on A&E.

A true butt bounty. Photo via Daily VICE.

Given how much we write about the topic here at VICE, you'd think the basics of anal sex were well understood both in and out of the office. But the reality is there are still a ton of misconceptions and myths about the, uh, ins and outs of butt stuff. Can you do it too much? Does it have to hurt? Is there always poop? I put these questions to sex educator and Anal Sex Basics author Carlyle Jansen. She was shockingly patient with my weird queries and very graciously explained all things anal while I tried not to laugh because I am a childish idiot.

Surely this is more than most of us have in our wallets currently. Photo via Flickr user Andrew Currie

When it comes to student debt, most of us are fucked and we know it. But some days, proof about just how fucked we are is released to ensure we never forget our dire situations. Today is one of those days. According to a new Oxfam report, young people in Canada are not only dealing with the highest student debt in Canadian history—they're also working more and earning less than ever.

If you're not already thoroughly triggered, consider another finding that this report included: The income gap between the young and old is widening. That's right, our parents' generation not only continues to make more than some of us ever could hope to, but it's getting worse. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate of people between the age of 15-24 is almost double Canada's average overall.

According to the report, "The policies that enabled an outrageously large portion of the world's wealth to accrue to the very top of the income spectrum have delivered a difficult present and uncertain future to a huge majority of today's youth." Great.

Most of us find ourselves in "low paying and temporary" work, according to report, and adding insult to injury, most jobs these days require some type of postsecondary education. But that education is increasingly coming at a higher price: Tuition has more than tripled over the last two decades, and "the average university student is nearly $30,000 in debt."

While we wait for the older generation to die out, at least we can take solace in knowing that even though we are fucked, at least we're in good company.

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ISIS supporter Aaron Driver was killed in an RCMP operation. Photo via CP.

As the family of an accused terrorist mourns his death in a small Ontario city, the RCMP is facing fresh accusations that their operation to thwart an alleged attack almost made a cab driver collateral damage.

ISIS supporter Aaron Driver would have turned 25 today. Instead, the wannabe terrorist, who was killed last week during a standoff with police in Strathroy, Ontario, was laid to rest in a private ceremony, away from prying eyes.

According to a statement sent to VICE News from the London Muslim Mosque, where Driver regularly attended over the last year, his family has chosen to hold a "private 'non-religious affair'" and that they "decided to cremate the body, which as advised would be against Islamic burial rules." Members of the Driver family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Driver's ashes are buried with his mother's grave at the Forest Lawn cemetery in London. His mother, Linda Driver, died in 1999. Staff there said they were placed there this morning. For now, a piece of square-cut earth is the only way to tell his remains are there. There are no flowers, no notes. In the next month or so, a formal marker will be placed on top.

Driver's case has once again thrust the issue of what authorities should do with people who express their support for violent extremism, but when there's not enough evidence to lay formal criminal charges. On Wednesday, public safety minister Ralph Goodale said the government was exploring imposing mandatory religious counselling on terror suspects.

Based on a "martyrdom video" he recorded earlier, it's believed Driver was about to carry out a suicide attack. He got into a cab in front of his sister's house, and detonated a homemade explosive in the backseat just before the RCMP fatally shot him. The driver suffered minor injuries, but has since slammed the police for not protecting him during the standoff, or warn him that they were monitoring the house.

Read More: The Troubling Case of Aaron Driver's Peace Bond

Terry Duffield told the London Free Press that if he hadn't leaned over to pick up a pack of cigarettes in the car, he would have been dead. He blames RCMP for allowing him to get so close to Driver before they intercepted.

"It was that seat and those cigarettes that saved my ass, no cop," Duffield said, adding that anxiety has prevented him from returning to work. His girlfriend launched a GoFundMe page to help pay for his medications, trauma counselling, and to "repair his life that was shattered that day in a terrorist bomb blast."

Photo courtesy of Terry Duffield

An RCMP spokesperson refused to respond to Duffield's statements, telling VICE News on Thursday: "There is still an ongoing investigation and the RCMP will not be providing any additional information/comment on this file."

A week since the incident, the street where it all went down is quiet. Several people in the town of 21,000 say they had seen Driver around, but never had any inkling he was living under an anti-terror peace bond — similar to a restraining order that ostensibly restricted his movements and access to social media — over fears he might participate in a terrorist group, or continue advocating for one.

A spokesperson for the London Muslim Mosque told VICE News that Driver had been attending the mosque as recent as earlier this month. And although mosque officials knew Driver was on a terror peace bond and held "strong views," they didn't turn him away and tried to keep him in the fold to show him the "true tenets of his faith."

After Driver was killed, the mosque offered his family guidance on how to perform an Islamic funeral, which requires the body to be treated a certain way, but said that none of their officials or imams would be directly involved in the proceedings.

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This was supposed to be the year of Pot-Palooza, when five states are set to hold ballot initiatives that would make marijuana legal for recreational users. If all passed, it would bring the number of states offering pot for sale to nine, following similar measures that passed in Colorado and Washington in 2012 and in Alaska and Oregon in 2014.

Legalization advocates saw it as another potential leap in their march to slow the decades-long war on drugs: The rest of the country would see that the nine legalized states were awash in tax revenues, and that fears of stoned drivers flooding the roads in search of late-night Mallomars had been overblown. Other states, they imagined, would quickly follow suit, bringing the country ever-closer to its marijuana tipping point, when the federal government would finally be forced to step in and end pot prohibition once and for all.

But as the legalization movement heads into the 2016 election, with the marijuana issue on the ballot in five states—Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada—the fantasy of a New Green Rush is coming up against unexpected resistance, its momentum slowed by a lack of funding that advocates were not prepared for.

Advocates with the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group helping to spearhead the ballot initiatives, say that fundraising is down 25 percent from what they need to compete on Election Day. "We are polling well in all of the states we are working in,"said Rob Kampia, the group's executive director. "But we know that without advertising on our side, the level of support is going to drop between now and Election Day. The money reminds people why they support this in the first place."

Kampia cited a bill to pass medical marijuana in Arizona in 2010, which had support from nearly two-thirds of voters in early polls. Without funding or an active campaign to support the measure, though, the initiative ended up passing with just a hair over 50 percent of the vote, and only after write-in and provisional ballots were counted in the days after the election.

Past legalization campaigns—including the statewide ballot initiatives that passed in 2012 and 2014—were funded in large part by a handful of wealthy philanthropists,including George Soros, Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis, Men's Wearhouse magnate George Zimmer, and John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix.

In recent years, though, both Lewis and Sperling have passed away, Soros has pulled back on his pot-based philanthropy, and Zimmer finds himself with a diminished fortune after being fired from the company he founded in 2013. And so advocates, who expect campaigns for the five legalization initiatives and four other medical marijuana ballot measures to cost in the $40-50 million range, are counting on the $7 billion legal marijuana industry to fill the fundraising void. But so far, the industry has mostly taken a pass.

"There has been a bit of a free rider problem with this thing,"said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which still receives funding from Soros and other wealthy donors.

"People are making a shitload of money on this stuff without them spending any more to get where we are,"Nadelmann told an audience at the Marijuana Business Conference and Expo, a bi-annual trade association event, this May. "They are using the opportunity of legalization to make a fortune without doing anything to create that opportunity. The marijuana reform movement is spread incredibly thin right now. And the question for 2016 is whether the industry will be there or not."

And so far, they haven't been. At a recent cannabis industry investor summit sponsored by the ArcView Group, which connects investors with entrepreneurs in the legal marijuana industry, executives boasted that they had helped raise $70 million for marijuana-related start-ups; but the same slide showed that the investor network had contributed less than $1 million for legalization efforts—a discrepancy that activists in the room were quick to point out.

"That is 1.4 percent,"Ben Pollara, a Florida political operative, told the assembled investors. "That is just pathetic."

Except in Arizona, where a recent poll found support for legalization at below 40 percent—and where business forces are funding the campaign against legalization—marijuana advocates are heavily outraising their opponents in the states where recreational marijuana is on the ballot. In California—which legalization advocates see as the biggest 2016, and where recent polls show sixty percent of voters favor legal weed—the pro-side has raised 60 times more cash than those campaigning against legalization.

In Maine, wheresupport for legalization stands at 55 percent, the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has raised over $400,000—but most of that money has come from outside of the industry, including $50,000 from television host Rick Steves and $140,000 from New Approach, a political action committee funded by, among others, Napster founder Sean Parker and Cari Tuna, the wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. In Nevada, where support for legalization hovers around 50 percent, pro-legalization forces have reported raising $285,000, or about half what marijuana advocates raised for a signature gathering effort in 2014. And in Massachusetts, where legalization opponents actually outnumber supporters, the pro-legalization side has raised over $300,000—but half of that figure is from a single donor, a man who faced a drug possession charge more than a decade ago.

In those three states, the anti-legalization campaign is virtually non-existent, although campaign finance filings don't show any funding for the anti-legalization campaigns, although most groups did not have to file reports until this spring, at the earliest. Still, marijuana advocates fear that their opponents intend to make a late advertising blitz to sway voters before Election Day. And indeed, the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches on Marijuana announced in July that they would spend $2 million to defeat the recreational marijuana initiatives on state ballots in November.

Their current financial advantage aside, advocates and political operatives seethe that the businesses and individuals who have directly benefited from their efforts are not contributing to the cause. And in interviews with a dozen marijuana industry leaders about the 2016 legalization campaigns, nearly all of them told VICE that they supported the measures, but had not yet given money to any of the state ballot campaigns.

"I support all of these measures morally and emotionally," said Randy Shipley, the CEO of CannaFundr.com. "But most of the people that are doing these campaigns, I am not sure that the money is being spent in the right way. I would like to see more transparency."

Industry leaders gave a variety of other reasons for not donating to legalization efforts: they hadn't budgeted for political spending; that state regulations for legal pot businesses were proving more financially burdensome than expected; they believed the measures were going to pass anyway. Some said that they just didn't want to get involved in politics.

"I live in California. I support the ballot measure—I hope it passes, I will vote for it. But that would be a personal decision, not a business decision,"said David Dinenberg, CEO of KIND Financial, a Los-Angeles-basedfirm that provides software compliance to the industry. "If they have made it to the ballot they are already very well-heeled and well-organized and they have done everything they are supposed to do. You have to be well-funded to make it onto the ballot."

Some industry players seem to prefer the status quo: More states coming on line means more business entering the market; and while most of these are currently smaller startups, large corporations are sure to follow, swallowing those who have been operating in their niche of the market.

"People are concerned about what legalization is going to look like for them,"said Michael Bronstein, a consultant for the American Trade Association for Cannabis. "You would think they would say, 'let's get this federal prohibition out of the way.'But they want stability. So many of them have dealt with instability for so long."

Tensions between the burgeoning cannabis industry and legalization advocates are not new. In 2015, for example, an industry-backed legalization measure in Ohio was defeated, after many political activists backed away from supporting it, arguing that the measure unfairly favored a few connected players at the expense of consumers.

"I love psychoanalyzing the marijuana industry,"said Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project. "In one bucket you have people who say they are too poor to donate. In another bucket you have people who just hope someone is going to save them from themselves. But any business that budgets zero dollars for political change is being silly because marijuana is actually illegal."

Plus, Kampia pointed out, adding more states to the legalized marijuana column would likely benefit many of the current industry players, since it would vastly increase their customer base. And he worries that failures in 2016 would slow, and perhaps even halt, the momentum that the legalization movement has gained in recent years.

"I like to joke that the worst thing we ever did was legalize marijuana in Colorado," he said. "People say 'inevitable.'I don't like that. The reality is you've got to pay the bills somehow. Because of limited resources, we have let go a lot of states where we could win."

If a handful of measures go down to defeat this November, it could also embolden the federal government to end its hands-off approach to marijuana businesses in the four states that have legalized the drug. Since federal law trumps state law, any president at any time could shut down the farms, dispensaries and thousands of businesses that have cropped up in the wake of legalization.

"Think about what would happen if Oregon and Alaska went down in 2014 because there wasn't enough money in these campaigns,"Nadelmann of DPA, told the conference and cannabis entrepreneurs. "All of the momentum, all of the ways in which people are thinking legalization is inevitable and the way of the future, imagine what would have happened if we had lost. Colorado and Washington would be seen as flukes. The net value of this industry would be fifty percent of what it is today."

"And if California, goes down,"he added. "It sets us back a decade. I don't want to say you are fucked, but..."

Follow David Freedlander on Twitter.

In this installment of VICE Talks Film, VICE's Ben Makuch sits down with the legendary German filmmaker and esteemed existential thinker, Werner Herzog, to discuss his new documentary, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. In it, Herzog brings his unmistakable voice and sense of wonder to the nebulous world of the internet. We caught up with the prolific director to discuss virtual reality, the future of humanity, and trolling.

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

I wasn't blind when I entered federal prison. In fact, at the time of my arrest on April 19, 2006, I was driving my car. But I have glaucoma, and my eyesight began to fade once I was inside. Colors lost their vibrancy, the TV wasn't as clear anymore — that's how it started. I bought magnifying glasses, and kept telling prison doctors, "My vision is just getting worse and worse." It's been difficult for me to get the treatment and help I need, and even now, my eyes are extremely painful.

When I started going blind, I was still trying to fight my case, and I remember sitting in the law library, straining to read the books. But after I completely lost my eyesight in 2012, my attempts at overturning my conviction quickly fell by the wayside.

Now I spend my days sitting in my cell, limiting myself to my direct surroundings. It's easier this way, even if it feels like I've put myself in solitary confinement. I used to participate in prison programs, used to work in the kitchen, used to go out to the recreation yard all the time. Not anymore.

I even asked prison officials if there was someone who could teach me Braille as a way of opening my world back up. They politely said no. Now I come out of my room for maybe one hour a day to get some air and take a shower. If I'm lucky, I make it to the microwave. That's pretty much it.

All day long I think about how many steps I take, what I have to do next, and prepare myself. It's 21 steps to the phone. Then it's 15 steps to the rail, grab the rail, swing left, 17 more steps, and I'm in the kitchen. It takes 120 steps to get to the metal detector. It's 38 steps to get to the microwave. That's all my mind can handle right now: counting steps.

My alarm is set for 5 AM. It used to be set for 6 AM, but it takes me a lot longer to get out the door by 6:30 these days. My watch has a snooze on it, so it's always going off every ten minutes, letting me know 5:10, 5:20, etc. That's helpful because otherwise I'd have no idea what time it is.

Every night, I set out my toothbrush, toothpaste, and other hygiene items on top of my locker, so I know where they're at. I can't see how dirty my room is, but every day they tell me, you need to clean your room, and I try to hit every spot.

When I go eat, I come to my door and call my guy. We've been together since last October. I say, "Hey, Antwane." He responds, "What is it?"

"Man, you know what it is. Get me there!"

'Twane ain't had no training or anything, but I grab his shoulder and we get going. He leads me from my door to the chow hall, makes sure I have my tray, gets me to the table and then takes my tray. He pretty much leads me everywhere. There are times when 'Twane's not around, though, and I gotta try to make it on my own. When that happens, I usually just go back to my cell.

For a while, I was being harassed because I was walking on somebody's shoulder—it made it look like 'Twane was my boyfriend rather than a nice guy helping me get from A to B. I'm either holding his hand, his arm, or his shoulder while we walk on the compound. That caused a lot of trouble for me. I've even been sent to solitary for my protection, and I feel safer there, because I ain't gotta worry about the next guy. But I lose so much. In solitary, you only get one phone call a month. In some cases, you don't get visits. And then for me, I ain't got nobody to read my mail. I just stack up my letters.

Now I have a white cane, issued by the prison. And when people look at me, they know, Oh, he's a blind guy, he's not that guy's boyfriend. It makes a difference. My life is so different now. I don't do crowds. I don't eat with the general population. I don't often go to the rec yard. I don't feel safe out there. I just stay away from everybody.

Burl Washington is incarcerated at FCI Estill, a federal prison in South Carolina. In 2008, he was sentenced to 30 years for distribution of drugs (including Fetanyl) that resulted in someone's death.

Illustration by Tyler Boss

Anyone else getting the feeling that Donald Trump's entire Presidential campaign is some massive performance before the prestige, that this whole thing is an illusion just waiting for a reveal, that this is the sinister-feeling heavy middle act of an M. Night Shymalan movie, when you know a twist is coming but you can't see exactly what it is yet? I do. I just feel like when he gets sworn in there's going to be a record scratch, freezeframe, and Donald J. Trump's voice comes through, clear like a bell, saying, "So I bet you're wondering how I ended up here." We are living through an alternate timeline where we are all extras in a teen movie starring Donald fucking Trump.

Anyway, this week he tweeted this:

What does it mean? What does anything Donald Trump say mean. If he wasn't rich, his tweets would have him in the custody of the state by now, but he is, so we're going to make him the most powerful man in the world. Anyway, we got some of VICE's illustrators to try and interpret what Our Future Overlord was saying. Enjoy:

SAM TAYLOR

(via Sam Taylor)

"I've drawn Mr Blobby as Mr Brexit doing a little pump because he's about as stupid as Brexit, that's how stupid Brexit is. Mr-Blobby-doing-a-pump stupid. The EU flag is on fire because he's fucked it. He's full of arrows from both sides because every is pissed off at him. The blobby arrows are our economy thanks to Mr Brexit. I guess the little trump coming out of his butt also represents Donald Trump along with the hair because if Donald wants to be Mr Brexit that's fine as long as he knows that this drawing is what he wants to be. Mr Fart-Butt Brexit Blobby."

JOE BISH

(via Joe Bish)

"My Mr. Brexit is basically the twisted, blackened soul of the English. Even though Brexit is a Britain-wide event or decision or whatever you want to call it, it is, to me, decidedly English. Arrogant, petulant, callow, but also aggressive, scary, and blinded. It really brought the monster out in a lot of people, who are trying to protect something small and petty, which is represented by the jar of Marmite."

PETE SHARP

(via Pete Sharp)

"It's Donald Trump's head on a proud and patriotic British bulldog. He's gone n done a big stinkin mess and in true Brexit leadership style is choosing to ignore it."

DAN EVANS

(via Dan Evans)

"Trump has become more and more like a character from the WWE (world's biggest heel) and whenever I see footage of him at his rallies, Hulk Hogan's entrance song starts up in my head (sample lyric: 'I am a real American, fight for what's right, fight for your life'). Seeing his recent tweet finally gave a name to the character: Mr Brexit, The Real American."

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All photography by Angelo Valdivia

Calling a Mario Kart 8 tournament an eSports event is a bold move. When people think about eSports, they picture about the world's best gamers playing intricate, strategic titles; about StarCraft and Dota 2 professionals who strap their wrists and exercise their index fingers, knowing that in their 30s they'll age out of top-level competition and will no longer be able to compete for million-dollar prize pools. When people think about eSports, their mind's eye isn't ablaze with randomised weapons and blue shells, seeing the player in last position hitting the race leader with an unavoidable lightning bolt as they go over a jump.

The Mario Kart 8 Ultimate Challenge, hosted on August the 6th by the Esports Gamers League in Adelaide, South Australia, was billed as "the first ever major eSport event" to hit the city. When I speak to Tom Radmonski, the event's organiser, he acknowledged the potential debate around his terminology.

"I know that, with Mario Kart, calling this an eSports tournament is a very loose use of the term." – Tom Radmonski

"I know that, with Mario Kart, calling this an eSports tournament is a very loose use of the term," he tells me. "From my point of view, eSports is any sort of electronic game that is competitive. I think that as long as you live with that terminology, any type of competition done by a game at any type of level could be called eSports."

There's an interesting distinction here between sports and eSports, which perhaps ties directly to that grammatically odd capital S that has ensured the use of the word as a proper noun, a name for something very specific. Sport can something enjoyed casually: a Sunday tennis match between friends, a mixed company softball team that genuinely doesn't care if it wins or loses the season, an indoor football team made up of tired dads who want to lose weight. But eSports, traditionally, is a term only applied to professionals taking select games designated "worthy" very seriously.

At the Mario Kart 8 Ultimate Challenge, there were only a handful of people taking the game seriously. By the time the competition reached the semi-finals there were all of 30 spectators left, the rest having left hours ago as the 67 competitors – well below the 400 the organisers anticipated – were whittled down. The man who eventually comes third, Jacob Aiossa, entered with no intention of winning, and speaks to me after the final race: "I thought it would just be a bit of fun. And then I got here and started winning, and just kept going." He didn't follow eSports beyond following a few streamers, and hadn't considered Mario Kart 8 as a game with eSports potential until participating in Ultimate Challenge. "I always thought of it as the party game that everyone goes to."

Even Radmonski doesn't seem to take Nintendo's racer all that seriously. "Mario Kart 8 is a stepping stone for us. We're not stuck on it. From our perspective, it's a matter of starting here and seeing where we go. Whether that's Dota 2 or Counter-Strike: GO or League of Legends or something like that, who knows."

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's short film on the competitive world of 'SMITE'

Of all the people in attendance, the one who seems to take the possibility of Mario Kart 8 as an eSport the most seriously – even over the eventual winner, Marley James, a young man who speedruns the game for fun and has a playtime of over 1,500 hours – is South Australian senator Nick Xenophon. Xenophon, who a week earlier announced his intentions to introduce a bill into parliament calling for the reclassification of certain online games as a form of gambling (thanks largely to a misunderstanding of how Counter Strike works), makes a very brief appearance at the event.

Two days later, Xenophon would put out a press release that named Mario Kart specifically in his crusade against underage gambling: "Mario Kart is a fantastic game that many millions of people around the world have enjoyed, but there are legitimate questions to ask about a kids game being used as a vehicle for online bookmakers and for gambling." Whether Xenophon believed that there was gambling happening at the event, or whether he simply had a strange interpretation of how the tournament was run – there was a $25 entrance fee, with a top prize of $1,500 available – is unclear.

"As an outsider, the distinctions that others might make between Mario Kart 8 and other, more 'serious' eSports games, aren't there."

What is clear, though, is that Xenophon considered this a proper sporting event, one that attracted the same potential issues that any sport can. As an outsider, the distinctions that others might make between Mario Kart 8 and other, more "serious" games, aren't there. When you take away the question of what can or can't be an eSport, of what games need to do to qualify as eSports, it makes sense to look at a huge group of people playing a game competitively, hoping to win a prize at the end, and call it sport. For all its issues, the Mario Kart 8 Ultimate Challenge showed how this cartoony, cacophonous, fun game could work as an eSports experience, albeit one that would be very different from what typical punters are used to.

Mario Kart 8, for what it's worth to the argument I'm about to make, is a brilliant game. It's easily the best Mario Kart ever released. The track designs are wonderful, the weapon balance (Spiny Shell aside) feels right, and there's definite scope for planning and strategy. But it wasn't until the game's final DLC release, which added in a 200CC mode for all players alongside its pay-walled extra tracks, cars and characters, that the game's real competitive potential emerged. The final two rounds of the competition, when the race speed was increased from 150 to 200CC, were by far the most fun to watch.

What becomes clear when watching Mario Kart 8 played at a particularly high level is that luck plays a much smaller part in who wins than detractors might assume. When you see a player build up such an impressive lead that the Spiny Shell (the deadly blue one) isn't enough to ruin their race, or hold onto their Super Horn despite an impending shell attack because they know they can outrun it on the next corner, or quickly flick the "look behind you" button and take out a chasing opponent before lining themselves up for a precision bend, it's hard to chalk victories up to fortune. The point at which power slides must start differs between speed grades, as does one's approach to jumps – there's rarely a reason not to tap the trigger for a boost as you go over a jump at 150CC, but at 200CC those can make you overshoot off the track, or into a wall. Marley James wins because he understands all of this, not because he gets a red shell at just the right time.

Watching these strategies unfold was hugely exciting. In the semi-finals, I saw a shortcut in the DK Jungle circuit used in a way I'd never seen before, as a player drove up a ridge leading to a boost jump but purposely slipped off the end right before the boost, knowing that they would get more speed and better positioning from sliding around the corner on the lower portion of the track. In Sherbet Land, power slides were navigated and planned so skilfully that the players seemed at constant risk of overshooting, banging against walls – but the winner never did. Mushrooms were hoarded for shortcuts that required them, activated right at the apex of a slide boost, the tiny bounce of the kart activated at the exact time required to minimise the speed lost from travelling over grass. It was incredible.

New, on VICE Sports: How eSports Can Survive When the Sponsorship Bubble Bursts

So if high-level Mario Kart 8 is tremendously exhilarating and fun to watch, then why isn't it being taken seriously as a potential eSport? In gaming parlance, there has long been a casual/hardcore divide between the games that are easy to pick up and play and those that require hours of practise and patience just to learn the fundamentals. In professional sports, this divide often boils down to an issue of athleticism – the world's best basketball player is going to be more famous and earn more money than the top competitors in bowling, darts, pool and chess. But "sport" is a term that embraces a wide variety of disciplines and activities.

Mario Kart 8 was chosen for this event for its accessibility. "I'm sure that if you talk to anyone, you'll find that Mario Kart is one of the best-known games (series) in the world," Radmonski theorises. "The Esports Gamers League is not designed for the one percent – it's for the other 99. It's to provide a fun, safe atmosphere, and for people to come together the way they would for any sport. The changing face of eSports will make it seem, in the next couple of years, that we're just another notch in the sporting contests." It's that very same accessibility, though, that has prevented the game from being called an eSport.

For a game like Mario Kart 8 to ever really emerge as a "genuine" eSport, our idea of what eSports are would have to shift. We'd need to think of eSports as something that isn't reserved for the absolute best in the world, and start taking the legitimacy of minor gaming competitions more seriously. There's plenty of talk about how seriously eSports should be taken, of the relevancy of eSports as a profession, to the point where the Olympic viability is a topic of debate. But perhaps for eSports to really expand, to truly meet its potential, we also need to think about how we could use the term in less serious contexts.

@Jickle

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On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, that irascible scamp, decided to take to Twitter, as he so often does, and announced: "They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!" Then, uncharacteristically, he went silent, leaving the media to speculate about what the hell he meant.

Broadly, the United Kingdom's decision to get out of the European Union was made in defiance of bankers and other elites, and was a rejection of the logic of globalization in favor of a "take care of your own first" type of nationalism. The victory of the Leave vote in the June referendum also caught many people off guard. The parallels are pretty clear: Trump, like Leave, is all about sticking it to the man, giving voice to the voiceless.

Unsurprisingly, Trump has been a big fan of Brexit ever since someone explained it to him a couple months ago. "These voters stood up for their nation—they put the United Kingdom first, and they took their country back," Trump's campaign wrote in a fundraising email just after the Brexit vote. "With your help, we're going to do the exact same thing on Election Day 2016 here in the United States of America."

So Thursday wasn't the first time Trump has portrayed himself as being the American reboot of a British original. If he starts highlighting Brexit in his speeches, it would be a new iteration of his nationalist "America First" strategy—one that would likely be embraced by his new far-right campaign "CEO" Steve Bannon, and not likely to be endorsed by those Republicans still hoping Trump will "pivot" back to a more traditional campaign.

Though pro-Brexit politicians and Trump both sound the same broad, angry notes—as do many nationalist politicians across Europe—there are a host of reasons why Trump's new self-proclaimed "MR. BREXIT" nickname is inaccurate. Here are a few:

The Polls on Brexit Were Close, Unlike the US Presidential Polls

For the last couple of years, polls in the UK, for whatever reason, have been wrong a lot of the time, and failed to predict the Leave triumph. But in the days leading up to the vote, polls did show that it was close, making the result surprising but not totally shocking.

The polls have been less kind to Trump, showing him consistently behind Hillary Clinton, both nationwide and in key battleground states. The election is still a long ways away, and Trump is far from eliminated—but the Leave vote was much more popular in the UK than Trump is in the US right now.

Britain Is Whiter Than America

The anti-immigrant sentiment at the heart of both Trump and the Leave campaign's appeal isn't explicitly rooted in race—but on the other hand, c'mon. Trump has portrayed Muslim immigrants as potential terrorists and called Mexicans rapists and criminals; his appeals to black voters have been tone deaf; maybe he's not a white nationalist, but white nationalists sure love him.

Meanwhile, just as non-white people don't generally like Trump, non-white British voters generally backed Remain. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Leave campaign was racist, but just like Trump's campaign, it appealed to a fair number of racists. For obvious and good reasons, people of color tend to be wary of causes that unite large numbers of angry white people.

The problem for Trump is that at last count, the UK was about 87 percent white, compared to 77 percent for the US. If a political movement is looking to harness white resentment, there's just more of it available in Britain than America.

The Brexit Campaign Wasn't About Left Versus Right

The Trump–Clinton contest is obviously partisan. Sure, you have some diehard Bernie Sanders supporters threatening to vote for Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or to just stay home, and some Never Trump Republicans going over to Clinton's side—but most people are staying in their lane. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 82 percent of likely Democratic voters would back Clinton over Trump; and despite Republican candidate's troubles, he's still has the support of 72 percent of likely Republican voters.

Brexit was a trickier beast to pin down. Even though the leading voices of the Leave campaign were right-wing types like then–UKIP Leader Nigel Farage and Conservative MP Boris Johnson, there were some leftists who wanted out of the EU for their own reasons. The particulars of the Brexit battle are too complicated and British to get into here, but in the end only 63 percent of Labour voters cast Remain ballots, and only 58 percent of Tories supported Leave. Brexit couldn't have happened without support from some Labour voters—and Trump is not going to get the equivalent support from Democrats.

Trump Is a Person, and a Lot of People Hate That Person

It's true that some of Trump's stated policies have the same kind of cross-party appeal that Brexit did. His statements on trade, for instance, mirror what leftists have been saying about free-trade agreements since even before NAFTA was adopted. But Clinton's strategy so far has not been to attack Trump's platform—which shifts depending on his mood, anyway—but to paint him as a dangerous, erratic figure, a bad role model who is simply too unhinged to lead the country.

The Leave campaign might have lost if it had had to depend on the personalities of its most public faces. Farage, for instance, couldn't win a seat in the British Parliament in 2015. But Britons didn't have to like, or even trust, Farage to vote for Leave. On the other hand, Americans who don't trust Trump can't pull the lever for him.

Maybe that's why Trump wants to be known as Mr. Brexit from now on: He knows that he won't be able to win running as Mr. Trump.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Although the first season of VICE Does America has come to an end, the show's hosts Abdullah Saeed, Martina de Alba, and Wilbert L. Cooper are still in awe of the experience they had making it, and the fact that their insane journey across the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election is an actual documentary show that aired on the VICELAND TV channel.

Production of the show took the hosts from Los Angeles through Nevada, up North to Iowa, back down to Texas, then across the Southern states, hitting Louisiana and Alabama. They then headed back up north through the Carolinas, finally culminating in Washington, D.C. Along the way they met pornstars, controversial figures like Cliven Bundy, politicians like Ted Cruz, Civil War reenactors, cannabis entrepreneurs, Native American activists fighting Big Oil, black Americans living in a US-based South African village, and the White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. Needless to say, it was a long, strange trip that touched on hot button topics like immigration, race, drugs, and sex, and taught the hosts a lot about themselves and their country.

What you don't see when you watch the show is how much hard work went into putting it together and all of the people who helped make it happen. The photos below offer a glimpse of those responsible (certainly not all of them—shout out to the show's excellent pre- and post-production teams) for VICE Does America who don't appear on camera—the producers, the cameramen, the sound dudes, the PAs. It also shows you how the team spent their time when they weren't shooting and driving—they gambled, they smoked pot (in states where recreational use is legal), and they stuffed their faces with regional delicacies.

Get an inside look at Abdullah, Martina, and Wilbert's great America road trip and tune into VICELAND to catch up on any episodes you might have missed.

William Boushie, brother of Colten Boushie, speaks to media during a rally outside of court. Photo by Canadian Press/Liam Richards

North Battleford –