In theory, a group of mascots competing for the "Gold Fluffy" award at the World Mascot Association Championships is primed for the Christopher Guest mockumentary treatment. Like the subjects of Guest's other comedies, mascots make up a strange little subculture with lots of opportunities for quirk and conflict. Unsurprisingly, Mascots is most reminiscent of Guest's earlier film Best in Show, yet it doesn't feel quite as memorable or funny. These are familiar beats; there aren't really any jokes in Mascots that you can't already find in Guest's filmography, though if you liked them there, you'll still probably like them here.

Mascots, for the most part, is just a gentle rehashing of Guest's best works: the exploration of a strange pocket in the world, the immense earnestness that often leads to sadness, the competitive nature (and the ridiculousness of watching people compete for something that means nothing), the usual cast (Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Ed Begley Jr., Christopher Guest reprising his role as Corky St. Clair, etc.), and the semi-improvisational nature. This makes Mascots easily watchable for Guest fans—and I assume the majority of audiences checking it out on Netflix will already be established Guest fans—though it will likely be a bit of disappointment, almost as though something's missing.

The central plot, as it were, of Mascots concerns a select group of mascots (both solo and duos) as they prepare for the eighth annual competition. Among those are an aging dancer looking for one last shot at glory as Alvin the Armadillo (Parker Posey); a bickering married couple (Sarah Baker and Zach Woods, the newcomer who most effortlessly fits into Guest's mockumentary world) whose personal issues seep into their mascot performances; and Tommy "Zook" Zucarello (Chris O'Dowd, who headed up Guest's mostly disappointing HBO series Family Tree), an overly aggro man performing as an overly aggro giant fist. Fans and judges fit into the world, too, but it's the mascots who are the prime focus. In fact, this creates an interesting—and welcome—contrast with the "real" world of mascots, the people who are normally hidden behind large costumes, who perform for little fanfare or accolades, and then shuffle away without us ever knowing how their names are now front and center in Mascots. (In a way, Mascots can be seen as the fictional, exaggerated version of Hulu's Behind the Mask docuseries.) Mascots enthusiastically showcases these people, alternating between celebrating and pitying them, but mostly focused on the often sad reasons why these mascots are mascots.

Predictably for a Guest mockumentary, the best and funniest moments are when the characters reveal just a bit too much about themselves, when they try to say something upbeat but a hint of sadness or confusion bleeds through. As always, Guest treats this subculture with a form of care: It's clear that there's a lot to laugh at, but they are still humans, trying to make something out of an occupation that is never thought of. But, of course, there are still plenty of funny sequences. Some that stand out include Ed Begley Jr.'s deadpan delivery when discussing his micropenis (ahem, "phallically challenged"), and a mascot showing up to a performance only to realize he is supposed to entertain an auditorium full of blind children. The easiest laughs come from fully costumed mascots performing ordinary tasks: using the bathroom, or dealing with a police officer. But all of this is broad, and sometimes phoned-in, as if there were better takes out there we could have gotten.

Yet Mascots coasts along on the strength of its actors (Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, and John Michael Higgins all show up) and the charm that is a mainstay of all Guest mockumentaries, regardless of quality. When it starts to sag in the second act, Mascots pumps back up the energy with the actual mascot competition. The choreography is a lot more stunning than you'd expect from oversize costumes, and it's actually a fascinating watch—and surprisingly tense at times. Yet none of the characters have been fully fleshed-out and explored enough to find us rooting for a particular one at the end. The mascots are fun but fleeting; the competition is enjoyable but ultimately not one you're likely to watch again.

Follow Pilot Viruet on Twitter.

Mascots is currently streaming on Netflix.

A Brexit boat (Photo: Theo McInnes)

The UK leaving the EU has garnered a fair bit of bad press. But think about it: it's actually pretty cool that this seemingly cataclysmic, internationally embarrassing financial folly has happened, because we've got some pretty nifty portmanteaus from it: Regrexit, Remoaners, Bremain and, of course, Brexit itself.

You know people say that the English language is dying, with people opting for emojis and taking selfies and playing Pokémon GO and sitting on ChatRoulette all day instead of engaging in the art of conversation? I say to those people: hogwash. As long as we have the tabloid press making up these great words to blindside us and make us forget what we're talking about as we're saying it, I think the English language should be A-OK.

Anyway, check this out: the geniuses over at the British Election Study have polled a bag of voters post-Brexit results to see if they're still happy with their decision. They found that, while the vast majority of voters on either side are pretty much sticking to their guns, 6 percent of Leave voters regret their decision, whereas only 1 percent of Remain voters regret theirs.

This is significant, as it's a greater percentage than the margin of victory for Leave (51.9, percent versus 48.1). The regret seemed to be widespread as early as the night of the vote, with a few reporters vox-popping people who looked a bit shocked and concerned that their vote actually counted and that they've potentially changed everyone's life by plunging them into the great unknown. Cool, guys, thanks for taking it seriously.

In similarly bizarre, stupid, idiotic Brexiteer bullshit, a man called Christian Holliday (the exact thing he no doubt feels the need to defend when the Express says festive cards with pigs on them are banned, or whatever) has set up a petition to demand that the government make the supporting of the UK's membership in the EU a crime after we leave. Holliday is calling for The Treason Felony Act be amended to include the following offences:

"To imagine, devise, promote, work or encourage others to support the UK becoming a member of the European Union; to conspire with foreign powers to make the UK, or part of the UK, become a member of the EU."

Holliday, who is a member of the Guildford Conservative Association, also states in his petition that "it is becoming clear that many politicians and others are unwilling to accept the democratic decision of the British people to leave the EU. Brexit must not be put at risk in the years and decades ahead. For this reason we the undersigned request that the Treason Felony Act be amended as set out in this petition."

Quite what kind of sentencing people would receive for this act of treason is unknown, but I highly doubt we'll ever have to find out.

More from VICE:

'Brexit: the Movie' Reveals Why the Upper Classes Are So Excited About the Prospect of Leaving the EU

The Left-Wing Arguments For and Against Brexit

Why Is the British Press So Overwhelmingly Pro-Brexit?

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

February 21, 2016, started as a routine day for Victor Alvarez. He went to work at Krispy Kreme, expecting his dad to pick him up when he finished his shift. But at 10:30 PM, Victor looked out the window and saw that his father, Jose, had been pulled over by the police right in front of the store, for what he later learned was a broken headlight.

The situation quickly deteriorated. Jose had a criminal record—a nonviolent drug charge from over 20 years ago, for which he had been deported, along with the crime of reentering the country shortly thereafter to be reunited with his young children. That didn't matter to the police officer, who quickly notified ICE that it had Jose Alvarez in custody.

In just a few short hours, Victor's whole life changed. By the early hours of the morning, his father had been deported to Mexico.

Throughout this presidential election season, Democrats have been pushed to acknowledge the central role the party played in contributing to mass incarceration and the criminalization of communities of color. Activists and scholars have specifically focused on a series of "tough on crime" bills passed during the 1990s, including the 1996 welfare reform act (known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) and the 1994 crime bill (known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act).

But there was also another crucial bill passed during the 1990s—the one responsible for Jose Alvarez's deportation. Twenty years ago this September, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibly Act (IIRIRA) into law. Now immigrant activists are campaigning to bring Jose Alvarez back home, and to raise awareness about the impact of IIRIRA on thousands of families across the country.

Like most immigration stories, this one begins with the hope of a better life. Jose Alvarez came to the United States in 1979, in search of job opportunities. He was undocumented, but got a green card under the 1986 immigration reform law. Several years later, in 1995—after he was already married with children—Jose was arrested and convicted on two drug charges for possessing meth. He spent more than three years in prison. When Jose was released in 1999, his green card was revoked, and he was deported.

If not for IIRIRA, Jose might still be in the United States. Both IIRIRA and another bill passed in 1996, the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), vastly expanded the number of people who were eligible for detention and deportation. Relatively minor, nonviolent crimes—like burglary, tax evasion, and a broad number of drug offenses—were now considered "aggravated felonies" in the administrative immigration context, even if those same crimes did not constitute felonies, aggravated or otherwise, under criminal law.

Importantly, IIRIRA has been applied retroactively, meaning Jose and others convicted of crimes prior to 1996 can still be deported under the law. IIRIRA and AEDPA also made detention and deportation mandatory for a vast number of criminal offenses, so immigration judges cannot provide relief based on circumstances of individual cases.

Jose Alvarez. Photo courtesy of the Alvarez family

Shortly after he was deported for the first time, Jose crossed back into the US to be reunited with his kids and wife. He rebuilt a peaceful and productive life in Long Beach—buying a home, raising six kids, even sending one son into the Marines—until his recent, fateful run-in with the police.

Jose's story is a classic example of how IIRIRA has operated, according to Daniel Hernández, an assistant professor of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American Studies at Mount Holyoke College and an expert in immigration policy. "Instead of catching people who arrived recently—like deported people who got caught along the border— created a whole era of interior enforcement," he told me.

In the late 90s, as a result of IIRIRA and AEDPA, detention tripled and became the fastest growing form of incarceration, said Hernández. Deportations also increased rapidly.

"Obama—and Bush before him—couldn't have become the deporter in chief without these laws," Hernández told me.

Watch: What Alabama's Harsh Anti-Immigration Laws Look Like

During this election season, Black Lives Matter and other activists have insisted Hillary Clinton take responsibility (with limited success) in pushing for the passage of welfare reform and the crime bill. But the impact of our flawed criminal justice system on non-citizens remains largely unacknowledged by Democrats and poorly understood by the American public.

"The immigration detention system is obscure—nobody really sees it, even though it's directly related to the criminal justice system in a sequential way," explained Hernández, the Mount Holyoke professor.

Indeed, Obama's policy—deporting "felons not families"—and broader Democratic approaches to immigration reform have mostly reinforced the core idea behind IIRIRA: that the "good" citizens are noncriminals, and the "bad" ones must leave.

Lina Newton, an associate professor of political science at Hunter College, told me that it wasn't just the "tough on crime" approach that linked IIRIRA, the crime bill, and the welfare bill. Over the 1980s and 1990s, according to Newton, there was a growing "division in public mind between taxpayers and the people who live off them." This logic shifted toward immigration, which manifested most overtly in the overwhelming 1994 passage of California's Proposition 187, which denied all but emergency medical care to undocumented people and their children (although it was never enforced).

The 1990s represented a "turning point for immigration becoming linked into the welfare reform discourse," which combined with existing understandings of the immigrant-as-criminal. In that sense, IIRIRA was shaped both by an increasing "tough on crime" rhetoric and an aggressive push to punish those perceived as "freeloaders."

For Victor Alvarez and his family, whatever the reasons for its passage, the impact of IIRIRA could not be more real. His father is now living with relatives in Tijuana, and although Victor, his mother, and his siblings often visit on the weekends, being divided by a border has taken an emotional toll on everyone.

" says he's OK, but I can tell he's not OK—we all can tell," Victor told me. "He just puts on a strong face, so we won't be worried about him."

With the main breadwinner in the family now gone from the United States, the deportation has also cost the family financially. Victor recently dropped out of college to help support his siblings and mothers.

Last month, on the 20th anniversary of the bill being signed into law, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and a range of advocacy groups sent a letter to former President Bill Clinton, asking him to sign a petition to bring Jose Alvarez back home. (There's also a petition circulating to support that demand.)

"Everybody in the community knows that '96 was bad," Salvador Sarmiento, the national campaign coordinator for NDLON, told me. "But nobody knows where to start the conversation. And that's why the specific ask to bring Jose back is important."

Although Hillary Clinton has publicly agreed to repeal one provision of IIRIRA if elected—the three and ten years bans on reentry for people who had overstayed their visas or entered the US without authorization—she has said little about whether she would seek to rollback other facets of the legislation.

Asked what NDLON says to Secretary Clinton if it could speak to her campaign directly, Sarmiento was clear. "Her party is responsible for this terrible law that is keeping this family apart and many thousands of families like them. We would ask, would she take a stand and join the effort to bring Jose back?"

Neither the Clinton Foundation nor Hillary Clinton's campaign team responded to comment requests from VICE about whether they would support the petition.

When I asked Victor Alvarez to share his thoughts about the future, and whether he thought the campaign to bring his father back would be successful, he didn't hesitate.

"You have to be hopeful," he told me. "There's a chance."

Follow Aviva Stahl on Twitter.

Screengrab of the movie 'Clerks'

If you've ever worked in retail or hospitality, you know that customers can be assholes. No matter how many smiles or pleasant assurances you give, there are some people who want to use a two-minute interaction in a shopping centre to assert their dominance over you. These people won't be happy until they've ruined your day, and there's nothing you can do except smile, try to be polite and wait for them to fuck off.

We spoke to people who work on the high street about, some of the worst, and weirdest, customers in Britain.

Source: Wikicommons

When I worked in the Body Shop I had to do a trial run of a woman's bridal make-up so that she could test out the products. We did the standard pre-wedding small talk and I asked whether she'd got everything planned and she said "Not really, I just don't feel like planning stuff. It's too much to think about. I don't feel excited about it at all."

I was 18 at the time and totally out of my depth, so I joked, "maybe just elope", to which she replied, "yeah, maybe the problem is him!" It was a joke and she did laugh, but it was the kind of empty laugh that doesn't reach a person's eyes. Then she kind of just had a conversation with herself, saying how they'd been together for eight years, and she never thought that she'd end up with anyone like him, and how he's not her ideal man at all and how if she thinks about the wedding then she just imagines it being with random men off the street or with celebrities, all while I slapped a load of makeup on her. Eventually she said, "I tried to say that I didn't think I was ready for marriage when we first got engaged, but he talked me round. But I'm right! I'm not! I think I've got to talk to him, I just can't get married. I don't want to." So, yeah, sorry to whoever's wedding I ruined. - Alice

Source: geograph.org.uk

When I was working in a branch of Motor World a guy and his three young kids came in. He bought a car battery up and said "how much for cash?" I replied that it was the same price however you paid, much to his chagrin. He gave a signal, and the kids proceeded to turn the shop over while he repeated, "How much for cash? How much for cash? How much for cash?" I watched them pull 600 air fresheners off hooks and throw windscreen blades everywhere before I relented. - Owen

Working for Apple, I had a guy come in to moan to me about his broadband. When I explained Apple only made his computer and had nothing to do with his broadband connection he said, "Ok dear, how about you go an find a man I can talk to about this. You're not getting it." - Beth

I had a man approach the counter in Game once to trade in a Nintendo DSi. He had been quite casual to start with, saying he just wanted to trade in for cash, and so I explained I just had to check the machine out and then take some details in order to do that. He had the correct paperwork so I went ahead and began to examine the machine. I tend to talk to myself as I work, so perhaps I said, "okay so I'll just go through the memory and check that out", but it was when I got to that stage that suddenly his whole demeanour changed. I suspect he may have seen my eyebrows shoot up at the sight of nine dick pics. I must say the artfulness of some of them has stuck with me, it's not easy to take a decent dick pic with a DSi camera, but he managed some exceptional shots that featured both his penis and his face, in an impressive upshot angle. I concluded the machine was fine and I'd take it in, so then began the lengthy paperwork checks and signing things in order to give him the cash. As soon as he had the cash in hand he sprinted out the shop. This was very much not an isolated incident – there were many instances of games consoles being traded in with incredibly abrasive screen names or porn DVDs in them. - Lizzie

Source: Kake Pugh

When I worked in Ann Summers, we had a woman come in to complain that her Rampant Rabbit vibrator had broken, and she wanted a refund. When she pulled it out of her bag it was covered in white crust. My manager flipped and refused to serve her until she bought it back clean, the woman got very angry and flipped a stand with a load of clitoral stimulators on it. - James

I once had a guy put his crying child on the counter so that I could explain why Christmas was cancelled and how it was my fault. I worked in Zavvi at the time. We'd gone into administration and we couldn't accept his £20 gift card. - Ben

One time I was working in a library and a woman tried to leave her toddler with me while she went to get a mani pedi. I said, "Ma'am, you cannot leave your child with a stranger you've never met in a public place, even if that public place is a library." She was insistent that she had seen me in the library before and was sure I was trustworthy and she simply HAD to make this mani pedi appointment and I was SO UNREASONABLE for not just making this easy for her. There was lots of huffing and sighing and threatening my job. In the end the only thing that swayed her was that the library was closing before she'd have to be back, but she was still very mad at me for inconveniencing her. The fact that I knew she was being absurd made it slightly less stressful, but I was really upset at the idea that this poor kid was being treated like an annoyance and a burden by her mum. And it was so frustrating that I couldn't convince her to care. - Kris

Source: Wikimedia

I was working in Morrisons. One day, a middle-aged man came into that weird little space between the two sets of revolving doors where they keep the baskets and the big ass bags of soil for your garden, dropped his trousers and pants and just shat everywhere. Like everywhere. He then rushed off to the toilets just inside the store, and by the time anyone got in there he'd managed to disappear out the window having: a) left his pants in the middle of the floor and b) smeared his own shit over every wall, cubicle, mirror and ceiling surface available to him. Management bought the cleaners a four pack of beer each before they went home that night. - Stephen

READ: More articles about people shitting supermarkets

One time when I worked at a call centre, an old woman stayed on the phone and shouted at me for close to five hours. At one point, when I let out an audible sigh, she just said, "You think I'm going anywhere? I'm 86, I've got nothing else to do with my day." - Tom

More on VICE:

I Went to BHS the Day it Closed Down and Saw the Corpse of the British High Street

It's Official: We All Think Scanning Avocados as Onions Isn't Actually Stealing

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Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images

US News

Trump and His Friends Say Election Is Already Rigged
Donald Trump and surrogates over the weekend stepped up claims the election is being "rigged" by media bias and Democratic Party voter fraud. Trump tweeted Sunday that the election is "absolutely being rigged" by the media and "at many polling places." His cheerleader, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, said that "dead people generally vote for Democrats," while former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich singled out Philadelphia—which can tilt potentially decisive electoral college vote prize Pennsylvania—as ground zero for vote-rigging. —Bloomberg

Three Arrested After Tyson Gay's Daughter Killed in Shooting
US sprinter Tyson Gay's 15-year-old daughter was killed in a shooting in Lexington, Kentucky. Trinity Gay was shot in the neck during an exchange of fire between two vehicles in a restaurant parking lot early Sunday. Police have charged Dvonta Middlebrooks, 21, Chazerae Taylor, 38, and D'markeo Taylor, 19, with wanton endangerment. —WKYT

FBI Investigates Firebombing of GOP HQ in North Carolina
Police in North Carolina are investigating after a Republican Party office in the state was firebombed and another building tagged with graffiti warning "Nazi Republicans" to "leave town or else." The FBI is assisting local police in Hillsborough after the graffiti—swastika and all—was discovered Sunday morning. No one has been reported injured in the attack. —NBC News

WikiLeaks Dumps More Clinton Campaign Emails
WikiLeaks has released yet another cache of Hillary Clinton insider emails apparently hacked from the account of her campaign chairman, John Podesta. The release includes discussion of appealing to black voters and how the candidate can effectively apologize. —USA Today

International News

Iraqi Military Launches Operation to Retake Mosul from ISIS
The massive effort to retake the pivotal Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State is officially underway. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the assault conducted by the Iraqi government and Kurdish Peshmerga, backed by a US-led coalition, on early Monday. The UN estimates up to 1 million people could be displaced from the city during the operation. —Al Jazeera

Prison Riot in Brazil Leaves 25 Dead
At least 25 inmates in a prison in Boa Vista, Brazil, died in fights over the weekend. Seven of the dead were reportedly beheaded and six others burned to death. —AFP

Thai General Election to Go Ahead in 2017
A general election will take place in Thailand late next year as planned, local media reported Monday, as Thais continue to grieve over the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The head of Thailand's royal advisory council, Prem Tinsulanonda, will stand in as regent until Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn formally succeeds the king. —Reuters

Nigerian Schoolgirls Reunite with Families
Twenty-one schoolgirls freed from captivity last week by Islamist group Boko Haram have been reunited with their families in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. A government official said talks were underway to free more girls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014. Of 276 girls kidnapped, 197 remain unaccounted for. —BBC News

Everything Else

'The Accountant' Debuts at No.1 at the Box Office
Ben Affleck's new movie The Accountant exceeded expectations by opening to $24.7 million this weekend and reaching No.1 at the box office despite mediocre reviews. Last week's No.1, The Girl on the Train, fell to third, taking just under $12 million. —The Wall Street Journal

Alec Baldwin Endorses Charlie Brown
The actor endorsed Charlie Brown in a promo video for Peanuts Rock the Vote, a website where people can register to vote, and also vote for their favorite Peanuts character. "Charlie Brown persevered, and so did I," says Baldwin. —The Huffington Post

European Probe Descends Toward Mars
A European Space Agency probe has left its mothership after a seven-month journey from Earth and is headed toward the surface of Mars. Schiaparelli is Europe's first attempt in almost 15 years to land an exploratory rover on Mars. —The Guardian

Killer Mike Is Open to Anti-Vax Movement
Rapper Killer Mike said he was "open" to the anti-vaccination movement. "I am very open to hear from anti-Vax'ers," he wrote on Twitter, before posting a picture of Andrew Wakefield's discredited 2016 documentary Vaxxed. —Noisey

Uber CEO and Pittsburg Mayor Discussed State Fines
When Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto wrote a letter to Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission—which slapped Uber with a $11.4 million fine—pleading for leniency on behalf of the company, it was written at the behest of the ride-share giant, according to emails obtained by Motherboard. —Motherboard

Almost 200 Countries Agree to Phase Out Greenhouse Gas
Nearly 200 countries have agreed to the early phase out of a potent greenhouse gas that is projected to warm the planet 0.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. At a UN conference in Rwanda, negotiators agreed to phase out hydrofluorocarbons. —VICE News

A van at the Trump rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday. All photos by the author

For more than a week, the Trump campaign has been grappling with the now- infamous pussy-grabbing tape followed by the accusations that Donald Trump sexually harassed and assaulted women. Republican officials have been put in the awkward position of endorsing a scandal-ridden and erratic candidate or rejecting him and earning the ire of his supporters.

For hardcore Trump supporters, though, the real scandal is the way the media is hyping dubious, decades-old stories to tear down the one man who could rescue the country from doom.

Many of these supporters gathered this Saturday in a car-dealership parking lot in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for a Trump rally. The usual signifiers were there: "Deplorable Me" and "Trump that Bitch" T-shirts, an overwhelmingly white and mostly middle-aged or older crowd. The attendees were mostly men, but there were plenty of women as well, none of whom seemed to have an iota of doubt about their candidate.

"The media, they're obsessed with sex, but the people are not," said Ellie Martin, a volunteer with the Trump campaign.

Martin said she's angry that media outlets are paying more attention to the women's stories than to emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign released by WikiLeaks. She's scared of what might happen in a world where Trump loses the election, worried that taking in more refugees would be devastating to a country that she believes is already drowning in debt. As a conservative living in hyper-liberal Vermont, she's been thrilled to see Trump bring voters like her out of the woodwork. And she's not happy with the Republicans who rapidly abandoned the Trump train in light of recent events.

"It's the same old, same old Republican Party," she said. "They shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get."

To Stacey Danforth, a Massachusetts real estate broker who was at the rally with her brother, Patrick Lundgren, the complaints against Trump look transparently political.

"My thought is it's pretty convenient," she said. "I think Bill Clinton's actions were worse than Donald Trump saying what he did."

Almost universally, the women I spoke with at the rally said that the complaints are exaggerated or completely invented, echoing what Trump and his surrogates have said about the allegations, including the charge that the women should have spoken up before now.

Sandy Gallan

"If I was a woman and I was on a plane 20-plus years ago, and someone did that to me, I would have said something immediately," said Sandy Gallan, a Vermont teacher wearing a hand-lettered "Deplorables for Trump" shirt, referring to allegations made by Jessica Leeds. "Why would you wait 20 or 30 years?"

Gallan said the important thing is to focus on issues like the deficit and Obamacare. She thinks a president Trump would restore a sense of cohesiveness and togetherness to the county.

"President Obama, when he was first elected, said that one of his goals was to end racial divisions in our country, and I think it has gotten much worse," she said.

A nurse wearing a flag scarf and a hat decorated with a Trump sticker ("It's an American look, something you will not see with Hillary") said there are bigger women's issues than the allegations against Trump, like the potential influx of Syrian refugees.

"We'll be wearing burkas if we have Hillary Clinton," said the woman, who declined to give her name.

She added that she's convinced Clinton has Parkinson's disease, was doped up for the debates, and is probably incontinent. She said she's noticed the outline of a catheter in Clinton pants. If Clinton gets elected, she said, the real president will be her longtime aide Huma Abedin—"the Muslim in the White House."

Among the Trump supporters I spoke to, the question of their candidate's bad behavior—the target of so many attacks from his opponents—was beside the point. Listening to Trump address the rapt crowd on this perfect fall day, it was easy to see why: Who cares about some creepy acts when America is about to fail? The country, Trump told his audience, is in rapid decline. Clinton ought to be in jail. She supports open borders, which threaten the very sovereignty of the nation. If Clinton wins, this could be the last competitive democratic election in the US. But if he wins, illegal immigration will disappear, crime will plummet, and no one will think Americans are a bunch of stupid people anymore.

Bobbie Files (left)

Beyond that bigger picture, some in the crowd thought the media focus on the sexual assault allegations reflected misplaced values. Bobbie Files, a Massachusetts real estate agent, agreed with other supporters that there's probably nothing to the allegations, and she said the focus on them risks depicting women as powerless victims. Working in a male-dominated environment, she said, she hears men say plenty of crude things about how they'd like to approach women.

"What I always say to the guys is, 'I dare you to go and do it,'" she said. "And if a female does let a guy grope her—that's permission."

Files said it bugged her that some Clinton supporters complained about Trump standing behind her during the second debate, comparing it to stalking. "Get your pussy off the pedestal," she said. "Would anybody be saying, 'He's stalking, he's threatening,' if Hillary was a guy?"

The only person I met at the rally who said she took the allegations against Trump seriously was Barbara St. Gelais. She and her husband, unlike many in the parking lot, aren't committed to voting for the GOP candidate. They came to the rally with her Trump-supporting sister and brother-in-law, Patricia and Wayne Tucker.

To the Tuckers, it was obvious that the women coming forward were politically motivated liars. Why else wouldn't they have spoken up before now? Why wouldn't they have gotten angry about the mistreatment they described? But St. Gelais disagreed. She said things have improved over the decades when it comes to what women have to endure, and that's changed our conversations for the better.

"I think it's wonderful that people are speaking up," she said. "They couldn't be angry then because there was nothing they could do."

The two couples obviously disagreed about this, but they were laughing and joking, showing no signs of letting the disagreement come between them. Maybe there's hope for the country after all?

For her part, St. Gelais said she wanted to keep an open mind about who to vote for. "I'm just waiting to see if anything else comes out," she said.

Follow Livia Gershon on Twitter.

Warning: Spoilers for episode three ahead.

There's nothing more fundamental to existence than change. We grow, we die. Everything that was cool becomes corny. You buy a new iPhone and suddenly your old charger won't work. And yet, change is also what we want and never seem to get, stuck as most of us are in our habits and routines. "I guess people like to read about what they want most and experience least," Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) says in the third episode episode, winking at the audience that tunes in each week to watch spectacular violence, adventure, and romance from the lazy comfort of their couches or beds.

But change is absolutely the theme of HBO's Westworld's third episode, "The Stray." This week, we see how recent events are disrupting the show's world as well as get new information that alters our perceptions of what has and will happen. Things are changing and getting stranger.

Alice's Adventures in Horrorland

We open with another creepy basement therapy session between Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Bernard. He makes her read a passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . "How queer everything is today," Alice says. Later, Dolores notes that this book is like every other one on her Robot Self-Actualization 101 Reading List: "It's about change."

But Dolores isn't falling into a wonderland—she's living in a land of horrors where she's the prey of monsters both human and programmed. What will happen when she falls down the hole into understanding her own reality?

One of the joys of Westworld is the way we get to see scenes play out multiple times with new twists thrown in. Back at home with her new fatherbot, Dolores finds the gun she dug up last episode, and it triggers memories of the Man in Black (Ed Harris) dragging her into the barn. This time, we see he pulls out a gigantic knife. Perhaps he didn't rape her but mutilated her like the croupier in his crazed maze hunt?

Back at HQ, Bernard gives her the red pill/blue pill option from The Matrix : Would she rather know the horrible truth of her reality or stay blissful and ignorant? She says she wants to stay in her loop, but she can't. She has changed. At the start of the episode, her programming wouldn't let her fire a gun, but by the end, she's murdered a would-be rapist robot and fled into the woods.

Photo by John P. Johnson/courtesy of HBO

Teddy Gets a New Past

While Dolores changes, Teddy (James Marsden) requires some reprogramming, Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) needles Teddy about his role in life, and Teddy, booted in safe mode, vacillates between his corny programmed dialogue and his robotic self-analysis. (The actors are really having fun in these scenes, and it translates to the screen.)

When Teddy starts talking about his dark past, Ford pipes in: "Ah yes, your mysterious backstory... we never bothered to give you one. Just a formless guilt you'll never atone for." Then he uploads a new one about a "villain called Wyatt."

Back in the park, Teddy and the sheriff go off to hunt down Wyatt. We see some of the gory backstory, and Teddy's ominous descriptions of how Wyatt has gone crazy and makes his men wear the faces of the dead. (You have to admire how the show uses every cinematic trick to make us care about a storyline and characters that they literally told us are fictions created only moments ago.)

The posse finds a truly grisly scene of half-dead bodies strapped to trees, then all hell breaks loose. "I told you we should have done the riverboat thing!" one frightened guest yips.

Photo by John P. Johnson/courtesy of HBO

Who's Arnold?

Dr. Ford's own backstory gets a rewrite this episode. After Elsie (Shannon Woodward) notices that the malfunctioning robots have been speaking to an invisible person named Arnold, Bernard confronts him, and Ford admits that he didn't create the park alone. He had a partner named Arnold. While Ford wanted completely controllable robots, Arnold wanted to create actual consciousness. He thought he could "bootstrap" it by having the robots think of their code as the voice of God. It didn't work—or did it?

Caught in a Loop

I've said before that Westworld could use a bit of humor, and we're finally getting some this episode, including a great scene where a group of robots exchange insults and quips with one another around an unlit campfire. They freeze up, and we learn they are stuck in a loop because the woodcutter robot glitched out and fled into the woods. No one else was programmed to chop.

Elsie and Ashley (Luke Hemsworth) find mysterious woodcarvings, each of which has some kind of constellation carved into them. They discover the missing woodcutter stuck in a crevice, like a Roomba trapped beneath a piece of furniture. He smacks back-and-forth against the rock walls, then scrambles up the rope and smashes his head in with a boulder. Ouch.

Bang Bang

William (Jimmi Simpson) also changes, finally enjoying the pleasures of the park. He strolls around with a smile and gets mixed up in a classic Western showdown. He kills the killer, but not before he—and we—learn that the robots actually can shoot humans. While the Man in Black didn't flinch at any of the dozens of shots fired at him, William is knocked down with a big ol' bruise on his shoulder.

Do the guns in Westworld contain bullets, paintballs, and blanks, and switch what gets fired based on who the gun is pointed at? The actual rules of Westworld don't seem clear yet, and the bruise makes me wonder how the human guests are protected from other humans attacking and assaulting them with knifes or fists. Perhaps we'll learn soon.

William has a taste for the park now and convinces Logan (Ben Barnes) to go on a side quest with him. Logan is a little upset that they are paying "40K a day to jerk off, alone, in the woods, playing white hat," and then Dolores—veering entirely from her normal programming—runs into their campfire, collapsing.

Crazy Fan Theory Time

Part of the joy of TV in the post- Lost era is predicting what crazy twists we'll see. One interesting theory I've heard is that the storylines are not taking place at the same time. What if William and Logan are adventuring decades before (or after?) the Man in Black? Could William even be the Man in Black, long before he turns into a maze-hunting monster? If so, that might explain the inconsistencies with the guns...

The newly introduced Arnold also invites theorizing about existing storylines. Did Arnold create the mysterious maze? Did he program the robots to unlock their consciousness when the right Shakespeare quote was uttered?

When Elsie and Ashley are hunting the woodcutter, they joke a little about their programming. I'm not sure if those two are robots, but I am sure that you don't have a show about robots that are indistinguishable from humans without having a few of the supposed human characters turn out to be androids. Hell, maybe they all are. Robot labor comes cheap in Westworld, so why not have the robots program and service the other robots?

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Donald Trump with his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, at a campaign event in New York City. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may have just reaffirmed the rumor that Trump has been running for the highest office in the land just to launch his own TV network.

According to the Financial Times, sources said Kushner, who owns the New York Observer, met with Aryeh Bourkoff, a colleague and the head of a boutique investment firm that specializes in funding media startups. The brief meeting, which reportedly happened sometime in the last few months, suggests that we could be seeing a lot more of Trump and his pals after the November election.

Sources close to the Republican candidate told Vanity Fair in June that Trump was thinking about creating his own far-right television network that would rival Fox News and could monetize on his special brand of supporters. The idea seemed even more plausible when Trump pulled former Breitbart head Steve Bannon on to his campaign. He's also kept a close relationship with Sean Hannity and ex–Fox News chairman Roger Ailes throughout the election.

Although Bannon denied the magazine's claims to the Washington Post back in September, Kushner was reportedly heard at a New York dinner party saying, "The people here don't understand what I'm seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him."

As Trump continues to flounder in the polls behind Hillary Clinton and blame the media for "rigging the election" against him, creating his own network could be the only move Trump has left to keep his brand afloat and his face in the spotlight after November 8.

Read: Did Trump Make a Mockery of Our Political System Just to Launch a TV Channel?

George Zimmerman. Photo via Seminole County Sheriff's Office

The guy involved in a road rage incident with George Zimmerman last May has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempted second-degree murder and a concurrent 15-year sentence for aggravated assault, CNN reports.

At trial in September, Matthew Apperson maintained he shot at the former neighborhood watchman's car in self-defense after Zimmerman pulled up beside him and threatened to kill him. Zimmerman testified that Apperson had seen him driving and pursued him, honking his horn and flashing his lights, before pulling a gun and shooting at the car. Zimmerman wasn't shot, but escaped the incident with a few cuts from the shattered window.

"The crux here is Mr. Apperson's blatant disregard for my life, any life... anybody driving up and down Lake Mary Boulevard," Zimmerman told the judge Monday, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

The road rage incident with Apperson is just one of many heated run-ins Zimmerman has had since he was acquitted for the fatal 2012 shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Perhaps most recently, Zimmerman claims he was decked in the face by some restaurant patrons back in August. Witnesses said the punches were thrown after Zimmerman bragged about killing Martin.

Read: This Video of a Road Rage Brawl Will Crush Your Lingering Hope for Humanity

When the remainder of Hurricane Matthew passed over Canada's east coast last weekend, leading to extreme flooding and damage that will take weeks to clean up, residents of little Lennox Island were spared.

Photo by Justin Brake via Twitter.

The RCMP arrested nine people as they attempted to blockade the site of a giant $11 billion hydroelectric dam in Labrador Monday morning.

Protests have escalated against the controversial Muskrat Falls project, which is slated to generate a wealth of renewable energy for the Atlantic provinces — but locals fear it will poison their food supply downstream. An Inuk artist is staging a hunger strike in opposition, and he joined dozens of protesters in blockading the site over the weekend. On Monday, a group of about 20 people defied a court-ordered injunction and blocked workers from entering the construction site before daybreak.

The protesters camped overnight near the site amid mounting fears that the company behind the project, Nalcor, could begin to flood a 41-square-kilometreswath of land any day now.

Peer-reviewed Harvard research suggests methylmercury levels will increase by 14 times downstream within 120 hours of flooding if the reservoir is not entirely cleared of trees and other organic material before flooding starts. Locals fear this will poison the fish, seals and other animals they rely on for food.

The company told VICE News last week it had cleared as much of the reservoir as possible—less than 75 percent of the trees—and has given notice that flooding will begin imminently, prompting the blockade. Twenty-five percent of the land will be flooded initially, with the rest to follow next year.

Read More: This $11 Billion 'Clean' Energy Dam Could Poison Locals with Methylmercury, Scientists Say

Monday's arrests came just hours before a group of about 25 protesters staged a sit-in at Newfoundland and Labrador premier Dwight Ball's office. The office shut down for the day shortly after the sit-in began.

"Just because they're making arrests doesn't mean we're going to stop," 21-year-old Carly Thomson, who was at the office, told VICE News. The Metis woman has written multiple letters to the premier and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calling for them to stop the flooding. She says the health, safety and culture of her community are at stake if flooding is allowed to go forward.

Seven people were arrested at the entrance of the construction site around 5 AM, Inuit protester Andrea Andersen, 25, told VICE News. An eighth protester, a woman from Rigolet, was arrested on the designated protest site across the street from the construction site, she said. Harvard researchers pinpointed Rigolet, a small community of 300 people, as most at risk for methylmercury effects downstream. One more protester was arrested later in the morning, according to the RCMP.

"The police officer arrested someone on the peaceful protest site who was making some verbal remarks about poisoning and methylmercury, and so one of the arrests we feel was very unlawful," Andersen said of the ninth arrest. She said the officer arrested the woman because she stepped onto the highway, but others were also on the road.

The RCMP confirmed the nine arrests to VICE News, and said they each face one count of disobeying a court order. They were expected to appear in court Monday afternoon.

President of the NunatuKavut Community Council Todd Russell called the arrests "heavy handed," according to CBC, and said the council stands in solidarity with the protesters. The elected council represents about 6,000 Inuit in south and central Labrador.

"While we believe there is still time to start making the right decision and build back trust with Indigenous people, we feel we have no other option but to commit our people, time and resources to on-the-ground action until our voices are heard and our rights respected," Russell said in a statement.

Buses and cars of Nalcor employees drove past the protesters as the arrests unfolded, according to Andersen. She said in recent days, employees have yelled from their vehicles that the protesters are wasting their time and preventing them from working, while others have crossed the road to visit the encampment, bringing Tim Hortons and throwing logs on the fire to show their support.

The dam project has already provided thousands of jobs in the area, Nalcor says, and when complete, it will generate a whopping 16.7 terawatt hours of electricity for Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and eventually, the company hopes, New England. That's the equivalent of taking 3.2 million cars off the road, the company says.

Follow Hilary on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Wyatt Fisher take two

First dates suck. OK, It feels like I haven't been on an actual date since the beginning of high school, but I still know that dating, and especially first dates, can be awkward at best.

First dates can feel like all you're trying to do is ask the right questions while not coming across as overly invasive. There's the basic stuff like, "Are you vegan?" "Are you a murderer/undercover clown?," "Do you have a job?" and "How many people are you lowkey dating?"

But what about the questions you really need answers to, especially before a hookup, like, "How often do you wash your bed sheets?"; "Do you use plastic or reusable grocery bags?"; "Anything weird going on in your pants that I should know about?"; "Why are you putting on a clown mask?"

From what I can tell, dating is about asking all the right questions so I surveyed some people on what they ask strangers on a first date or before a hookup.

*Carly, 27

Is there anything you have to ask on a first or before a hook up?
I like asking guys how they feel about sex workers and strip clubs. It's funny to watch them lie, and it shows if they're jerks who slut shame women.

Once I went on a first date on Valentine's Day, and the guy was a photographer. He told me that he dreamed of taking photos of the lockers in the dressing rooms of strip clubs because he heard they're covered in Disney stickers because those women didn't have childhoods. It was revolting and ignorant, and we never spoke again.

How do most guys respond to those questions?
Sometimes I get them being like, "Gross no I hate strip clubs, that's disgusting." That's the worst answer. Maybe they're lying because they think I want them to say that, I'm not sure. But I don't like that attitude regardless so it's a red flag.

A lot of guys are honest, I think. Finance guys go to strip clubs a lot so it's commonplace. Guys from Montreal have gone since they were like 17 so they don't get too excited about this topic either. Suburban Toronto guys have the most awkward replies, in my experience.

And sometimes they'll get really honest and say "I saw a sex worker once, in Thailand. Or something like that." In that case, it usually comes out much later in the relationship. I love that though. I think every guy should support his local sex workers.

Why is asking that question important to you?
Sex worker rights are important to me. But beyond a social justice angle, it says a lot about how a guy is going to express himself sexually—is he adventurous? Is he honest about what he likes? Is he respectful of women who are sexually exploratory?

In one way or another, we should all support sex workers —that doesn't mean paying them for sex, but it does mean speaking respectfully about them, seeing their work as legitimate and supporting their human rights and labour rights... In my opinion, the kind of guy who says strippers aren't fun and hot is the kind of guy who will cheat on you with your neighbour three years down the road. Every woman should ask this question.

Also, I am a sex worker. When dating you want to know you're with someone who is thoughtful and kind and those kinds of people don't judge and hate sex workers.

Here are vegetables shaped like a dicks. Photo by the author

Dianya, 21

So what's something you always ask on a first date or before a hookup?
I always ask guys to walk my dog before I bring them back to my place. And I ask them what kind of vegetable they would be if they could be any vegetable.

Why do you ask about what vegetable they would be?
It's an easy icebreaker.

And why do you ask them to walk your dog?
My dog is impossible to walk so it gives me an extra 15 minutes to talk to them and decide if they're chill before I bring them or don't bring them to my place.

Why do you ask about vegetables specifically?
Because it's weird. If they can't roll with it then I don't wanna smooch.

What's the response you usually get?
Everyone actually humours me and they'll pick a vegetable. This guy I met last night said he'd be a ghost pepper. And the response has to be based on what vegetable you feel like inside, not what you like to eat. Although too many guys have just said cucumber because it's wiener shaped which is pretty lame.

Is that also how you decide if you want to hook up with them or not, based on what vegetable they choose?
Oh ya.

Ya, all feet are pretty disgusting. Photo by the author

Kate, 19

Let's say you're on a first date or you want to hook up with someone, is there anything you have to ask them right away?
I need to know if they have fucked up feet. My current boyfriend has a lot of health issues, and one of them is with his feet. On our first date I was sad to hear that he can't go into the water or walk barefoot anywhere because he has fucked up feet.

Thankfully he's more than his feet, but it sucked not being able to go swim with him.

What's wrong exactly with his feet?
He got nail fungus from a gym shower before we met. Poor guy hasn't been able to swim through his 20s. And he's got a wart in his heel, and when you get warts in your heels they grow upwards and are impossible to dig out.

Every time I sleep over I watch him clean his feet up and occasionally push the fungus filled toenails off. I feel so bad because it hurts him... He's a super hygiene freak, which is why I never really asked when we first met.

So that's something you would usually ask? If they have fucked up feet?
Ya definitely because your feet are a reflection of who you are 90 percent of the time. If you don't cut your damn toenails I can't go out with you or sleep with you. That's the rule. I don't want to get scratched by toenails. Dudes can be very careless with their feet.

So you think someone's feet are a reflection of their personality?
Definitely. Hygiene is a reflection of who you are and feet are a huge part of it.

Have you dealt with foot issues before your current boyfriend?
Ya, I have. I've smelt some smelly feet; people who don't believe in socks. When I was more sexually adventurous, I hooked up with this one guy who actually scratched me with his toenail. The big one. It fucking hurt. That's when my severe hatred for unkempt feet really started.

I'm pretty good at predicting whether or not people have weird feet on my own, but I ask.

How do you tell if someone has nice or ugly feet?
Their overall appearance, their hands and their hair. Also with how they dress. People who put effort into their outfits don't skip out on anything.

Wendy, 34

Is there anything you have to ask on a first date or before a hook up?
I ask if they have any certain fetishes.

Why do you ask that?
I've been on some great dates but by the third date they tell me they want to pee on me or put me in a cage so after that happened a dozen times it was something I asked about ahead of time. I didn't want anymore surprises. It's also to see their reaction.

People said they wanted to put you in a cage and pee on you?
I've had all sorts of strange requests. It may be because I don't really judge people. The first few dates would be cool but then out of nowhere there would be random requests to do sexual things.

I never really cared but it wasn't my cup of tea. Golden showers are more common than you would think. The cage thing happened once and then there would be requests to have threesomes with me... Those requests usually started with them being like, "I'd like to try anal beads, or something like that in myself and maybe have a dude join us."

And what would you do?
Usually there would be nervous laughter, followed by me being like, "Haha funny." But then realizing they're not joking. I'd say that I wasn't into that but that I wasn't judging them. If it's something they needed to explore, it would have to be with someone else.

Jennifer, 18

Let's say you're about to hook up with someone, is there anything you have to ask them first?
Because I'm severely allergic to peanuts, before I hook up with someone I have to ask them if they've eaten anything with nuts that day.

Have you had any bad experiences with your allergies?
One time I was about to hook up with this guy who I was friends with benefits with at the time, and I asked him if he ate anything with nuts that day. He said no, so we did our thing. I went home and started having a reaction.

And then what?
I ended up in the emergency room at the hospital.

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Melted campaign signs are seen at the Orange County Republican Headquarters in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on Sunday, October 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Jonathan Drew)

A Republican Party office in Hillsborough, North Carolina, was firebombed overnight Saturday, the latest escalation of the 2016 presidential race into outright political violence. Vandals apparently tossed a bottle filled with a flammable substance into Orange County GOP headquarters, charring pro-Donald Trump signs and furniture. They also scrawled "Nazi Republicans leave town or else" and a swastika on a nearby wall in spray paint, embracing a cavalier historical analogy that has long been embraced against Republicans but especially against Trump this year.

No one was injured in the incident, which wasn't noticed until Sunday. Local police and the feds are investigating what North Carolina governor Pat McCrory has called "an attack on our democracy," the Charlotte Observer reports.

The attack came during an especially tense stretch in an often-heated campaign. Four days ago, during a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, alleged billionaire Trump alluded to a "global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities."

So far, Trump has not explicitly targeted any group in his new shtick. But there's a long history of the candidate sending coded messages to racists and bigots of all kinds––like the infamous Star of David tweet from last July, which stoked fears among some Jewish Americans that a major contender for president was willing to appeal to white nationalists for votes. And the new globalist conspiracy line is in keeping with anti-Semitic tropes over the decades.

Trump supporters who identify as part of the alt-right movement have, in the past, appropriated the Pepe the Frog meme and decorated him with swastikas. The symbol has become so prominent that Hillary Clinton felt the need to explain it on her website last month.

For his part, North Carolina state GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse told the Associated Press that this weekend's firebombing constitutes an act of "political terrorism" and that the bottle landed near couches where volunteers are known to nap after-hours.

Hillary Clinton tweeted that the attack was "horrific and unacceptable." Democrats then raised $13,000 to help rebuild the office, which was completely destroyed.

"Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office in Orange County because we are winning," Trump tweeted out in his typical belicose style.

As of Monday morning, no suspects had been apprehended in connection with the attack.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Portraits by Renata Raksha

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

It's easy to forget that legends are people too—that they wake up with stale breath and crust in the corners of their eyes, drop their iPhones and crack the screens, forget to pick up cream at the market. It's not that we don't think of them as human. It's that we just don't imagine them enduring the daily indignities of being human. We imagine them as ads in the 1950s imagined women: They never sweat or shit.

But when I called her in early September for our interview, Kim Gordon, guitarist, vocalist, and co-founder of Sonic Youth—one of the most iconic and influential noise rock bands of the past 30-plus years—was having a very mundane problem. Her hotel phone was broken.

Brnnng. Brnnng. Brnnng. The staccato buzzing of her publicist's phone tickled my ear and distracted me from the nervous flips my stomach was doing. Phone interviews are how you know God hates journalists—it's like having a long distance blind date. A click. I inhaled, smiled, and prepared to make small talk with one of the Coolest Women Alive. And then the line died. Her publicist rang me again. "Uh, so her phone broke," she said. "Hotel maintenance is coming up. Maybe it'll just be 20 minutes?"

Comforted as I was to know that Gordon doesn't have some superhuman ability to avoid the daily annoyances that swerve into our lives, there was still an ocean between us, literally: We'd scheduled the less-than-ideal phone interview because the 63-year-old artist was in Australia for a series of shows and speaking engagements about "rock, rebellion, and resilience." It might read a little glib, but it's a pretty accurate summation of her career. After forming Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore in 1981, Gordon and the band put out their first studio album, Confusion Is Sex, two years later. While Sonic Youth released a total of 16 records before it broke up in 2011, and is often heralded as the blueprint for many alt-rocks bands (with Gordon herself being tagged the "godmother of grunge"), the group always preferred to experiment with unconventional tunings and custom-made instruments than to court mainstream success.

Gordon cut a path of her own, too, writing for Artforum, curating exhibits, and showing her own artwork; debuting as a producer, at Courtney Love's request, on Hole's critically acclaimed first album, Pretty on the Inside; working on a fashion line; and making guest appearances on everything from a Gus Van Sant film to an episode of Girls. Along the way, she became a feminist icon, praised for her impact, even though she told me "sometimes I just entertainment, you know? It doesn't actually affect things in a larger picture." She bucked the stereotypes of being a "girl in a band" and, last year, subverted the tired old question she has heard too many times by titling her memoir—what else?—Girl in a Band. Since the dissolution of both Sonic Youth and her decades-long marriage to Moore, Gordon makes music with Bill Nace as Body/Head. And she recently checked off yet another first—releasing a single, "Murdered Out," as simply Kim Gordon.

But as intimidating as her résumé is, Gordon does not want you to feel that way. She sweats. She shits. She likes Rihanna's "Work." She doesn't really want to stand out, and she shrugs off even the mere suggestion that she's a legend.

"I don't wanna think that I'm influential or an icon or blah blah blah blah," she said. Her words rushed out, then stopped, and then started again, abruptly. "Ultimately, I feel most confident when I'm just working. Thinking about ideas. That's how I'm most comfortable. Or performing in a group situation." She laughed. "I feel connected to myself, but I can't actually tell you what that is. I mean, I could tell you what my astrologer says I am!"

Gordon was born in Rochester, New York, but when she was five years old, her father accepted a position at UCLA, and the family packed up their station wagon and moved to Los Angeles. An academic instead of showbiz family, they lived in a normal middle-class neighborhood, removed from the celebrity studded canyons, which meant Gordon daydreamed about the glamorous lives of musicians like Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young as much as a kid in Kansas. Her father, a sociologist who was the first to identify and name high school archetypes like jocks, freaks, preps, and theater geeks, proved the absent-minded professor stereotype—he once put her into the bath with her socks on—and her mother, who ran both a seamstress business and the household, was no nonsense and unsentimental in the way that many who lived through the Great Depression were. Their influence, along with her older brother's merciless teasing, caused Gordon to suppress her inner rebel. She became a teenager who listened to jazz and Joni Mitchell, smoked pot and painted, and only flirted with trouble.

"I feel like I can have more fun with it now. I don't care as much. It's just very freeing. I feel like everything I've done has been leading up to this in a way."—Kim Gordon

"Sometimes I think we know on some level the person we're going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information," Gordon writes in her book. That process was easy for her. Though she cringes at the cliché, she says that she knew she would be an artist since she was a child. Graduating high school just as she turned 17, she bounced from Santa Monica College to Toronto's York University. She started a band with friends as a project and realized she liked performing. She went back to LA, attended Otis Art Institute, and then moved to New York, where she met Moore, started Sonic Youth, and became a legend.

But recently, LA beckoned, and she decided to return to her roots. "I think I've always carried a bit of LA and LA aesthetics," she told me. "One of the things I like most about Los Angeles is driving around and looking at the contrasting houses—one could be a completely different aesthetic. On the other hand, it's kinda scarily existential, 'cause you don't have that pulse of the city that you feel in New York. Even if you aren't doing anything in New York, you feel like you are. 'Cause there's so much activity around you. In LA, you really have to kinda make your own energy in a way."

Gordon never needed much outside stimulus to create, though she seems to have found at least bits of it in her hometown. She certainly never took her cues from conventional sources. "Not that I'm not drawn to some conventional things, but what I'm comfortable expressing is usually something that isn't the most straight, mainstream version of it," she said, as if it were something her legions of fans didn't already know. "I have very unconventional tastes. It's just what I'm drawn to."

Her new single, "Murdered Out," is a funked-out, inspired-by-lowriders tune that features her processed vocals over frayed drums. It was inspired by LA car culture—an ode to dark tints and a black-on-black matte aesthetic that she said is like the "ultimate expression" of "purging the soul."

She laughed when I asked how she developed such unusual receptors. "When I walk around and I'm on tour and exposed to a lot of music, whether it's in a taxi or walking into a store or a restaurant, there's all this music that nobody's listening to, and it is, in a sense, noise," she said. Noise music "is almost like starting at ground zero. When I'm playing it, something about electricity that I find really calming. Being surrounded, it's like a bath of sound or something."

It will be interesting to see how Los Angeles, with its wide-open blue skies and black underbelly, will affect and inspire the other art Gordon will make. "Murdered Out" shows that she's still experimenting, and LA seems to be giving her the freedom to do so.

"I like that you don't have the sense of ambition pounding at your door. I like the idea that you can get lost here. Things are not in such a fish bowl. Maybe things can develop more eccentrically or something," she mused. "I think to some extent I feel like I can have more fun with it now. I don't care as much. It's just very freeing. I feel like everything I've done has been leading up to this in a way. It feels right, basically." Gordon's daughter Coco, a painter who just graduated from art school in Chicago, also recently relocated to LA.

Gordon would like to transition and make visual art her main focus as well, but it's difficult; too many people keep pulling her back to music and performing. There's a reason for that. "After 30 years of playing in a band, it sounds sort of stupid to say, 'I'm not a musician.' But for most of my life, I've never seen myself as one," she writes in Girl in a Band. But maybe that's exactly who she is—a musician. The girl in a band.

"I spent a good deal of my life evading labels," she told me. "Mostly I don't wanna think about who I am."

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Kellie Leitch wants to be the new Stephen Harper. Photo via CP.

"It's not racist or xenophobic—it's common sense."

Kellie Leitch, standing onstage at the Gayley Theatre in Collingwood, Ontario, just a few kilometres past the aptly-named town of Nottawa, launched her campaign this weekend on the back of a promise to "stand up for the values that make this country great."

It was impossible to miss parallels with the increasingly unhinged Trump campaign south of the border.

From Leitch's warning that the record levels of immigration fuelled by armed conflicts worldwide are a top-tier threat to the Canadian homeland, to the cry of "Canadians first!" from a campaign supporter, as she extolled the virtues of welfare support for laid-off workers in Alberta's oilsands.

But Leitch, running to helm a Conservative Party still searching for its soul, rebuked anyone drawing that comparison.

On a list of talking points that Leitch leaned on in a post-speech media scrum—sheets of paper easily legible from a nosy journalist's eyeline—several lines spell out how Leitch would respond to allegations that her proposals amount to racism.

"Isn't screening for anti-Canadian values intolerant?" the lines predict as a question.

"No. It's common sense," was the prepared response, underlined in blue pen.

"You talk about the number of immigrants coming to Canada being too many. Just admit you're anti-immigration—quote-unquote 'racist,'" reads another hypothetical question Leitch's campaign thought she might've been asked.

"I'm not anti-immigration," her prepared lines read. "I'm pro-screening. That includes screening for anti-Canadian values and face-to-face interviews with trained immigration officers."

VICE asked Leitch repeatedly to give details about what questions she is hoping to ask would-be Canadian citizens, but she refused to provide any.

Read More: The Conservative Leadership Race Is Totally Sick, but Not in the Ironic Sense

The policy, which originally popped up in a questionnaire sent by to the campaign to supporters, and the rhetoric around it, was perhaps an accident, or an afterthought. But Saturday's launch was a clear sign that Leitch—so far the most talked about and polarizing candidate in the race for Stephen Harper's successor—intends to take this policy and run with it.

Her entire career has led up to this. Leitch rocketed from being a back-bench Member of Parliament for small-town Ontario to becoming Minister of Labour and Minister for the Status of Women under Harper's administration.

Leitch was bullish in both roles. She introduced legislation to pre-emptively force rail workers back on the job before they even voted to strike ("extraordinary," one lawyer called it) and played defense when her government flatly refused to launch an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Regardless of her job performance, Leitch's hasn't endeared herself to her colleagues. Not a single current member of the Conservative caucus is backing Leitch. Many Conservative politicians, strategists, and staffers have privately and publicly expressed dismay at her campaign, which has been criticized in the press—a Globe and Mail editorial called her proposal "frightening."

But Leitch seems convinced that support for her values test will propel her to the leadership role, into Stornoway—the official residence for the leader of the opposition—and, eventually, 24 Sussex.

"The majority of Canadians, as I have said, are individuals who have said they want screening on Canadian values," Leitch said on Saturday. "So I'm going to continue to talk about it."

Thus far, she's still a ways off. Despite a large pot of money collected from Bay Street types early in her campaign, Leitch has only pulled in roughly $350,000, as of June, a ways off from the $5 million spending cap for the race. Many of her donors have already contributed the maximum allowed. And, as a crowded field gets more crowded—with the campaign announcement from potential frontrunner Lisa Raitt expected within weeks—Leitch might need to broaden her appeal.

The only other idea Leitch brought forward on Saturday was a seemingly-impossible to implement limit on how much money Ottawa can spend each year. Even that idea, mentioned midway through her 45-minute speech, was not intended to distract from her central pitch. "A cap on government spending is directly related to my discussion of Canadian values," reads Leitch's talking points.

Indeed, the term "Canadian values" was emblazoned on the podium she stood at to deliver her speech. As a slogan, it was undoubtedly meticulously chosen—and almost certainly comes from Nick Kouvalis, her campaign manager.

A brochure for his company, Campaign Research, offers focus groups that "can be used to test campaign messages, and often provide those 'language gems' that encapsulate your party's or candidate's key message." He's done it before, as the mastermind behind the tag lines that propelled the late former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, into office.

Kouvalis isn't just Leitch's campaign manager. He has a hand in virtually every key aspect of her leadership bid. Along with his services, Kouvalis' companies Campaign Research and Campaign Support specialize in market research, focus groups, opinion polling, and voter identification. Leitch's campaign runs on Track & Field, Kouvalis' proprietary voter-tracking program.

According to two long-time conservative strategists, Leitch supposedly agreed to pay Kouvalis $1 million for his work on the campaign. A caucus colleague of Leitch heard the same figure. A fourth source with knowledge of Kouvalis' business said that the figure was believable, but stressed that contingencies might be included—that the full amount would only be paid if she won the leadership, for example.

Requests sent to Kouvalis and the Leitch campaign about the $1 million figure went unanswered.

Kouvalis may well be worth the money. Canadian-born, but of Greek descent, his strategy appears to be targeted at winning over exactly the group that talking heads say it should be alienating: Immigrants.

At the Collingwood theatre, the crowd was hardly homogeneous. A variety of ethnic backgrounds, some young, some older. Leitch was introduced to the stage by Ehab Masad, a supporter and a Jordanian immigrant who trumpeted Leitch's values rhetoric to warm up the crowd.

On a conference call with campaign workers in September, volunteers implored Leitch to hold events in their various cultural communities.

Two campaign organizers walked volunteers through how they should go about signing up memberships. Both workers had been well-placed staff in the leadership campaign for Patrick Brown, the former backbench Member of Parliament who came from behind to win the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership race, thanks to a formidable amount of support in Ontario's immigrant communities.

The 17 people on the call—VICE included—were then treated to a message from Leitch herself, who was in Drummondville, Quebec "learning the language and getting to know our members." A Conservative source provided VICE the access number to the call.

"We know things are going extremely well for us," Leitch said on that call. "I'm delighted with the direction we've taken."

Leitch's paradoxical, but perhaps ingenious, strategy needs both immigrants and anti-immigration Canadians to propel her to the leadership.

The candidate spent much of September in rural Quebec, hoping to convert members to her cause.

Because of the rules of the leadership race, which awards 100 points to each of Canada's 338 ridings, to be distributed proportionally based on how the Conservative Party membership in that riding votes, ridings with fewer members, like Quebec, are strategically important.

If she can gain support in Quebec and tap into the undercurrent of nativist politics, akin to that which propelled Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee, she might just have a shot.

But Leitch's tactic isn't just to appeal to soft nationalism. She appears to be actively courting Canada's burgeoning alt-right movement.

Leitch appeared on The Rebel, the online-only commentary outlet started by Ezra Levant that is unabashedly pro-Trump, and brazenly Islamophobic. In the episode that features Leitch's interview, Levant warns that many Syrian refugees coming to Canada would pursue a "life of crime," added that "we're importing Jew-hating, America-hating radicals who like the Islamic State" and told listeners to "get ready to hear 'Allah Akbar' shouted a lot more in Canada."

"The elites and the media have had a certain reaction, they want it to go down a certain path, but the fact is that the supermajority of Canadians want to talk about this," Leitch told Levant. An excerpt from the interview, posted to Youtube, has been viewed just over 3,000 times.

Leitch told the controversial host that the reaction has not just been positive. It's encouraged others to speak up about their desire to block these "anti-Canadian values."

"I've been delighted to have, you know, women come up to me on the street and say, you know: 'Thank you, you know, I was afraid to talk about these issues. I was feeling that I was being judged, and now, I feel I have a voice,'" Leitch said. "And I think that's spectacular, because this is what Canadians want to talk about."

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Illustration by Taylor Lewis

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At dinner recently, a female friend mentioned how shocked she was to discover that our mutual gay acquaintance was a top. After all, this guy is quite effeminate—he works in fashion and is so light in his loafers that he's practically hovering above them. And yes, not only does he prefer the insertive end of anal intercourse, he's what we in the industry call a "total top," meaning that his butthole, in the crude parlance of homophobes everywhere, is a one-way street.

But why was she so shocked, exactly? Why is it that we usually imagine the swishier men among us as bottoms and reserve our conception of tops for guys who look like G.I. Joe? "It's all about stereotypes," said Dr. Andrew Reilly, a psychologist who has written several studies on tops, bottoms, and what our perception of them does to individual psychology. "And people think that if you're a stereotype in one area, then you're a stereotype in another."

In other words, we still haven't evolved enough in 2016 to separate sexual preferences from looks and personality. But there's some research to back up the idea that masculinity and effeminacy might correlate with those preferences: In particular, a 2013 study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which found that "people rely on perceptions of characteristics relevant to stereotypical male–female gender roles and heterosexual relationships to accurately infer sexual roles in same-sex relationships."

For those of us who have forgotten their college psych, that means that people can pick out tops just by scanning their faces. In the study, 23 participants (seven of whom were female) were shown online dating profile pictures of 200 gay men—100 who unambiguously self-identified as tops, 100 as bottoms, zero as versatile—and asked to identify the role they preferred based solely on their appearance. Each featured a man free of facial adornments, like glasses or beards, looking directly into the camera; their faces were standardized in size, cropped from their original background, and converted to grayscale.

Based on facial attributes alone, participants were able to pick out tops an average of 64.56 percent of the time, but bottoms only 38.82 percent of the time (overall guesses were correct an average of 51.69 percent of the time.) That means participants may have shown bias toward "heterosexually-inspired stereotypes about men," as the study conceded, in picking out tops from the crowd; when the study was released, co-author Dr. Nicholas O. Rule said the results had everything to do with biological indicators of masculinity (such as hairiness or a square jaw), not behavioral indicators. That means that just because a top looks like a top doesn't mean he can't act like Paul Lynde at a Judy Garland concert.

But a 2011 paper by Chinese and Canadian researchers Lijun Zheng, Trevor Adam Hart, and Yong Zheng found that some correlation does exist between one's preferred position and how likely they are to flame out, at least among the Chinese gay men they studied. "Sexual self-labels appear not only to distinguish sexual behavior patterns but may also suggest gender role differences among Chinese gay men," it said. That means that guys who self-identified as tops in the study also identified their own behavior as more masculine and tended more toward "gender-related interests"; bottoms self-identified as more expressive and as adhering to female gender roles. (In other words: Tops are from Mars, bottoms are from Venus.)

A separate study by the same researchers found that bottoms were more interested in faces considered to be traditionally masculine, while tops showed more interest in traditionally feminine faces.

But it shouldn't take this much research to figure out that tops want to have sex with bottoms—that's like saying carnivores enjoy eating meat. When asked why it appears feminine guys might be more inclined toward bottoming and masculine guys toward topping, Hart, the Canadian researcher, has a few theories. "One hypothesis is there are biological differences between tops and bottoms, and that's a possibility, but we don't have any evidence to support it," he says. "Guys who are feminine are being pushed into feminine roles, and we construct roles in heterosexist ways. That's as likely as an answer, and I think there is more evidence ."

So our stereotypes beget behavior that begets identity that begets behavior that begets stereotypes. It's just a spiral of topping and bottoming, like a snake eating its own tail—or, rather, like a gay dude trying to stick his own dick in his own ass.

However, some men know just what those stereotypes are, and because of the stigma attached to bottoming—a byproduct of a patriarchal society that tells us everything that is feminine is wrong—they seek physical ways to keep other people from spotting them as a bottom. In a 2011 paper, researchers Andrew Reilly, Danielle Young, and Loriena Yancura looked at "sexual position identity" (if a guy says he's a top or a bottom) along with body image and levels of internalized homophobia. "Gay men with a higher degree of internalized homophobia and who identify as bottoms are more likely to work out to get muscular, so that would negate the idea of being a bottom," Reilly said. "Once you have your muscles, you're viewed as straight, even though they have created this other stereotype: the muscular power bottom."

At the end of the day, Hart and all the other researchers I talked to said that it's nearly impossible to tell if a guy is a top or bottom just by looking at how he looks, dresses, and behaves.

Hart said that you might begin to see similarities between tops and the bottoms "if you 400 tops and 400 bottoms," he says. "But that doesn't account for individuals. There are a lot of tops that are feminine and bottoms that are masculine. But there is no data on individuals. We shouldn't exaggerate the importance of a label." Hart said if we actually tabulated the number of times guys had insertive or receptive anal sex, it would show they aren't as exclusively one position or another as they think they are.

Hey, and if you're getting close enough to a guy where it's really going to matter, you might have to figure it out the old fashioned way: Ask.

Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter.

Cleveland celebrates. Photo via CP.

An Ontario court dismissed a celebrated Canadian architect and Indigenous activist's application to ban the Cleveland Indians name and logo from being used in Ontario, just hours ahead of the team's third playoffs game against the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday night.

Douglas Cardinal, who did not appear in court as he is currently in China, launched an application on Friday to temporarily block the American baseball team from wearing their regular jerseys or displaying the logo of Chief Wahoo in any way during their playoff games against the Blue Jays this week in Toronto.

The judge, Thomas McEwan, did not immediately release the reasons for his decision.

The application for an injunction, heard Monday afternoon in Ontario's Superior Court of Justice, also named Major League Baseball, and Rogers Communications, which hosts the games and owns the channel that broadcasts them.

"Someone like Mr. Cardinal ought to be able to watch the game, like every other person in Canada, without suffering from racial discrimination," his lawyer Monique Jilesen, told the court. The use of Cleveland's name and logo constituted discrimination in the provision of a service, defining service as "professional sports entertainment in the Rogers Centre and as broadcast to a national audience," she argued, noting that the size of the audience for a Toronto-Cleveland playoffs game would give an unprecedented audience to the image.

Fans carrying or wearing their own Cleveland merchandise wouldn't be impacted by the injunction as they weren't providing a service, she clarified.

Read More: Blue Jays Bats' Go Cold

Jilesen said the team could wear their spring training jerseys, which didn't have the "offending" logo on them, instead. And Rogers could stop their on-air personalities from using the Cleveland's full team name during broadcasts and refrain from showing the logo during broadcasts and on the jumbotron during games.

Since Cardinal's lawyers weren't asking for the game to be stopped or for its broadcast to be cancelled, "there would be no loss of enjoyment for any viewers," said Jilesen, adding that "Indigenous people can watch, at a minimum with a reduced amount of discriminatory iconography."

Cardinal, described in the notice of application as a sovereign Anishnaabe elder, has also launched two human rights complaints related to the same issue—one before the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the other before Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, and the injunction would've been imposed until the end of those proceedings.

Chief Wahoo is a "racist caricature of an Indigenous person," said the notice of application. The logo and the team name constitute discrimination on the grounds of race, ancestry, colour, as well as ethnic and national origin, it argued, calling them an affront to his dignity as an Indigenous person."

In a statement to VICE News, Rogers spokesperson Aaron Lazarus said the company understood that "the Cleveland name and logo is a concern for a number of Canadians."

"The playoff series between the Jays and Cleveland is also significantly important to millions of passionate baseball fans across Canada," he said. "Punishing these fans by blocking the broadcast of the games doesn't seem like the right solution and it would be virtually impossible to broadcast the games without seeing the Cleveland team name and logo on the field, in the stands and in the stadium."

Cardinal's legal bid was the latest in a number of public protests to Cleveland's name and logo. Last week, Blue Jays radio broadcaster Jerry Horwath revealed that he has refused to use the name since a First Nations person wrote to him saying that it was deeply offensive 20 years ago.

Screenshots via Instagram

The first couple months of the fall semester set the perfect environment for ignorant post-secondary students who are living away from their parents for the first time to make bad life choices. And this weekend, some students at Queen's University homecoming have given the internet a special, precious gift: A video of a young woman slapping a police horse's ass and promptly getting kicked by the animal.

It might not be legal, but there are some ground rules. Photo by Rafal Gerszak

When I first visited a back alley harm reduction tent in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside last month, officials were keeping quiet about the whole thing. At the time, tent co-founder Sarah Blyth said a few dozen people were coming by each day—some asking for water and hand sanitizer, others looking for a safe and dry place to inject drugs.

Responding to an epidemic of opiate overdoses in the neighbourhood, a small crew of volunteers has since seen tent visits grow to over 100 a day. They've handed out clean needles, swept sharps out of the back alley, and responded to several overdoses—all without asking permission to operate.

Several weeks and a few close saves later, the City of Vancouver has finally acknowledged the tent. And so far, city, health care, and law enforcement officials have no plans to shut it down.

"This is not a sanctioned safe injection site," reads part of a City of Vancouver statement released Friday. One Vancouver Coastal Health spokesperson put it more bluntly: "It's not legal," Anna Marie D'Angelo told The Canadian Press.

Despite breaking some rules, the city has pledged to collaborate with police and "assess the risk of the unsanctioned overdose management site" from a distance.

Read More: This Back Alley Harm Reduction Tent Isn't Asking Permission to Operate

The latest back alley overdose happened late Saturday in "dark and stormy" conditions, Blyth told VICE. A volunteer injected the victim with the opiate-blocker naloxone, known by the trade name Narcan. "They had to give him three shots, which is a lot of Narcan," she said. "Thankfully he walked away from it."

With the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl showing up in 86 percent of street drugs and over 60 percent of overdose deaths across the province, the tent's volunteers say more street-level support is needed—both in Vancouver and other hard-hit communities. Blyth is planning to host a certified overdose response training this week, to teach more volunteers, some from other BC cities and towns, how to perform CPR and use naloxone.

Meanwhile, the do-it-yourself approach to the opiate crisis has gained a lot of traction both in Canada and abroad. "Someone from Boston just contacted me," tent co-founder Sarah Blyth told VICE. "They want to get a tent set up as soon as possible—they're having five to six people dying a day in Boston."

While Vancouver has always been a North American leader in harm reduction programs, it's tough to say how other cities would handle unsanctioned injection sites. Blyth is hopeful a hands-off approach will prevail. "There's been some incredible support behind us," she said. "I think people realize saving lives is a good thing, it's not a controversial thing, it's not an illegal thing."

Blyth set up a crowdfunder to cover supplies for the tent, which has been endorsed by former politicians, Centre for Disease Control employees and the parents of fentanyl overdose victims. By their own estimation, the crew have nearly raised enough money to keep things running for a full year.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Donald Trump in Bangor, Maine, on October 15. Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images

December 13, 2000: Every election is rigged if you ask the right people, but the 2000 contest was particularly ripe breeding ground for conspiracies. Al Gore concedes the contest a day after the 5–4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore put an end to a monthlong controversy over some contested ballots in Florida. With the country's highest court ruling that George W. Bush's victory in the state should stand, Gore doesn't have much of a choice, but he emphasizes in his concession speech that it was time to move on. "While I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I do accept it," he says. "For the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

In a sense, though, that election is still going on today. Gore's remarks didn't stop the left from pushing the idea that the election had been stolen—a lot of theories center on Jeb Bush, George's brother who was then the governor of Florida. To this day, you can sign Change.org petitions calling for the 2000 election to be investigated; when Gore showed up at a Clinton rally recently, the crowd broke out in a "you won!" chant.

2004: John Kerry loses the presidential election. Or does he? Just like four years earlier, some on the left advance the theory that a close contest was stolen from the Democrat. Theories about how voting machines in Ohio were rigged to give the state and its decisive electoral votes abound for a long time afterward, even showing up in Mother Jones in 2005. But Kerry himself never gives any credence to any of this; he concedes the morning after Election Day once it becomes clear he couldn't win Ohio.

2008: As the election approaches—a relative cakewalk where Barack Obama would trounce John McCain—Republicans in Ohio challenge a rule letting voters register and vote on the same day. This is part of a broad right-wing effort to make it more difficult to vote on the grounds that voter fraud is rampant—an effort, Democrats say, that looks an awful lot like an excuse to intimidate and harass minorities, the poor, and students, all voting demographics that lean Democratic.

Studies have found repeatedly that in-person voting fraud is extremely rare, but that doesn't matter. Allegations of voter fraud (often racially tinged) will be constant for the next eight years.

2012: Obama wins reelection pretty handily, but some on the right have questions about the areas in Philadelphia where Mitt Romney got zero votes. "Odd? Romney Got ZERO Votes In 59 Precincts in Philly, and 9 Precincts in Ohio" read one headline on conservative news site the Blaze. But it wasn't that odd—the 50 divisions (not precincts) in Philadelphia who went unanimously for Obama were Democratic strongholds, as were those Ohio areas. And, for his part, Romney himself carried some Utah precincts unanimously.

The notion that these results indicate something fishy persists, though, and local Philadelphia Republican Party officials took time to debunk this idea recently.

OK, time to flash forward, but you get the gist: A lot of people complain when their candidate loses, some of that complaining edges into conspiracy-theory territory, but candidates themselves don't traffic in any of this. The US has a long, pretty dang impressive history of peacefully transferring power from party to party, and a big part of that is that party leaders have always accepted election results and refused to even hint that the system screwed them over—even, as in Gore's case, when they would have had a decent case.

Then...

April 2016: Trump complains about the Republican primary rules in some states that led to Ted Cruz, his main rival, winning all of Colorado's delegates. "The system is rigged, it's crooked," Trump says on FOX News. Despite his sour grapes, Trump is actually winning and benefitted in earlier primaries from some GOP rules.

Summer 2016: On the other side of the political spectrum, Bernie Sanders supporters complain of various ways that they feel Hillary Clinton is stealing the primary. Among their most serious complaints are that a purge of the voter rolls in New York was intended to disenfranchise Sanders supporters, Arizona's disorganized primary benefitted Clinton, and that Sanders actually won California. Though later evidence would show that officials at the Democratic National Committee were pro-Clinton—and the whole process undoubtedly favors Establishment candidates like Clinton—these wilder theories seem to be just wishful thinking.

Sanders doesn't sign on to these conspiracy narratives. In early May, he says the primaries were a "rigged system" because of unelected superdelegates, but later that month he backtracks and just called some rules "dumb"—again, an example of a leader refusing to engage in his followers' wilder notions. During the Democratic convention, though some angry Sanders delegates would walk out, Sanders (and most of his supporters) remain firmly behind Clinton, dumb rules and all.

Donald Trump loves all of this:

August 1: Trump has been throwing around the word "rigged" to explain everything from Sanders's defeat to Clinton not getting charged with any crime over her private email server. But this day marks the first time he throws out the R-word when it comes to the general election. "I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest," he says in front of a crowd in Ohio, before going on FOX News to tell Sean Hannity, "I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it's going to be taken away from us."

It's worth nothing that at the time Trump's polling numbers were in a nosedive following an ugly public spat with the parents of a dead Muslim soldier.

August 2: In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump links up his criticism of the election with the mainstream Republican notion of the voter fraud epidemic. "The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development," he says, apparently referencing a recent court decision against a voter ID law. "We may have people vote ten times."

August 19: A poll finds that a majority of Trump supporters aren't very confident that their votes will be counted accurately, backing up anecdotal evidence from his rallies that Trump's fans see themselves as being in opposition to a vague but extremely powerful Establishment. That view dovetails with the us-against-the-world message Trump has been pushing since the primaries, so no surprise there.

August 23: A civil rights group asks international election monitors to watch the US contest closely in response to Trump's rhetoric about how his supporters need to make sure people in "certain areas" aren't committing fraud. When people sign up on Trump's website to be poll watchers—a routine function by campaign volunteers—they get an email that says, ominously, "We are going to do everything we are legally allowed to do to stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election," according to NBC News.

September 7: A poll of Florida voters finds that 75 percent of Trump supporters think that if he loses, it'll be because of fraud.

September 26: During the first presidential debate, Trump says that he'll "absolutely" accept the results of the election, even if he loses.

September 30: Trump changes his mind, I guess, because in an interview with the New York Times, he says, "We're going to have to see" if he would accept the results of the election.

Early October: In the wake of the scandal over the tape of Trump saying he could grab women "by the pussy" because he is famous, the GOP candidate starts throwing around accusations that the media is biased against him for supposedly focusing more on the allegations of sexual misconduct against him than on the Clinton campaign emails released by WikiLeaks.

But his "rigged system" rhetoric—repeated in tweets and at rallies—goes way past a candidate whining about the media's mistreatment:

As the election gets closer, Trump's repeated assertions that the election is rigged are notable because he's complaining about a crime before it happens, and because he's putting what would normally be a fringe view at the center of the campaign. Candidates never ever do this sort of thing, because it's seen, rightly, as a rejection of 200 years of American democracy.

October 15: Speaker of the House Paul Ryan tells Buzzfeed, "Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity," more or less directly contradicting Trump.

October 16: Trump surrogates go on television to defend their man. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich calls the election a "coup d'etat" by the news media against ordinary people, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says that "dead people generally vote for Democrats" and voter fraud is bad for Republicans because "they don't control inner cities the way Democrats do."

Also on October 16: Mike Pence, Trump's running mate, missed a meeting or something because he goes on Meet the Press and says, "We will absolutely accept the result of the election."

October 17: Kellyanne Conway, who missed the same meeting Pence did, talks to CNN and, when asked about what Trump means by "rigged," replies, "Anybody who reads the newspaper online or in print or has a remote control probably has recognized that in many ways, the fix is in for Mrs. Clinton when it comes to the mainstream media."

But wait, back up a second to October 16:

And then, back to October 17, literally just hours after Trump's own campaign manager is like, Oh, he's just talking about the unfair media:

Finally, just hours ago: The latest poll on the subject shows that four in ten voters—and 73 percent of Republicans—think that the election could be "stolen" from Trump.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.