Photo via Flickr user Örlygur Hnefill

Police are looking into multiple assaults on Muslim women that have taken place on university campuses in the days following Trump's election, the New York Times reports.

On Wednesday, a female Muslim student at San Diego State University was reportedly robbed by two men as she walked to her car. According to police, the men took her purse, backpack, and car keys after reportedly making comments about Muslims and Trump. When the student returned to the parking lot after reporting the incident, her car was gone. Police are investigating the assault as a hate crime.

That same day in Louisiana, a separate pair of men beat a Muslim woman from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a "metal object," tore off her hijab, and robbed her. According to university officials, one of the men was wearing a white hat promoting the president-elect.

The campus was also reportedly marred with pro-Trump graffiti and lines like: "Fuck your safe space." Similar graffiti has been found on Muslim spaces in universities like NYU.

"University campuses are places where men and women of all races and religions should be able to exchange ideas and learn from one another," UL at Lafayette president Joseph Savoie wrote in an email to students. "We grow as human beings by listening to others who have different backgrounds and experiences."

Watch: The Movement That's Fueling Donald Trump's White Nationalist Supporters

The East Side Gallery, a series of murals painted on an old section of the Berlin Wall. Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Probably a lot of us have some moment of election hubris replaying in our minds right now. The thing I wish I hadn't said came out on Tuesday night at about 11 PM Central European Time. I was in a bar in Berlin and telling two British people how it will be interesting to see if all these European countries who have elected conservative governments in recent years start viewing America as the more progressive place, given that we were on track for 12 years of Democratic presidents. I was wrong—I wasn't the only wrong one, but I was way, way wrong.

My girlfriend and I came to Berlin on a two-month working vacation for the same reason most young Americans come here. It 's cheap, it's pleasant, and we know people who have moved here from their respective countries to take advantage of that cheapness and pleasantness. When these people have asked me about Trump's appeal, as the token American, I've tried to explain about white resentment, the decline of good jobs for the working class, our lackluster Democratic candidate, and the international rise of populist rage.

I knew why some Americans wanted Donald Trump, and I could articulate those reasons pretty well. But I couldn't feel what those people felt. It 's like how people can explain all the reasons they love football or the Kardashians, and I believe they mean it, but I can't imagine myself ever even liking those things. Maybe a better way to put it is that some people see a man get shot with a gun and think that we should try to get rid of guns, and some people see a man get shot with a gun and think they'd better get two guns.

My British friends warned me about what could happen. They had seen the same polls I had, but they also remembered the feeling of waking up twice in the last year to horror, first with the Labour Party 's parliamentary defeat and again with Brexit. I knew that the experts had been wrong about everything this election cycle and that the Warriors blew a 3–1 lead in the NBA finals, but I also thought that every smart and not-so-smart person saying Hillary Clinton would be America 's first female president was reason enough to believe it.

We left the bar feeling confident at around 2 AM. We got home and brushed our teeth and lay in bed, and though we 'd decided there was no point in staying up—it 's not like our watching election results would affect them—we checked Twitter anyway. Trump was... not losing. Then he was winning. Then he had won.

I watched all that unfold over the next five hours, franticly refreshing my timeline, fluctuating somewhere between panic and intense disappointment. Turning on the lights or getting out of bed never occurred to me. Being six hours away from the US, I felt especially powerless and disconnected from what was going on. I wasn't a huge Clinton fan—I didn't vote for her in the '08 or '16 primaries—but I never seriously considered not voting for her in the general election. I saw her as basically a continuation of Obama, and hoped to wake up today with America facing the same problems we faced yesterday, as opposed to all of those problems plus a yet-to-be-determined set of potentially catastrophic what-ifs.

It's freezing and gray right now, but Berlin is a beautiful city—and so much less stressful than New York. There are parks and the sidewalks are wide and no one honks or seems to work too much. The horror of World War II, seven decades after it ended, is always in the back of my mind, made all the more incomprehensible by how pleasantly livable it feels now. (As the expatriate author German W.G. Sebald put it, "No serious person thinks of anything else.") I think about if something similar could happen in America, and I think about if 70 years later America could be pleasant and beautiful again. Of course Trump hasn't done anything yet that would make me feel like I need to permanently leave America, and I hope he never does.

But, well—I've been to rural and exurban parts of America and gotten those "you're not from around here" looks. I've felt how hostile that dividing line between Trump's America and mine can be. Even with a language barrier, Berlin feels more like home than most of non-urban America does. Here I see stickers reading " Nazi Trumps Fuck Off"; in Southern California, I see Confederate flags. A few days ago, I felt confident explaining American culture. Now when people ask me about the election, about my country, I just tell them, "I don't know." It's become my answer to everything.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

A man in a "White Lives Matter" T-shirt at the American embassy in London on November 9, where people were gathering to in protest and counter-protest over Donald Trump's election. Photo by Jay Shaw Baker/NurPhoto via Getty Images

A few days after the British people voted to leave the European Union, I went to a Polish social club in south London to find out what one of the UK's largest immigrant populations thought about Brexit. There was uncertainty and some fear.It was like the country had changed overnight, turned darker. "I believe Britain might be a racist place now," Michael, who had been in the country for 12 years, told me. "I have Polish friends who have children who were born here. They've grown up here, and now they are being told at school that it's not their country. Anyone would find that difficult."

Everyone asked me a variation of this one question: "If you were living in Poland, and had been there for ten years, would you like to be told to go back to your country?" And immigrants were told this, in so many words, many times. At the end of September, Britain's highest-ranking policeman said that there had been a "horrible spike" in hate crime following the Brexit vote.

Something similar is now happening in the US. On Wednesday, a British friend who teaches at a high school in Texas got in touch: How, she said, was she going to get up in front of mostly non-white children and explain the election of a man who has called Mexicans "rapists," who has spoken openly about banning Muslims from entering America, referred to refugees as terrorists, and ridden a wave of white nationalist anger all the way to the White House?

On this side of the Atlantic, we have long cherished our "special relationship" with the United States. Ever since American soldiers made sure happy young Brits didn't have to "grow up speaking German," Britain has followed Uncle Sam around the world, eagerly carrying his bags of Bibles, trade manuals, and drones while he wages war from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Britain's unresolved longing for its lost empire is so strong and its need to be a big international player so deep that London's foreign policy is pretty much dictated by Washington.

As close as the countries are, it's easy to make easy comparisons between Brexit and Trump. The Republican candidate has gone on and on about this link, and even had Leave leader Nigel Farage show up at some of his rallies. In both cases, the liberal types in big cities said that it couldn't happen—Remain would win out, Hillary Clinton would be the next president—only to be proven disastrously wrong by a mostly monochromatic coalition of voters bitterly unhappy with the way things are.

This shared predicament has more to do with globalization and its discontents than our shared language and love of the Beatles. In both the US and the UK, people have seen their jobs go or their salaries stagnate; they have begun to feel—with different levels of desperation—as though their livelihoods are not secure and the Political Establishment has not given them a convincing enough sense that this will be made better.

In short, it's not like there weren't some perfectly convincing reasons for voting for Trump, or to leave the European Union, and it's not as if either Clinton or the Remain campaign offered anything other than a relatively uninspiring business as usual vision peddled by the same old people. But to simply sing a song of the dispossessed working man is to ignore a crucial element of both campaigns. Bernie Sanders spoke truthfully to these problems but did so in a way that was not full of hatred for anyone who isn't white and straight.

White Americans and white Brits have been stirred up by rhetoric that normalized racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and pushed, again and again, the idea that their nations were exceptional places. The success of the Brexit and Trump campaigns was cultural as well as economic, though the two are linked. In harder economic times, the racism and hostility that can be found in white populations that consider themselves to be more American or more British than non-white citizens can be exploited to devastating effect. They can be told that political correctness is the great evil of our age, and they can believe it because, hey, things aren't so great, and they want to say whatever the fuck they want, and who cares if people are deeply, truly offended and upset by it? Who cares that this kind of language leads to serious violence?

This feeling was more a part of mainstream politics than Clinton supporters or the Remain campaign wanted to admit. But the "whitelash" that followed Brexit is real. Our post-Brexit government has already floated the idea of deporting foreign doctors, of checking the teeth of the small number of refugees being allowed into this country to make sure that they are not "overage," of establishing, in a quite sinister way, who is truly British. Theresa May, the prime minister, even has her own version of Trump's border wall—a suitably pathetic British number built in Calais, France.

This white fury has been fueled, of course, by a media that has either stoked the fires of fear and violence, or obediently regurgitated the platitudes of the ruling elite. In an eerily prescient 2010 afterword to his critique of media narratives, Hello Everybody!, the Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk wrote that unless the press stopped reporting what people "like to hear... another ignorant, gung-ho populist will win the elections, plunging the US—and the democratic West with it—into another disastrous military adventure." Well, here we are.

"Defenceless under the night", the English poet W.H. Auden wrote at the beginning of the Second World War, "our world in stupor lies." This is where we are. Our systems are failing us or being eroded. The politicians who are taking power take our insecurities and enflame them, turning people against one another. This is happening everywhere, not just the US and the UK—as everyone has noted, nationalist movements have been on the rise throughout Europe for years. Violence and division are in the air.

But that is not all that is in the air. Auden's poem continues:

Yet, dotted everywhere
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Now, then, is the time we look to one another. It's all we can do.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

This guy is going to be the president. Photo by Mark Lyons/Getty Images

Like nearly all Republicans, President-Elect Donald Trump has no interest in fighting climate change. He has floated the idea of abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency; a fellow climate change denier is running his EPA transition team. Trump has suggested that an actual fracker—oil and gas kingpin Harold Hamm—will be in his cabinet. He has vowed to withdraw the US from the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement. And at some point in his first 100 days, he plans to pull funding for anything related to climate change.

For climate activist and author Bill McKibben, the Trump administration looks like it will be, at best, "a completely wasted four years, on an Earth where we do not have any presidential terms to waste." But since the issue is "driven by physics, more than politics in the end," activism can't slow down, McKibben told me.

Even if the new president were Looten Plunder, arch nemesis of Captain Planet, environmentalists would be pushing him to enact reforms, even if he just cackled maniacally in their faces. McKibben said even the "slow incrementalism" of a Hillary Clinton administration would have been an obstacle, and the job of activists would have been to "push her to do much more, and fast." By contrast, Trump's policy proposals give climate activists essentially nothing to work with.

So if Trump simply refuses to even acknowledge that the world is getting hotter because of human activity, what will the next four years of environmentalist politics look like?

According to Tom Steyer, the Silicon Valley billionaire hedge fund manager and environmentalist noted for spending more money than any other donor this election, that's the question everyone will be asking this month in Marrakech, Morocco. That's where Paris Agreement signatory countries are scheduled to carry on negotiating new ways to combat climate change this month during their first international meeting. But Steyer is already pessimistic. "I have no idea how you proceed when the most powerful nation in the has decided they don't believe in science," he told me.

Steyer's organization, NextGen Climate, focused on get-out-the-vote efforts and preaching environmentalism during the campaign. His message, he feels, worked on voters—but maybe only voters in his own backyard. California as a whole, along with several towns, passed some environmentalist initiatives, including taxes on plastic bags. But sadly for Steyer, the country as a whole was not energized around climate issues.

"This was a political failure," Steyer told me. "No question about it."

His side's bruising defeat has left him with no choice than to start from square one: "Get the information. Think it through. Come up with a plan. And then execute it. And that's what we're in the process of doing," he told me.

Steyer waved away pessimism about the environment on the whole, however. "The technology is already winning, and it's only gonna win by more going forth," he said.

On fine-grained questions of energy policy, Trump—as he is on a lot of issues—is pretty vague. At a Pennsylvania rally in August, Trump said he hates wind power because it kills birds and said he loves solar but dismissed it as too expensive.

What Trump really loves is coal, which is the single biggest polluter in the US, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But Trump—lest we ever forget for a second—thinks of himself as a dealmaker, and while he expressed doubts about solar power's return on investment in his Pennsylvania speech, solar generating stations become a better and better bargain every day. "The price of solar panels has fallen 80 percent in the last eight years," McKibben said, "so it's a very different equation than it has been in the past." He added that the next president will be the "first president to take office in a world where renewable energy is cheap."

Steyer was even more optimistic. "It's not a question of whether we win. We're gonna win," he said. "The question is how much damage is gonna be done beforehand."

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Photo courtesy of VICELAND

As part of comedy team lets GOtoCLASS, 31-year-old Los Angeles resident Erik Hoffstad pumps out YouTube sketches skewering topics ranging from skeevy prank shows to internet trolls. Before that, though, he became internet-famous through a series of faux-instructional videos in which he smoked salvia and attempted—or, more accurately, failed—to do daily tasks like gardening and driving a car while on the drug.

Hoffstad appeared on Wednesday's episode of Hamilton's Pharmacoepia to discuss his experiences with salvia, and I spoke with him on the phone earlier this week to talk about how he got into making funny videos on the internet, what his parents think about his salvia-related notoriety, and what advice he has for people looking to take the drug for the first time. Just make sure you don't smoke any salvia before reading this—save it for after.

VICE: How did you get into working in the medium of video?
Erik Hoffstad: My high school had a really good media program, and the teacher let us have our way with the equipment. Eventually, everybody started downloading editing software to make projects on their own, and a good number of kids who came out of that media program probably still do that to this day. The first video I ever made was a recut trailer for The Horse Whisperer where I made it look like a horror movie.

I've enjoyed using hallucinogens over the years, but salvia has always scared me—to the point where I've never touched it. Were you apprehensive the first time you smoked it?
If I'd known what it did, I don't think I would've touched it either. I had no level of apprehension whatsoever, though—I had nothing to be apprehensive of, you know? I smoke weed, I drink beer, so I'll take a new thing. My friends brought it over, and when they said they bought it at a gas station, I was like, "OK, this can't be that bad, right?" And they were telling me, "Oh, you've got to try it, it's really crazy." I smoked it, they were looking at me waiting for something to happen, and I was like, "Oh Christ, what did I just do?" That's when the apprehension might have started. Salvia does kind of the same thing every time you smoke it—you don't build a tolerance. Every time I smoke it, it knocks me out and turns me into a little baby.

Is salvia your favorite drug?
Far from it. I don't feel the need to go on vision quests on a regular basis. I'll take a joint any day.

Tell me about the decision to make YouTube videos about smoking salvia.
Me and my friend Chris Lader have our YouTube channel let'sGOtoCLASS, but before that we'd get together on random weekends and shoot funny sketches. YouTube was just beginning at that time, and there were plenty of people who were carving out their niche. We had just gotten out of film school and saw that we could put our stupid videos up somewhere. Our the first one was called "Billy's Guitar Lesson," and it did pretty well, so we were like, "Let's keep doing this." The salvia sketches are the channel's heavy hitters.

How'd you come up with the conceit behind the salvia videos?
The effect it has on you makes you fairly useless. I wasn't the first one to put up salvia videos on YouTube—there were dozens up before I'd even thought of doing a video—but they were all the same thing. They'd smoke it and they'd flop over on their side and ramble. It's endearing—you could be the most racist asshole in the world, but when you smoke salvia you turn into an adorable child. "David After Dentist" is a very similar thing—this little kid who's zonked out on pain meds and saying ludicrous stuff. A lot of funny salvia trips are usually when they zone out and say something that makes no sense. People really love that shit.

Was there ever a concern that you were being too lighthearted about such an unpredictable drug?
No, there wasn't much concern. The fact that it was something that you could go out and buy in a store took the worry out of it. Anything in the wrong hands can be dangerous—alcohol, pot brownies. You shouldn't do too much of something.

When did you first notice that the videos were taking off?
I put the first one up on the Something Awful forums and that gave it a push because a big group of people were sharing it. It was very strange—I'd log on and all of a sudden it would have 100,000 views. I was like, "Jesus Christ, this is awesome."

Did you receive any negative attention because of the video?
Yeah—KTLA and Fox 5 would do investigations about, "Has the salvia craze gone too far?" and they'd have me smoking out of a bong in my car. I didn't drive, though—I didn't even have my car keys.

What did your family think?
They think it's funny now, but they didn't think it was funny at the time. They thought it was terrible, and I'm sure that if I have kids one day, they're going to do something stupid on the internet and I'm going to have to feel that burn. I got interviewed by the New York Times about salvia, and there was this picture of me in a fucking sunhat with a bong in my hand smoking salvia in the article. My dad saw it and was like, "What is this?" I woke up at noon that day and had a bunch of missed calls from him, so I called him back and was like, "Dad, what happened—is everyone OK?" He was like, "Why the fuck are you smoking a bong in the New York Times, Erik?" I was like, "Oh, listen, that's fake."

Did he believe you?
No, but he accepted it anyway. My mom was like, "Listen, thanks for telling us it's fake—we're going to choose to believe that." Over time, though, they've been more inquisitive. At one point, my mom asked me what the high was like, and I explained it to her. They're not closed-minded whatsoever—they're just worried that if I go get a job and my name is googled, there's going to be a picture of me smoking a bong. They're not as worried about what I'm doing to my body as they are about what I'm doing to my career.

Have the salvia videos negatively affected your career?
No, not at all. When I filmed the videos, I was working in the art department on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so I emailed them a link to one of the salvia videos. They were like, "Hey Erik, we saw the salvia video—are you OK man? Are you going to hurt yourself?" I was like, "No, no, it's funny," and they were like, "Oh, OK." That was the extent of the videos affecting my career.

What were the positives that you experienced when it came to filming the videos and smoking salvia in general?
I'm glad I experienced it. Initially, when Hamilton was interviewing me, I was like, "It's terrible, it leaves you sweaty, and there's nothing fun about it." But the more I thought about it—even before doing it with him—I was like, "You know, it's really wasn't that bad." It's actually kind of relaxing—it's interesting to put your mind into that place. You can have a hallucinatory journey in the course of five minutes, and it's interesting that we can make our brains do that. If we were allowed to study it further, we'd be able to do some interesting stuff with it beyond getting people high. Classifying it as a dangerous drug is the greatest detriment you can possibly do to something like salvia.

What advice would you give to someone who's about to smoke salvia for the first time?
My advice would be, "How much thought have you put into this?" One of my friends tried it out for the first time, and within two minutes she stood up and face-planted into the wall. It affects everyone differently, and I can't recommend it to anyone unless they're aware of what their limits are. I'm surprised it didn't make me freak out, but I think that's because I drink a ton of beers before I smoke it. If somebody came to me right now and was like, "I'm smoking salvia right now, what can I do to make it good?" I'd tell them to go outside, drink two beers, smoke just a tiny bit, and then when that tiny bit doesn't work, smoke a lot of it. When that works, you'll see why you never want to do it again.

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You can catch Hamilton's Pharmacoepia on VICELAND. Find out how to watch here.

Trump photo via Wikimedia Commons

On Tuesday evening, Greisa Martinez sat huddled with 40 friends around a TV to cheer Hillary Clinton's victory. But that night, Martinez—a 28-year-old Mexican immigrant who moved to the United States at age seven—was shattered by Donald Trump's win in the presidential race.

Martinez braced for the worst: Trump, who vowed to "immediately terminate" the deportation relief President Obama granted to 800,000 young people who came to the US as children, could strip her work permit and possibly even deport her.

"I am concerned, I am scared," Martinez told me. "The impact of this will be immense."

Ending deportation relief is just the tip of the iceberg: Trump shaped his campaign with ideas like building a border wall, banning Muslims from the country, and kicking out all 11 million undocumented residents with a deportation force, to name a few. But now that he's president-elect of the nation built by immigrants, what does he actually have the power to do? We looked at how a Trump administration—backed by a Republican Congress—is capable of changing immigration in America.

Ending DACA

One of the likeliest things that Trump can and will do is to end Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which gave deportation relief and work permits to undocumented youth who arrived in the country under age 16, went to school, and complied with the laws.

"Trump does have the power to reverse this on his own, but one unanswered question is if he will then terminate work permits people already received through Obama's executive action or say they can't get new ones," Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell, told me.

The repeal could put recipients like Martinez at risk because they registered with the federal government to receive benefits, and will once again be vulnerable for deportation.

"The impact would be great—over 700,000 people have received work permits and temporary relief from deportation and now all of their information in database, so it's very easy for agents to find them," Yale-Loehr told me. Even still, he said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "can't pick up everyone at once and Trump has said deporting criminal aliens is the top priority."

Increasing Deportations and Detention

Even though Obama has deported more people than any other president, Trump suggested taking it even further, at one point promising to round up all 11 million undocumented individuals with a deportation force. More recently, Trump backed off the impossible sweep and said he'd instead deport about 5 million, targeting immigrants with criminal records and individuals who have overstayed their visas. He added that "anyone who has entered the US illegally is subject to deportation" and promised to triple the ICE force.

"He certainly pivoted to talk about a more realistic strategy later in the campaign," William Stock, President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. "He's talked about targeting the enforcement to bad dudes right away. He alleges that the government knows where these folks are but my experience is that that's not the case—if the government knew where they were, they'd deport them."

Stock pointed out that the president has power to direct enforcement priorities, but in order to expand ICE, he must request approval from Congress through the appropriations process. "Republican-controlled Congresses haven't been extremely amenable to expanding the size of the federal government, but are more inclined to with law enforcement and immigration," Stock told me.

But Yale-Loehr said the conservative Congress would almost definitely approve requested funds for ICE.

"I think they certainly want to see more criminal aliens deported, so they'll say yes," he told me.

Yale-Loehr said Trump would also likely get Congress' support to further expand immigrant detention—which is already at a record high and includes a family detention system that a federal judge deemed illegal.

Building the Border Wall

Building a wall is perhaps one of the most famous promises of the Trump campaign. Since summer 2015, when he announced his candidacy, he's boasted that he would construct a 55-foot high concrete wall along the Mexican border and "have Mexico pay for that wall."

If he can't make Mexico's government pay for the wall, Trump has said he'd seize remittances sent from the US to Mexico. Stock told me Trump may try to justify that action through the Patriot Act of 2001, which allows the president to block money sent to people believed to be terrorists.

"That could be found unconstitutional if he is sued—the court would have to decide whether he was acting within or outside of the powers Congress granted him," Stock said, explaining that the remittance threat may just serve to pressure Mexico's government to pay. "But even if government of Mexico remits money to the US he can't without the approval of Congress use it to build a wall."

But Stock said he doubted Congress would approve a wall.

"There are treaty issues involved in building a wall, and there are parts of the border where it makes no sense to build a wall because there are mountains you cant climb anyway, and there are parts of the border that belong to Native American nations where Congress cant build a wall without approval of the tribes," Stock told me. "There certainly are a lot of thoughtful politicians on both sides of the aisle who think a big concrete wall is a big waste of money."

Stock called the wall a "symbolic gesture" and said Trump would more likely work with Congress to expand the current physical barrier, as well as to expand Border Patrol. Yale-Loehr also predicted Congress would increase funds to more border security.

Ending Birthright Citizenship

Even though the 14th Amendment blatantly states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens," Trump told NBC's Meet the Press last summer that he would deny citizenship to the babies of undocumented individuals.

"They've got to go," he said. "What they're doing: They're having a baby. And then all of a sudden nobody knows—the baby's here."

"He's come up with a legal theory that the 14th amendment doesn't mean what 150 years of legal scholarship shows it means, so he says we'll test it in court," Stock said.

Trump might tell the US State Department to stop issuing passports to children of the undocumented, Stock envisioned. Then those children could sue—and put Trump back in his place.

Blocking Refugees

As the world faces its largest refugee crisis in recent history, Trump vowed Sunday to suspend the Syrian refugee program, and claimed he would not allow refugees from any country to be resettled in communities that did not want them.

"Here in Minnesota, you've seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval," Trump said on one of his final campaign stops. "How stupid are our leaders to allow this to happen?"

As president, Trump will have the total power to block refugee resettlement, according to Michelle Mittelstadt, Migration Policy Institute's Director of Communications and Public Affairs.

"The president sets the annual allocation on refugee admissions and within that number which people from which region," Mittelstadt told me. "Trump has expressed serious opposition to Syrian refugee resettlement and could stop it."

Decreasing Legal Immigration and Denying Muslims Entrance

In his crusade to protect American workers, our real estate mogul-turned-president has pledged to reduce legal immigration substantially, though he hasn't specified by exactly how much. But any reduction would require Congressional approval, Mittelstadt noted—and the results are difficult to predict.

"Anybody who tells you how immigration debates are going to play out in Congress either has a crystal ball or is a fool, because immigration is one of most complex issues out there," Mittelstadt challenged. "While having a unified Congress would lend itself toward greater agreement on immigration, immigration is not just a party issue but also an idealogical one and party debates have exposed significant differences within the Republican party."

Currently, Yale-Loehr told me, about 1 million individuals are allowed to legally immigrate to the US each year—a number that Congress may hesitate to decrease, because even conservatives see economic benefits in legal migration.

But Trump could indeed stop individuals from certain countries from stepping onto US soil, whether as visitors or as immigrants, Yale-Loehr said. According to Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the president can act without Congress to block individuals or groups of individuals from entry.

"He could suspend visas on his own, because this provision gives the president power to prevent people who are detrimental to national security from entry," Yale-Loehr explained.

Yale-Loehr stressed that it's "too early to tell" exactly what moves Trump will make, but it's likely that "overall, our immigration policy will be more nativist, protecting American workers rather than focusing on how we fit with the global economy."

Regardless of what Trump does, Greisa Martinez told me she and her fellow DACA recipients won't stop pushing for reforms.

"We'll fight for our people to remain part of the framework of our country," said Martinez. "We're not declaring defeat yet."

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It would be an understatement to say a lot was happening at 2 AM yesterday morning. Donald Trump had just been declared president-elect of the United States, markets were crashing around the world, millions of Americans were crying, millions were cheering.

And in New York, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline was flooded with calls.

"As the evening wore on, we saw a doubling of calls," John Draper, the Lifeline's director, told me. "We had about a 140 percent increase over normal number of calls. At 1 AM alone, 166 people called in, which is something we haven't typically seen."

Draper told me the only other time he's seen that kind of call volume was in the wake of Robin Williams' suicide, when there was lots of media attention promoting the Lifeline number. "What was different about the election," he said, "is that to my knowledge there was not a lot of promoting of the Lifeline number—there was a lot of active seeking out of the number online."

The Lifeline wasn't the only crisis hotline experiencing such an unprecedented influx as the results rolled in. The Crisis Text Line, which allows anyone to connect immediately over text with a trained crisis counselor, recorded double the number of normal incoming texts in the 24 hours surrounding election night.

"The words 'election' and 'scared' are the top two things being mentioned by texters," Liz Eddy, the Crisis Text Line's director of communications, told me.

"I worked at during the Boston Marathon bombings, and even that didn't affect people in the same way." — Danielle Cohn

Individual therapists also noted an unprecedented amount of panic and anxiety over the election. Danielle Cohn, a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at American University, has worked in the outpatient practice of a DC-based mental health clinic for three years and told me she's never had any world event come up as much with clients as with this election.

"I worked at McLean during the Boston Marathon bombings, and even that didn't affect people in the same way," she told me. "This election is much more personally triggering for people."

There are many reasons why Donald Trump's election to the White House would be triggering for the millions of Americans who have been traumatized, brutalized, and marginalized based on the color of their skin, their country of origin, the religion they practice, their gender, or their sexual orientation. People of color, who have spent much of 2016 watching systematic violence and killing by police officers and civilians, may reasonably fear that Trump's America will include threats to their life. Sexual assault survivors must be reminded every day that their country can more easily forgive a man with over a dozen assault allegations against him than they can a woman who mismanaged her email server. And LGBTQ Americans will have to live under a vice president who supports "conversion therapy." (Eddy told me "the most common association with 'scared' was 'LGBTQ.'")

"People are afraid of Trump's beliefs and the policies he might enact based on them," Cohn told me. "This is true with sexual trauma in particular. What he has said and done to women over the years affects what people are working through as it pertains to rape and sexual assault. His election confirms to many people that if they do speak out about their assault, people may not believe them."

Watch: Living Through Gay Conversion Therapy

And it's not just theoretical: Concrete examples of violence and bigotry have permeated the election, and Election Day itself. With election day falling on the 78th anniversary of the Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) attacks on Jews in Germany, the words "Sieg Heil 2016," "Trump," and a Nazi swastika were spray-painted onto a glass storefront in Philadelphia. "Black Lives Don't Matter, and Neither Does Your Vote" was graffitied near Durham, North Carolina. A Trump supporter beat, robbed, and ripped the hijab off a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana. At a Walmart, also in Louisiana, a woman says another woman pulled off her hijab and threatened to hang her with it. A male student reportedly grabbed a girl's breast at school and told her it was "his right." "Fuck Niggers" and "Make America Great Again" were scrawled in a bathroom stall in a Minnesota high school.

Both the National Suicide Prevention's Lifeline and the Crisis Text Hotline are specifically set up to handle unexpected influxes of calls, as in the wake of events like 9/11 and mass shootings. So even with double the call volume, they told me they were prepared to listen and talk to everyone. Many crisis centers have offered the same advice to the general public about what to do if Trump's election has been triggering: "Limit your interaction with people and things that might aggravate your stress right now," Frances Gonzales, National Suicide Prevention Hotline's director of communications, told me.

"If your parents voted for the other party, maybe avoid talking politics with your parents for a few days," Eddy added. "Over 5 percent of texters yesterday mentioned anxiety about family disagreements over the election."

Already, Trump's election has proved to many vulnerable populations that the country is hostile to them and indifferent to the perpetuation of their traumas. That what little protection they had painstakingly constructed over the years could be reversed in the course of a night. No wonder calls were spiking.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, contact the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Follow Elizabeth Nicholas on Twitter.

Xenophobia wins votes. John Locher/Associated Press

A lot of Canadians woke up in mourning Wednesday, with the knowledge that the United States elected Donald Trump, a bigoted, misogynistic demagogue with literally zero governing experience, to lead the free world.

Trump's support largely came from white people, and, though I wish we could blame the old or uneducated, it crossed all demographics.

CNN commentator Van Jones poignantly described the result as a "whitelash"—a response by white voters threatened by progress, most notably the election of President Barack Obama, the country's first African American leader.

Still, no one predicted this outcome.

In light of it, much has been made of Americans looking to flee north. On cue, Canadians used obnoxious hashtags to express how grateful they are to live in a country that's so inclusive.

But are we really immune from having our own Trump-style whitelash?

When I got to work, one of the first emails waiting for me (subject line: Progress) went like this:

"The good, God fearing people of the great nation of America have chosen. Maybe you should look in the mirror and realize how ignorant the propaganda people like you helped nurture and spread against President Trump." It suggested "Satanists" like me beg for the lord's forgiveness.

"Hopefully Canada will find its own Mr. Trump and follow America's lead."

Easy enough to brush off as the ramblings of an alt-right troll. Less easy, though, to dismiss Conservative leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch, who expressed glee that Americans "threw out the elites" by electing Trump.

"It's an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada," she said in a fundraising email Wednesday.

Read more: I Look to America and All I See Is the End

Leitch, who is leading the Conservative race according to a new poll, previously stated she wants immigrants to be screened for "Canadian values" such as "intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour." (The irony is painful.)

She repeated that message in the email, vowing to ensure that "every visitor, immigrant, and refugee will be screened."

As many have pointed out, immigrants are already screened before entering Canada, which makes Leitch's proposed policy redundant. But, like the "barbaric cultural practices hotline" before it, it also serves as a dog-whistle for xenophobes who straight up don't want more foreigners coming here; similar rhetoric was used to fuel the UK's disastrous Brexit movement. While less extreme and more cleverly veiled than Trump's proposed wall along the Mexico border or Muslim ban, it's in the same wheelhouse.

Kellie Leitch. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

To be fair, other prominent Conservatives have said they don't share Leitch's views. But there's no question that populist ideology could take hold here. We saw it with the mayoral election of homophobe and all around buffoon Rob Ford in Toronto—a city that hosts one of the largest gay Pride parades in the world.

Ford, a millionaire by birth, appealed to Toronto suburbanites by promising to "Stop the gravy train"—a slogan that was actually echoed by Trump—and stand up for the little guy. Despite the fact that his claims about cutting $1 billion in spending were repeatedly debunked—not to mention the whole crack smoking scandal—Ford remained astonishingly popular in his 2014 re-election bid prior to dropping out because he had cancer.

Frank Cunningham, University of Toronto emeritus professor of philosophy and political science, has examined the role of populism in Ford's election. He told VICE when it comes to comparing the political climates of Canada and the US, we're a more "muted" version of them.

Trump pandered to working class people for whom "the American dream has never panned out," Cunningham said. "They have a legitimate grievance... They find themselves unemployed, working part-time, plunging wages, and all the rest of it."

The nightmare is just beginning. Masatoshi Okauchi/REX/Shutterstock

You'll find the same problems here. Youth unemployment and precarious work is exceedingly common. Alberta has been devastated by the crash of the oil boom. Residents of Vancouver and Toronto are being priced out of the housing market, with the blame being pinned on foreign buyers.

"There is already a long tradition of populism in the West, with a right-wing version especially in Alberta," Cunningham said.

When Canadians elected Justin Trudeau last fall, they were clearly looking for a change from the decade-long Stephen Harper regime. (Though Harper lost the election decisively, it's noteworthy that he made brief gains during the campaign when he targeted Muslim women with the idea of a niqab ban.)

While Trudeau's approval ratings are still high—at around 55 percent according to a September poll—he's starting to break promises. Take the Kinder Morgan pipeline in BC for example; greenlighting it would put him at odds with Indigenous communities and environmentalists.

"Down the road, suppose the trajectory starts turning against Trudeau and the Liberals," Cunningham said. "That'll be open ground for a resurgent Conservative party, perhaps employing Trump-type rhetoric."

Still, Cunningham doesn't believe the vitriolic racism and sexism that exists in the States could flourish to such extremes here.

Let's hope he's right. But, as we learned the hard way from our American neighbours, we shouldn't count on it.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

As if people need anything else to be fearful of, HBO dropped its creepy-ass trailer for Beware the Slenderman Thursday, a documentary that focuses on the true crime story of the fake online boogyman and the trial of young girls who tried to kill for him.

Back in 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin attempted to murder a fellow classmate by coaxing the third girl into the woods and brutally stabbing her 19 times. The victim somehow survived, and the girls were arrested.

When interrogated by police, the tweens said that the murder was a sacrifice to Slenderman—a tall, faceless, and fully fictional character who was originally created during a creepy Photoshop contest on the site Something Awful.

The movie premiered at South by Southwest earlier this year and will air on HBO January 23, and it looks both sad and terrifying. Give the trailer a watch above.

Watch: A Conclusive List of the Top Five Scariest Horror Comics

Really makes you think. Images via Twitter, 'She's All That'

The 1999 film She's All That was many things. It was the peak of Y2K's Jimmy Stewart, Freddie Prinze Jr.'s career. It was the crest of the wave of 90s teen movies that taught a teenage me that there was a magic party waiting for me somewhere over my adolescent horizons that I'm still hoping to attend. It was the launching point for SixPence None The Richer's "Kiss Me." It was an adaption of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, which is some dinner party trivia that goes down surprisingly smooth. But more than all of these things, She's All That, is a hauntingly accurate portrayal of why liberals fail and why Justin Trudeau is going to break all our damn hearts.

Image via 'Daily VICE'

A short drive into Buffalo from the Peace Bridge, Pam Bartlett and her friend Terry were eating omelettes and talking Donald Trump the day after the election. Both voted for Hillary Clinton and were nursing the stinging loss.

Bartlett halfheartedly pondered migrating to Canada to get away. "It's basically right there," she said, pointing in a random direction. But after a couple minutes, reality set in and she declared she's staying put—and will tell other disheartened voters to do the same.

"Trump made a gracious speech when he won, about uniting everyone, and I'm going to remain optimistic that he's going to reign it in," she said. She turned to her friend, Terry, and asked her if they should give him a chance. "Mhm," she nodded.

Over the last year, countless Americans have threatened to pack up and move to Canada should Trump win the election. Immigration lawyers across the country say they have been inundatedwith calls from Americans inquiring about how to relocate to Canada. And the night of the election, Canada's immigration ministry website crashed due to a huge spike in traffic coming from the US—12 times the usual traffic rate.

But expressing interest and making the move are two very different things: it's notoriously difficult for US citizens to resettle in Canada, and dozens of them along both sides of the border Wednesday predicted it likely won't happen, and hope it doesn't.

Indeed, all was calm at crossings between Ontario and New York the afternoon after Donald Trump was confirmed the next president, with mostly commercial trucks going in and out.

"People seemed to be worried about Trump winning before," said one Canadian border guard at the Rainbow Bridge entrance. "But I think everyone is starting to accept it now."

On the Canadian side in Niagara Falls, Richard Alloway was basking in the Trump afterglow.

He came over from Pennsylvania with his wife and a couple friends the day after to gamble and to take advantage of the weak Canadian loonie.

"Everything's looking rosy," he cackled at the lookout over the waterfall.

Image via 'Daily VICE'

Carlos Orduna, a Clinton supporter, wasn't so sure. The 18-year-old lives in Florida, but drove to Niagara from Albany, New York, just for a couple of hours on Wednesday. Orduna was born in the US, but spent most of his life in Mexico.

"Trump was saying he was going to kick Mexicans out of the United States, and I have a few family members in Florida who don't have a passports," he said.

But even he said he's going to wait it out and give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Neither he nor anyone in his family, even undocumented immigrants, plans to leave.

"Maybe we're going to get racist people discriminating against Hispanic people," said Orduna. "But we have to deal with it. He's already President now. We are going to learn how to live with it."

As for those who are still threatening to leave, Alloway says good riddance.

"We're gonna help them pack," he said. "Like Rosie O'Donnell, and Whoopi Goldberg, and Cher. We'll help them all pack."

Except when it comes down to it, it's all empty threats, he believes. Not many Americans are actually going to leave. "They know where they have it good, and they will see the changes that are coming."

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter

Lauren Lubin runs in this weekend's New York City Marathon. Photo courtesy Lauren Lubin

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Nearly four years ago, Lauren Lubin moved to New York City and took up running. The athlete and filmmaker had relocated to work on a forthcoming documentary, titled We Exist, about the lives of individuals who do not identify as male or female—instead preferring the terms "non-binary" or "gender neutral" to indicate their rejection of gender binaries. Lubin (who uses "they" pronouns) hardly knew anyone in the city, and lacing up a pair of sneakers was as good a reason as any to get out of the apartment.

It didn't take long for a routine to turn into a passion. Lubin first registered for a race in 2014, but almost immediately, their non-binary gender identity came into conflict with the deeply embedded gender-based rules and regulations of the sport.

At the starting line for one of Lubin's first races, the president of the group organizing the event proudly announced that running is a sport for everyone. The audience cheered—except for Lubin.

"I was like, 'No! Running is not a sport for everyone; running is a sport for two types of people,'" Lubin said. Cisgender athletes may not pay much attention, but the sport of running is deeply segregated by gender—everything from registration to the gear provided at a race requires athletes to identify themselves on the binary. Non-binary runners like Lubin, a small but increasingly visible gender minority, are forced to compete as male or female. "That quote hit me so personally," Lubin recalled. "There I was, unable to run as the person I really am—forced to either sit at the sidelines or run under a false identity in order to participate."

Last weekend, nearly two years later, Lubin joined 50,000 other athletes for the New York City Marathon, running as the first ever openly gender-neutral athlete in the marathon's history.

You could spin that as a faint glimmer of progress, but Lubin isn't attending in celebration. It's a protest to the larger world of sports, where non-binary athletes are widely denied access to major events and discriminated against in ways both subtle and overt. These athletes face a dizzying, seemingly impossible choice: disregard their gender identity—arguably an unhealthy and wholly unacceptable option given the negative effects of remaining closeted—or sacrifice their love of sports.

A lifelong athlete, Lubin has wrestled with this choice since childhood. "There were two really early identities I developed—one I could not identity with, my assigned female gender, and one I could fully identify with, being an athlete," Lubin said. Fulfilling a dream to compete on the college stage, Lubin received a full athletic scholarship to the University of Colorado Boulder, playing women's basketball from 2003 to 2006. But Lubin eventually quit the team; it would take nearly a decade for them to return to organized sports.

"What I experience today is a dire need for change—there is no place for non-binary athletes to freely compete," said Lubin, who launched New York City's first non-binary running group in 2015 to raise visibility for the issue. "We can no longer move forward in the sporting world—or just in general—assuming that gender is binary or that even sex is binary. These things are not true," Lubin argued.

Sure, this year has seen small but significant victories for athletes who don't identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, most notably at the Olympics. In January, the International Olympic Committee adopted new rules, which made the Summer Games in Rio the first to allow transgender athletes to compete without having undergone sex reassignment surgery. While no openly trans athletes competed, this development remains a necessary step toward full trans inclusion.

But let's be clear: this progress has little bearing on gender-neutral athletes, because trans identities hinge on the gender binary. So, while transgender inclusion disputes the rigid constructs of male and female athletes, inclusion for non-binary individuals poses a much greater question to athletic institutions—challenging the very notion of gender-segregated sports.

Watch "The 14-Year-Old Female Rock Climbing Phenom":

It's hard to deny that the concept of male and female sports seems archaic, especially given the fact that we expect full gender inclusion in virtually every other corner of society. "Sport, alongside bathrooms in North Carolina and the Catholic Church, remains one of the last institutions that formally segregates by gender," said Eric Anderson. Anderson, a professor at the UK's University of Winchester, has extensively researched the sociology of sports and is a world-leading expert on gender and sexual minorities. "This bifurcation, which for decades has been taken for granted as logical, is rightfully beginning to erode," Anderson noted.

Still, the age-old dispute rages on—even in feminism, where the debate over whether sports should remain segregated remains a sticky subject. Sports ethicists commonly argue against integration because they claim men have certain physical advantages over women. That argument smells sexist, a la the antiquated view that women wouldn't perform well as politicians. But it's an assertion that scientific studies seem to back up. For example, a 2010 study in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine recorded the performance of male and female athletes in 82 different sports since 1896, the beginning of the modern Olympic era. Researchers found, in general, that men outperform women, concluding that "women will not run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men."

Non-binary athletes will rightfully point out that physical characteristics vary not just between those of different sexes, but from athlete to athlete, which ultimately raises the question: Is there a more inclusive way of organizing sports—not just at the professional level, but also for amateur and youth leagues?

Anderson argues that such rule changes would be easier to institute than some would have you think.

"The structures of sport can be, in most cases, easily changed in order to promote gender integration," said Anderson. "Those who profit from professional sport change the rules whenever the sport begins to die; consider, for example, the three point line in basketball or changing the rules of tackling to—barely—lessen concussion in football."

Anderson believes that, if sports bring people together in affirming ways as the Olympics contend, then integrating people of all races and gender identities should be essential to the institution. "If we believe that sport teaches us to get along as a team—that it can teach us to work with a diversity of people—then black and white, gay and straight, male and female all belong on the same pitch," Anderson argues.

What, precisely, then would these changes look like? "There's not a single answer. I believe this is going to be the culmination of many different disciplines and institutions coming together to reorganize themselves," said Lubin, describing it it as an upgrade from an outdated operating system—as if someone still used MS-DOS in 2016.

Despite the many variables and questions left unanswered, one thing remains crystal clear: "Sports at large is a microcosm of society at large," said Lubin. "When we look at sports and how binary it is—how exclusive and often discriminatory it is—we're looking at a reflection of our society."

Follow Jon Shadel on Twitter.

Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine

In September, I began a motivational speaking tour of all 50 states. Each stop features an extensive open discussion where people share with me their thoughts and concerns, as well as situations they're working on in their personal lives. One of the topics that comes up most frequently is forgiveness. How to move on. How to let go. How to heal. How to make sense of a painful experience or make amends with someone who has wronged you.

Recently during an appearance in Tennessee, a young man approached the microphone and emotionally yet calmly explained that he was angry with several friends who'd been withholding information from him. A woman they all knew had been beaten by her boyfriend. This had been happening for some time. The angry friend had only found out about it when she was put in the hospital after an especially brutal confrontation with her abuser.

Naturally, this friend was beside himself with frustration that he'd been kept in the dark. He wanted so badly to go back in time and save his friend. He wanted to avenge her and attack the man who'd beaten her. He wanted to lash out at his friends who hadn't told him or done anything to intervene. He was living with a knot in his stomach, and it was tearing him apart.

At another stop, a young lady had just overcome a battle with cancer and was upset with her sister, who'd never bothered to visit during a long stay at the hospital, even though the two lived in the same city. She was so hurt and couldn't figure out how to forget about all the loneliness she had felt, all the resentment she had steadily developed for her sibling while stewing in her room.

The two wanted to know: Is it possible to let these feelings go?

It's a very hard question to answer in both cases—or in any case where someone feels aggrieved, for that matter. When hurt is heaved upon you, it can feel personal and raw.

The benefits of forgiveness are well known and much touted, but very challenging to execute. It's a gesture you make toward the offending person, in essence freeing the wrongdoer from their own guilty conscience. Of course, the added bonus is also freeing yourself from pain by lifting the burden of resentment, anger, and frustration.

True forgiveness, for me, has always remained elusive. So I've come up with a workaround of sorts.

I've never quite mastered either of these: letting go or absolving. From my own experiences, I've held on to resentment and anger and sadness for years. I've been on the receiving end of bad business deals, bad relationships, and general bad behavior. I've certainly done my own fair share of harm to people in my life, and there's definitely been some karma there.

Because of that, true forgiveness, for me, has always remained elusive. So I've come up with a workaround of sorts, one that has less to do with excusing the wrong that someone has done to you or alleviating the negative impact of the experience on your life. Instead, when someone hurts me, I try to transform that resentful energy into an opportunity.

I've found it's very satisfying to take all that desire for revenge, all that desire to get back at someone, all that desire to inflict equal amounts of misery on a person who has done me wrong, and redirect all of it into an inner conviction, and vow to never do to someone else the thing that has been done to me. You can think of it as a kind of Golden Rule in reverse.

I've found this contract with myself can bring about a feeling of completion and progress, a proactive process of absorbing and applying a lesson to my own life. I've found there is an incredible release and exhilarating freedom in turning all that hurt energy into a determination to live a decent and ethical life.

If you can use the experience of having seen someone do wrong as motivation to never do that to someone yourself, you are building a better you. This is applicable to a broad spectrum of grievances. The man in Tennessee, for instance, rightfully upset with his friends, could vow to never turn a blind eye to wrongdoing as they did, or act as though some evil being done was none of his business. He would never fear stepping in when it was clear that he absolutely should.

The young woman torn to shreds by her cold and unfeeling sister for not visiting her while she was sick in the hospital could vow to never ignore those in her life who need her support. She would choose instead to rise to the occasion, and be there for the people who need and rely on her.

These raw emotions inside us are real power and real energy. They are not to be wasted or numbed out or squashed, but channeled and harnessed and used for good. It's so easy to want to lash out at a person we disagree with, a person we're mad at, a person we wish would behave differently. But all that frustration and anger and vital energy is much better spent making sure we are living the most virtuous life we can, and being the kind of person we wish others would be toward us. These frustrations and ordeals are all tests to see if we have the inner strength and resilience to not only withstand adversity, but to use the pain to transform us into something bigger and better than we would otherwise be.

We cannot let anything or anyone corrupt our hearts or cause us to compromise the dignity and virtue of our character. There will be great tests and challenges, but each time we resist the temptation to lower ourselves, we not only overcome an obstacle, but graduate to a new level of inner strength.

Follow Andrew W.K. on Twitter.

Check out Dame Darcy's website, Instagram, and Twitter.

(Illustration: Dan Evans)

Come rain or snow, recession or economic boom, sex work continues. It's happening everywhere, from high-end hotels with underfloor heating and a wide array of pastries, to grotty back alleys littered with fag ends and used condoms. And it's happening all the time, even if we – as a society – don't talk about it all that much.

When we do talk about it, though, we tend to talk about the workers themselves – whether that's because they're being rounded up and sent to detention centres, or because some entrepreneur with a very flimsy understanding of the law wants to open a cafe where you can have a blowjob with your coffee. What we don't talk about are the people keeping sex workers in business: the clients.

To find out a little more about that side of the deal, I asked Sarah, a 22-year-old escort and blogger, to take me through every category of customer.

POWER CLIENT

The socially strong type of client; the ones who are very confident about themselves and typically have a high-powered job. Solicitors, people in finance and celebrities, for instance. People who like to talk a lot about how much power they have.

What they're trying to get from the experience is either an ego boost or an ego slashing. It's these clients who often want to be dominated; they have high-powered lifestyles and the opportunity to absolutely take control of other people, so – behind closed doors – want to be talked down to and demoralised, because it's the opposite of how everyone treats them in their day-to-day existence. A lot of power clients liked being pegged, for example. Or they want me to financially take advantage of them, asking me to ask for really expensive presents. I have a lot of expensive shoes that I don't even like from clients with foot fetishes.

PARTY CLIENTS

I've found that clients usually want the opposite of the way they live when it comes to sex. The "party client", for instance, is the antithesis of the "power client". These men want to own a human being for a little bit. The power client will automatically have that dominance in a real life social setting, whereas the party client craves it.

He's usually a very laddish, party animal kind of guy: loves coke, loves drinking, oozes confidence on the surface but maybe doesn't really have any. I mean, he does have confidence – you can see that in every single swagger or story about a fight in a pub – but it only comes out with the help of drink and drugs. After a couple of lines he'll swan out of the bathroom reformed as an amalgamation of an 80s porn star and a TOWIE cast member.

He will ask you what you're comfortable with so he can just try to push you to go further. It's almost as if that list of things you have made it clear you won't do is some kind of challenge for him to overcome. "I'm sure you'd like it if I did it," he'll say. Erm, no. "What if I paid you more? Or gave you a better review?" Still no.

READ: The Disturbing Trend of Vigilante Attacks on Sex Workers

GUILTY GUY

So those are the two main categories, but there are rarer types who pitch up occasionally, such as the guy who has a sudden, last-minute attack of guilt during the deed. The last one I had was a client, around 35 years old, who walked in with a big hat. Once he was inside he double checked the door was locked – proper paranoid. We were literally mid-way through me going down on him and he suddenly shot up and said, "STOP! I really can't do this." I asked him if it was something to do with me and he said, "No, I've got a wife; I can't stop thinking about her."

Maybe just take her paintballing next time you're looking for an adrenaline rush, eh mate?

GUY WHO THINKS HE'S RICHARD GERE IN 'PRETTY WOMAN'

These men have a fantasy about whisking a lady of the night away and showing them a better life, presumably because the idea that I could be a good girl just for them gets them all riled up and sweaty. The last one of these told me he was going to train me to be an estate agent so I "didn't have to do this any more".

Thing is, I would rather choke on my own saliva than have to drive a little branded Smart car around all day, trying to convince people to bankrupt themselves on flats we all know they hate.

GUY WHO'S GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING

This client will book a hotel room for the end of his stag-do. He'll often make a duel booking and turn up with his best man. They'll openly admit that they're on their stag-do and sometimes they'll even show you pictures of the bride-to-be on their phones. Some of them were really attractive.

Some calling cards (Photo Per Gosche, via)

GUY WHO CAN'T PERFORM AND THEREFORE WANTS A REFUND

Seeing a sex worker can be a daunting task for some men – we're very experienced, they might not be – which can affect their performance. Some will just laugh it off and leave, while others try to get their money back. But it obviously doesn't work like that; we're not no win-no fee injury lawyers.

GUY WHO ISN'T GETTING ANY

Their partner may have recently died, or they've come out of a long-term relationship and they've not yet got into the swing of how dating has changed. Or they're totally satisfied with every aspect of the marriage or relationship they're in apart from the sex. There are more people than you think out there who'll say: "I am absolutely in love with my wife and I want to be with her until the day I die, but I don't want to have sex with her."

There are so many people who say that, in fact, that it genuinely puts me off marriage a bit.

THE VIRGIN

If a guy gets to around 20 and still hasn't popped it he'll be feeling the weight of social pressure heavy on his head. So you'll occasionally get guys with mates who will pay for him to lose it, stand outside the room when it's happening and cheer when he walks out de-flowered. Every prostitute has experienced this. I sometimes wonder how many guys have lost it this way.

THE EMOTIONAL CLIENT

There was one guy I used to see who was in his fifties. When I first saw him I was expecting him to want to have full sex, but he said, "I just want to lay here and cuddle, if that's OK? And maybe we could talk about how our days have gone." He was a widower who missed that connection where you have skin-to-skin contact. Or that moment where you both feel exactly the same and you just want to lie together. They are some of the most difficult clients, because although you want to satisfy that need in them, you want them to go and find it in the real world.

THE DARK CLIENT

These people have what I'd consider perverse sexual tendencies. Coming out about their fantasies would be absolute social suicide – like men who enjoy working girls over the age of 18 dressing up as young children, or even making the room they're in look like a child's bedroom. Most girls in the trade would never do that kind of stuff, but it's not unheard of.

READ: Student Sex Workers Talk About Paying for University By Escorting

GUY WHOSE WIFE ARRIVES HALFWAY THROUGH

The agencies that take your bookings get a lot of phone calls from women saying: "My husband keeps ringing this number." They know the script – they've seen it a thousand times before – so they'll play it off by claiming they're a work agency. But some wives are much more persistent than that; they'd follow their cheating spouse to the flat where the deed was taking place. Then you get angry, heartbroken women shouting outside.

I was halfway through a booking with a middle-aged man in a city centre flat once when the intercom starting going "buzz, buzzz, buzzzz". We were both naked, heels up to Jesus, showing no sign of stopping. Usually that means the agency has double-booked, but on this occasion when I rang the madam said they hadn't. So I answered it and it was a woman's voice just saying "hello" over and over again. The guy, who was fully dressed by now, ran out the front entrance and made his escape to the car he'd parked at a nearby supermarket. That's one of the reasons we tell people to park nearby and not outside the flat where the action is taking place.

GAY GUY WHO'S TESTING IF HE'S BI

You don't get them a lot, but it's definitely a subset of the clients. Sometimes they find out they are, other times not.

GUY WHO SPENDS WORRYINGLY BIG

A client spending money is good, but this goes too far, to the point the girl starts to question it. It's very rare that a regular client – or a "bread and butter punter" as it's known in the trade – would only see one girl. So if they're spending, like, a grand with you every single week, you know they're dropping a crazy amount of cash with the agency in total. More often than not they are the ones who want to try and sexually gratify you and don't want anything doing to themselves. They get off on the notion that they have a beautiful woman that they really satisfy in the bedroom.

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I wonder if he is going to hang himself.

That stray thought entered my mind one day eight years ago, when a troubled old man I'll call Rob was my cellmate.

Even before Rob moved in, I'd already heard he was a bit... off. I told myself I'd just listen to him spill, one time—get it all out—so we could coexist by ignoring one another.

But on the day Rob arrived, he didn't look like he had a mental illness. No bug eyes or Manson beard or nothing. A little below average height; a receding hairline. I had no idea what he'd done to earn his 20-year sentence.

The first thing he asked me was if I liked rap music. I said that I did.

"You're welcome,'' he said.

"What do you mean, 'You're welcome'?"

"I mean you're welcome for me writing all them songs you hear," Rob said. "I wrote all that shit back when I invented rap in '85. I just wish motherfuckers would give me respect for it, you know?"

"Well thanks, man. I appreciate it," I replied.

I guess no one had ever thanked him before, because in that moment, he looked at me like I was Jesus holding a pardon.

"What about Prince, man? Do you like Prince?" he asked.

"Yeah man, I like Prince. Who doesn't like Prince?"

Rob grinned and looked to the left and the right like little kids do right before they tell you a secret.

"I'm Prince."

"If you're Prince, then who's the guy on the radio?" I asked.

"That's my homeboy acting like he's me. We figured it all out when I got my time. He'd be me while I's locked up. I wrote all them songs he does back in '87. He just be lip-syncing and acting like he playing guitar. That's me on a tape. He stacking all my money for me when I can have it, after I'm out I mean. I used to write him and tell him to send me some, but the state'll steal it. Last time he sent me a mil and the state jacked me for it. I wrote a grievance but it didn't go nowhere so I told him from now on just hold on to my money for me."

I listened to Rob's rant in its entirety that day—from the minimum wage being $145 million a day to his performance with Dr. Dre at the Grammy Awards. It took about six hours, but since we were confined to our cell for 20 hours every day, at least it was something to do.

As the weeks went by, though, it got worse. Rob was so medicated that he couldn't wake up sometimes, and he would piss all over his bunk. I was on the top, and the stench never failed to yank me awake.

I would get down and wake him. Sometimes I would be forced to slap him. I'd make him get up, clean himself, and wash his sheet.

The days were bad, too. I suggested he listen to the radio so he could make a list of all the people stealing his music. He thought it was a great idea and spent most of his waking hours making those lists.

Two weeks after Rob moved in, I met a guy who knew him five years ago at a different unit. He said that the psych department there had placed Rob in solitary because of his erratic behavior—covering himself and his cell with his own excrement, sometimes eating it.

The Rob I knew was apparently the G-rated version.

I wondered if Rob had changed because he had truly been treated or helped, or if the psych department in our unit just gave stronger medication.

Either way, it didn't last. One day, I was cleaning up our shared space and found a sealed bag of shit under his bunk. I slapped him awake and confronted him, but he denied knowing anything about it.

A few days later, I wrote a letter to psych and tried to explain what was going on. I never heard back, and they never came to see Rob.

I no longer gave him coffee or allowed him to listen to my radio. I figured that if I froze him out, he'd eventually try to get himself moved.

Then, one night, I was reading in my bunk when, out of the blue, he piped up.

"You know you can die and come back."

I ignored it but he kept repeating it.

"Rob, what the hell are you talking about?" I eventually said.

"I got my head cut off once but put it back on. Another time I woke up in a coffin and had to dig myself out."

"Rob, you can't die and come back."

"Yeah you can, 'cause I did it."

I closed my book and looked down at him. "I tell you what Rob. You know how you've been asking for a bag of coffee? You hang yourself off the vent and when you come back I'll give you a bag of coffee."

Our cells aren't perfect squares. One wall sits at an angle and is made of steel instead of concrete. It's where our light and toilet/sink combo are attached.

Seven feet or so off the floor is a small vent that's supposed to let heat in during the winter. It has a steel grate over it so that we can't stash stuff inside.

About 30 minutes later, Rob got up, went over to the toilet, climbed onto it, and tied his sheet to the vent. He secured a knot around his neck.

I started to think about what I was going to do if he actually hanged himself. There was no way I could get a guard in there before he died.

No one gave a damn about Rob. Why was I supposed to care about him when nobody else did?

I sat there pretending to read.

In fact, I decided, if Rob hanged himself, I was going to let him die. When they find him, I'll just claim I was asleep, I thought. Suicide in prison isn't that rare.

Rob took the knot from around his neck and stepped off the toilet.

"I know you can die and come back, but I ain't sure how many times you can do it," he said.

I just shook my head and told him to take his sheet down.

A few days later, Rob got into a confrontation with an officer and was transferred. I never saw him again.

Johnathan Byrd, 33, is incarcerated at the Connally Unit in Kenedy, Texas, where he is serving a life sentence for murder and aggravated assault.

Illustration by Matt Rota

The author, in college, eating a slice of meat-free cheese pizza. Photo from Nate Dern.

My mom is a vegetarian and has been for as long as I've been alive. I was too for many years growing up. But then I grew out of it.

Today, 20 years later, I am still convinced by all of the intellectual arguments for vegetarianism. I believe that vegetarianism is a more efficient diet for a global community. I read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals and said, "Yes, factory farming is a terrible blight on our world!" I read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and agreed with the book's premise that we should eat mostly plants.

But despite being convinced in my mind, my taste buds remain a hold out. The other night I ate an entire pouch of pepperoni slices while sitting on the floor of my kitchen, wearing only my underwear, the refrigerator door still open.

My sister, three years my junior, was a better vegetarian than I was. I craved restaurant visits because I knew it would be my chance to taste the sweet fatty goodness of charred animal muscles. In contrast, meat repulsed her. The smell of it, the taste of it. It never appealed to her. For her, the intellectual arguments came later, a secondary justification to what was first a gustatory preference. I envied her. For me, I tried starting with intellectual arguments hoping that my palate would fall in line. So far, it hasn't worked.

Despite what I see as my personal shortcomings in this dietary matter, I have spent many years of my life as a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian from ages 12 to 18, and there was a six-month period in there where I went vegan. During that time, it would also be fair to say that "Being a Vegan" was my primary personality trait. The only thing about me cooler than my tendency to steer any conversation to being about Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation was my habit of painting my Birkenstocks with vegan slogans like "Meat is murder" or "Kiss me, I'm vegan."

I told myself that I was just a vegetarian who kept having meat accidents with my mouth.

I did truly believe everything I was saying about the benefits of vegetarianism, but I think if I'm honest, I have to admit that I primarily enjoyed what I imagined was the alt cache that came with my lifestyle choice. There weren't many vegetarians in my hometown of Evergreen, Colorado.

Then I got to college and there were lots of vegetarians. Hell, there were dumpster-diving, Freegan revolutionary socialists who were way more hardcore than I'd ever be. Vegetarianism was no longer a special thing about me. It was just a lot of hard work. College was hard for me in a lot of ways, and at some point, while eating alone in a dining hall, I didn't have the mental energy to remain disciplined. I ate meat.

But I didn't think of that as me stopping being a vegetarian. I didn't think of myself as a pretend vegetarian lying to my friends. I told myself that I was just a vegetarian who kept having meat accidents with my mouth. Oops, how did that steak get in my burrito? Did I say steak? I meant beans, but, oh well, since you've already made it I guess I'll just eat it and also I better order two more steak burritos with extra steak please I love meat thank you thank you.

Besides, I'd introduced myself to all of my new friends and classmates as a vegetarian. I would feel like a fraud if a few months later I was like, "Oh, never mind." So my entire freshman year, I kept telling other people, and myself, that I was a vegetarian. I promised myself that each time I slipped off the meat-free bandwagon was the last.

I was delusional. And my delusion nearly led to my death in the spring semester.

The author, not eating meat. Photo from Nate Dern.

I signed up for an "Alternative Spring Break," a trip with other students to do community service at a therapeutic horseback riding farm in South Carolina. As was my habit, I told the others on the trip I was a vegetarian. I did this thinking it would help keep me honest on the trip and not eat meat. One of the other students on the trip was a Lebanese student named Ghia who told me that she was also a vegetarian. We bonded a bit over that and I immediately developed a huge crush on her.

On one of the last nights of the trip, for dinner our host prepared grilled chicken cutlets. The vegetarian option was iceberg lettuce. Ghia and I commiserated over this, and then she ate her lettuce. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, grabbed a handful of cutlets when nobody was looking, and ran outside.

I stuffed the chicken into my mouth, trying to eat it as quickly as possible, a single light hanging above the steel garage door illuminating what I'm sure was a disgusting display. After a day of manual labor, the cutlets tasted amazing.

Even when it felt like blood vessels were popping in my eyeballs, I still tried to swallow harder.

Then something went wrong. I was choking.

Not "Oops, it went down the wrong pipe, how embarrassing, can you pass me a glass of water?" but full-on choking. No air going in or out, esophagus blocked. I panicked. I was an animal with my gullet sealed shut.

Through the fog of my panic, a choice became perfectly visible to me: go back inside for help, reveal to everyone I was a pretend vegetarian, and survive...or stay alone outside with my secret and risk choking to death.

I stayed outside.

I punched myself in the stomach with both fists. Nothing. I threw myself on the top bar of a wood fence attempting to self-Heimlich. It didn't work. Then, in a final attempt to live, I summoned all my strength and I tried to swallow as hard as I could. Even when it felt like blood vessels were popping in my eyeballs, I still tried to swallow harder. My neck muscles contracted, my face turned blood red. The chicken went down.

Traumatized and tears streaming down my face, I went back inside and sat down. "What's wrong?" Ghia asked. "Have you been crying?" I shook my head no and mumbled something about feeling emotional about the meaningful community service work we were doing. I had bruises on my solar plexus and my throat was sore for weeks.

That scare kept me a real vegetarian for a couple years. I stayed true until a study abroad trip to do thesis research in Buenos Aires the summer before my senior year. Once there, the temptation of home cooked, meat-filled empanadas with my host family was too great to resist. Plus, I didn't want to be rude. Plus, it was in a foreign country, so that hardly counted. Plus, meat tastes so damn good.

I promised myself I would be a vegetarian again when I returned home. This time for good. This time I meant it. This time I really, really meant it.

Follow Nate Dern on Twitter.

People have been burning their New Balance sneakers in protest after the company came out in support of Donald Trump's presidency. On the latest episode of Desus and Mero's late night VICELAND show, the pair tries to figure out what the brand sees in Trump. Whatever the reason, New Balance officially makes the least-woke kicks around.

The makers of New Balance shoes aren't the only Americans believing that Donald Trump will Make America Great Again, obviously. But, as Desus and Mero pointed out, the rest of the world isn't wearing the same orange-tinted glasses.

Catch new episodes of Desus & Mero weeknights at 11 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

On Monday, I flew down to Miami to volunteer for the Clinton campaign. It had been my brother's idea. He said that, selfishly, if Trump won, he wanted to know that, he'd done everything he could for Hillary.

I felt the same pricks of panic but I also had my own reasons, equally selfish. In 2008, I'd been a staffer for Barack Obama in the general election; since then, I had been missing the hustle of campaign life. I had worked in in Detroit in the constituency vote operation: Women for Obama, Arab-Americans for Obama, Small Business Owners for Obama, Whoever for Obama. One group I personally organized was European and Mediterranean Americans for Obama, a category I privately referred to as "White People for Obama."

About five weeks before Election Day 2008, the campaign transferred me to North Carolina after the McCain camp had abandoned Michigan as unwinnable. I remember at the time thinking they'd given up too soon.

Monday morning, my brother and I report to the Wynwood field office of the Hillary campaign. A large empty art space, one of those countless offices that political operations quickly erect in vacant strip malls and empty storefronts, then abandon the day after the election. The rooms are always cavernous. The ceilings always echo. There's enough space here that an entire wall is painted with a 20-foot-high Hillary H. There are lawn signs and posters and stickers and buttons, rainbows and Spanish and pleasant blue fonts. When I worked for Obama, we referred to this merchandise as "chum," because it sent supporters into a frenzy. You'd chum the waters with it to get them to come to events. Now it's the last day, and there's way more of this stuff than anyone would ever need. We can take as many stickers as we want.

A woman with a clipboard greets us, smiling, on autopilot, with blonde bangs and a blue tank top. She hands us a packet and leads us into a corner decorated with magic marker-ed edicts for effective canvassing. She does a role play about a voter interaction, explains that you need to get supporters to visualize going to the polls in order to get them to do it, that we mark our contacts as HRC or Not HRC, moved, deceased, hostile, refused, etc, etc. She stumbles in her spiel and apologizes.

Sorry, she says, this is, like, the 800th one of these I've done.

Another woman, a volunteer, gives us the walk lists for our turf. She has Hillary flash tats running up and down her arm and is surrounded by a wall of Post-Its. The folders we get are meticulously organized, with scripts in English and Spanish, maps and literature and sticky notices to leave on doors with voting hours and hotlines.

Please return your packet, she says, or I'll be that crazy person calling you! She laughs, edged with panic. She has called people before.

Oh, she adds. Supposedly Cher's coming by at six.

Sometimes people answer but usually not the right ones. Often they're annoyed.

Our turf the first night is in Coral Gables. It is a rich neighborhood for the most part, with giant stone houses and Banyan tree canopies and wide, curving streets. I keep jumping at the rustling in the grass, thinking it's a snake or a rat, but every time it's just chameleons, no bigger than my palm.

It's the middle of the afternoon. Almost no one on our list is home. One house looks nearly abandoned, until a woman comes to the door and shakes her head, says in broken English that the woman we're looking for isn't there. Pitch black inside—the house has switched off chandeliers and a pool with cloudy water. Every house here seems to have a pool and the same low silver furniture and generic modern art. I can see through the windows as I affix the voting notices to their locked doors.

Sometimes people answer but usually not the right ones. Often they're annoyed. There's a lot of houses with literature still jammed under the doormats, untouched, unopened, with handwritten notes by volunteers: Every vote counts!

One woman stomps to the door, the sound of a child's piano lesson in the background, to hold up her hands in an angry FOUR, the number of times the campaign has visited her.

A young woman with Jersey plates says the guys we're looking for don't live there anymore, and we're the second people to come looking for them. One man tells me everyone in his house will vote for Clinton except him. He's for Gary Johnson, he says, he's not into "my girl." But he appreciates that all the Clinton volunteers who come to his door are "beautiful" like me. He calls me sweetheart and tells me to take care.

A little girl in a school uniform answers the door and smiles hello before a woman throws her arm between us and the child, physically shields her from us, then watches us through a sharply drawn living room curtain as we walk away across the lawn.

"Should we mark that down as hostile?" I ask my brother.

Our coordinator warned us we would have a low hit rate but my brother is still discouraged. We have yet to speak to an actual voter from our assigned campaign walk list, except through a closed door, when we reach the last house of the night. Is Elana here? The woman smiles. Oh, yes! She's here! (I've changed the names in this piece so as not to reveal anyone's personal information.)

Elana comes to the door, in shorts and a sweatshirt. This is the moment we've been waiting for—actual contact.

"HI!" I say. "ARE YOU A HILLARY SUPPORTER?"

She is.

"HAVE YOU VOTED?"

She has not. She is planning to vote tomorrow, after work, at six. I gulp.

"THE POLLS CLOSE AT SEVEN, SO YOU HAVE TO BE IN LINE BY THEN OR YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO VOTE."

She nods, unconcerned. Does she know where her polling place is? She does. It's over at the middle school, right? Right.

When we leave my brother asks if I want to camp outside her house tomorrow and make sure she voted. Her name—Elana!—becomes a joke between us, like if we lose, it will be on her and by extension, us.

Watch VICE News Tonight's Report on How an Election Gets Made:

We make it back in time for Cher. This is the kind of surrogate event I used to work on in '08, something to fire up the volunteers, or drum up donations. I once sang "You've Got a Friend" with Carole King in a living room of Michigan moms, once tailed Kal Penn through a fundraiser in Grosse Point, once handed out Irish Americans for Obama signs at an acoustic Bruce Springsteen show on a baseball field in Ypsilanti. This is like that. Fired Up. Ready To Go. Call and Response. The surrogates are tailored to the location. Cher has the crowd in Wynwood on tenterhooks.

We walk in just as she is describing a tea of some kind she had with Hillary. Cher and Hillary, a couple of gals hanging out, both of them so famous they go by one name apiece. Apparently, Hillary said something like: I'm so tired. When this is over, I think I'd like to go to a spa. Do you know a spa?

To which Cher replied: Babe, I'm a diva. Of course I know a spa.

Cher goes on to remind us, the faithful, how committed Hillary is, how terrifying Trump is. To me the browning of America is a great thing, she says. This line gets massive cheers. The audience is diverse, seemingly heavy with LGBTQ supporters. There are lots of fearful nods, signs clutched in worry.

She tells us she could barely bring herself to watch the debates, that she watched one from her bathtub and wept, which is an image I will treasure always—Cher immersed in bubbles, glued to CNN, mascara on her cheeks

Some people have come all the way from England to help, a group of female British politics students. Cher thanks them in her remarks, tells them she stayed up all night watching Brexit results.

The British students are in front of us in the line for pictures. They came over to be a part of the election and see what they could bring back to the UK. I ask one girl if she's been to any Trump rallies and she giggles no, her mum didn't want her to go anywhere near that stuff.

I ask the her what elections are like in the UK. You could miss it, she says. She gestures to Cher, the wall-sized H logo, the line of impassioned volunteers. She is impressed, thrilled even. There's nothing, she says, like this. I think about telling her that the day to day of campaigns is mostly spreadsheets and walk lists full of closed doors and phone banks with high flake rates. That this is frosting, sizzle. But at this point in the campaign, less than 12 hours to go, it's all frosting. So who cares?

My brother and I get our picture. Cher is gracious and smart. We are starstruck, unexpectedly. We decide without irony that she is "awesome." We talk about how great she smells. It's worth noting that my brother is not Cher's core demographic. He is, essentially, The Man—50, white, married, suburban, in finance. But he is giddy afterwards, zooming in to screenshot the image of his hand on Cher's shoulder. He tells me over dinner that he thinks he was the only straight man in line and probably the most excited.

'When Pigs Fly,' a mural by Miami artists Rei Ramirez and Ivan Roque. RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)

Early Tuesday morning, Election Day, the campaign calls us, twice, first thing, to make sure we're still coming in to volunteer. We get assigned to canvas Wynwood.

Just as in Coral Gables, a lot of people aren't home or have moved. We get a lot of padlocked gates and dogs and people justifiably wary of coming to the door. Multiple houses we have to mark as "inaccessible." Eventually I tell my brother to start standing further back behind me or wait on the curb because he looks like what he is—a six-foot plus white banker, the kind of guy who only knocks on your door to deliver bad news. Maybe he's why no one is opening the door for us.

I attempt some Spanish, poorly. I translate through a kindly neighbor or super or just point a lot at our Spanish literature. I manage to help several people find their polling station. I circle the time the stations close and smile beseechingly. People call me back, say their girl wants to vote or their roommate. I circle more polling stations, underline the number they can call for help or a ride. One woman, half-joking, yells at her friend.

I told him to vote, she says, disapproving. His mom's gonna kick him out of the house if he doesn't. She tells him he'll get deported back to Haiti if Trump wins. He laughs. Good, he says, defiant, at this point still laughing.

We get one house with two kids at home. They are, judging by the decals in the window, "terrific" and "honor students." Their father is not home, but they tell us he already voted.

Is he a Clinton supporter? I ask.

"Ummmmmmm..." one begins. The other cuts him off, tactfully. "We're not sure."

We drive back to the hotel and listen to NPR as we cross the bridge into Miami Beach. We've earned a break, my brother says. We have a drink at lunch.

The host is taking calls, and we listen to Kevin from Morristown, New Jersey, who wants to share two songs that he thinks "really epitomize where we're at." One is "America," by Steppenwolf (a Canadian band, he notes) and the other is the Doors' "This the End." He helpfully repeats for NPR's listeners the lyrics to each that he finds most relevant, in case we've missed the nuance:

This is the end, he says.

This is the end.

This is the end.

The anchor laughs, momentarily dumbstruck, and then returns to normal programming with a thank you to "our upbeat friend, Kevin."

Watch VICE News Tonight Recap the Election:

We get back to the field office around five, two hours before polls close. They've put lawn signs out on the street, like furniture discarded in a move. Other volunteers come back with their own packets. They're all stoked, all of them out-of-towners. Some drift back towards the H mural for pictures.

Our coordinator, the woman with the flash tats, tells my brother and I that there's not much left to do. We basically beg her for a task until she finally says she'd love a Red Bull. We run out of the office to the nearest bar and bring back one regular and one sugar-free. She hugs us, then chugs both in rapid succession.

I've drunk the Kool-Aid, she tells us. We really are stronger together.

She says all the celebrities (like Cher) are great but the best thing about the campaign has been meeting ordinary people. Like us! She beams. She's been volunteering here for months. Tonight she's even brought her daughter. She points and we see a small girl curled up on a camp chair by the entrance, watching something on an iPad.

We ask if she's heard anything. She says, carefully, that she's been told it won't be a landslide. She stills seems optimistic.

We leave for a nearby bar that for some reason puts ESPN on the main screen. We strain to see the far TVs, tuned to CNN, and the results come in. Nothing too unexpected, not yet. The South turns red, the Northeast goes blue. Florida is too close to call.

We lapse into silence, then swing back by the office. There's no TV set up inside, no one really there. Just a marker note taped to a card table with the address for the Hispanic Caucus watch party. So we go to the the hotel and sit at a tourist bar, sipping light beer, still not speaking. The air reeks of hookah. The drinks come in plastic margarita glasses the size of small hubcaps. At some point, my brother switches to wine and we order fries that I can't eat. My sister-in-law calls, panicking. I hear my brother tell her that I've stopped talking.

I feel as though I should wait until they call Florida, that if I stay downstairs in this awful bar by the ocean that I'm somehow fulfilling a civic duty.

Numbers are trickling in. Clinton's votes haven't come in the way they were supposed to. She's losing North Carolina and Ohio, might lose Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan even.

I feel as though I should wait until they call Florida, that if I stay downstairs in this awful bar by the ocean that I'm somehow fulfilling a civic duty, that this needs to be a communal experience like a World Series or a natural disaster, like I'll somehow jinx it if I leave. There's no closed captions on the TVs they've set up and the aspect ratio is all off, so half the screen is cut off at the corners, but we can see enough to know it's over. My brother and I still have our stickers on and I can feel people clocking them as they take in our drawn expressions.

We go upstairs before Florida is officially red. I turn on MSNBC and almost instantly regret it. I put it on mute.

In our Detroit office in '08, we used to say that people got campaign goggles—like beer goggles. We meant it in the sense that the stress and isolation and long hours and shared purpose led to odd couplings. The intense emotions of politics bleed over into your personal life, hookups happen that you can't believe in retrospect but seem inevitable at the time.

But there are all kinds of ways campaigns put goggles on people involved in them. Political causes acquire their own logic and language. You forget the world outside is not in on your jokes, has not memorized your talking points. You spend so much time convincing other people of the rightness of your cause that you inevitably end up convincing yourself most of all. Campaigns require this kind of thinking to keep you all going. You know you are going to win, because how could you not? How could the real world be so different from the world you are working toward?

I fall asleep before the national results come in. They call Michigan for Trump around 11 the next morning. I'm not sure if Elana ever voted.

Meg Charlton is a producer with VICE. Follow her on Twitter.

On Tuesday, Americans—mostly white Americans—voted Donald Trump into the White House. Now the country is wondering what Trump will do once he gets there. For LGBTQ people—including Trump supporters like some white gay men and Caitlyn Jenner—the question will be how the incoming administration will handle legislation protecting them from discrimination, and they have ample reasons for fear.

Trump's attitude toward LGBTQ Americans wavered throughout the campaign. At times he seemed to court their votes during his campaign (by stoking fears of violence in the wake of the Pulse massacre), while at others he's expressed support for HB2, the North Carolina "bathroom bill" that forces transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding with the sex they were assigned at birth. He also said he would "strongly consider" appointing a conservative Supreme Court justice who would help overturn its marriage equality ruling. Perhaps most worryingly, Vice President-Elect Mike Pence's stated views (that people choose to be gay, that it's "God's idea" to stop marriage equality, that gay couples have brought about "societal collapse") and record as governor of Indiana present a truly frightening cultural and administrative force for LGBTQ Americans to reckon with.

Trump's personal views aside, the GOP will soon control Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. That makes it vanishingly unlikely that new federal non-discrimination legislation will pass the House and Senate, nor is it likely to be put forth by executive order. Existing laws at the state level protecting LBGTQ people from discrimination could be repealed, and an unfriendly Supreme Court would make challenging explicitly discriminatory laws harder.

Could an explosion of bathroom bills beyond North Carolina state lines be on the horizon? Many legal experts and LGBTQ rights advocates fear the worst.

"I predict very bad things happening in the future legal landscape," said Pooja Gehi, the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. She noted that legislation like HB2 now has "a real possibility" of seeing passage in other states. "HB2 is so full of hate, so the idea that it's likely to spread to the federal level is horrifying."

Others are less pessimistic, citing the president-elect's unclear views. " did say in his convention speech that he wanted to be inclusive of LGBTQ people," said Jennifer Pizer, the Director of Law and Policy at Lambda Legal, a group that advocates for LGBTQ rights. "He has not specifically criticized non-discrimination laws with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity, so we don't know, of course, what he will do. An enormous concern is that he will immediately revoke executive orders."

These are non-legislative rules that Trump could cancel immediately after taking office. One, Executive Order 13672, prevents federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

In theory, non-discrimination laws protect all LGBTQ people, but much like the president-elect's sometimes inclusive campaign rhetoric, they often fail to address the community's most marginalized subgroups. You can't be protected against employment discrimination if you can't get a job in the first place, said Gehi, so these protections don't always offer much help to undocumented LGBTQ people—some of whom Trump has sworn to remove from the country within his first 100 days in office—or LGBTQ people with past criminal convictions.

But for all their faults in application, these laws are important. "An absence of protections leads to a cycle of negative outcomes for people in our communities," said David Dinielli, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "People don't come out at work because they could lose their job. They don't their sex lives to their doctors because they're worried about getting the appropriate treatment... The absence of protections simply feeds this cycle and keeps LGBT people on the outside of our society in many places of our country."

Only 20 states protect trans residents from housing and employment discrimination, and only 22 provide similar safeguards for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. In other words, in 30 states, it's still legal for employers to fire someone for being trans, and in 28 it is still legal for landlords to kick out a renter for being bisexual. Three states—North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—have laws specifically designed to prevent the passage or enforcement of local non-discrimination legislation. Their number might increase in the very near future.

"We certainly have been anticipating that we will see a raft of such nominees will be, but no doubt we are facing continued danger with respect to the expansion of religious exemption rights."

A number of legal cases would have a decisive impact on the future of LGBTQ non-discrimination protections, such as Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College or Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital; in both, lesbian plaintiffs are arguing their employers violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by firing them because of their sexual orientation. Both could set a precedent for the legal interpretation of sexual orientation-based discrimination, and both could make their way to the Supreme Court in years to come.

And then there's G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of transgender high school student Gavin Grimm, whose Virginia school district has prohibited from using the boy's restroom. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case in 2017.

"If the Court decides that this is an appropriate interpretation of federal law, that will affect not only has implications for discrimination against transgender people at any place." Federal law currently explicitly prohibits sex discrimination in employment, housing, access to public accommodations, and credit. If the Supreme Court decides that discrimination against trans people is a form of sex discrimination, their gender identities will be protected in all of the aforementioned legal areas and more.

VICE News Meets Gavin Grimm:

But what happens if they don't, and the court rules in favor of laws that discriminate against trans people? Or if the Republican-led Congress passes the anti-LGBTQ First Amendment Defense Act that Trump has already promised to sign into law?

Gehi, of the National Lawyers Guild, doesn't believe that the law will necessarily be the tool that will "help us fight back" over the next four years, but is optimistic about extra-legal means of change, like protests, community-led political education, and social media organizing. From STAR and ACT UP to Black Lives Matter and even social media posts urging trans people to get their federal documentation in order as soon as possible, LGBTQ people—particularly queer and trans black women and women of color—have always found ways to advocate for their lives when the law failed to do so for them.

But a historical precedent borne out of discrimination and neglect does not have to be the norm. Any "friend of the LGBT community," a title that president-elect Trump claimed many times on the campaign trail, would be able to see that.

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