So you're a government employee, and you're thinking about leaking government secrets to the press. Congratulations! As you're no doubt aware, your boss, President Donald Trump, has a "war on the media" going on. He's said that people in the media are "among the most dishonest human beings on Earth" and once claimed that journalists are actually "the lowest form of humanity." His advisor Steve Bannon said he views the media as "the opposition party."

Except your colleagues don't seem to view journalists the same way. Though the Trump administration tried early on to clamp down on federal workers communicating with the press (or even Congress), leaks from inside government have been coming fast and furious about details big and small.

"Leaking is ubiquitous in Washington," according to Esha Bhandari, staff attorney at the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "Officials from the highest levels on down leak for a variety of reasons, whether it's self-interest, whether it's public interest motivation, whether it's to advance their political goals."

Some leaks seem to just be the work of one faction in the White House wanting to shit-talk another faction. Other juicy details don't seem to be much more than gossip, like Trump's alleged tendency to hang around the White House in a bathrobe or his rage at SNL's Sean Spicer sketch. But a few leaks are legitimately big deals, like the documents that are allegedly drafts of potential executive orders.

Leaks that expose actual government wrongdoing are constitutionally protected speech, but they're not treated that way these days according to Bhandari. "The system as it currently stands puts a lot of the onus on government employees to have to deal with legal challenges, and obviously that has a strong chilling effect," she told me. "That's a loss for the public."

So if you're thinking about leaking, but you don't know when it's OK, or how to do it anonymously without getting caught, here's everything you need to know:

1. Decide Whether You Really Need to Leak

I get occasional emails from would-be leakers—mostly in the private sector—and I can say from experience that leaked info is not always news. Sometimes, people leak as a way to screw over their workplace rivals, or for some other petty reason; you might want to ask yourself if this material you're trying to send to the press is really going to be of interest to anyone.

Also worth noting: If your organization is doing something awful, but you're in a position to voice your concerns internally, that's the best short-term course of action. The Obama administration defended itself after the Edward Snowden revelations by claiming that Snowden stayed mostly quiet about his concerns before he took them to the press—implying that he was leaking information for self-serving reasons. But an investigation by VICE News last year proved that Snowden actually pushed fairly hard for internal change before blowing the whistle.

"There are official channels for blowing the whistle to institutional audiences," said Tom Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project. "You can bring that to the Federal Whistleblower Agency, the Office of Special Council, an agency inspector general, or the head of the agency where you work. But you're limited to those channels."

2. Know Your Rights

According to Bhandari, leaking is your constitutional right. "The First Amendment would require that the government can't prevent people from whistleblowing about illegality, waste, fraud, or abuse occurring the in the government, because the government has a great need to know about those things." So yes, the Constitution is on your side, but unfortunately, Bhandari added, "Current law doesn't adequately take that into account."

Instead, she said, "review of retaliatory decisions goes through an administrative process that heavily favors the government," and this process can have "a chilling effect on people in government who want to blow the whistle about illegality or abuse that they're seeing."

The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 was supposed to prevent retaliation against certain government employees who expose crime, gross abuse, mismanaged funds, or public safety threats, Bhandari said, but she noted that "not all federal employees are covered by that. Notably, a lot of intelligence officials are not covered by that."

So often, when you expose wrongdoing by giving sensitive information about to the press, "You're acting at your own peril," Devine told me.

3. Choose Your Recipient(s)

Only a few dozen organizations accept anonymous leaks. The easiest way to transfer your documents anonymously is with a tool called Securedrop (I'll explain how that works shortly), which keeps a directory of media organizations and NGOs who use it. My favorite is VICE Media, but I'm biased.

Leaking to multiple organizations is a good idea, Devine told me. If someone misconstrues the information you're providing, or publishes something that doesn't cover the whole scope of the problem you're trying to expose, that can have the opposite of the desired effect. "It could be an advanced warning that gives the corrupt institution advanced opportunity for a coverup, for destroying documents, and for solidifying testimony. That would be a disastrous mistake."

So while journalists like myself love exclusive news leads, you potentially have a lot to gain by also dropping your information into the SecureDrop, an activist organization like the Project on Government Oversight, the ACLU, or Greenpeace, which might already have the necessary expertise to act on your evidence. "If that happens, then society surrounds the corrupt bureaucracy instead of the corrupt bureaucracy surrounding the whistleblower," Devine said.

4. Prepare the Documents You're Leaking

You obviously need to get the relevant files safely out of your workplace, and I don't know how to help you do that. But according to Devine, you might not want to take the originals—that way you're literally not stealing anything. This is a particularly useful strategy if your leak is going to result in some law enforcement agency rummaging through all these files soon anyway.

"I have people do screenshots of the records, so they can honestly say they didn't take those documents out of the organization," he told me. A phone picture of your computer screen might also be a good idea, since the document instantly transfers to a device that is your private property. In order to direct the investigators who will eventually arrive to the smoking gun, Devine said, "Set up a folder with a misleading name. Put it in the archives, and you can direct the government where to find it."

But it's much better to have the originals, so if possible, transfer the files onto a thumb drive or something and take them home.

5. Prepare a Leak Machine

Screenshot via Wikimedia Communs User Tails project

Unless you go the 20th-century route and have your leaked documents delivered by the United States Postal Service (which arguably is a good idea, as that avoids an electronic paper trail), you're going to be doing this digitally. In that case, "leaking" means sending detailed note, or some files, or both, anonymously over the internet, and that's going to involve a lot more than just shooting a reporter a quick email.

It's critical that you not use your work laptop for any leak-related activities. Instead, choose a laptop you don't use for work-related browsing or emailing. It might be a good idea to grab an old laptop you don't use anymore, clear the hard drive, and start fresh. Even better: You may want to install the Tails operating system, which is programmed to "forget" everything you do while you're using it.

6. Make Yourself Anonymous

You could do your leaking from home, but I don't recommend it. Instead, when you have some time off, locate a source of WiFi you don't generally use—a library or a Starbucks a few towns away. Your phone is a tracking device, so keep that turned off or leave it at home. Once your leak machine is on WiFi, you're going to access the deep web. Don't be scared.

If you're running Tails, you already have a browser on there called Tor. (If not, you need to install it on your leak machine before you leave the house.) You'll immediately find that Tor sucks. It's the slowest browser in the world, but that's because it's running everything through multiple layers of encryption. In addition to encrypting your online activity, Tor is pretty much the only way to access deep web urls, which end with .onion, such as VICE's SecureDrop page: cxoqh6bd23xa6yiz.onion.

Word to the wise: Don't do anything with Tor apart from leaking your documents. If you log in into your email or social media accounts, you risk having them associated with Tor and therefore, your leaking activities. So stay focused.

7. Drip, Drip, Drip!

SecureDrop itself will guide you through the very easy process of uploading your files, and will allow you to add a note—or you can send just a note, if you prefer. Upload everything you have, and then add a detailed note that helps the recipient connect dots. It's a good idea to explain laws, policies, and other inside-baseball stuff about your workplace that the journalist on the other end might not know about. In short: Spell out the violation. Don't just drop off the documents.

After you click "Submit Documents for the First Time," you'll get a long string of random words like "gamble shark rent enough verify temporary regal," or something like that. This is a secret code you can use to log back in and check for a response a few days later. This is important: You will want to log back in, according to Devine. "Very seldom does it work where you can just drop evidence in someone's lap," he told me. "There needs to be a tutorial on its significance, and maybe a lot of explanation to help demystify the technical jargon." He doesn't think of links in terms of a "disclosure moment," but rather as "disclosure process."

Be patient. We journalists can be a lot dumber than movies make us look. In all likelihood, we'll have a lot of questions to ask you before we can go ahead with a story. We might even want more documents. Sorry.

8. Expect a Shitstorm

"Whether or not you've done it right or wrong, you should expect that if the leak has had an impact, there'll be a determined effort to find the source—sometimes an obsessive effort," Devine told me. Obviously you become a target, but this effort can impact your coworkers as well. After a leak in 2007, for instance, the FBI raided the homes of unrelated NSA employees who had raised similar issues internally, despite the fact that they "had scrupulously worked within the system," Devine told me.

If you're caught, you might be celebrated as a hero, or your life could be ruined.

Judges in the past have decided that some leaks, like the revelation of horrific war atrocities during the Vietnam War by Daniel Ellsberg, were justified, and the charges against Ellsberg were dismissed. But don't count on that. Some kinds of leaks—like the ones about White House staffers struggling to find light switches—are frowned upon, but not really punished. Other leaks can earn you a lengthy prison term like Chelsea Manning, or force you into exile like Edward Snowden.

9. Never Tell Anyone

When I say never tell anyone, I mean never tell anyone. Not your significant other, not your cat. No one. It's the only way to stay in control of your secret.

In rare cases, people who leak information stay anonymous as long as they want. Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, who helped expose President Richard Nixon's involvement in the Watergate break-in in 1972, managed to stay anonymous for 36 years. If you expose serious wrongdoing, and cover your tracks, you can follow his example.

When I found that only 2 percent of practicing physicians in the United States are black women, I had trouble processing the thought. I am a black woman (not a physician) and my life is filled with fierce black female healers. But of course, anecdotal perceptions don't overridestatistics. The lack of representation is real, systemic, and it robs power and dignity from these women. Take, for example, the Delta Airlines flight attendant who implied that physician Tamika Cross (responding to an emergency on the plane) was not an "actual" doctor.

Writer and documentarian Crystal Emery provides both context and hope around this issue. As a black woman with a disability, Emery understands the insidious form of oppression that arises when people underestimate your capabilities. Her most recent project, a documentary called Black Women in Medicine, explores the unique barriers and triumphs that black women doctors face. This work (which includes her companion book, Against All Odds: Celebrating Black Women in Medicine) is part of a multi-faceted initiative called Changing the Face of Medicine, which aims to increase the percentage of African American physicians in America by 2025. I spoke to Emery about her new project.

Read more on Tonic

There was no wild rhetoric about "killing whitey" or clandestine plots to ambush and torture cops when I attended a political education class hosted by Dallas's Black Women's Defense League last year. Instead, there were a lot of women of color speaking from the heart, telling one another how they felt when they walk down the street alone, sharing the fears they had for their children growing up in America today. Some of these sisters rocked kente cloth with dreads, while others had weaves and perms and wore skirts and heels. A few of the women were decidedly old school: They were alive when the original Black Panthers stormed the California State Capitol building with shotguns in 1967. But there were millennials on hand, too—ladies with hip-hop songs paused on their iPhones and books like The New Jim Crow tucked into their purses.

The Black Women's Defense League first popped up on my radar thanks in part to its red, black, and green logo, which features a woman with an afro toting a shotgun. After flipping through photos of the founder, Niecee X, brandishing firearms on social media, I couldn't help relating to the group's advocacy of firearms for self-defense. Even though I've never owned a gun, I've certainly thought about it, tempted by the illusion of security it might offer in a country where someone like George Zimmerman, a vigilante who took a young black life like mine on a whim, can walk away scot free. But prior to actually meeting with the group, I failed to grasp the scope of the issues they grapple with.As Ibora Ase, one core member of the Black Women's Defense League, put it to me, black women don't just have to fight "the man—we have to fight our men."

Niecee, the Defense League's leader, defies easy caricature. There is a distinct elegance on display in herperfectly posed Instagram selfies, where she mixes militant-fatigues, African prints, and exuberant hair styles that run the color spectrum from cherry red to Frank Ocean blond. Above all, though, she's stern and fastidious when it comes to her work as an advocate for black women—leading the core members of her group in self-defense training sessions, charity work in the community, and outreach to the at-risk youths of Dallas.

Her grandmother gave Niecee the politics bug when she was still a kid. "I knew all of the senators and who the Republicans were," she said. "I was really drinking the Kool-Aid for a minute." But it was in her early 20s that she found her way activism through local black groups in Dallas like Guerilla Mainframe and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which introduced her to radical organizing.

It was only about two years ago that she broke off from those groups after a series of personal and professional incidents that begged for an organization specifically focused on obstacles faced by women of color. "There were issues with an individual that I had been dealing with romantically," she said of a man she met within Dallas's black activist community, "and there was some violence that occurred between him and me."

Niecee said that she was pregnant at the time and the alleged violence led to her losing a child. But what compelled her to start the Defense League wasn't a single act of malice so much as how the Huey P. Newton Gun Club handled her abuse allegations when she brought them to the attention of leadership.

"There has to be a hard line drawn within our communities and for each other that this isn't something that will be tolerated, and even further that when it does happen, if it does happen, that it will be dealt with swiftly and dealt with in a way that will ensure it does not occur again," she told me.

In an email, the co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, Babu Omowale, said that because the alleged violence took place before Niecee was an official member of HPNGC, it wasn't their problem. He questioned whether it had happened at all and added that his organization offered Niecee a tribunal with a council of elders to resolve the situation, an offer she refused. After her refusal, Niecee was excommunicated from the group. (Niecee told me her refusal was based on her wariness that the tribunal would be run predominantly by men who might not be sensitive to her concerns as a women. This is the same wariness that led her not to report the allegations to the authorities.)

After I reached out to Omowale for comment, he posted an irate note on Facebook that publicly criticized Niecee for talking to "craKKKas media." Referring to the Defense League, he said that it is "unfortunate you have to fight your own before the enemy… you and your gay ass feminist group can burn in hell."

The episode speaks to how, even within the "woke" community of radical black activists in 2017, there is still much to be done on gender equality. As Ase put it, there's sometimes a desire to "keep things in house" in the black community. The problem is, if we don't we start talking about these issues—which plague all American communities, but can be particularly threatening to black women—many more people are going to be hurt, and the movement as a whole will be held back.

The problem these women are confronting is an ugly one: According to the Violence Policy Center, which analyzed FBI data from 2014, in cases where there is a single female victim and single male offender, black women are murdered by men at more than twice the rate of white women. And 91 percent of these murders are committed by dudes they know. What's more, CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey from 2010 found that 22 percent of black women were raped at some point in their lifetime. That's probably lowballing it, too, given there were an estimated 15 black female sexual abuse victims for every one who officially reported an incident, according to a report released by the Department of Justice in 2006.

Some black women don't report abuse because theydon't trust the system, which is understandable.After all, prior to the 13th Amendment, America legally viewed their bodies as property. Systematic sexual abuse, bodily torture, and violent death were a fact of life for black women. The system was not there to serve them—it was there to institutionalize their suffering. Can you really blame black women today who don't trust a government that has failed again and again to protect black bodies?

Dallas police have won some plaudits in recent years for attempts to improve community-police relations, but their sluggish approach to closing sex crime cases—while is hardly unique to the city—seems to have cast a long shadow. Until recently, local cops had a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits that dated all the way back to 1996.

Who would want to go through the pain of reporting a sensitive crime like rape, when the police have a woeful record of not even doing the simplest tasks necessary to protect women on the street? In this light, it makes perfect sense that the fastest growing demographic for the purchase of concealed handguns in the state of Texas is black women. As Niecee told me while we were sitting at the group's headquarters, "At the end of the day, we have a common goal, and that common goal is ultimately liberation, but at the very least the well-being and safety of our sisters."

I had this blindspot myself.When Sunn M'Cheaux, a dreaded male member of the Black Women's Defense League, challenged me to name a black woman who died after garnering unwarranted police attention. Besides Sandra Bland, I couldn't think of one. I might have offered up plenty of facts and opinions about Eric Garner or Michael Brown. But at the time, I hadn't even heard of people like Yvette Smith, an unarmed black woman who was asked to come out of her friend's house by the police and, when she complied, was almost immediately shot and killed. Or Reika Boyd, a woman who was shot in the back of the head by an off-duty officer who mistook her friend's cell phone for a gun.

The facts speak for themselves. Black people are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, and women face unique hurdles that can make them vulnerable more vulnerable to the wrath of the state. Although black women only make up 13 percent of America's female population, about 30 percent of all women behind bars are black. This follows a troubling trend of criminalizing black women that starts with childhood. According to the US Department of Education, black girls are suspended six times as often as white girls in school. And once in the justice system, they have an incredibly hard time navigating their way out because of limited financial resources: Black women are five times more likely to live in poverty than white women.

What we have here, then, is a war on both sides, with black women battling both the patriarchy and racial prejudice. And the Black Women's Defense League has responded to that fight by embracing the American way:taking arms and standing their ground.

Of course, there's no guarantee that Niecee's efforts will actually make her and her comrades safer. In fact, if American history is any indication, being an outspoken activist for women and black liberation might bring her even closer to police or extralegal crosshairs. I started to worry about thisas I sat with the Defense League, surrounded by portraits of slain civil rights leaders and books like Robert F. Williams's Negroes with Guns. On the one hand, guns have always played a role in America's Civil Rights struggle—even a pacifist like Martin Luther King Jr. kept guns around, because he understood that standing up to institutionalized oppression is a life-threatening proposition. But thoseguns didn't stop him from getting assassinated.

When you're black and you actually evangelize for self-defense against the violence of state like Niecee does, you can find yourself in an extremely precarious position. White Second Amendment advocates like Cliven Bundy's "We the People" are often framed as patriots, but blacks activists with guns have historically been perceived as insurgents. In fact, modern gun control was spurred in part by the Panther Party for Self-Defense's embrace of firearms in the late 60s, with conservatives like California governor Ronald Reagan signing bills restricting the rights of gun owners. Later, this group was eviscerated by local and federal law enforcement through assassination, surveillance, and covert sabotage.

Niecee got a little taste of that about six months after we hung out, when she was mistaken by Dallas cops for being a cop killer.

On July 7, 2016, she attended a Black Lives Matter protest in response to the police shooting of Philando Castile, a legal gun owner who announced his possession of a firearm to an officer before being killed in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. Military veteran Micah Johnson, who had a history of mental health issues, used the protest to ambush the police in what he seemed to believe was retaliation for police violence against blacks. He murdered five and injured nine (plus two civilians) before police were able to kill him with a robot-delivered bomb. According to Niecee, even thoughshe was unarmed at the protest, she was still detained by the police for more than six hours under suspicion of being connected to the killings. She said they confiscated her car and copied all the information on her cellphone, which she'd used to livestream the chaos.

Despite the terrifying ordeal of being perceived as terrorist in the midst of an active shooting, and the vitriol she's incited from men within Dallas's black activist community for advocating for women's issues, Nieceeisn't going anywhere. She was on the ground protesting at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last year, and she led the BWDL to the Women's March in Washington, DC, the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration to stand in solidarity with all women. And although she has her sights on expanding her group nationwide, she continues to support women in her own community, using the BWDL's network to raise funds for women fleeing abusive relationships.

The time I spent with her and the rest of the BWDL certainly helped me begin to reckon with the unique threats faced by black women as a result of institutional racism and entrenched sexism. Until we reach the day when this nation stops brutalizing black women, Niecee and the Black Women's Defense League have vowed to be out there on the front lines, protecting their sisters by any means necessary.

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump's pick to fill the vacant Supreme Court spot, is reportedly pretty offended by the president's tweets regarding the federal judge who blocked his controversial immigration ban, CNN reports.

Gorsuch, who was nominated (and then man-handled) by Trump just a week ago, met with Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday and said that he felt that Trump's tweets about US District Judge James Robart were "demoralizing" and "disheartening." On Saturday, the president called Robert a "so-called judge" and then followed up by tweeting that people should blame him and the court system if "something happens."

"He said very specifically that they were demoralizing and disheartening and he characterized them very specifically that way," Blumenthal told CNN. "I said they were more than disheartening and I said to him that he has an obligation to make his views clear to the American people, so they understand how abhorrent or unacceptable President Trump's attacks on the judiciary are."

The federal appeals judge from Colorado has been meeting with various senators on both sides of the aisle ahead of his upcoming confirmation hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Democrats will likely ask him about his opinions on Trump's tweets. In order to get confirmed, he'll need at least eight Senate Democrats to back him to reach the 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster.

Beginning in January, Red started getting calls from groups of furries who wanted her help fighting Nazis.

Red—who did not want me to use her real name because members of her subculture who speak to the press can be blacklisted from events—knows her stuff. The 26-year-old Chicagoan has been dressing up in a fur suit since 2008, and joined Antifa International three years later, after getting involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Antifa International (for anti-fascist) is a group dedicated to fighting right-wing politics, and to achieve that mission antifas are prepared to do anything up to and including punching Nazis. But Red, who believes fascist rhetoric should be met with a closed fist—or paw—wasn't sure the furries were prepared to do what it took.

"Most furries find any kind of violence abhorrent," she told me.

The furry fandom is one of the most inclusive subcultures on the internet. Many furries are queer, and most are used to being ridiculed for their "fursonas," anthropomorphized animal avatars that are used in roleplaying that sometimes (but not always) gets sexual. But even the furry community isn't immune from the political upheaval sweeping through America. Instead, it's a microcosm—albeit an odd one—of the culture war that the rest of the country is consumed by. The furries who called Red faced a question all too familiar to many people today: What should be done about far-right figures coming out of the shadows?

To be clear, Nazis are not new to the furry community. All the way back in 2007, a group called Furzi clashed with Jewish users of the game Second Life, which is a popular place for furries to congregate. Several members of the fandom told me that the ideology has festered among some furries ever since. More recently, a group called the Furry Raiders has become emboldened by the campaign, and eventual victory, of Donald Trump.

The Raiders are led byLee Miller, a 29-year-old Furry who goes by Foxler Nightfire—a blue-eyed character who wears a red-and-black armband that should be familiar to any student of world history. Although he's been a known quantity within in the fandom for years, Foxler drew wider attention in January when he tweeted out a picture of himself with the hashtag #altfurry.

In late November, before "alt-furries" or "Nazifurs" attracted media attention, group called Antifa Furries formed to try to address the growing problem. Their goal is to get Nazifurs banned from events and to encourage furries to get involved in politics—efforts that seasoned activists like Red think are insufficient when it comes to combatting the far right.

Red told me that when members of the Antifa Furs called her up to ask for advice, they didn't like what she had to say. Though being "anti-fascist" seems like an obvious position to take, especially at a time like this, many antifas advocate property destruction and other forms of lawbreaking—which, Red said, the Antifa Furs weren't up for.

"Everyone jumped on this antifa bandwagon, but they are getting over their head," she told me. "It's not for all liberals, it's for anarchists and for communists. It's not for people who wanna hold a sign or sign a petition, it's for people who are willing to do whatever is necessary to stomp out fascism."

logo courtesy of Antifa Furries

Instead of fighting Foxler with violence, the Antifa Furries decided to go with a strategy of trying to convince people to boycott conventions that didn't ban the Furry Raiders from attending—a fairly roundabout way of ostracizing one's enemies.

Fiver, a soft-spoken 20-something member of a group called the Antifa Furries, told me that furries—who tend to be both gentle and geeky—may reluctant to expel problematic community members because they're afraid of being as intolerant as the people who bullied them in high school.

"While we do desire to be as accommodating and accepting as possible, this attitude has also required the acceptance of Nazis who will turn around and tell you that if you don't accept them, you're the real fascist," he told me.

When I talked to Lee Miller, who lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, he told me he's been into the fandom since he 12. According to the high school dropout, his Nazi-esque armband originated as a Second Life accessory—but it's difficult to pin him down on what it actually represents, or what he actually believes.During the course of our conversation, he oscillated between claiming ignorance and irony. When I asked why he won't just take off the armband to end the drama, he unspooled a story about how the character of Foxler was based on his deceased father and that changing it would be tantamount to disrespecting his memory. When I asked about his politics, he said that they're starting to change in reaction to all the backlash he's received from people offended by his outfit. Before all of this, he used to look exclusively at 4Chan, he says, but now he's starting reading about "SJWs" and "safe spaces" and getting more involved in what might be termed slightly more mainstream right-wing modes of thought.

"Why are people trying to control my existence or tell me what I can and can't do when it's within the law?" he says. "I've never really driven into politics, but I need to get more serious about them now that all this is happening."

Miller says he originally supported Bernie Sanders, but now agrees with at least some of Trump's views. He also admires Trump's campaign tactics and the way the orange-faced provocateur played the media into giving him coverage. Meanwhile, furries aligned against him say Foxler/Miller has emulated these tricks. They say that he'll say anything to anyone as long as it increases his popularity and gets him more followers. It doesn't matter that he's bisexual, or that his boyfriend is a minority, because aligning himself with white nationalism has given him a platform. His backstory and its apparent contradictions make him vaguely similar to Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right personality who has built a whole career out of saying things calculated to piss off the left. Miller even attended a Yiannopoulos event he attended last month in full furry regalia.

As for how a furry might be radicalized in the first place, one hypothesis among furries is that members of the fandom congregate on anything-goes image boards like 4Chan, which are also frequented by members of hate groups like Storefront who will deliberately appeal to lonely nerds. The Raiders, like a fair number of those on the far right these days, can claim that they're just conducting a social experiment or trolling, but their opponents say that's just an excuse that they use to hide their honestly bigoted views.

"Foxler is all about grooming and manipulating people that don't feel like they belong anywhere—and, let's face it, most furries feel like they don't belong anywhere," a Colorado-based furry named Ash told me.

Ash is a 28-year-old who, like Miller, lives in Colorado and has been working to ban Foxler and his crew from local meetups. Armbands are now almost universally disallowed from the local scene, she told me, and Foxler is also not welcome at a local bimonthly dance party called Foxtrot. One problem, however, is that since people in the community are almost always in disguise at these events, it's impossible to tell who is secretly an alt-furry. Ash and others have been monitoring Twitter and trying to suss out who's been communicating with the enemy, but it's been tough.

Her big target is the Rocky Mountain Fur Con, which is set to take place this August in Denver. Anti-fascist furries claim that members of the Raiders are on staff there and that the con has been silent about their pleas to ban Nazis because they fear violence like the chlorine gas attack that sent 19 Illinois con-goers to the hospital in 2014.

Sorin, the con's chairman, declined a formal interview but instead issued a relatively middle-of-the-road statement: "Rocky Mountain Fur Con does not support or condone discrimination or violence in any of it's forms and is saddened by the hatred and division that has been caused be [sic] a small minority of our community on both sides of this issue."

That division, like the larger one afflicting America, isn't likely to heal anytime soon.

"It's so strange that this is also happening in our community," Ash told me. "But since the fandom is growing exponentially and the group is getting bigger, we were bound to pick up a small sliver of people that are completely off the wall. Foxler would be that sliver."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Nothing in life is ever easy, and there's never a guaranteed happy ending. And nobody likes to talk about the hard times in relationships, moments when you begin to think that love won't save you this time.

And it won't. That's the hard truth. There will come a time when your relationship faces a true calamity, and you will have to go beyond love and tap into commitment—that commitment to show up even when it feels so hard as to be impossible, times when you begin to wonder if you even love each other anymore.

My husband Alex, boyfriend Jon and I recently faced a period like this, a rough patch when each of us considered whether or not our relationship would survive, and what we might look like should it do so.

It's easy to blame a crisis on one person in your relationship. Alex had been struggling for over a year, and much of it was happening far away from Jon and I. He was working on a TV show in Spokane, Washington, and talked about feeling depressed and hopeless. We were in LA, and we had no idea what was happening.

When Alex came home, he saw a psychiatrist. He was initially misdiagnosed with depression and prescribed Wellbutrin, an antidepressant. For depression, that makes sense, but for someone who we would later come to learn was bipolar, it would prove to be a disastrous combination.

Wellbutrin sent Alex into heights of mania. He would be up for days, disappear for hours, hallucinate and hear voices. In response, his medication was changed. And changed. Each pill caused a new nightmare. Some caused him to sleep endlessly; others took away his libido; others brought on more mania and hallucinations; each one made him feel more out of control.

I began to wonder if he was using drugs. Looking back, it was clear that I was grossly uneducated and unprepared to deal with what he was going through. I knew nothing about mental illness. I kept trying to get Alex to change his behavior, to make him sleep or wake up or otherwise snap back into his old self. There were days when he would just disappear into his own head, and I would start huge fights just to get him to talk to me.

He began looking for ways to self-medicate. The three of us became more isolated from each other and our friends, who we thought were tired of hearing us talk about what seemed to be an insurmountable mountain of problems.

Desperate after a string of prescriptions and no longer sure where to turn, we found a residential treatment center in LA, where we live, called The Hills. The Hills provides high-end luxury celebrity rehab, but it also specializes in mental health issues. It was one of few places we found able deal with both our triad and Alex's bipolar disorder.

Their program consists of a 30-day inpatient component, followed by 30 to 60 days of intensive outpatient treatment, then another 30 to 60 days of outpatient. Alex was able to stabilize during that time, and he began working on finding the right set of medications. Meanwhile, Jon and I were sent to family therapy and family group therapy, as well as individual and "triad" counseling.

It would be easy to blame Alex for the chaos that exploded into our lives, but blame assumes a wrong committed, and I don't think Alex did anything wrong. We all fell victim to an illness that seemed to make no sense.

When Alex and I first met, I was six months sober. I was insane. The combination of any new relationship's ups and downs with my fighting to stay sober caused more than its fair share of problems, but we found our way through it, and I believe it made us stronger, maybe even prepared us for what was coming.

I relied heavily on Jon in Alex's stead, and that's one thing about being in a triad that I hadn't foreseen; when things fall apart, someone will be there to help carry the burden. With Jon, there was someone to help me with the cleaning and the bills and the pets, the little things in life that begin to seem like mountains when you feel like you're drowning. Together, we were able to take on the burden when Alex needed to focus on what was happening to him.

When we began our search for a family therapist, we strongly believed that we wanted to work with someone who had worked with other triads and poly "families," as well as someone who understood issues surrounding bipolar disorder and substance abuse (both Jon and I are sober). Jorja Davis, who directs the family therapy program at The Hills, happened to have experience treating poly relationships, and ended up making the most sense for us.

"What I've found in working with poly families and triads is this: the more people that are involved in any relationship dynamic, it obviously becomes more complicated," Jorja told me. "In relationships, it's not so much adding more people that's the problem, inasmuch as it's a multiplication of issues, attachment strategies and communication styles. Couples in traditional relationships usually circle around four major challenges: money, sex, in-laws and parenting. These challenges also take place in poly and triad relationships, but in poly relationships, we start out by looking at definitions of who we are, what roles each of us take and how those roles affect each other."

At her office, the three of us sit in a row, with Jon in the middle. Jon also sleeps in the middle. When we began seeing her, we were terrified. None of us had any idea where or how to begin. So she began by asking each of us questions, treating each relationship—Jeff to Alex, Alex to Jeff, Jon to Jeff, Jeff to Jon, Alex to Jon and Jon to Alex—as its own entity, encompassed within the relationship that is the three of us together. Soon, everything began to unravel.

That unraveling has lead pretty miraculous changes in how we communicate and interact with each other. It has taught each of us how to properly voice our needs and our fears, and to really hear what each other is saying.

This is a new adventure for us; none of us know what we're doing. And as each of us goes out into the world and makes new friends and meets new people to love, it seems our familial network keeps expanding. What are the boundaries? Who are we, the three of us, in relation to this ever-growing thing we are now a part of? How do we maintain our individual identities as well as our primary relationships within it?

I suppose these are all things we can figure out in therapy.

You can argue what brought us here was a crisis, but I believe each of us is stronger because of it, and that we are growing and learning through this experience, becoming better people and lovers and friends all the while. And maybe that's the whole point.

When Coretta Scott King goes out of her way to write a letter condemning someone, you'd think the world would listen. Or, at least, take that into consideration when naming that someone to be a major player in our government. But apparently that's not the case.

On Tuesday night, Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to present a letter Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow wrote in 1986 criticizing Jeff Sessions, then nominee for federal judge, on the Senate floor. Instead of being able to quote the important document, she was silenced by Mitch McConnell.

Wednesday night on Desus & Mero, the hosts talked about Mitch "Turtle" McConnell, and how his racist tendencies go beyond this sad Senate hearing.

Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

I hate the beginning of every new year. I never know what to do with myself – with all these blank months stretched out before me, mocking me for not having a plan for them yet. It makes me feel like I'm trapped in a video game, stuck at a level that I don't fully understand. Should I be collecting coins? Beat up an enemy? Just wait it out?

During these uncertain first months of the year, I have found some solace in closely following that one segment of society that always seems to have its act together – professional instagrammers. The kind of people who don't just live – they lifestyle. They consistently look radiantly beautiful in their selfies, raising their glasses of Moët & Chandon to a "New year, new me! Many exciting projects to come!" I might be a bit of a vlogger myself, but the only "exciting project" that I have lined up for 2017 is to learn the complete Thriller choreography. Which is exciting, but not the same thing.

All photos courtesy of the author

Life, I suspect, is better when you're living the kind that attracts followers on Instagram. People always say that Instagram isn't real and that it's toxic to compare your life to that of others –which I'm sure is well-intentioned advice but also very boring. I happen to love comparing myself to others – and if others can do it, why can't I fill my life with #goals and filters that make every captured moment more meaningful? It might just be the only thing to get me out of my extended January blues.

Day 1

I went to an event for bloggers and social media influencers once, which turned out to be just a presentation of electronic household appliances. I did socialise with two food bloggers there, who told me that puréed chickpeas taste exactly like cookie dough. So with the wind of this experiment in my sails, I decided to start my week by making chickpea cookie dough for breakfast. I have all the ingredients in my kitchen cupboard already – chickpeas, milk, sugar, vanilla and cocoa-nibs. Call me Gwyneth.

When I'm done mashing chickpeas, I get into bed with my laptop and a fashion magazine because that seems the most Instagram place to consume my questionable breakfast. I caption this moment in my mind with a heartfelt "Breakfast in bed!" and treat myself to the first bite. I quickly realise, however, that puréed chickpeas do not taste like cookie dough at all. They taste like deception. Everybody knows that food bloggers are the most dastardly of social media influencers, but I hadn't expect them to outright lie to me. Something tells me this will be a very long week.

Day 2

After yesterday's disappointment, my day didn't exactly take a more Instagram-y turn. So today, I am determined to try harder. After lunch in a restaurant, I force my boyfriend to take an outfit-of-the-day picture of me. I've spent 45 minutes putting my outfit together this morning and have brought my SLR camera to lunch, just so we can perfectly capture how casual and spontaneous I look today.

Mid-shoot, I realise that I need bare ankles to pass as a style-conscious Instagram star. I take my socks off and leave them on the pavement just out of view. How style-conscious Instagram stars survive with bare ankles at -3 °C outside is something I haven't entirely figured out yet. When we're done, my boyfriend and I select a picture out of the 50 he shot – one that says I'm #workingit.

#ootd accomplished.

Day 3

Popular people on Instagram do yoga, that's just a fact. None of them seem to do it to relax though – you'll usually read a caption like "I was in a meeting, then rushed home to do some yoga". Why not just do some breathing exercises while taking it easy on your way home, then? Anyway, I manage to squeeze in a 20 minute yoga session today.

I decide to do it with the help of a yoga class on YouTube. The instructor tells me to imagine that I am "inhaling a golden string through my nose". If I were actually inhaling a golden string through my nose I would absolutely have a panic attack, but I must admit that the yoga exercises really are very relaxing. So relaxing in fact, that I fail at taking a proper #selfie while doing it. And if I haven't posted a photo of it on Instagram, did I even do any yoga at all?

Day 4

It might have been the yoga, but I wake up at 6AM. Like a spider in his web, ready to attack an unsuspecting insect, I wait for my boyfriend, Dominik, to wake up so he can take a picture of my back while I pretend to be asleep.

It sounds simple, but it takes Dominik about 5 minutes to make sure I look casual and relaxed while fake sleeping. After he's perfectly positioned my limbs and takes a picture, we have breakfast. We go to a place that I've seen pop up on Instagram a few times, that serves something called "acai bowls". The bowl itself is alright, but I struggle to take a proper picture of it. The lighting in this place is a nightmare for influencers like myself, to be quite frank.

As if that wasn't bad enough in itself, I realise that I've spent four days as a professional instagrammer and still haven't been invited to some kind of promotional event with other instagrammers. This is unacceptable. My sudden rage drives me to invite my most beautiful friends to a trendy bar for drinks and finger food. Some of them show up, but when I try to explain what I'm doing, none of them seem to care. They don't mind taking a selfie together, but when I start discussing what hashtag we should all be using here I get some extremely blank looks. Not much later we share the bill and I hurry home to do some yoga.

Day 5

As much as I like making fun of professional Instagram stars, I have to admit that being one for a week is exhausting. It's not easy to constantly try to find little moments in everyday life that could potentially be interesting to share with other people.

And on top of that, wild monkeys have taken better photos of their everyday moments than I have of mine. Whenever I try to make a flatlay (when you're shooting items from directly above) my hands start shaking. I now have about 52 shots of an acai bowl stored on my phone, which keeps giving me notifications that there's "Not enough storage space left on device". The biggest help this weeks has been my boyfriend, who I'm exploiting like an intern at a fashion magazine. But whatever – my life looks amazing and everything's going really well for me right now, I'm in a really great place in my life.

Day 6

If I'm going to have a successful and prolific life on Instagram, I need to give food another try. I decide to bake vegan, sugar-free blueberry muffins.

Although it's not mentioned in the recipe and nobody I know is gluten intolerant, I choose gluten-free flour for my muffins – I'm not sure it'll count as pure Instagram baking if there's gluten involved in the process. When the muffins come out of the oven they taste absolutely awful, but they thankfully look fancy enough to use as a prop in my attempt at a #flatlay above.

Day 7

Today is the last day of my experiment and I seem to have the whole thing down. I wake up early, prepare a healthy breakfast and go for a jog – mostly so I can then post a picture of myself in my jogging outfit. My followers seem to appreciate the plan – I'm racking up likes even before I've left the flat. It's freezing outside though, which is unfortunate. Since I'm one of those people who open their mouths widely while jogging, a bit like a golden retriever does, after a few minutes my throat starts to feel like I've swallowed razor blades.

I go home – it's been five minutes but my followers won't know. I do feel a bit guilty, so I bake some more – cookies this time. These ones are made with 400 grams of sugar, no sign of chick peas and packed to the brim with gluten – but at least I've actually made and ate them.

Life as a professional instagrammer isn't as easy as it seems – and, coincidentally, life in general isn't as easy as instagrammers make it look. It's possible that my real life is just too boring to be followed by a bunch of strangers, but I suspect I'm not alone in that. I just really don't like dealing with the pressure that comes with pretending life is always well-lit and that there's an inspiring lesson to learn from every mundane moment.

Oh well, I try looking at it this way: chickpea cookies are to actual cookies what Instagram moments are to actual, spontaneous, wonderful moments in life. And that thought alone could just be enough to beat my extended January blues.

An anti-travel ban protester in London (Photo: Oscar Webb)

The rise of Donald Trump has made for some very strange bedfellows. In the UK, both press and political nerds have been thrilled by the emergence of Woke John Bercow, after the Speaker of the House of Commons declared his intention to refuse Trump an invitation to address both Lords and Commons in Westminster Hall. Left-wing Guardian columnist and organiser of Stop Trump protests, Owen Jones – who might be expected to share little in common with Bercow's politics – declared him a hero, "speaking for Britain".

For Bercow this is the summation of a long march away from the right-wing politics of his youth (as a member of the hard-right Monday Club) and toward an embrace of the kind of liberal Toryism which has vanishingly little purchase at the top of the current Conservative Party. There is no question his disgust for Trump is real, and shared by the vast majority of MPs, just as there's no question that Bercow has an eye for the spotlight and a knack for grabbing attention. (A Westminster Hall address was far from certain, anyway.) He was also simply doing his job: representing the sentiment and interest of MPs, and asserting parliamentary sovereignty.

One might feel troubled by an odour of hypocrisy here. For all the fine words about Parliament's commitment to the rights of women and minorities, throw a rock blindfolded in the chamber and you'd have a good chance of hitting some oozing reactionary with views last updated in the 1930s: Nick Soames, who recently barked at a female MP; men's rights fruitcake Philip Davies; even the Prime Minister, who distinguished herself in her last post by sending vans emblazoned with "Go Home" messages onto the streets and hymning the new "hostile environment" for migrants. Nor has Parliament as an institution distinguished itself with virtue in the rulers it welcomes: as the hardy band of Trumpophiles on the Tory benches ask, what is so abominable about the President, given the rabble of bloodthirsty potentates and corrupt princelings we routinely welcome?

"Are all of us who object to Trump on the same side?"

The question is an uncomfortable one, especially for anyone who entertains any illusions about Parliament's innocence. After Brexit, calls to abandon any pretence at propriety and snuggle up to the world's least salubrious leaders will resound, especially if we chase their cash for Britain's transformation into a sunless North Atlantic tax haven. In such a "realist", transactional view of politics, values-driven objections are less important than the sheer exercise of power and what those who have it can do for us. Beyond those cold-blooded few who can see the world exclusively in those calculating terms, we might ask: are all of us who object to Trump therefore on the same side?

The opposition to Trump spans vast ideological and political chasms. There are those, like me, on the farther reaches of the left, who see Trump primarily in terms of the rise of an unholy alliance of the conservative right, a merry band of corporate deregulators and profiteers, with a disgorging seam of crypto-fascists and hard racists reinventing themselves for the internet age as the "alt-right". They prey on the resentment, exclusion and atomisation of the old working class, while promising to salve their wounds and restore a decaying golden age. In this, they are not so distinct from the wave of new right and nativist parties springing up across Europe. They are signs of a transformation in the political world order, which was served notice with the crisis of 2008 and is now beginning to crack up.

But there is also a more liberal objection to Trump, which remains agnostic on the questions of economy and politics which produced him, and focuses more on his procedural outrages and crassness, his disregard for democratic procedure and inclination to dictator-like "decisionism". The most cherished hope of such anti-Trumpists is that they can somehow roll this crass booby out of office, roll back to a time before Trump, before the crisis, before his voters exercised their vote, stick a plaster on the world and go back to how things used to be. Trump is a disaster, but he is not a disaster merely because of his disregard for democratic procedure – as if his bans and walls would be better if only they had been brought through proper channels.

WATCH: Speaking to protesters at the London anti-Trump demonstration.

Between these two positions are the vast majority of people who are attracted to the Stop Trump protests, who carry home-made placards, often with a slightly ironic, slightly desperate joke slogans. Unlike many, I feel a kind of tenderness for these slogans – far better than the SWP's astroturf signage, anyway – as they feel to me like a hesitant and halting use of long-dormant muscles, an uncertain public searching for a voice. Many on those protests will feel something of both positions: that something large and dangerous is happening, that something old and important is slipping away, that old certainties are beginning to crack. To sneer at that realisation – to castigate belated awareness of our political situation – is to cut off any potential development of these protests at their beginning.

The Stop Trump protests aren't where we might want them to be: in their focus on an illegitimate foreign leader they risk turning our attentions solely to the US, when the same sentiments about migrants take hold in Number 10 and the UK border regime further intensifies. And making this connection between Trump's Muslim Ban and the direction of our government is essential. Such connection-making is the bread-and-butter of left-wing writers and activists, but more difficult is answering the fears of people who sense that the political order that has underwritten their world – the norms of liberal democracy – is slipping. This may involve telling some home truths about the democracy espoused by Bercow and co – its ease with rights violations, its habit of transforming temporary powers into permanent exceptions, its history of corruption and imperfection. But that alone is not enough to answer fear. Answering those fears – and this is a project which can reach Trump voters as much as protesters – requires articulating a vision of new institutions capable of transforming the decay of the old order.

At root, the problem with Bercow and those latching on to anti-Trump sentiments is not hypocrisy. Hannah Arendt, the thinker of totalitarianism who has had something of an intellectual revival since the Trump's accession – and who I normally find somewhat questionable – was right when she wrote against the tendency to see the heart as the source of political virtue, and the danger of placing the impulse to root out hypocrisy at the centre of one's politics. The problem is not that they are hypocrites, nor will we win merely by eradicating hypocrisy from ourselves and exhorting others to do the same. The problem is that they are advocates of a sterile politics, long retreated from the people, in love with the trappings of democracy while its corpse moulders beneath them. The only way out is through the chaos, and a reckoning with the political order that brought us here.

@piercepenniless

(Screenshot: 'Mad Men' / AMC)

Imagine you've put yourself through the ringer to score a competitive job at an industry-leading advertising agency. This is your dream, it's what you've always wanted: a creative job, sure, but in the right circumstances a chance to change the world, and to wear jeans with a blazer a lot, and to be a couple of promotions away from a six-figure salary. Creative, but without the poverty. Here's how you got here: you went through three rounds of applications, passed multiple interviews, tests and presentations. And now, you've landed a role boasting the full buffet of benefits and big name clients. But not just this: you've been told the company is friendly, encourages proactivity and is ranked as one of the best in the UK for employee happiness.

Sadly, everyone is a dickhead and behaves like a dickhead and it's a dickhead industry built on a strong foundation of dickheadery.

So you see the problem. That was me, one year ago: bright-eyed and bushy tailed and marvelling at the fact there was a fridge full of free Diet Cokes (free!) in the office with me. Instead, I was plunged into a world beyond parody: airhead creatives, drugs, idea theft bordering on fraud and not an ounce of common sense to police it all. Sure, I expected the industry to have some bullshitty quirks – the industry is essentially monetised bullshit – but, you know, not quite this much bullshit.

Anyway, here's what I learned:

IF IT SOUNDS GOOD, THEN IT MUST BE GOOD

Ideas are the bedrock of the advertising industry, an industry that understand ideas are ethereal, hard to force, sort of shapeless, in need of free-thinking and the right space and time, need careful tending to, like orchids. Sadly, the industry is also absolutely bereft of them, so that doesn't matter at all.

It began with small things. I witnessed one of the most senior strategists take notes in a meeting on a napkin, despite having brought a notebook with him. We got company-wide emails featuring inspirational quotes from the famous boxer "Mohamed Alli". We had presentations that compared a brand's "viral content" to viral diseases, with people being "infected" by the "spreading epidemic" of their content (without so much as a hat tip to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).

I started to attend open brainstorms – which are, of course, heavy on bullshit by design – and my hopes weren't high, given what had come before. I was expecting maybe two or three good ideas per hour. Maybe four, on a good day.

There were no ideas. Zero. Instead, in their place came… well, whatever these are:

"The Underground, by its nature, is very hidden."

"When your ad isn't authentic, it feels fake."

"Through synergetic promotion, we can increase awareness."

This would all be fine if some of these inverse riddles didn't later become the basis for some pretty expensive actual ad campaigns.

KEEP YOUR COMPLEX THOUGHTS TO YOURSELF

In my first week I ran head on into one of the values the agency had identified and stuck to across the board: complex strategies were to be expressed only in the form of slides. The more pictures the better, and

• No.
• More.
• Than.
• Five.
• Bullets.

So when I made the mistake of writing up a detailed competitor analysis into a Word document, I was told by my manager to "visualise" my research. I was told that the company liked to use only sophisticated tools, such as – and this is a direct quote – "PowerPoint".

IF YOU CHANGE THE BRAND NAME, IT'S NOT PLAGIARISM

As another regular feature of brainstorming sessions, senior staff would encourage us to gain inspiration from ideas from other brands. We would get "inspired" by watching an ad created by another agency, taking the key themes from that advertisement and parsing it down word by word to change it into something relevant to the brand we were working on. This happened at almost every brainstorm I attended.

For example, we were working on a popular biscuit brand that was trying to rebrand one of its most well-known, but often despised (think Marmite, but a biscuit) (actually: that idea is amazing?) products. In order to come up with a likeable campaign, lead agency creatives gathered us in a room to watch a single ad from Oreo, over and over again, and over, and again, then one more time, then over and over again, until the final product looked like we'd essentially put the ad through thesaurus.com.

Another time we were working on a pitch for a major car company and got our "inspiration" completely from Mercedes-Benz's 2014 campaign "Build Your Own Car On Instagram". We spent an entire meeting going down all of the possible routes you could take to get every combination of car, and directly applied it to the brand whose business we were competing for. The agency won that business, by the way.

NO MATTER YOUR BACKGROUND, AGE OR SKILL-SET, YOU TOO CAN BE AN ADVERTISER

Even with some maybe less-than-rigorous creative methods, the agency could have easily had some really sharp analytic minds in the form of client directors, those tasked with managing not just accounts and creative, but also budgets and data. My run-ins with client directors were, however, not hopeful. I once had an extended conversation – and I'm pretty sure this wasn't ever resolved – explaining to one that a -1 percent increase in sales year-on-year was an improvement on a -3 percent increase from the previous year. These same directors would regularly take contributions from brainstorms and stick them, unedited and undiscussed, into a multi-million pound ad campaign. The lesson is: with enough cockiness, a big enough mouth and enough entitlement, anyone can make it in the ad industry. The intellectual barrier to entry is exceptionally low.

IF NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU WRONG, IT'S NOT A LIE: OR, 'THE TAO OF BULLSHIT'

My time at the agency also featured regular inductions to each department, where the heads of each department would say what their department would contribute to a pitch. Although each section offered up their own skills and strengths, the one thing that was mentioned by every department without fail was:

"No, no, we don't just massage the numbers of our success rates – we make them up."

One department was particularly proud of a tool they'd developed, based on an algorithm created by the agency, which could enhance targeting in television advertising. The one small snag with this tool? It didn't exist. However, senior staff informed me that clients loved seeing the Photoshopped interface of the tool and the unbelievable results the agency had achieved with it, and that it really helped seal the deal with winning an account, so… was… there… really… any... need… to make it real?

When hired for the position, one of the things I was most excited about was the company culture. The agency won awards every year for its employee happiness rates and was known for having some of the best benefits in the UK, not just in advertising. And I wanted some of those benefits.

Sadly, the day-to-day reality wasn't quite worth the company breakfast bar. What was discussed at work could be largely categorised into three topics: what happened at the last office piss-up (shagging; cocaine), which media owner they'd most recently done coke with at a lunch (cocaine; shagging), and graphic reruns of recent sexual escapades (a perfect Venn diagram of cocaine and shagging). Several company presentations added "banter" in the form of pictures of senior staff posing with strippers at clubs. My fellow colleagues often spent company time screeching at tweets their colleagues had sent asking female celebrities to "sit on my dick". And, when they got bored with that, they'd begin a heated debate about which nationalities were "best" when it came to hiring nannies and cleaners. I don't remember Don Draper ever yelling, "Fuck off! Italians SHIT on Poles!" But there you go.

AS LONG AS YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH IT, DO IT

Advertising – as you've probably guessed from the number of public outrage-causing campaigns in recent years, from Protein World to the Superbowl – is a land operating far outside the confines of PC. And no more was that so than around mid-November, when my department's Christmas party invitation came through.

The theme "Benefits Britain" was promoted by a flyer covered in tasteful images of Vicky Pollard encouraging the staff to participate, with the instruction: "DON'T JUST THINK CHAV – THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!!"

When I quietly suggested this was perhaps unwise – even if only from a business perspective, given some of our clients were non-profits on government contracts – I was met with hysterical derision. A discussion that started with "how would this even get out?" naturally morphed into the "it's PC-gone-mad" echo chamber, and was finally brought to a close with an open-ended question: "Is blacking up even that bad?" Yes, blacking up is bad. As is going to your Christmas party in ironic Burberry and smashing a champagne bottle open with sovereign ring.

So would I recommend the advertising industry to anyone? Yes and no. On one hand: no. On the other hand: no; it's still no. When you dive into it headfirst and deal with the people there every day, and bang your head repeatedly up against a creatively bereft wall, and make the same advert (diverse set of children slowly open their eyes in close-up to the camera; haunting single note version of a formerly popular song; bourbon-and-smoke voiced narrator; Honda Civic driving off gleaming into the sunset) over and over again, you realise: that's why there's so much cocaine and shagging in this industry. It's the only way to cope. Anyway, I work in Communications now. It's much nicer.

This Is the Worst Advertising Campaign Ever

Advertisers Are Living in Your Brain

Why Not Rent Your Head to Advertisers?

(Screenshots: 'Trainspotting' / Film4; Photographs by the author)

A major bank recently did one of those awful, trying-very-hard-to-be-zeitgeisty press releases in which they revealed that putting money into property in a "Trainspotting postcode" in 1996 would have, in hindsight, been a very sound investment. House prices in the locations the film was shot have increased by over 200 percent, they salivated, as though the onslaught of impossibly high living costs is universally received as great news.

Apparently no one has told Sick Boy, Trainspotting's perennial not-quite master criminal.

"The great wave of gentrification has yet to engulf us," he jokes in recent sequel T2, as he introduces the ramshackle pub he has inherited. The bar is meant to be in Leith, the Edinburgh dockside district that has, in reality, been steadily gentrifying for two decades.

Likely for that reason, the producers of T2 scouted out a pub near Glasgow to film at in its place, with the decaying wasteland of Clydebank's waterfront – safely free of Michelin-starred restaurants – providing a more fitting backdrop.

Much the same dilemma faced the filmmakers of the original Trainspotting film in the mid-90s, which, a bit of east coast scene setting aside, was famously shot in Glasgow. So what has happened to those iconic locations over the last two decades? Have they too been overcome by a tsunami of pop-up shops, wine bars and hawkish estate agents?

To find out, I went on a tour of the key Trainspotting sites around Glasgow to see what I could find.

THE NIGHT CLUB

The night club scene, in case you don't remember, is the bit where Ewan MacGregor's anti-hero Renton meets Kelly Macdonald's schoolgirl Diane for the first time, as "Atomic" by Blondie reverberates in the background.

The Volcano night club was a real venue, situated in Partick in the west end of the city. But like the fate of so many clubs since, it was flattened soon after featuring in the film, and the street is now occupied by, predictably, some luxury flats and expensive student accommodation. Where once under-agers took pills, partied all night and got off with strangers, there are now lonely freshers in their studio flats and, apparently, a "beautifully landscaped internal courtyard".

VERDICT: Partick has long been at the frontier of gentrification in Glasgow, stuck right between the River Clyde's former shipyards and the leafy boulevards of the west end. The area's changed beyond recognition since the mid-1990s, so no surprises here as the great wave of gentrification claims Benalder Street's Volcano night spot as its first victim.

THE PUB WHERE BEGBIE KICKS OFF

The famous pint-to-the-face pub may be situated right by the residences where Glasgow University pack their thousands of new arrivals in every autumn, but few of them would ever dare step inside here. Its reputation preceded it – it was definitely not a "studenty place", because, well, haven't you seen Trainspotting?

That remained the case until a couple of years ago, when Crosslands – as it was once known – was bought by a hip local chain and rebranded The Kelbourne Saint. The arrival of wooden panelling, craft gins, an obsession with rotisserie chicken and a playlist of easy listening music did not take long to follow. Far from there being any dead babies crawling on the ceiling, there's instead whole corners of the pub devoted to storing high chairs and children's books.

VERDICT: This pub got gentrified, and no cunt leaves here till we find out what cunt did it (although at least you can buy a cocktail named after everyone's favourite psychotic pint throwing hardman, Franco Begbie).

THE CAFÉ WITH THE MILKSHAKE

The waves of Italian migrants who arrived in Scotland in the early 20th century brought many brilliant things with them, not least ice cream and deep fried pizza. Tiny Italian eateries also started popping up all over the central belt, and Café d'Jaconelli on Maryhill Road is one of the finest examples. There since 1924, its most famous moment came in 1996 when Renton and Spud sat down for a strawberry milkshake and a dab of speed.

VERDICT: Jaconelli's hasn't changed its décor in about 50 years, let alone its menu, and it's all the better for it. Certified yuppie free zone.

THE STREET RENTON OVERDOSES ON

Only a few minutes drive from the centre of Glasgow, Possilpark feels like a different world. The parts of the area featured in Trainspotting looked pretty close to demolition 20 years ago, so it's little surprise to find that not much remains now aside from empty streets, overgrown and strewn with broken glass.

VERDICT: I don't think the urban landscape of Possil has won many accolades in recent years, but congratulations this time round – it's far and away the least gentrified of any of the original Trainspotting locations.

THE HOSPITAL

Straight after overdosing, Renton gets rushed to A&E. The filmmakers used Canniesburn Hospital in Bearsden, a posh area to the north west of the city. The basic structure of the building is still there, although it's now all been turned into luxury penthouses. In this eerily quiet, Neighbourhood Watch suburbia there are no signs of screaming ambulances or drug addicts getting hauled out of taxis.

VERDICT: Thinking of ways to gentrify what is already the poshest part of the city must be pretty tough, but turning a pre-war hospital block into luxury flats just about manages that, so great work Bearsden.

MOST OF THE INTERIOR SHOTS

Tobacco has long been intertwined with Glasgow's history: much of the city's early wealth came from exploiting the transatlantic trade in the product. Many of its grandest buildings once housed the wealthy tobacco merchants, and the city had huge cigarette factories as recently as the 1980s. Once of those factories, on Alexandra Parade in the east end, happened to be lying empty while the makers of Trainspotting were scouting for a large space they could take over. They ended up constructing sound stages inside it, and many of the indoor scenes in the film were shot there.

It's now a giant office block housing call centre staff, so the next time you're on the phone to a Scottish-sounding call handler at British Gas or Sky, be sure to ask them if they're in the same building that the baby dies in and where Renton falls into a carpet.

VERDICT: Not so much gentrification, more just an emblem of all the shitty jobs that post-industrial Britain has gifted us.

@parcelorogues

More on VICE:

What Happened to the 'Trainspotting' Generation of Heroin Users?

An Oral History of 'Trainspotting' 20 Years Later

'Filmmaking Is Terribly Colonial' – Talking 'T2 Trainspotting' with Danny Boyle

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

US News

Jeff Sessions Becomes Attorney General
Alabama US senator Jeff Sessions have been confirmed as attorney general, by a vote of 52–47 in the Senate. "Denigrating people who disagree with us, I think, is not a healthy trend for our body," he said in a speech, referring to intense Democratic opposition to his confirmation. Sessions now has authority to oversee key issues like marijuana legalization, police reform, transgender rights, and the status of sanctuary cities.—CBS News / VICE News

Neil Gorsuch, Trump's Supreme Court nominee, has called the president's swipes at the judiciary "demoralizing" and "disheartening." Gorsuch's remarks were revealed by Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, after the pair spoke on Wednesday. They were then confirmed by Gorsuch's spokesman. It follows Trump's dismissive tweets about "so-called judge" James Robart, who blocked his travel ban.—CNN

Almost 150 Inauguration Protestors Indicted for Rioting
Grand jurors in Washington, DC, Superior Court have indicted 146 people who protested in the US capital on Inauguration Day, slapping them with felony rioting charges. This brings the total number of people facing charges relating to the protests to 209. Felony rioting charges come with the potential for a $25,000 fine and a maximum prison sentence of ten years.—NBC News

US Stops Screening Refugees on Nauru
US officials have ceased vetting refugees on the island Nauru, where they are detained by Australia. It follows a dispute over a deal made by the Obama administration to accept 1,250 refugees, an arrangement described by President Trump as "dumb." Australia's Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said Department of Homeland Security officials had left Nauru, but he expects US vetting to resume "in due course."—CNBC News

International News

Explosion, 'Intoxication' at French Nuclear Power Plant
An explosion and fire at EDF's Flamanville nuclear power plant in northern France on Wednesday morning reportedly left several people "intoxicated" but uninjured. Olivier Marmion, a senior local official, said it was "a significant technical event but it is not a nuclear accident." Local fire services also said the explosion happened away from the plant's nuclear zone.—Sky News

Red Cross Aid Suspended in Afghanistan After Six Killed
The International Committee of the Red Cross is putting relief work in Afghanistan on hold after an ambush attack on a convoy left six of its aid workers dead and two missing. The Red Cross condemned Wednesday's attack in the Jowzjan province as "despicable." Local police believe it was carried out by ISIS militants.—BBC News

Two Dead in Gaza Tunnel Bombing
The Gaza Health Ministry has blamed Israel for a pre-dawn bombing of a tunnel near the border with Egypt, killing two Palestinians. An Israeli military spokeswoman denied knowledge of any strike. Several rockets had earlier been fired at the Israeli city of Eilat from Egypt, but there were no casualties.—Reuters

New Zealand to Clear Criminal Records for Gay Sex
Legislation will be introduced to wipe decades-old convictions related to consensual gay sex in New Zealand before it was decriminalized in 1986. Around 1,000 men are expected to be eligible if the legislation passes, which seems likely.—The Sydney Morning Herald

Everything Else

LeBron James Attacks Trump's Travel Ban
NBA star LeBron James has denounced President Trump's travel ban. Complaining that it "does not represent what the United States is all about, "the Cleveland Cavaliers player said, "I am not in favor of this policy or any policy that divides and excludes people." —The Hollywood Reporter

Ecuadorian Opposition Leader Wants Assange Out
Guillermo Lasso, leader of Ecuador's right-wing Creo-Suma party, has threatened to remove WikiLeaks' Julian Assange from the country's London embassy if he wins the February 19 presidential election. "We will cordially ask Señor Assange to leave within 30 days," Lasso pledged.—The Guardian

Grey Gardens Mansion Up for Sale
The East Hampton mansion once inhabited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin, made famous by the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, is on the market for $19.995 million. The real estate company describes it as "American folklore."—Newsday

Former NSA Contractor Indicted for Data Theft
The Department of Justice has indicted former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin III with "willful retention of national defense information." He is allegedly behind one of the biggest-ever thefts of US government information.—Motherboard

Border Agents Discover Weed Disguised as Limes
The US Customs and Border Patrol has revealed its agents discovered nearly 4,000 pounds of marijuana at the Texas-Mexico packaged to look like 34,000 limes. The drug shipment was estimated to be worth nearly $800,000.—VICE

Kate McKinnon Signs Up for 'Magic School Bus' Reboot
The Netflix reboot of 90s TV classic The Magic School Bus, called Magic School Bus Rides Again, will feature SNL's Kate McKinnon as the voice of teacher Ms. Frizzle. The 26 half-hour episodes will feature updated tech, like robotics and wearables.—VICE

President Donald Trump's administration name dropped two terror attacks that happened on Canadian soil this week, but neither one was the recent mosque shooting that killed six worshippers in Quebec City.

Instead, the White House inexplicably put out a list of 78 "under-reported" terror attacks on Monday, claiming they "did not receive adequate attention from Western media sources." (The list sadly left out Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway's imagined Bowling Green massacre.)

Plenty of media have already weighed in by fact-checking the list and recounting in-depth coverage of the San Bernardino, Orlando nightclub, and Paris attacks. Which is a fine way to do journalism, I guess. But for longtime media critic Jim Naureckas, the list is too ridiculous to even justify with a response.

"It's like complaining the Super Bowl was under covered," he told VICE. "To say that terror attacks are not covered enough, I mean, I suppose you could have entire channels devoted to nothing but terror attacks, but it's a fairly big theme in American media."

Read More: How Quebec Mosque Shooting Shows Holes in Canada's Gun Laws

Trump's list happened to include the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As any Canadian with an internet connection will recall, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau managed to kill one soldier before being shot dead by authorities.

Though certainly not the White House's intention, that case study does point to American media's uneven coverage of active shooters in Canada. Because Zehaf-Bibeau actually got about six times more US airtime as the recent Quebec mosque attack that killed six.

A recent media analysis by Naureckas and his organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found many networks covered the Ottawa shooting far more than the Quebec City killings in the four days following the attacks. FAIR surveyed eight major outlets, comparing mentions of the perpetrators in each case.

"We found the Ottawa attack got more coverage, sometimes much more coverage," Naureckas told VICE.

ABC mentioned Zehaf-Bibeau in six stories during the first four days, compared to one mention of alleged white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette. CBS covered the Ottawa shooter six times over the same period, while the Quebec City shooter was mentioned four times.

CNN devoted 46 stories to the attack on Ottawa, with Anderson Cooper reporting live "on the ground." The same 24-hour network covered the deadly mosque shooting four times in as many days. Adding up more coverage from NBC, MSNBC, Fox, PBS and NPR, Naureckas found 88 mentions of the Ottawa shooter, and only 15 mentions of the shooting deaths of six Muslims.

Granted, there are variables that can bend and shape media coverage of any world event. Zehaf-Bibeau pointed his gun at the nation's capital building on a weekday morning, and was shot down just a few paces from our most central halls of power (to make no mention of the closet-hiding PM). The mosque shooting happened on a Sunday evening, when American media already had their hands full with a slew of executive orders and protests.  

Read More: Quebec Shooting Reminds Us Hate Is Not Imported

But no matter which way you slice it, "one killed six times as many people as the other," says Naureckas. Quebec City should be a bigger story, and yet, it was the Ottawa shooter that got about six times the media spotlight.  

What does this all mean? Media are playing a dangerous, racialized game with their editorial choices, according to Naureckas. With Zehaf-Bibeau swiftly branded a Muslim convert harbouring radical opinions about Middle East politics, the Ottawa shooting was perhaps an easy narrative to sink into—an outsider that hated the "dominant" culture. On the other hand, the slow and contradictory release of info from Quebec City, muddled by anti-Muslim truther conspiracies, was not as easy bait for American networks.

"It's hard to escape the conclusion that the story isn't as big because the victims are Muslim, that Muslim life is not considered as important as Christian life," Naureckas told VICE. By the same token, he says on some level attacks by Muslims are generally seen as more threatening than people motivated by white supremacy.

Naureckas made this assessment before Trump told Florida, of all places, that Islamic terrorism is "not even being reported" by "the very, very dishonest press." Clearly the White House is also aware of the perception of uneven coverage.

To fight this perception from all sides of the political spectrum, Naureckas says media need to establish better standards for covering acts of political violence, similar to the standards established around covering suicide.

"There's an idea that because crimes are committed to gain attention for a political cause, they should therefore be given a lot of attention. It doesn't make a lot of sense," he said. "I frankly think that terror is covered too much, that it should generally be covered along the lines of other crime stories."

Copycat crime is not a new phenomenon, and neither is "suicide contagion." While media now take steps not to suggest suicide methods, they still tend to spotlight shooters and their motivations, though some outlets have shifted toward more victim-focused reporting.

"It's pretty clear when you focus on acts of mass violence, you encourage other acts of mass violence. But there has not been the same kind of connection made, that maybe media should be reporting on these attacks in a different way."

Liberals and conservatives don't attack one another in the same ways. The Oxford English Dictionary released a blog post about the differences in slurs hurled across the political aisle, but the data, gathered in 2014, feels dusty, as if it were culled entirely from emails forwarded by grandmas. The findings don't square with our current reality, where a meme of a president, elevated by message and image boards, has turned our entire political discourse into a comment thread.

Some political insult truths remain constant. The right tends to go for pithy but broad slaps across the face, while the left seems to go for too-cute-by-half allusions or apt but un-sexy descriptive labels. This disparity in attack methods makes it difficult for direct 1-to-1 comparisons. But I chose to go ahead and write a guide to insults used by the right so, in the interest of parity, here's an attempt at cataloging the zings used by the left.

Basement Dweller

Long before internet subcultures were overtly affiliated with political parties, members of these groups were referred to as losers who live in their parents' basement and rarely leave to see the light of day. The left has simply used the transitive property to deliver this insult to Trump supporters. Basement dweller = internet subculture = 4chan = Pepe = Alt-Right = Trump supporter.

Birther

Donald Trump was one of the key figureheads in perpetuating the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that asserts Barack Obama forged his birth certificate because he was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, thus making him an illegitimate President according to Article II of the Constitution.

The birther thing could've remained a weird little racist footnote in the history books. Then, last year, Donald Trump dredged it up by falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton had invented the theory and that he had "settled" it.

A play on "truther," a term for one who believes the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job, the birther label is primarily used as an ad hominem attack that would discredit the target. "If they believe Obama was born in Kenya, why should we care about their thoughts on…"

Christian Sharia

Conservatives are the primarily party concerned with the (non-existent) encroachment of Sharia law within the US. An insult mentioning Christian Sharia is pointing out the irony of the group most opposed to Islamic religious-based laws entering the country being the same that cites the Bible when pushing for legislation that would overturn Roe v. Wade or allow for discrimination against homosexuals.

Conned

Many consider Donald Trump to be nothing more than a simple con man with an inheritance safety net. Between the settlements for his sham University or the myriad lawsuits filed against him for fleecing contractors, it's easy to understand why the left asserts that his supporters have been emotionally defrauded in a similar fashion.

Conspiritard

A portmanteaux of conspiracy theorist + retard. Pretty uninspired tbh.

Deplorables

Hillary Clinton made the mistake of referring to Trump supporters who are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and otherwise unsavory characters as a "basket of deplorables." This was dumb. Trump fans immediately glommed on to the word "deplorable," adopting it as a badge of honor, emblazoning it on T-shirts, hats, and Twitter handles.

Drumpf

On the February 28, 2016 episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver explained that Donald Trump's ancestral family name was, in fact, "Drumpf," but changed over time. When levied at one of Trumps supporters (e.g. calling them a "Drumpf Supporter") this insult wrongly assumes that a) the supporter isn't already aware of Donald's "real" name and b) that they care. This insult has the added bonus of yielding any high ground the insulter may have had.

Fascist

If someone on the left calls Trump, his administration, or those who would support his administration fascist, it's probably because the administration has displayed fascistic tendencies.

Using the 14 characteristics of fascism enumerated by Dr. Lawrence Britt, who academically compared numerous fascist regimes, we see that the Trump administration ticks all 14 boxes: 1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism, 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights, 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause, 4. Supremacy of the Military, 5. Rampant Sexism, 6. Controlled Mass Media, 7. Obsession with National Security, 8. Religion and Government are Intertwined, 9. Corporate Power is Protected, 10. Labor Power is Suppressed, 11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts, 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment, 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption, 14. Fraudulent Elections.

Fake News

America has a problem with unreliable news sources. Unfortunately for the right, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and other historically dependable outlets are not part of the problem.

In a staggering collective display of cognitive dissonance, Trump supporters and the man himself have a tendency to refer to any news source that challenges their world view as "fake news." In response, Liberals have taken to using the phrase against the right. Generally when calling out actual instances of shady journalism.

Milo's Opinion

Milo Yianoppoulos, the weaponized diversity deployed by the right as proof that minorities can be as shitty as majorities, was banned from Twitter last year for leading an attack on actress and comedian Leslie Jones. Since then, the left has directed traffic to his deactivated profile as a sort of schadenfreudistic Rick Roll whenever news of the lad surfaces. Like this Reddit post, titled "Milo responds to Hillary's anti Alt-right speech!".

Misogynist

Do you really need all of these explained in detail? The right is widely regarded as the anti-women side. Hence, y'know, the whole Women's March thing.

Neckbeard

A neckbeard is a slur for a portly internet denizen who, either in an attempt to hide his multiple chins or purely via laziness, grows an unkempt mane of facial hair on his neck. As the realms of internet subcultures and Trump supporters have meshed, the insult has taken on a more politically charged tone.

Re-thug-licans

An embarrassing garbage pile of an insult only used by indignant left-of-center PTA moms, "Re-thug-lican" is awful in not just its clunkiness, but also in its reinforcement of the notion that liberals are a bunch of hall monitors calling out mean ol' bullies.

Rigged!

Before, during, and after his upset win of the presidential election, Donald Trump has insisted that the cards were stacked against him. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he and his supporters have bemoaned the election results. Like many other items on this list, liberals have simply adopted this term as a mocking retort of their own, employing it as a means of taunting the commander in chief or his denizens whenever they complain about faltering polling numbers, political opposition, or even the weather not being to their liking.

Sad!

A favorite interjection of Trump's, Sad! (and that exclamation mark is crucial) has also been co-opted by the left to lampoon him. Best when paired with a fact or news story that would probably get under the president's notoriously thin skin.

Snowflake

The tug of war over insult ownership is nowhere more pronounced than with snowflake. Primarily used by the right to taunt the assumed preciousness and entitlement of the left, liberals have taken to returning fire with the very word used to attack them.

Starbucks Cup

Whether unintentional or calculated, the world's top coffee chain can't seem to avoid the cultural battlefield. After a manufactured November protest (that, for some reason, included buying the company's products) and the above linked controversies, some on the left have taken to referencing a Starbucks cup as a means of highlighting just how short the taking offense fuse is for some on the right.

Sure, Jan

Primarily used as a rebuttal to a flagrant lie being spouted by Kellyanne Conway, "Sure, Jan" turns Christine Taylor's condescending sibling jab from 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie into a doubtful burn for the masses.

Teabagger

The Tea Party isn't really a thing anymore, so this insult is sadly a bit of an endangered species. But it deserves mentioning as it's referencing not just the vehicle by which tea leaves are steeped in hot water, but also the act of dipping one's testicles onto another person's face.

Trumpkin

A way to describe supporters of Donald Trump, this insult is popular partially because it rolls off the tongue so nicely and also because it alludes to a blumpkin, a sexual act where a blowjob recipient is simultaneously taking a shit.

Trumpster

Less impressive than the previous entry, the Trumpster insult is an awkward mash-up of dumpster and Trump. Nobody really calls people they don't like dumpsters, so this comes off as forced. "Cum Trumpster," on the other hand, has untapped potential.

Vanilla ISIS / Y'all Qaeda / YeeHawdists

Twitter users enjoy cracking wise and, when some rednecks holed up in an Oregon federal building and engaged in an armed standoff with law enforcement, the social media site went in on them, firing off a flurry of burns that compared the inept, gun-toting fighters to Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

Velcro Shoes

The assumption that the right is less intelligent is woven into a fair amount of the left's insults and has been for decades. This slam plays upon that stereotype, insinuating that the opposition in unable to handle the complexities of a bowknot.

Wrong Side of History

By most metrics, society, as a whole, has become increasingly progressive over time. Labor rights, women's rights, civil rights, and gay rights were all hard fought movements eventually won by progressive ideology. Progressives view these coups as evidence that conservatives, who are, by definition, diametrically opposed to progressives, are bound to wind up on the losing team in the long run, whatever the cultural battle may be. Though all evidence points to liberals being right in this sentiment, they could stand to come up with a less shit-eating way of expressing it.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

In January 2017, a new video store opened in Los Angeles that only stocks 14,000 copies of 'Jerry Maguire' on VHS, which aren't available for rent or purchase. Video art collective Everything Is Terrible began amassing this collection over eight years ago in an attempt to create a "store" that's functionally intended to be more of a hallucinatory, immersive experience. To bring finality to their burdensome obsession, the group's next goal is to construct a permanent place to house their "Jerrys"—a giant pyramid in the Nevada desert.

(Top photo: Theresa May. Photo: Stefan Rousseau PA Wire/PA Images)

Donald Trump and Theresa May, as we know, are in love with each other, and they love to show it off by holding hands, and meeting the Queen together, and presenting each other with gifts of, you know, the right to run the NHS and that kind of stuff. Their love might be dismissed by some as a marriage of convenience: embattled would-be dictator meets girl desperate for someone, anyone, to pump enough capital into her nation's economy to stop it from collapsing after Brexit. But in fact – as a number of other commentators have noted, including James Butler in this very publication – it's clear that what's bringing them together is, as much as anything else, their shared ideological programme.

On the one hand there's the hungry, all-consuming global capitalism that they are more than happy to feed body after body to by dismantling healthcare provision, state education, welfare and so forth. On the other: an oppressively backwards nativism, the instinct of every provincial, swamp-ridden village to sacrifice any unsuspecting outsiders to their Old Gods, now written into bureaucratic procedure as government policy. This ideological programme is of course inhuman on every level, weaponising as it does the worst instincts of their supporters to ensure their continued endorsement of a political system that functions contrary to their interests.

But here's an odd thing. When Donald Trump does all this bad stuff, it's seemingly obvious to everyone. Granted, this has so far not hampered him at all, but his presidency has already seen pretty much daily calls for his impeachment, as well as mass protests against his rule not only in the United States but throughout the globe, especially in relation to his Muslim-country travel ban.

But when Theresa May does it, she's never able to trigger anything like the same reaction.

For instance: one of the most especially vile aspects of Trump's travel ban was the indefinite suspension it placed on Syrian refugees being able to enter the country. This was, rightly, something that millions of people rose up in protest against. But yesterday, May's government quietly announced a policy that, in terms of its actual effects, will be basically very similar. Cameron's government had previously, amid some controversy, indicated that it would take in up to 3,000 Syrian child refugees (a frankly miserly figure, considering that this was out of some 90,000 unaccompanied minors total). But now, the government has said, the UK would be taking in just 350 of these urgently vulnerable children.

There's been some criticism of May (and her Home Secretary, Amber Rudd) in parliament and on social media, but on the one hand: a) it's mostly been drowned out by Jeremy Corbyn continuing his Leicester-like transformation from miracle to mediocrity over the Article 50 vote; and b) a lot of the starkest criticism has involved actively comparing May to Trump, as if the latter is the measure of all bad things and she's just a politician who is usually mostly alright?

More to the point: if Trump's ban could lead to emergency protests in this country – a nation that, let's not forget, he does not actually govern – why hasn't May's?

Why, in short, is it so easy to get people excited over the evil things a furious, shuddering ball of orange wax does, but relatively so much harder to get them to rise up in anger over the starkly similar actions of something that looks, mostly, like a human being?

The big problem that many of Trump's enemies seem to have with him is that he just doesn't look and sound like he ought to be President of the United States. By contrast, Theresa May looks and sounds exactly like she ought to be British Prime Minister: stirring up some primal identification with authority by being every bit as stern and well-turned-out and unable to quite countenance any flights of energy or imagination as a primary school headmistress. So even when people do find something to contest in her policies, they find it hard, ultimately, to contest her right to be in charge.

This was why May was heralded as a "safe pair of hands" when coming in as Prime Minister after the referendum, despite her record of barbarism and incompetence as Home Secretary. It's why her demented Brexit plans have apparently been welcomed with such widespread consensus that parliament has opted to give itself zero oversight over the whole process. It's why May is able to own up, quite happily and with no apparent consequences, to having lied to the House of Commons about a failed nuclear test. And through all this, it's what lends all of her excesses their grey air of inevitability, as if they have been ordered from deep within reality and simply cannot be contested, so no one ought to bother.

A similar thing, you'll remember, happened with David Cameron: he looked and sounded to many like he ought to be Prime Minister as well, yet throughout his tenure he governed as the most disastrous, balloon-looking thing since the Hindenburg. And now look where we are: saddled with a political system compelled to destroy itself in the name of what David Davis would refer to as our "patriotic duty". For our own sakes, we need to find it in us to be angry at Theresa May, at all times and in as extreme a way as we can muster.

@HealthUntoDeath