While most of us will never worry that Satan is holding our uterus hostage, the demonic pregnancy narrative is still horrifying. Films like Rosemary's Baby (1968), Alien 3 (1992), Grace (2009), Honeymoon (2014), and many others address complex anxieties about fertility, gestation, and birth. Fittingly, the demonic pregnancy subgenre is a site for feminist concerns such as: Is a woman simply an incubator? What is our identity when we become intrinsically connected to this Other that sets up house in our uterus, drains us of nutrients, kicks, causes vomiting and acid reflux, and sometimes dies in the womb and starts to rot? What becomes of our identity when we are faced with an offspring we didn't want, whom we hate, and who might destroy us?

Season two of The Magicians has been dark in the usual ways (amputations, mutilated cats), but Julia's rape revenge and pregnancy plot has pushed the show into the larger cultural conversation about how much power women really have over their bodies. By referencing horror and sci-fi subgenres that feature feminist undertones—the rape revenge narrative and the demonic pregnancy narrative— The Magicians asks us to question the recourse available to a victimized woman who is saddled with an unwanted pregnancy. Not only does Julia encounter the red tape that confronts all women seeking abortions, but her fetus seems unable to be vanquished by medical or magical methods and is prepared to kill in order to survive.

Episode five, "Cheat Day," confirms that Julia's rape by the fox-god Reynard resulted in a pregnancy. Throughout this season, Julia has been grappling with the trauma of this rape and the process of healing. With the discovery of an unwanted pregnancy, Julia is now not only on a quest to murder her rapist—she must also find a way to get an abortion.

Abortions have been receiving more even-handed treatment on television as of late, with shows like BoJack Horseman and Crazy Ex Girlfriend destigmatizing the procedure and refusing to cast judgment. What's so different and interesting about a show like The Magicians, with its world steeped in magic and supernatural possibility, is that getting an abortion is still fraught. In fact, it might even be impossible because this magical fetus has mind-control abilities; it can manipulate and advocate for its continued viability in vitro. This extreme is terrifying—and it's also timely and appropriate for our current misogynistic political atmosphere.

Take the now infamous comments about pregnancy made by Republican Representative Justin Humphrey on February 17, 2017:

What I call them is, is you're a "host." And you know when you enter into a relationship you're going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don't get pregnant… But after you're irresponsible then don't claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you're the host and you invited that in.

Humphrey's rhetoric might as well have come from a horror or sci-fi film, so neatly does it fit the narrative of the woman who is held supernaturally hostage by her reproductive capacities. His commentary comfortably fits the structure of the demonic possession narrative in which a woman is held responsible for welcoming a demon to inhabit her body. The language of penetration and hosting is uniquely feminized. There is a sexual dimension to "inviting that in."

However, in The Magicians, we don't have a gynotician regulating women's bodies; we have a fetus holding a traumatized rape victim hostage. We see the fetus's power when Julia goes to her appointment at the abortion clinic. Julia is laid out on the operating table in one of those flimsy blue paper gowns—she is the image of vulnerability, desperation, and hope. Then something goes wrong: The doctor's hands act of their own accord, and she reluctantly stabs herself in the eye with her own medical instrument. It seems like the fetus has either telepathically caused the doctor to commit suicide or manipulated her behavior.

As the doctor bleeds out on the floor, Julia screams for her friend to come in. Julia is so desperate to get rid of this pregnancy that she begs her friend to give her an abortion right then and there, dead body be damned. One can't help but read a politicized anxiety present in her plea: If I can't get a professional to do this, I will literally ask anybody; I will do anything. Her anxiety feels like it could belong to any woman threatened by her shrinking and disappearing reproductive healthcare options.

Rape and abortion narratives can often be problematic when handled poorly. Sometimes they fail to take into account a woman's unique perspective and instead become narratives about male feelings, reactions, and growth. Sometimes they are used as less significant plot devices intended to move a larger plot forward. Often, rape narratives are handled insensitively and can be triggering for survivors. Despite some occasional clumsiness, The Magicians has so far been careful to exercise caution, and I hope they continue to do so. It's still uncertain how this plot will resolve, but Julia's quest to take control of her narrative is part of a larger polemic on how trauma repeats itself and how those who are traumatized are forced to endure that trauma repeatedly. Her additional quest to take control of her reproductive destiny is an important part of this journey—and ours.

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Megan Phelps-Roper never used to care about the feelings of the people she disagreed with. "Have a lovely day. You're going to hell," was the kind of invective she threw around. Or, "Your rabbi is a whore!"

She was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, the far-right Christian cult infamous for loudly telling everyone from gay people to dead veterans that they're doomed in the afterlife. Nearly everyone hates the WBC, and the WBC hates them right back. "Politics were basically meaningless," Phelps, now 31, remembers. "The left and the right were both going to hell, and the whole political game was just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

Phelps-Roper was able to break free of her family and the toxic environment they fostered (her grandfather, Fred Phelps, was the church's founder*) in 2012; she gives credit in large part to ideological Twitter battles that gradually became a series of spirited, yet genuine, in-person dialogues. "We live in a world where each of us has a perspective that is ultimately limited by our experiences," she told me. "And the only way to truly expand our view is by communication."

During her departure from the WBC (which was detailed in a 2015 New Yorker profile), Phelps-Roper ended up forming friendships on social media with people who argued with her. Last year, she married a man she used to spar with on Twitter. She's now spreading her tale—and its fable-like moral of how engagement across differences set her free—through a recent TED talk and an upcoming book.

The Roman philosopher Cicero once wrote that the first goal in an argument is to secure the goodwill of an audience, so that they may then be more sympathetic to your cause. This is not usually the case in the forums of contemporary American politics, where the goal is geared toward "destroying" or "eviscerating" your opponent through mockery and pointed logic, earning plaudits from your political brethren but not convincing the unconvinced of anything.

"Cicero is spot on," Phelps-Rogers told me by email. "If we can't learn to speak in a way that our audience can actually hear, what is the point of speaking?"

Since the election, the "resistance" has been opposing Trump any way it can—protests, lawsuits, social media call outs. It has energized a huge number of people who were previously apolitical. But for it to succeed, it will ultimately have to change the minds of at least some Trump voters. And changing minds is hard.

The philosopher Daniel Cohen, a professor at Colby College, teaches classes on logic and argumentation. For him, the troubling thing about the current climate is how easily "alternative facts" are thrown around—often it seems as if Trump supporters and opponents are living in separate worlds. (According to one recent poll, 78 percent of Republicans trust Trump more than the media.)

A self-proclaimed opponent of "the deafness of smug dismissal," Cohen makes the case that when we view an argument as incomprehensible, "We ought to take that as a prima facie sign that we don't get it, that we're [the ones] missing something." (The catch in this model, Cohen realizes, is that it's dependent on largely rationally motivated participants.)

Watch the VICE documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church:

"Being right is never enough," DeRay Mckesson, a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement and founder of the Resistance Manual, told me. "The left sometimes faultily believes that the best idea wins, but what we know to be true is that the idea that is repeated over and over, that is able to be said at the dinner table, that uses imagery and shared stories—these are the ideas that win." (Social science bears out this idea that facts aren't sufficient for persuasion.)

If evidence-based arguments won't help, what will?

Phelps-Roper, who says she is a political independent, blames the increase in intolerance and anger on a lack of "interaction—especially positive interaction—between Trump's supporters and his detractors."

From her vantage point, "People on both sides reduce the other to hopelessly simplistic caricatures of human beings. In the absence of a reasonable person to calmly offer alternative perspectives, the cycle of rage and escalation continues."

But when right-wing congressmen talk openly about how "Western civilization" must be protected from somebody else's babies and some left-wing campus protesters are willing to use violence to shut down what they see as hate speech, who's to say who is calm or reasonable? And is dispassion even a virtue in these times?

"I do not know what civility looks like when some people show up to the table not believing that you are worthy of existing," Mckesson said.

For those who study diversity/sensitivity training, this cultural moment—in which progressives are reduced to snowflakes who preach fascism in the name of political correctness and conservatives are concordantly summed up as rednecks who preach fascism in the name of racial purity—is nightmarish.

Blair Causey, a black 22-year-old about to begin a master's program in human rights and organizational dynamics, repeatedly faced casual racism during her undergraduate years in Arkansas. But she objects to the politically uninvolved getting "condemnation for affiliation" just for associating with a certain supposed tribe.

"It is the collection of individuals in between, straddling the fence of indifference, who often determine whether we go forward or backward," she told me.

The dilemma for the resistance is how do you talk to a group of people who you believe supported a racist demagogue? Progressives often argue that the marginalized should not have to take on the emotional labor of explaining their oppression to the oppressor, that the racist or the homophobe primarily carry the burden of discovering their faults and changing. Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian immigrant, wrote a powerful defense of the sentiment in her essay "Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Really Talking About."

Phelps-Roper expressed sympathy for the dilemma but worries about progress becoming too dependent on the unenlightened experiencing epiphanies.

"I don't believe there is any obligation on the part of the oppressed—but I don't know how the communication will happen if more and more people choose to opt out of the discussion," she said. "Listening is not agreeing. Empathy is not a betrayal of one's cause. These are tools of effective persuasion."

She cited her own conversion as evidence. "When I was at Westboro it was people from groups I had spent my life demonizing—gays, Jews, atheists, other Christians—who had the greatest impact on me. They didn't have to spend their precious time and energy trying to teach me anything about their lives—but the fact that they did resulted in one less oppressor and one more ally in the world. I am so grateful for them."

*Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Fred Phelps, Megan Phelps-Roper's grandfather, as her father.

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During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to rebuild an America that had allegedly atrophied under a disastrous Obama administration. Trump was a political neophyte but could make big, vague, shiny promises like an old pro: The border wall would be built, and Mexico would pay for it. America would be great again. The military would win again. On Thursday, in his administration's budget proposal, Trump showed the country what all of that might look like, and it isn't pretty—making America great apparently involves massive cuts to the arts and sciences, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other popular programs. In exchange, Trump is proposing a whopping $54 billion increase in defense funding, $4.4 billion more for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and $2.8 billion more for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), $2.6 billion of which goes toward funding that southern border wall.

So, turns out that if it ever actually gets built—which remains unlikely—America will pay for that wall after all.

This proposal only covers discretionary spending, which is 27 percent of the overall federal budget (mandatory spending includes money that goes toward entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security). It also doesn't include promised tax reforms or an infrastructure rebuilding plan that Trump has talked about for months. Additionally, any budget proposed by Trump must be approved by Congress—and even Republican politicians object to parts of it. The battle over the budget will likely be long and bitter and might lead to a "continuing resolution," a way to keep the government funded without passing an official budget, which is what Congress has been doing pretty often in recent years.

Still, the budget document reveals Trump's priorities in a way that his stump speeches and interviews don't. It's clear what he doesn't value: scientific research, diplomacy, economic development programs that help specific areas, the arts, foreign aid, education, and other non-military functions of the federal government. The idea is that state and local governments (and in some cases the private sector) should take on more responsibility; in other cases, the Trump administration claims that there's no proof programs are working. But the administration isn't offering any road map to provide these services some other way—they're simply getting eliminated.

Below is a list of some of the most drastic cuts:

Science and Health

Possibly the biggest target of the budget proposal is scientific research and agencies that do anything related to combatting climate change, which makes sense given Trump is on record saying it's a hoax orchestrated by the Chinese.

The EPA is facing the harshest cut by percentage, at 31 percent. Its climate change–related programs would be gutted along with green energy initiatives and programs that benefit specific regions (states apparently have to pick up the slack). More than 3,000 of the agency's 15,000 employees would be laid off. Among the many, many initiatives on the chopping block is Energy Star, an incredibly popular energy-saving program that saves money, reduces emissions, and costs only $57 million.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the Department of Commerce, would get stripped of over $250 million in funding. This money helps coastal areas fight off storms.

The National Institutes of Health would lose $5.8 billion. The Department of Energy's Office of Science would get $900 million taken away. Together, these cuts represent a massive divestment from research that has been traditionally funded by the federal government. The scientists whose work relies on grants from these agencies would have to... figure something out, presumably.

Though NASA is not targeted for deep cuts, it would lose funding for programs that are related to climate change.

The Chemical Safety Board, an agency that investigates chemical-related accidents, wold be eliminated entirely.

Foreign Aid and Diplomacy

So far, Trump seems to want to conduct foreign relations through White House officials like Jared Kushner rather than the diplomatic corps. He also has promised to crack down on foreign aid, which many Republicans view as a waste of money (though it's only a tiny part of the federal budget). Combine these two impulses and you get a budget that's extremely hostile to diplomatic institutions.

The State Department, US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Treasury International are facing a 29 percent budget cut. That includes a complete elimination of funding provided to climate change–related programs, and also a directive for these agencies to "pursue greater efficiencies through reorganization and consolidation in order to enable effective diplomacy and development." State was already demoralized and marginalized under the Trump administration, and this just confirms that the new president doesn't value the department. Notably, though Trump is promising to slash international aid, he wants to continue sending $3.1 billion annually to Israel.

The United States Institute of Peace exists to try to tamp down conflict in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; Trump, who clearly sees this sort of diplomacy as a waste of time, wants to get rid of it.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is a think tank that gets some of its budget from the federal government. Trump wants to pull federal funding from it, which the Wilson Center has apparently been preparing for for years.

The African Development Foundation, a relatively small agency (it requested just $28 million in funding for 2017) that provides grants to poverty-fighting efforts in Africa, would be wiped out. It's the sort of foreign aid that Trump's "America first" orientation is obviously against, but the agency argues on its website that more stability in Africa is good for US security as well.

The Inter-American Foundation provides similar aid to Latin America and gets just above $20 million from the federal government; Trump wants to end this program too.

Education

Trump wants to spend $1.4 billion more on "public and private school choice," in other words government-funded charter schools and vouchers for private schools, initiatives that compete with traditional public schools. Meanwhile, public schools themselves are getting hammered under his proposal.

The Department of Education would lose $9.2 billion, mainly through cuts to teacher training, before- and after-school programs, and grants that help low-income students go to college.

How an 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger film predicted the future:

Infrastructure and Development

Trump has still not submitted a specific plan for how he wants to rebuild the country's infrastructure. But in his budget proposal, he wants to slash many agencies and programs that are basically working toward that goal right now.

The Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership that works to improve the struggling economy of Appalachia, would be eliminated. This is a striking one because many voters in Appalachia cast ballots for Trump, and the ARC works to help them.

The Delta Regional Authority is similar to the ARC but for the South's Delta region, is also slated for defunding—another head-scratcher given Trump's support there.

The Denali Commission, which exists to improve Alaska's infrastructure, would also be lost under Trump's proposal.

The Northern Border Regional Commission does the same for distressed areas near the Canadian border in the Northeast. Trump wants to wipe this out of existence, naturally.

Poverty Assistance

Trump has also talked about helping people in "inner cities," but his budget would eliminate initiatives that provide assistance to those very people.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development would get a 13 percent haircut. Slated for elimination is the $3 billion Community Block Grant Program, which helps builds affordable housing, and programs that help encourage homeownership in low-income areas. The proposal calls on states and private companies to step in to fill these holes, but it's not clear how that will happen.

The Corporation for National and Community Service, best known for Americorps, the organization that sends Americans to help communities out in all sorts of ways, would be wiped out. It has a larger budget than some other agencies, asking for just over $1 billion for 2017, but it is broadly popular.

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Community Services Block Grant, which help poor people with their energy bills and other needs, would be wiped out, a savings of about $4.2 billion.

The Legal Services Corporation, which requested $502 million in funding for 2017, helps provide low-income people with legal counsel. Trump wants to kill it.

The Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, also known as Neighborworks America, uses its budget of around $140 million to fund a variety of community-based programs, like affordable housing and assisting homeless veterans. Trump would end all that.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness coordinates efforts on homelessness, of course, and costs the government just $3.5 million. That's too much money for the Trump administration.

Arts and Humanities

Relative to its other priorities, the federal government doesn't spend a lot on these programs, but Trump wants to eliminate even these smaller budget items.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be wiped out entirely, meaning no more federal money for NPR, or PBS—including the latter's beloved children's programming. (They would have to rely on other funding sources.) Maybe more importantly, the CPB literally keeps the lights on at local public broadcasting stations.

The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are both on the chopping block, each of them small programs that are nonetheless vital to lots of arts organizations all across the country.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services does exactly what it sounds like: support museums and libraries. If Trump's proposal became reality, it would lose its entire $230 million budget.

Immigrant Detention

The Department of Justice is not targeted for many cuts—Trump actually wants to boost funding on some things like the FBI, as part of his tough-on-crime approach—but here's one strange one:

The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which gets $210 million that is mainly used to reimburse states for detaining undocumented immigrants, would be wiped out. This is an odd request given that Trump seems dead set on detaining more undocumented immigrants.

Assistance to Businesses

Trump has bemoaned America's trade deficit, but is set to eliminate two agencies that help companies export goods:

The US Trade and Development Agency exists to help American companies export their goods to foreign markets—exactly the sort of thing Trump wants. It asked for just $80 million in 2017 and claims that for every dollar spent it generates $74 in exports. Still, Trump thinks it should die.

Similarly, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which helps companies find opportunities in emerging markets, would be struck down.

National Parks

Last, but not least:

Trump's proposed cuts to the Department of the Interior would mainly harm the National Parks, which are already struggling with the limited funds they get now.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

Photos by Kayle Crosson

Yesterday, the Dutch held their national parliamentary elections, and with the fresh memory of Trump's victory and the rise of the political far-right in Europe on their minds, many feared (or hoped) that the populist anti-immigration, anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) would win. A big win for its leader Geert Wilders would be seen as the beginning of, in Wilders' words, a "patriotic spring" across the continent.

In the end, the centre-right, conservative-liberal VVD party remained the most popular with 33 seats in parliament, while the PVV came in second with 20 seats, closely followed by the progressive liberals of D66 and the Christian democrats of the CDA, who both came to 19 seats. Current prime-minister Mark Rutte of the VVD will likely remain in his position, while Wilders will probably end up in the opposition – most other parties have already announced they would not form a majority coalition with his.

After the first exit polls came in yesterday, we asked some young Dutch muslims how they feel about the results, and if they're relieved that Wilders' PVV wasn't as succesful as expected.

Ola, 21, studying Law and International Justice

VICE: Are you glad that the PVV did not win?
Ola: No, I'm not necessarily relieved. I think it's striking that a lot of foreign media are painting this as a loss for Wilders, while the PVV still has 20 seats in parliament. His is the second most popular party now.

Did you follow these elections more closely than previous ones?
This was the first time that I got to vote, and the first time that I was really involved and followed everything closely. I'm 21 and I know what is important to me, and I wanted my values to be represented properly. Especially since Trump's victory.

Do you feel threatened by the results?
No. I believe that you have to try to contribute to a healthy political climate yourself, and that you shouldn't feel threatened. But I do see how the country has changed. I wear a hijab and people respond negatively to that sometimes – like yelling "Allahu Akbar, boom!" at me. I've always felt Dutch through and through, and it's very annoying to constantly have to prove myself.

Mohammed El Baroudi, 21, studying Governance, Economics and Development

VICE: Are you relieved that the PVV is not the biggest party?
Mohammed: No, I'm not relieved – he still gained five seats in parliament. I'm not going to follow along with the trend saying that we should be happy because he didn't win – five more seats is still a lot.

Did you feel like there was more at stake this year?
Yes, it was different. I saw Moroccan mothers and aunts from my neighbourhood asking for advice and wanting to go out and vote. Everyone wanted to participate. It felt like a make-or-break moment. That's because of the current political climate, but also because there were some new parties like DENK [which was recently founded by two Dutch-Turkish members of parliament] that really managed to mobilise people.

How do you see the future?
I'm fairly positive, but I want to stay sharp. I'm afraid that poorer people are getting a really bad deal from this result. That's why I hope that people will start to realise that it's a bad idea to vote for a right-wing party out of anger, and forget to look at their place in the bigger picture. In the end, it's especially the working class who will suffer the consequences of the far-right.

Sevgi, 24, studying Governance of Migration and Diversity

VICE: Are you relieved that Wilders didn't win the election?
Sevgi: I'm definitely relieved – I was genuinely scared he would win. Trump's win really got to me – especially as a Muslim and a Turk. And I was worried that the diplomatic row between Turkey and the Netherlands last weekend would affect the result in a major way as well.

Still, more than 13 percent of Dutch people voted for him. Does that worry you?
Yes, his party came in second, that's a very worrying development. But it's important to remember that other parties did really well, too. I hope the other parties stick to their promise that they won't form a majority coalition with the PVV and don't involve Wilders.

Did you follow these elections more closely than you otherwise would have?
Absolutely. I wasn't that interested in the elections four years ago – my dad really had to push me to go and vote. It felt different this year. There is so much polarisation between majority and minority groups in this political climate, that as an ethnic and religious minority I often felt like I was personally being addressed during the campaign, and affected by some developments.

Ilyaas, 21, studying International Relations

VICE: Did you vote yesterday?
Ilyaas: Yes, I voted for a left-leaning party, purely because I think it's important, especially now, to counter the right-wing populism that is gaining ground in Europe.

Are you relieved that Wilders didn't come in first?
Absolutely. I've always been optimistic, though. I thought: "The people of the Netherlands know better." There was a lot more pressure on these elections – we've seen Trump win, we saw Brexit happen, and the fact that our society is on the edge has pushed more people to go out and vote.

What did your friends think about the results?
We talked about the elections a lot, but we were also pretty light-hearted about it. We'd joke about what the country under Wilders would look like, for example. But those jokes come from a place of fear – what if he really had won? During these elections, the political middle took a more radical stance on things like immigration, to make sure people would vote for them instead of Wilders. I think it's very worrying that right-wing populist movements are being normalised like that. Politicians say things that pit people against each other, but as active citizens we need to hold them accountable and make sure we can discuss using reasonable arguments.

Ouafa, 20, studying Social and Cultural Education

VICE: Were you relieved when you found out the election result?
Ouafa: I was. An old classmate of mine had posted on Facebook that she'd voted for the PVV, and I'd responded that I felt happy that she was being honest about it, but that I also found it a pity. I think it's sad to see that people put so much hope in a guy like that, and honestly think that he can make everything better.

How do you feel about the future?
I'm really worried that there's going to be more friction between certain groups. I read an article where Wilders said he wasn't going to make it easy. Why not? Why can't he dedicate himself to all Dutch citizens, and why can't he try to make it easier and better for everyone?

Zouhair, 26, sociologist

VICE: Are you relieved that the PVV didn't win the election?
Zouhair: In part, but a lot of people still voted for Wilders. The fact that a lot of people agree with the things he thinks and says doesn't necessarily mean that they hate Moroccans and Muslims, but it does mean that they have problems that need to be heard. That's something we need to work on.

What kind of influence do you think this will have on other right-wing populist parties in Europe?
That's hard to say. But it's clear that populism is graining ground, and that there are certain social groups that feel like they have been overlooked by the governments of the past. They're attracted to that rhetoric, and are happy to choose scapegoats. That worries me.

How do you feel about the future?
I think these results are a small victory. I don't like that the VVD [the conservative-liberal party that won] is the most popular party again, but it could have been much worse. There is a Japanese saying: "In victory, tighten your helmet straps." In other words, we still have to stay focused and think about why two million people voted for Wilders. And about how we can work towards a more inclusive society.

A few years ago, I was sitting in a friend's apartment when he said something curious: that he couldn't be a gentrifier because he was gay. He lived in Williamsburg, the most gentrified neighborhood in all of New York City, where rents rose nearly 80 percent between 1990 and 2014. The building was old. His room was tiny. And my friend, who is white, paid an astronomical sum for it, in an apartment divided among three other white people. How could he possibly see himself as immune from the process that so obviously surrounded him?

It's one question among many I tackled in my book, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. The answer, I believe, lies deep in the history of how LGBTQ people have both been victims and perpetrators of gentrification, and the complicated relationship that exists between queer people, the cities they live in and their development. They've sought refuge in cities, fleeing the oppressive straightness of the suburbs and the rest of the US. But they've also directly benefitted from gentrification, and been used as pawns by real estate developers to help kick off the gentrification of neighborhoods and entire cities.

This history is important to remember if we're ever going to challenge the forces of gentrification. As cities—especially large, gay-friendly ones—become largely unaffordable to working- and middle-class people, untangling how LGBTQ people fit into the gentrification puzzle is necessary to ensure that they, and everyone else, can continue to afford to live in them.

Queer people flock to cities for an obvious reason: there's safety and community in numbers. For most of recent American history, it's been hard to find LGBTQ acceptance in suburbs and rural areas. You know the story: a kid grows up in a small town, feels like they cannot live their fullest life there, and flees to a big city, where they can find others like them.

But part of what makes cities good for gays is simple economics. Queers comprise a relatively small portion of the American population, making it hard to have a "gayborhood" without density. Any given suburb likely doesn't have enough LGBTQ people living within it to support multiple bars and stores, or nonprofits, or other aspects of queer culture—arts, pride events, and the like—that make for vibrant communities.

You see this play out in cities like San Francisco, where gay people (mostly gay men) flocked during and after World War II, when they were banished from the communities they'd come from before the war and kicked out of the military for being gay. And it was that concentration of LGBTQ people in San Francisco, as well as in New York and Chicago and other cities, that allowed queers to organize grassroots liberation movements, as noted in The City and the Grassroots, a study of urban activism by Manuel Castells. Density gave way to activism and organization, and organization allowed for liberation.

But looking at San Francisco and New York today, it's hard to tell they were once centers of radical LGBTQ politics. While plenty of LGBTQ people remain in each, the West Village (where I grew up) and the Castro are by no means "radical" in 2017. Those neighborhoods—alongside West Hollywood, Chicago's Boystown and many other LGBTQ-settled quarters—are largely Disneyfied, corporate-friendly versions of their former selves. So are their pride parades and their bars. Rent in the West Village averages about $3,500 a month as of this February. Stonewall Inn, once synonymous with anti-cop riots, now welcomes the cops with semi-automatic weapons that regularly stand outside its doors.

What happened? Two things: first, cities became more attractive prospects for real estate developers after a period of urban decline in the 1960s and 70s—decline brought on by developers and governments themselves, as local, state and federal agencies subsidized mortgages for suburban housing and "redlined" black and Latino neighborhoods, trapping poor people of color in cities, and decimating real estate values. (Those decimated city neighborhoods could then be bought back up for cheap.)

LGBTQ people happened to be concentrated at the center of those neighborhoods. Throughout the 80s and 90s, the AIDS epidemic freed up tens of thousands of previously-occupied apartments in New York's gentrifying neighborhoods, as revealed in Sarah Schulman's memoir of the AIDS crisis in New York City, The Gentrification of the Mind. As Schulman writes, it's no coincidence that neighborhoods now most synonymous with gentrification—namely the West Village, East Village, and Harlem—were gayborhoods in the past.

But LGBTQ people, especially white gay men and lesbians, also began to become complicit in gentrification. In Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, her study of gayborhoods and policing, University of Maryland American Studies professor Christina Hanhardt writes that the most mainstream (and therefore best-funded) post-Stonewall LGBTQ groups tended to focus solely on safety, often teaming up with police to make gayborhoods safer for their mainly white inhabitants and the white-owned business they frequented. In the process, they may have endangered other, more vulnerable LGBTQ people, namely people of color, who have a history of being disproportionately abused and arrested by police.

And as (white) gays became associated with safety in now-attractive cities, they became tools for real estate developers to enact gentrification themselves. In The Rise of the Creative Class, urban studies theorist Richard Florida lays out the argument that gay people were essential to the economic development of post-industrial cities. He theorized that tolerant, diverse cities that wooed young creatives would prosper more than cities that were not tolerant, and while he employed controversial data to back his claims, and they've been heavily critiqued, his work nonetheless became appealing to broke cities in search of an economic fix.

After all, it's easier to believe that gay tolerance boosts economies, rather than believe that American capitalism essentially means that some cities are now destined to become poor as industry and high-paying jobs flee to elsewhere. That could explain why Detroit even mulled creating a gayborhood out of thin air in an attempt to revitalize itself after the city went bankrupt in 2012.

There's no easy answer to what drives LGBTQ gentrification. I know queer people of color who consider themselves gentrifiers because they've moved into neighborhoods they're not from. But whiteness and queerness (especially gayness) have proven throughout recent history to make for an especially exploitable combination for real estate developers to raise property values. While my Williamsburg friend may not have purposefully gentrified Brooklyn, and while his larger reason for living there (he used to live in the rural Midwest, where he didn't know many gays) may be legitimate, he was nonetheless a cog in the machine, not because of his individual actions, but because of the history that followed his identity.

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When Rose Townsend wants to mix baby formula for her four-month-old, she has to get water from the bathtub. If the elevator is out—as it often is in Brooklyn's sprawling Lafayette Gardens and plenty of other New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments across the five boroughs—the mother of three is forced to choose between waiting hours for a repair and abandoning the bottom half of her youngest son's stroller in the lobby so she can drag his detachable car seat up the urine-soaked stairs.

Windows stay broken. The front door won't lock. When her kitchen sink broke nearly two weeks ago, Townsend said, NYCHA workers pulled the counter away from the wall, ripped out the basin and covered the hole with a plastic trash bag, leaving the pipes exposed.

Oh, and the heat? Don't count on it.

"They cut the heat off and it's cold outside," she told me as she shivered in the bitter March chill while waiting for a cab near Woodhull Hospital. "I've got a newborn baby and my house feel like out here."

Disrepair is nothing new for New York's public housing projects. But if the Trump administration has its way, that problem is about to get a whole lot worse.

The White House wants to slash over $6 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which could in turn gut funding to public housing across the country. Though national in scope, those cuts would be especially painful for residents in New York City, which accounts for about 20 percent of the country's public housing stock. Earlier this month, HUD began cuts of $35 million—which would amount to five percent, over the course of the year—in federal funds for the city's affordable housing units, the Wall Street Journal reported. The exact number is likely to change with the Congressional budget process next month, and could be much higher.

The impact is poised to be immediate and uncomfortable for the 400,000 "authorized residents" of the New York City projects—and the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 additional "ghost residents" who also call those developments home. Nationally, about 2.2 million Americans live in what most of us know as public housing (millions more lean on Section Eight housing vouchers).

"It means slower services, slower repairs, lot more strain on our infrastructure," a NYCHA spokeswoman told VICE, confirming the authority's ongoing federal haircut.

Public housing residents across the city say basic maintenance and ordinary repairs already take too long, though wait times have actually shrunk considerably in recent years, from an average of about nine days in 2015 to about four days last year, according to a January report from the Mayor's Office.

The HUD cuts will wipe out those gains, the NYCHA spokeswoman told me. But they will also threaten critical infrastructure projects that keep the aging developments from falling apart.

"It's going to be grim," said Nicholas Bloom, an associate professor of social science at the New York Institute of Technology. "The city and the state are going to have to make those investments," something he said local governments are reluctant to do, lest that encourage the feds to cut deeper still.

"We've gotta fight HUD, we need to fight [Secretary] Ben Carson," argued Robert Jackson, a 40-year resident of the Albany Houses in Crown Heights, where workers have nearly finished a years-long, city-funded overhaul of the 60-year-old development's leaky roofs. NYCHA budgeted about at least a billion dollars for similar capital projects in 2015, and more are desperately needed. (Federal housing officials at HUD declined to comment for this story.)

Lafayette Gardens was built in 1965, making it one of the newest projects in NYCHA's portfolio. The oldest turned 80 in 2015, and at least ten more are septuagenarians. If age weren't enough, a bevy of developments from Surfside Gardens in Coney Island and Ocean Bay Apartments in Rockaway to Jacob Riis in the Lower East Side are still awaiting repairs from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

"It's a dire situation," the NYCHA spokeswoman said.

And even if the infrastructure stands up, scaling back the most basic repairs may have another unintended consequence—an increase in crime.

A 2014 analysis by the New York Daily News showed that the projects most badly in need of repair also had among the highest rates of crime, even as the crime rate hit historic lows across the city.

"They just now fixed the front door in the building—just now, and I've been living there for nine months," Townsend said of her home. "People come in the building, they get into fights in the building. It's a big problem."

But Bloom, the social scientist, thinks these cuts are merely a taste of what's to come.

"This is just the beginning—Congress is going to change the rules of the game," he warned. "The best thing [Americans] are going to be able to do is limit the damage."

Follow Sonja Sharp on Twitter.

On Wednesday, New York City police found a minor explosive device inside an unattended bag at Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal, as CBS News reports.

The bag was discovered a few minutes after 5 PM Wednesday evening, at a deli inside the bus depot. Authorities first inspected it with a K-9 unit. When they subsequently opened the bag, they found bolt cutters, a knife, and screw drivers, along with an undetonated explosive device.

The device appears to have been a flash-bang—a non-lethal stun grenade familiar to anyone who has played their share of first-person shooter video games. The Bomb Squad reportedly took the explosive up to Rodman's Neck in the Bronx, where they examined it.

Police were able to trace the bag back to its owner because he apparently came looking for it, and the suspect—Arsenio Mason of Jersey City—was arrested around 8 PM.

Mason has been charged with reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon, among other things, and is currently being held on $500,000 bail.

UPDATE: @McDonaldsCorp has posted the following comment: "Twitter notified us that our account was compromised. We deleted the tweet, secured our account and are now investigating this."

Former McDonald's commercial star and current president Donald Trump woke up this morning to discover that the world's largest fast food chain had some harsh words for him. This all went down on the official McDonald's corporate Twitter account.

Seriously.

Continue reading on MUNCHIES

(Top photo: Shane Augustus, via)

Now, I don't know about you boozy cats out there in Whereversville, but me: I like to piss when I'm drinking. I say "like", but what I mean is urination at the pub is usually a panicky emergency that takes place with alarming frequency. The worst thing is when you have that final I'm-going-home piss, but it's not actually the final one – far from – so you spend the next hour on the tube or bus or cab ride almost delirious with desperation, clutching seats, trying not to move as your swollen bladder bounces around in your pelvis like a fat dog on a netted trampoline.

If there's one phrase you'll here with the most regularity when it comes to this topic, it's likely: "The problem is: beer just goes right through me."

But does it actually?

Richard Viney is a Consultant Urological Surgeon and a Senior Lecturer in Urology at University Hospitals Birmingham. I asked him why my pint addiction is also making me want to piss my pants all the time. "It is volume on top of everything else," he says. "If you were matching pints with teetotallers drinking pints of water, the beer drinker would still be visiting the toilet more frequently."

So what does alcohol do to the bladder?

"Alcohol itself is a diuretic, which means that the kidneys themselves put out more water," says Viney. "The more alcohol you put in, the more urine you produce per volume of alcohol. Secondly, it will increase heart rate and push blood pressure up, which will also drive urine output, so having beers or any alcohol will increase urine output, which will have an impact on the bladder. Alcohol will have a direct impact on the bladder as well, because it is an irritant and the bladder will want to empty more frequently."

However, according to Rizwan Ahmed – a member of the London Urology Associates – it's not the same for everyone. "The effect of alcohol on the bladder is variable for some individuals, especially females," he says. "For them it has more of an effect, but for the majority it will have at least some effect, varying from an increase in urine frequency to a state where someone who drinks alcohol has to go to the toilet almost immediately. It will just run through their body. The course of increased urinary production is in relation to one of the hormones in the body."

"If you are a cigarette smoker, cigarettes are massively irritant to the bladder."

So our delicious al-kee-hol has things in it that create water in our poor, stretched out bladders. But is this only relevant for beer and the exorbitant amount of it that we drink? Or does it apply across the board?

"It depends on the type of alcohol you are drinking," says Viney. "If you're drinking beer, then beer is bringing various things to the table as well. If you're having a night on the beers versus a night on the whiskeys, gram for gram you are going to be peeing more with the beer, purely because of the volume element to it."

So maybe there is some truth to the old beery adage, after all – if only because you drink more of it, and more quickly, than you would other types of alcohol. But what about the other aspects of your typical night out? The cigarette smoking, the drink mixing?

"If you are a cigarette smoker, cigarettes are massively irritant to the bladder," says Viney. "The cigarettes are driving heart rate up, but the nicotine is also a massive bladder irritant, and it is pro-malignant, so bladder cancer comes from smoking and passive smoking. When we see bladder cancer in dogs they have all come out of smoking households. The other thing, of course, is mixers – fruit juices can change the PH of your urine, and that can be a bladder irritant. Also, if you like your party drugs, like ketamine, it is a hugely destructive drug for your bladder."

So we know why your bladder fills to burst, but what about the horrendous discomfort that goes along with it? When I over-eat, which is a daily occurrence, I feel full and maybe a bit queasy, but never close to the eye-popping horror of needing desperately to piss.

"Without going too far into the biology," says Viney, "there are two ways in which your body is controlled neurologically. There is what's called the somatic nervous system, which is controlled and you are consciously aware of all that stuff – like if you want to touch your nose with your finger, you are in complete control of that process, but there is a whole lot of other stuff which goes on in your body that is controlled by your brain without you ever being consciously aware of it, like your heart beating, like your lungs breathing, like sweating... and these things happen automatically. The bladder is a funny structure because it is part somatic and part autonomic, and it is a battle between the two: between your conscious control – not wanting you to wet yourself in an awkward point in time – but it is your bladder's desire to get rid of waste fluid."

So there you have it: booze makes your kidneys produce more fluid, filling up your bladder. Pints of lager stretch you out even more, because you're drinking more of them in quick succession than you would spirits, and so you need to piss more.

Mind you, technically beer doesn't go "through you" quicker than any other type of alcohol. So next time someone makes that complaint, remind them that they are wrong.

@joe_bish

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Above: A Syrian boy looks for his possessions in the trash after his family was evicted from Hospital Squat in Athens. Illustration based on a photo by Marios Lolos.

It was 4 AM on Monday in Athens when police broke open Hospital Squat's metal doors. Somaia, a Palestinian refugee from the Syrian Civil War, was sleeping alongside her son, but the bangs jolted her awake. Along with 127 other refugees, she had found a sort of home in the squat on Alkiviadou street. Now, as she watched crowds of policeman storm the first floor, her future was again in jeopardy. "You're being expelled," one of the cops told her.

"Why?" she asked in English. "To where?" He gave no answer. Instead, police loaded refugees and volunteers into buses, and took them to the Aliens Department of Athens. They were forbidden to take any possessions, not even a change of clothes.

Hospital Squat—an abandoned hospital owned by the Red Cross that in February had been occupied and converted into a living space for Syrian refugees—wasn't the only squatted building targeted by authorities. That same morning, police raided Villa Zografou, a much beloved anarchist social center and squat, and took seven residents into custody.

These raids, activists fear, are just part of a crackdown on the network of left-wing squats that provide shelter to both refugees and impoverished Greeks. But they also represent an attitude of anti-migrant feeling that has been percolating in Europe for years but is now manifesting in new policies that are hurting one of the most marginalized groups of people in the world.

The raid on Hospital Squat also showcases the seeming hypocrisy of some large NGOs working in Greece. The Red Cross has filed a lawsuit demanding the Syrians refugees' eviction, claiming it will lease the abandoned building to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which will turn it into a center for unaccompanied minors. But IOM and the Hellenic Red Cross have each received over $30 million to care for refugees in Greece. Why couldn't they simply rent another building, rather than working to make more than 100 refugees homeless? (Red Cross has not responded to my repeated requests for comment.)

Once inside the massive brick box of the Aliens Department, refugees sat together in a huge room—37 kids, a pregnant woman, and five ill adults among them—while police separated those with papers from those without. Because of her English skills, a polite officer asked Somaia to serve as an interpreter.

"Why do you treat us with this cruelty?" Somaia demanded. "We are refugees. We have the right to know what has happened." The officer said he did not know. She would have to wait.

As she waited, news of the raids spread through Athens's tight-knit activist community. Demonstrators gathered outside the station, along with lawyers who the police forbade from entering. A green anarchist flag fluttered from the window of a detention cell on the top floor, held by a North African man who had been locked inside for nine months. Protesters marched in two separate rallies. Police shot tear gas. Fires burned, as they have so often in the city since 2008, when police killed teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos—since long before that.

Somaia had been detained for 12 hours when she described her ordeal to me on WhatsApp. "Humiliation," she said. "At this moment I hate my life."

Watch a VICE News Tonight segment on proposed laws that would crack down on protests in America:

Since the financial crisis, approximately 30 percent of Athens housing stock, and 20 to 50 percent of its stores, have lain empty. Out of these abandoned buildings, leftists wove an archipelago of squats. These are homes, gathering places, community kitchens; some are decaying, others as sleekly artsy as any hipster bar. While most squats house Greeks, they are also an attractive option for refugees, thousands of whom now live in squatted buildings. When I visited refugee squats in October for my recent VICE feature, the reason was immediately obvious. Unlike the vast majority of camps, squats provide privacy, decent food, a home in the city center, and, most notably, autonomy, dignity, and respect. At City Plaza, a squatted hotel ten minutes from the recently raided Hospital Squat, I watched as an Afghan woman presided over a professional cafeteria that cooked delicious traditional food for other refugees, while men from Aleppo made Arab coffee at the hotel's own café.

Refugee squats are sometimes targeted by police—last September, Amnesty International demanded an investigation after five Syrian boys living at another squat alleged that police had beaten them and forced them to strip naked. At other times, they are begrudgingly tolerated.

Where squats have succeeded, official responses have failed. Most government camps are squalid, overcrowded horror shows. Their food is stale and sometimes infested by maggots, their shelter, in many places, still consists of flimsy tents. At least five refugees have died due to cold this winter (one was killed when their tent caught fire as they were desperately trying to keep warm in the snow), and thousands more are unprotected from the elements. In most camps, there are no schools, no decent medical care, no distractions, nothing to do except try to find a decent smuggler. Conditions are so brutal that according to a recent MSF report, refugees, including children, have been driven to attempt suicide.

The problem is not lack of funding. The Greek refugee crisis has brought in $803 million in aid dollars between 2015 and 2017, according to News Deeply's meticulously documented report about how the "most expensive humanitarian response in history" became a humanitarian nightmare. That reported showed how political skullduggery, incompetence, and waste bedeviled both NGOs and Greece's government; seven out of ten euros were misspent. Not that government officials will admit it. On Tuesday, Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis praised the raids in comments made to the newspaper Kathimerini. "Hosting refugees should be undertaken exclusively by public services and authorized organizations, in order to truly protect refugees and their rights." In other words, Squats and solidarity groups are the bad guys. Our camps are doing great.

Public sympathy for these refugees has faded. No borders solidarity is out. Ethno-nationalism is in.

A year and a half has passed since the four-year-old Aylan al Kurdi drowned in the waters off of Bodrum, Turkey, a death captured in a photo that seemed to finally shake the West into realizing the stakes of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. In the fall of 2015, it seemed the whole world was descending on Lesbos to help the hundreds of Syrians, Afghans , and others who arrived each day on lifeboats. But since then, public sympathy for these refugees has faded. No borders solidarity is out. Ethno-nationalism is in.

Primetime news has moved on from refugees in Greece to Trump and the bleach-blonde crypto-fascists who back his worldview; meanwhile. European Union countries have turned on both refugees and the volunteers who helped them. In Hungary, MSF alleged, border guards beat and sicced their dogs on refugees trying to cross into the country, then stripped them naked and forced them to walk back to Serbia in the snow. France is prosecuting villagers who helped refugees cross from Italy. SYRIZA, Greece's dominant political party, which ran on the promise of closing Greece's notorious detention centers, announced last month that it would open new ones on the islands. They will be called, cheerfully, "pre-departure camps." An MSF report released this week found that in recent months the European Commission has pressured Greece to detain more refugees.

One turning point was the EU-Turkey deal, signed in March 2016 after Greece's Balkan neighbors closed their borders to refugees. It was supposed to work like this: Turkey would take back every refugee who arrived in Greece by boat. Until their deportation, these refugees would be confined to the camps on the islands. In exchange, the EU would resettle an equivalent number of refugees from Turkey, as well as give Turkey $6.8 billion in financial aid and potential visa-free travel for its citizens. That isn't how things turned out. Between 50,000 and 60,000 refugees remain trapped in Greece; only 9,000 have been resettled elsewhere in Europe, and many have been forcibly deported to Turkey. Confining refugees to island camps not only immiserated them further, but bred a new lucrative market for smugglers. Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu announced on Wednesday that Turkey might cancel the deal.

"On March 20, it is one year since the deal, and they want to be proud that the deal is working," City Plaza organizer Nasim Lomani told me, the day after the raids. By making refugees visible, and allowing them to live in city centers, places like Hospital Squat just further highlight the EU Turkey deal's failure.

As for the refugees detained in the raids, after 17 hours in detention Somalia and 100 others—now homeless—were released onto the midnight streets. They were not allowed to retrieve their possessions or papers from Hospital Squat. At best, they could fish out what police had dumped in the trash. 27 refugees who did not have documents remain in detention.

In the aftermath of the raids, the leftist social center Khora released this statement: "They are mistaken if they believe they can crush the squat movement with riot police and district attorneys. The struggle for solidarity and dignity will continue unabated. It is a Social need. It is a political choice."

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter.

For Allison Ferry, it didn't take long for the "dress code" at the restaurant where she waited tables to catch up with her. Her toenails detached, a bone in her foot painfully misaligned, her hips and shoulders ached.

At many restaurants in Canada, including the Earl's Restaurant in Winnipeg where she worked, two-inch heels were mandatory for female servers. A skirt was good. A shorter skirt was better.

"They use the word 'professional' a lot," she told VICE. "It looks more 'professional' but you know that it's a code for sexual, you look more available."

Often mandatory, always implied, high heels are required of female wait staff at many restaurants despite human rights laws across Canada that make it illegal for employers to have gender-specific dress codes. Under public pressure, Earl's amended its dress code last year.

"The laws are in place across the country. Mandating the wearing of heels is not legal; it's just something that hasn't been enforced," Ferry says.

Earlier this month, the Ontario Human Rights Commission weighed in with a report reminding restaurant operators of that very fact.

In British Columbia, Premier Christy Clark has voiced support for a private members' bill that would explicitly bar employers from setting dress requirements based on gender, meaning to hell with heels.

"This is a human rights issue. I didn't think people could do this in 2017," says B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver, who introduced the bill last week.

Read More: Breastaurants Are the Worstaurants

In Britain, where the footwear revolt has made it to Parliament, it was a 26-year-old office temp who sparked the revolution.

Two years ago, Nicola Thorp showed up at the accounting firm PwC with flats on her feet. When she refused to don heels at least two inches high, she claimed she was sent home without pay.

She started a similar petition; 150,000 signatures and a popular social media meme later, a Parliamentary committee recommended in January that laws need to be tightened up to discourage such sexist workplace practices.

The committee heard from hundreds of women whose workplaces required everything from skirts above the knee, lipstick, nail polish, hair not showing any visible roots from dyeing, jewellery, and just plain and non-specific "sexy."

"It is clear that the Equality Act 2010 is not yet fully effective in protecting workers from discrimination," says the report.

For wait staff, heels pose particular problems, according to Ferry.

"It affects your whole body because you're carrying these heavy trays, you're bending in weird positions, you have to pick stuff up. Hips, feet, everything," said Ferry, now 31, who worked in the restaurant industry for five years early in her working life.

A few years ago, she worked with former massage therapist-turned-communications professional Amy Tuckett to launch a petition asking the Manitoba government to kick mandatory heels to the curb. They heard… crickets.

Last year, they launched another petition aimed at restaurant chain CEOs. That now has 30,000 signatures.

"There are safety issues that have to be addressed," Tuckett told VICE. Spurred by massage clients with high-heeled horror stories, Tuckett made a documentary called Hell on Heels a few years ago.

"There are a lot of health issues that stem from high heels," she added.

She explained that she was treating clients for bunions, osteoarthritis, and a host of other ailments she blames on faltering footwear.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission chose International Women's Day to release its latest report reminding restaurant owners that sex-based dress codes not "legitimately linked to the requirements of the job" are discriminatory.

The report points out that hosts, bartenders, and servers are predominantly female, and more than one-third are young women under the age of 24.

"It's a vulnerable population," Ferry said, who added that dress-code discrimination is an easy fix. "Don't make women wear heels."

Weaver's private members' bill continues to work its way through the BC legislature.

Lead image via Facebook.

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A cousin of Tina Fontaine, whose murder sparked a national call for an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in 2014, died in hospital earlier this week after she was shot in the back of the head and her house was set on fire, according to reports from her family.

29-year-old Jeanenne Fontaine, the second Indigenous women shot and killed in Winnipeg since Sunday, was found inside of her burning home on Winnipeg's north end Tuesday, her family told the CBC.

They said Jeanenne was rushed to hospital, but was taken off life support late Wednesday morning. She was a mother of three.

Winnipeg police haven't confirmed her family's report, but are investigating the incident as a homicide and believe the fire was set deliberately. In an interview with the CBC, Constable Jason Michalyshen said Winnipeg police have visited the house Jeanenne was found in many times for a "variety of matters." A 22-year-old man was shot in the lower body at a house party there three months ago, which he recovered from.

Michalyshen said that while autopsy results are still pending, the shooting and injuries Jeanenne sustained from the fire are attributed to her death. He wouldn't confirm whether the shooting was random or targeted, but did say that investigators would probe any potential connections to gang or drug activity.

Read more on VICE News.

"I can't tell you how many parties I went to in the 90s where I was at some random apartment where people were doing molly and bad cocaine, and they would have that poster," said T. Cole Rachel, Senior Editor at The Creative Independent. "That poster" was for the movie Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's 1996 opus about a group of heroin addicts scheming and shooting their way through Scotland. The film's grisly depiction of drug use and existential ramblings would come to define a generation of disaffected youth. It spawned countless parodies, late-night meaning-of-life conversations, and inevitable political rants about how the film was glamorizing heroin (apparently their definition of glamour included Ewan McGregor sticking his face into the world's worst toilet in search of opium suppositories).

Though the movie would go on to become a major hit, the poster campaign was groundbreaking in its own right. Its distinctive look—which was recently re-interpreted for the film's sequel, T2: Trainspotting, helped cement the film's cult status. But perhaps more importantly, it didn't resemble anything else in the industry at the time—and that was the point.

"The film distributors were looking for something that kind of set it within a similar market to the music industry," said Rob O'Connor, owner of Stylorouge, the firm that designed the original Trainspotting campaign. "We didn't really want it to look like any other film poster."

Adds Mark Blamire, who worked at Stylorouge at the time, "We were given lots of time to develop and nurture the ideas that went into the campaign and come up with something unique. I think that film companies rarely go to proper design agencies. They just want to market the film, so they use the same old clichéd format."

Stylorouge, which was then best known for their album cover work with the band Blur, succeeded with Trainspotting by going anti-cliché. They used a bright orange color palette and Helvetica typography to resemble the warning signs you might see on hazardous materials or a bottle of prescription drugs, then shot black-and-white portraits of the actors—a major creative risk for a film that wasn't actually in black and white to begin with. But the initial test shots ended up being a bit … off; the cast looked too chummy, like they were part of a cheesy network sitcom and not a film about heroin. So they shot them in character instead.

"These guys just walked in very intense," said O'Connor, about the day of the photo session. By then, the cast had just wrapped shooting and was exhausted. "They really had been living this life for a few weeks. And it was a reasonably low-budget movie. They weren't being mollycoddled as actors. They looked pretty grim."

Grim, perhaps, but they were still game to do what was needed—even McGregor, who had to be soaked in water for the shoot, a callback to the infamous toilet swimming scene. Once O'Connor, Blamire, and photographer Lorenzo Agius completed the necessary shots, the design was shipped off and posters soon began popping up near universities to help drum up excitement among students. Considering the initial fanfare surrounding the film—the movie was based on a popular Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, and had previously been turned into a play in London—it wasn't long before other companies were parodying the work that Stylorouge had come up with.

"It became a bit of a standing joke," said O'Connor. "For a long time I did actually collect all the pastiches I saw but it eventually became too many."

Trainspotting monologue poster

One poster Stylorouge wasn't involved in was the one that featured McGregor's famous "Choose life…" monologue. For years I had associated that particular poster as the "official" version from the film, having missed out on the character poster work. I had seen the monologue version countless times, pinned up in dorm rooms and apartments. I even remember the first moment I spotted it, freshman year in August 2004, during the annual campus poster sale. So who designed this poster? Was it some mass-produced bootleg? Not quite. After Stylorouge created the original poster, the producers ended up licensing the campaign to another agency.

"It was a very early license for us. Most of the designs were taken from the [original] campaign," said Mark Arguile, a senior licensing manager at GB Posters, the company behind the monologue poster. "We kept renewing it over the years. It has never been out of print. Most of the designs were taken from the campaign they did themselves. We did three versions of the quotes poster. It's probably the only poster license that we've had continuously for 20 years."

It may not include any of the actual actors on the list, but the monologue poster does feature the film's most important, heartfelt bit of dialogue: the one that made Trainspotting more than just a movie about drugs. The "Choose life" speech epitomized college student ennui and the crippling anxiety young adults feel as they get older and try to find their place in the world.

"I still have it," music journalist and Trainspotting superfan Kat Bein told me. Bein, who first saw Trainspotting when she was 14, has been carrying around that same poster ever since. "You like [the movie] because it's filled with bad stuff and it's cool and edgy and you're a fucking 14-year-old and what do you know? But as I've gotten older that monologue has really resonated with me… There's this point when you get to your life where you need to make choices."

Follow Alex Suskind on Twitter.

Welcome to Last Call , where we visit watering holes around the world to collect life advice from their trusty barkeepers, learning everything from how to get over a broken heart to what drink orders will get you laughed out of their bar.

This time, it's the turn of Will Scully, a Dubliner born-and-bred who learned the bar trade from his father and grandfather before him, and now works at the Mercantile. One of Dublin's most popular drinking spots, the Mercantile is also steeped in history, dating back to the 19th century and even making an appearance in James Joyce's Ulysses.

We gave Will a call to find out what it's like to pull pints at such an institution—and how to raise a glass to St. Paddy like a true Dubliner.

Continue reading on Munchies

(Top image: a screen shot of a bet365 pop-up advert on a streaming website)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Pop-up adverts on illegal TV streaming websites are usually the domain of get-rich-quick scams, "The Brit Method" and horny housewives looking to hook-up in your area, but legitimate companies are also using the seedier side of the web to advertise their services.

Betting firms, including Bet365 and Sky Bet, are in part funding TV piracy sites, such as Watch Series, by paying for pop-up advertising on the sites. A number of links to popular TV shows on Watch Series – including Game of Thrones, Suits and The Walking Dead – feature adverts for betting sites.

"No gambling firms licensed by the Gambling Commission should be advertising on websites that breach copyright regulations, giving them a look of legitimacy," said Gambling Minister, Tracey Crouch.

Streaming sites like Watch Series attempt to circumvent copyright regulation by providing links to pirated content, without actually hosting the content themselves. They exist in a legal grey area by acting as a conduit between pirated content and viewers. However, they are regularly targeted by anti-piracy operations, often changing domain names to avoid being blocked by internet service providers. It is a game of cat and mouse that piracy sites are currently winning, despite a recent agreement between Google, Microsoft and the UK Intellectual Property Office to move infringing sites further down search results.

Authorities are determined to stop copyright infringing sites operating so openly because of the scale of the illegal profits they make. A 2014 report from the Digital Citizens Alliance estimated that piracy websites generated $227 million (£183 million) that year from advertising, and found that even lesser-known sites can make upwards of $100,000 (£81,000) a year.

"We know that lifetime problem gamblers are influenced when they're young and that their habits start when they're young, so I think we should be concerned about young people receiving advertising and advertising interrupting other activities when they are below the age that it is legal to gamble."

To crack down on sites that are profiting from piracy, City of London Police have launched "Operation Creative", an initiative to identify and blacklist websites that breach copyright, encouraging digital advertisers not to do business with sites infringing the law.

The Gambling Commission, which regulates British betting firms, is also involved in the initiative. The commission is in charge of handing out gambling licences in accordance with its regulations – but is also funded by the industry through fees set by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. "In 2015 our involvement in an Operation Creative pilot exercise led to a 36 percent decrease in gambling advertisements appearing on websites providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content," a Gambling Commission spokesperson said.

The spokesperson confirmed to VICE that as part of their regulations "gambling operators must not advertise on websites which provide unauthorised access to copyrighted content", but a number of firms do not appear to be paying attention. There was no suggestion from the commission that any licenses will be revoked, despite continued breach of regulation by gambling firms.

Marc Etches, CEO of charity Gamble Aware, argues that because the industry is largely self-regulated, through the code of practice drawn up between businesses and the Gambling Commission, there are issues with advertising in the gambling industry. "It is self regulation and I would say that there are some gaps in there," Etches said. "So that code of advertising doesn't cover perimeter advertising around sports grounds, for example; it doesn't cover advertising or promotion of gambling on sports shirts. So there certainly are some gaps in it."

Betting firms are facing tougher regulation for daytime TV and social media adverts, as part of a government review into fixed-odds betting terminals, which have become a huge source of income for the industry (and HMRC). However, by advertising on illegal streaming websites, betting firms have found an area to advertise in that is, by nature of its illegality, free from regulation.

A bwin advert on First Row Sports

Offending companies are not just advertising on TV piracy websites, with illegal sports streaming sites also playing host to numerous gambling adverts. Watch Wrestling, which provides free links to wrestling shows and pay-per-views, has adverts for Bet365, while popular live sports streaming site First Row Sports has adverts for Austrian gambling firm Bwin embedded in many of its livestreams. Bet365 adverts also appeared on First Row Sport's streams of the David Haye vs Tony Bellew fight at the beginning of March.

On Watch Series gambling adverts by Bet365 and Noivbet also appeared next to programmes primarily aimed at children, such as Dragon Ball Z and SpongeBob SquarePants, which raised further concerns with Gamble Aware.

"We know that lifetime problem gamblers are influenced when they're young and that their habits start when they're young," said Etches. "So I think we should be concerned about young people receiving advertising and advertising interrupting other activities when they are below the age that it is legal to gamble."

This is not the first case of betting firms circumventing regulation – or shrugging it off entirely. Whether drawing in punters through "affiliated" betting tipsters who drum up business through Twitter, or refusing to pay out to persistent winners, betting firms are adept at exploiting the grey areas in regulation to ensure the house always wins.

SkyBet, bet365 and Bwin did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

@HaydenVernon

Denzel Curry bounds out of AJ Tracey's London home and unexpectedly hands us a chocolate bar. He seems up, bouncing, even. And why wouldn't he be? The 22-year old rapper is behind some of the most thrilling sounds of the past couple of years and is over from his native Miami for a sellout show at London's Jazz Café. He might as well tie in a quick video shoot with grime linchpin AJ Tracey while he's at it.

"I got up around 8 AM, took a shower, got dressed, got ready for the day, headed to the airport, and came here," he says, making a transatlantic flight sound as easy as popping to the shop for a pint of milk and a packet of Frazzles. "We were three hours late to our own video shoot with AJ but it worked out. We had a hard time getting past the border guard because they had to look up what we were doing here to see if we were telling the truth. But we was telling the truth."

In fact, it's hard to imagine Denzel Curry doing anything but tell the truth. Sharp and effortless, ever since he announced his arrival with his debut LP Nostalgic 64 in 2013, the Carol City, Florida, rapper has carved out a space for himself as perhaps the most exciting prospect to have come out of the troubled Miami Gardens neighborhood since Rick Ross. Eighteen years old at the time of release, Denzel had already spent a couple of years as part of SpaceGhostPurrp's cult Raider Klan crew, making his name as the punk kid behind knockout mixtapes King Remembered and King of the Mischievous South. With sonic influences ranging from OutKast to the afro-psychedelia of Flying Lotus, video games to the melting pot nature of his home city—his family is from the Bahamas and his flow reveals a Caribbean influence—Denzel has created a sound that is, like Miami itself, quite unique. What's more, he did it all while still in high school.

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In a speech delivered to law enforcement officials in Virginia on Wednesday, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed dismay about increased public acceptance of marijuana.

"I realize this may be an unfashionable belief in a time of growing tolerance of drug use," he said, according to his prepared remarks, later adding, "And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana—so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that's only slightly less awful. Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life." (In the actual speech, perhaps tellingly, Sessions left out the words "only slightly less awful.")

My own tweet in response got picked up fairly widely, including a retweet by renowned sci-fi author William Gibson:

While this delighted my fan-girl heart, I'm not mentioning it simply to brag. The overwhelming response to what Sessions said (or was going to say) perfectly illustrates how even light-hearted social media can serve as a check on harmful drug propaganda. Indeed, the same splintered and deeply contested media environment that allowed a self-proclaimed serial groper to become president could prevent his administration from succeeding if it does try to crack down on America's growing fondness for weed.

To understand why, it's helpful to consider a sociological concept called "moral panic"—and the role the media play in this phenomenon. Coined by South African sociologist Stanley Cohen in the 1960s, a moral panic has several key features.

According to Scott Bonn, professor of criminology at Drew University and the author of Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the US War on Iraq, a moral panic is essentially an exaggeration of a threat that leads to an over-reaction by government, usually with unduly harsh policies. "What makes it a moral panic is when the state response is greater than the threat warrants," he says.

Moral panics involve several critical players: so-called "folk devils" who are alleged to be the source of the threat; "moral entrepreneurs" who promote themselves and their solutions as salvation while hyping the threat; the media, which buys into it, and politicians, who react.

"The media are an essential player in all of this," Bonn says. "It doesn't mean that there's a conspiracy, it just means that they've gone along for the ride."

A classic example is the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and early 90s, which made a drug that was a real public health problem in poor communities into a national threat warranting mass incarceration.

The "moral entrepreneurs" in this case were actually mainly politicians: Republicans stirred up panic over crack because it was an excellent signal to racist white voters that framed poor people— African Americans in particular—as the source of their own problems.

The "folk devils" here were crack users and sellers. Users were overwhelmingly depicted as black—even though whites smoked plenty of cocaine themselves— and they were portrayed as evil zombies who would kill for a hit. Sellers were even worse: pushers of a substance that caused instant moral degradation. The overreaction and harsh policy, obviously, brought what most of us now know as the peak of the War on Drugs.

And the media buy-in was tremendous: the New York Times, Washington Post, all of the television networks and countless local media hammered on crack's dangers over and over and over, to the point where in 1989, 64 percent of people polled said that drugs were America's biggest problem. The media overwhelmingly spoke with a unified voice, cheering on the drug war.

Bonn notes that there are two types of moral panics: those led by grass roots activists, and those spurred by elites. The crack panic had elements of both, which may be why it grew so large and was sustained for so many years.

But these days, America is dealing with a very different media environment— and that could stymie Sessions and Trump if they declare war on weed (they continue to send mixed messages on the subject). The monolith of the mainstream media is no more—thousands of different perspectives vie for attention, and if politicians try to spread drug-related panic, scientists, experts and journalistic debunkers like me can reach large audiences rapidly.

Essentially, you can't have an elite-led moral panic without lots of media support: if too many journalists object, the critical mass needed to spur uncritical fear responses simply can't be generated. "You could argue that in world today, the internet provides a counterbalance to elite propaganda," Bonn says. On the other hand, he notes, grassroots moral panics may be amplified by social media, "which could be the basis for disseminating falsehoods and hysteria"—a.k.a. fake news.

The particular case of marijuana will make Sessions' task even harder. The "grassroots" here obviously aren't panicking—support for legalization is growing and recently reached 60 percent in one survey. Nearly one in five Americans now live in a state where recreational marijuana use is legal or will soon be legal. And 26 states and Washington, DC, now have some form of legal medical marijuana, with three more set to implement legalization schemes in the near future.

Marijuana panics also require public ignorance: the most significant of them occurred in the 30s, 50s and 80s, when alternative perspectives were much harder to find and scientific data far more difficult to access, according to historian Emily Dufton, author of the forthcoming Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. "It's hard to generate fear about this drug right now," she tells me. "Having an information vacuum is critical for it and that doesn't exist any more."

Dufton points out that several other conditions also militate against panicking the public about pot. "Right now, marijuana has a 21-year history of being legal medicine," she says. Also, marijuana panics are much easier to stir up when there isn't another demon drug vying for public attention—and at the moment, given the tremendous overdose death rate, opioids are in the spotlight.

The contrast between drugs that are now killing more people than AIDS did at its peak—and one that has never produced a known overdose—is stark. I was snarking in my tweet about it, but I was also making a serious point: Marijuana can sometimes substitute for opioids—and when it does, it can save lives. More than half a dozen studies now support this idea: they show that pain patients often do use marijuana instead when it is legal and that opioid prescribing, use rates, addiction rates and overdose fatalities are substantially lower in medical marijuana states.

And one response to my tweet showed just how cruel Sessions' ideas about marijuana really are:

The statements offered so far by Trump administration and law enforcement officials have understandably fed concern that they will attempt to crack down on legal marijuana. And it wasn't so long ago that a few prominent government officials expressing concern about a drug was enough to spark mass hysteria. But the response from the public already suggests that the old lies won't cause moral panic any more—and without moral panic, the drug war is unsustainable.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Rap collective Awful Records contains the art freaks of Atlanta's rap scene. Compared to other collectives like Lil Yachty's Sailing Team or the Dungeon Family, Awful is like Atlanta's acid-laced, red-headed punk stepchild. The Awful aesthetic is bolstered by its in-house photographer, Brandon McClain, a.k.a. Eat Humans—though McClain has become notorious for his raw portraits of underground rappers, his sinister and crude art photography is what originally got him noticed by Awful. We talked to the photographer about the difference between pretty and beautiful, the mundanity of small-town America, and how to celebrate disillusionment.

This interview has been been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: So tell me about what it is you like to photograph and why.
Brandon McClain: It's gone through stages. At first, it was just that I hated where I lived, in Acworth, Georgia, and I just needed something to keep me sane. I was just working at Kohl's, and I'd go the same route every day and notice everything I'd drive by. I never really stopped—it was just daydreaming kind of stuff. But when I got a camera, everything got interesting. I remember I would see this basketball hoop every day, and it was just slowly growing into a tree. That's one of my favorite things I've ever photographed. I started seeing the beauty in [Acworth] and seeing the beauty of everything in it.

Then I started to add a human element to it. At first, I wouldn't do faces. I just wanted to have a human presence in it, so I would have them put on a mask or just have a limb in it. I wanted to be more conceptual with it. Then I grew more comfortable with shooting people as themselves. All my friends are rappers, so that's just who I shot. Then everyone got interested. Especially when I moved to Atlanta, because everyone wants to know what's going on here with Atlanta rappers.

So what clicks between your work and Awful?
I met Awful through [Awful founder] Father's girlfriend. I started hanging out with them just as friends. I didn't even know they made music. The thing about Awful is that we're a bunch of outcasts really. I never feel like a weird person with them. We were the kids who were just creative, and that's kind of all we have. Like think about Slug or Rich Po. What else would we do but create? I don't know what else I would do. Taking photos is really the only thing that's made sense to me ever. They're some of the weirdest people I know. And we're pretty much all black, too. We all have that in common. Father is just the glue that keeps us all together.

What drives the anger, or even violence, that we see in these photos?
It's not so much anger, but it's more about feeling misunderstood and being hurt. I can see how that comes across, though. It's about wanting to be understood really. I feel like a defender of beauty that's not considered pretty. There's definitely a dark side to my photos, though. When I started shooting people, I really wanted to show that side of them. I want that to translate.

How do you separate your music photography from your art photography, if you do?
That's the hard part. I'm really trying to combine them, actually. At first, when I started taking pictures, I didn't want to take photos of people themselves. So taking pictures of Awful in the beginning wasn't that easy. Like I said, I don't really like having faces in my photographs. That's hard when you shoot people who have their own brand. It's hard to find that happy medium of having my aesthetic with them as the subject. They want their face in it, because artists will want the photo to be about them, and to me, it's more about the photograph itself.

What do you want people to see in your photographs that aren't of rappers?
I really only take photos of rappers for a couple of reasons. The main being that I want to be involved in the black community as much as I can. I just want to be around and be involved with black creators. Most of my friends just happen to be rappers. But, as for my art personally, I just want to show people that everything is beautiful. I want people to know that no matter where you are, no matter what town you're in, if you feel helpless where you are, there's beauty there. There's art to be made. I make it a point to shoot in very remote places. It's crazy that so many people just fly by these small moments that look like nasty, disgusting shit, but it's so beautiful. It's just everywhere.

All photographs by Brandon McClain. You can follow his work here.

British Columbia's overdose epidemic has killed 219 people in 2017 so far—significantly more than the first two months of 2016.

Synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil continue to taint drugs across the country, but BC remains the hardest hit. Drug overdoses have now killed 998 British Columbians over the last 12 months.

Though the province's death toll has come down a bit since its peak in December 2016, BC's coroner released a statement Friday cautioning that the crisis is far from over. "People are dying in far higher numbers than we've ever seen, and a slight decrease in fatalities from the previous month should not be seen as any indication that the risk has decreased," said chief coroner Lisa Lapointe.

The coroner noted none of the deaths happened at government-sponsored supervised injection sites, or volunteer-run overdose prevention sites. "This is evidence that these sites are saving lives," Lapointe said. "People need to be encouraged to visit these sites as the majority of deaths are occurring when people use illicit substances without medical attention or assistance nearby."

Read More: No One Knows How Many People Are Dying in BC Recovery Homes

Sarah Blyth, co-founder of a back alley overdose prevention site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, told VICE the new numbers were "really depressing" and proof the feds need to jump in and do more. "It's just going to be really terrible if it takes that many more people to die for them to declare a national health crisis."

BC declared a public health emergency in April of last year, and with that came a push for real-time overdose tracking. With the exception of Alberta, which is also keeping up-to-date stats, most provinces' data on overdose deaths are either years out of date, or incomplete.

Justin Trudeau's government has pledged $65 million over five years to battle opioid misuse, with $10 million in emergency funds slated for BC, and $6 million for Alberta. That money is supposed to go towards collecting evidence and supporting better addiction treatment options.

The feds' "opioid action plan" makes no mention of prescription heroin treatment, something BC politicians have hinted at. "That's a solution that people don't want to deal with—providing a medical version," Blyth said. "That takes money, and people don't want to pay for that."

Lead image: A study participant at Vancouver clinic injects prescription heroin. Photo by Jackie Dives.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

The early days of Donald Trump's presidency have been mired in go-nowhere battles, apparent failures, and pronouncements that are more flash than substance. In the past week alone, the Trump-supported House healthcare plan has been attacked by other Republicans, Trump's proposed budget was widely criticized for its aggressive cuts, and a judge placed a temporary restraining order on the administration's revised travel ban. Even most of Trump's other big-deal executive orders often seem to be more bark than bite, PR-friendly maneuvers to demonstrate to Trump's base he's working hard. Yet he and his GOP-controlled Congress have made significant progress on one key joint priority: an unprecedented crusade against regulations.

Trump has long made it clear that, while he supposedly likes some core (but unnamed) labor, environmental, public health, and safety regulations, he believes up to 75 percent of the country's current regulatory framework is redundant, outdated, or inefficient. (None of the experts I've spoken to have any idea where he got that figure.) The notion of a bloated, inefficient government has been GOP gospel for decades and is independent of Trump—most Republicans in Congress have long voiced support for exactly the kind hacksaw approach to regulations Trump advocates.

"Some of that accords with their small government ideals," Center for Progressive Reform regulatory wonk James Goodwin told me. "Some of it stems from the fact that regulations were associated with the Obama administration, so attacking [them in blanket fashion] had that convenient political dynamic to it" as well.

Over the past few weeks, congressional Republicans have delivered on deregulatory promises by using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a esoteric legislative tool that allows them to nullify late Obama-era rules with simple majority votes. It's only been utilized once before, in 2001, to block a Clinton rule on ergonomics. Yet in the first weeks of the Trump era Congress has utilized the CRA eight times (although Trump has only gotten around to signing three of these measures into law), killing regulations on business disclosure, school accountability, and environmental safety, to name a few.

The CRA can only be used early in an administration, but the experts I've spoken to believe it could be flexed a few more times on major rules.

Congressional Republicans have hinted at further efforts to use the budget process to limit funding for regulatory enforcement and to defuse existing regulations. Bills have been advanced that would expedite the future use of the CRA, intensify the review of existing regulations, and give Congress more control over the development of major regulations, potentially slowing the rulemaking process indefinitely.

Trump is doing what he can to attack regulations from the White House. On the day of his inauguration, he froze progress on all developing regulations for at least 60 days for review. At the end of January, he issued an executive order requiring most proposed regulations (with some exceptions) to come with recommendations of two older regulations to be potentially eliminated and put an annual spending cap on new regulations, set at $0 for 2017. A month later, he created new officers and task forces within federal agencies to enforce deregulation policies—regulating the deregulation process, basically. In between, he ordered the delay, non-enforcement, or review of a number of regulations in five separate executive actions.

Watch a VICE News Tonight segment on troops being sent to Syria:

Trump's team has also staffed key agencies with individuals hostile to their missions, a way to weaken the impact of regulations through minimal enforcement without actually formally getting rid of them and limit new rulemaking. Amit Narang, a regulatory expert at Public Citizen, an advocacy group involved in a lawsuit against Trump's one-in-two-out executive order, suspects Trump will neglect to defend embattled regulations in court as well, spurring along their potential judicial death.

Few of these measures are unique. Every president since Reagan has frozen regulations after taking office, and every president since Carter has ordered some review of existing regulations to identify redundant, outdated, or inefficient rules. George W. Bush was particularly adept at staffing agencies with regulatory heel draggers, Goodwin told me. Joshua Huder, a legislative affairs expert at Georgetown University, noted that Congress has attempted to choke regulation enforcement by limiting funding before.

The Trump administration's only truly new tactic may be his cap on regulatory spending, which has grown every year since 1982. Susan Dudley, director of George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center, calls it "probably the most dramatic action since the requirement for regulatory oversight and benefit-cost analysis established in 1981." Yet even this measure has its roots in proposals going back to the Carter era and initiatives to offset regulatory costs in other nations.

But the vigor with which Trump and the current Congress are pursuing these tactics and the rhetoric they've employed are wholly unprecedented, the experts I spoke with agreed. In the past, Narang stressed, Republicans acknowledged that there was such a thing as good regulation—it just had to be smart. Now, he said, "It's just a complete rejection of regulation across the board."

That could be chalked up to Trump's focus on cost with little to no thought for benefit, also evident in his budget, which eliminated entire programs and agencies wholesale, even popular ones like AmeriCorps. It may be difficult for public opinion to push back on this, as Narang noted that the current regime is great at a rhetoric of appealing abstractions rather than talking in concrete terms, making it hard for casual observers to recognize what citizens could lose.

"We've never seen anything like [this]. And I lived through Reagan," said University of Maryland regulatory expert Rena Steinzor. "On the other hand, much of the threats are flash, not fire."

To wit, as with most of his executive orders, Trump's most significant directives on regulation are so stunningly imprecise they may be next to impossible to enforce. Notably, "regulation" is ill-defined in the one-in-two-out order, as are potential exemptions and the methods by which costs will be measured. Meanwhile, Congress is so dysfunctional—especially on the budget processes—that Huder doubts it'll be able to follow through on timely funding restrictions or get major regulatory reform bills past a likely filibuster from Senate Democrats.

Ike Brannon, a regulatory expert at the libertarian Cato Institute with experience in the rulemaking machine, believes many regulations have been crafted and reviewed under less than fully stringent cost-benefit analyses, so Trump's people may find some fat to trim. But Narang thinks it's telling that Trump rarely, if ever, cites specific rules for potential elimination.

Without the CRA, removing any regulations eventually slated for cutting involves going through the full regulatory review process again, dealing with public comments and likely the courts, which can take years. Either that, or they have to go through Congress, where repeals or alterations could risk idiosyncratic opposition or filibusters. Navigating this, says Brookings Institution regulatory expert Philip Wallach, "will take leadership and skill in dealing with existing bureaucracies… we have yet to see which of Trump's appointees possesses those traits."

Given all of those obstacles, it's unlikely that Trump will really succeed in wiping out the 75 percent of government rules he says are unnecessary. Still, even if they can't actualize their grandest plans, Trump and his congressional allies could have a major impact on America's regulatory framework overall. The CRA doesn't just axe a few rules; it blocks the creation of any similar rules in the future without Congress's approval, freezing whole lines of rulemaking indefinitely. And experts tell me Trump's regulatory budget and two-out-one-in order will tie up resources on hypothetical deregulations and may have a chilling effect on the nature of new regulations. Delay and review tactics, Dudley says, may have already initiated a substantial slowdown in rulemaking.

"We could be in a regulatory dead zone, to a certain degree, for the next four years," added Narang.

But as the Republican base celebrates attacks on the EPA and other unpopular regulatory agencies, the risk is that fewer regulations will mean more, well, risks: of pollution filling rivers and the air, of worker abuses, even of a new financial crisis. If and when those consequences occur, they won't hurt people like Trump or the billionaires in his cabinet. As Tom McGarity, an administrative law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me, "Those regulations that protect vulnerable and not very powerful populations will be the easiest ones to cut."