"I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am," Russian spy Victor Podobnyy told another Russian spy in 2013, explaining his efforts to recruit American energy consultant Carter Page, who recently served as an advisor to Donald Trump. "It's obvious that he wants to earn lots of money."

On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed that Russia's efforts to recruit Page—and the American's willingness to share what he called "immaterial" information in response—was one of the pieces of evidence the FBI used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order permitting secret surveillance of him last summer. The disclosure helps explain why the feds opened a case "investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government", as confirmed by FBI Director James Comey before Congress last month. The paper's disclosure also partly refutes a key claim made by British reporters, starting in November and repeated in January, that the FISA court had rejected an application targeting Trump associates.

But perhaps the most startling detail of all is that this FISA order was made public at all, with the Post citing "law enforcement and other US officials" as its sources.

There are few instances in US history when secret court-approved surveillance on Americans has been unearthed for all to see. In February, the Post reported that retired General Mike Flynn's conversations had been collected incidentally in intercepts targeting the Russian ambassador, though he was not targeted personally in the collection of those calls. Flynn was soon fired amid an uproar over his having lied about those conversations to Vice President Mike Pence.

Late last year, two of the same Post reporters, both then still at the Wall Street Journal, described how diplomat Robin Raphel had been targeted with a FISA order in a counterintelligence investigation when the FBI grew suspicious about her intercepted discussions with Pakistanis. And in 2014, the Intercept profiled five Muslim leaders who had been targeted under FISA years earlier; the outlet obtained permission to release those names. So for six of the people in the United States known to be targeted by foreign surveillance warrants in the past, those warrants became public only after FBI had decided they were not spies. Almost as important, the orders became public as part of stories about how they were spied on for questionable reasons.

Perhaps the most comparable example of the revelation of a FISA intercept targeting an American in a still-active investigation came in 2009. First, the New York Times, citing anonymous "government officials," reported that intelligence agencies had intercepted emails between Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Then the Post confirmed the story, citing anonymous law enforcement officials and House Intelligence Committee Chair Pete Hoekstra speaking on the record. Years later, an after-action report on the Nidal Hasan attack provided extensive detail of the FISA collection on Awlaki.

As with this current investigation into ties between Russia and Trump's associates, the Hasan-Awlaki intercepts got leaked in the context of a highly charged political claims. In revealing the intercepts targeting Awlaki, Hoekstra and others explicitly questioned whether the FBI and the Obama Administration paid due attention to Hasan's efforts to reach out to Awlaki.

That the FBI obtained approval to surveil Page during the summer will further inflame complaints about Comey publicly commenting on the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server during the campaign, while saying nothing about Trump and Russia. But this latest leak also indicates that, even as public reports suggested that the FBI wasn't taking the Russian allegations seriously, the investigation had advanced far more than suspected.

There's another lesson to be gained from the public exposure of the intercepts targeting Awlaki in 2009: Alerting Awlaki to the intercept allowed him to respond. Eventually, he even taunted the US government, opining, "I wonder where were the American security forces that one day claimed they can read the numbers of any license plate, anywhere in the world, from space." Then, according to details released in a British terrorism case, Awlaki adopted encryption that took authorities nine months to break.

What this means is that while the leak that the FBI had reviewed Hasan's emails with Awlaki months before the Fort Hood attack may have ratcheted up the pressure on authorities to target the cleric more aggressively (within four months, the feds approved his drone-killing), it also may have made it harder to pursue him. One would assume the law enforcement sources cited by the Post have no intention of making their investigation into Russian spying more difficult.

Watch the VICE News Tonight segment about the new birth control app that lets you skip a doctor's visit.

Mind you, there's something the Post story doesn't reveal: whether the intercept on Page remains active—whether the FBI continues to suspect he is a Russian spy, which he denies. (Page has not been charged with any crimes.) The story reveals the 90-day order has "been renewed more than once," suggesting it got reauthorized in the fall and again in the winter. But it remains silent about the most important detail: whether it just got reauthorized, or is due to be reauthorized soon.

Of course, Page didn't need to read a newspaper to know the FBI was interested in his ties to Russia. After all, the feds interviewed him about his contacts with the Russians in 2013. And had Page read the court documents describing his earlier recruitment attempt, he would have known the Russians joked about cheating him in the deal. "This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners?" Podobnyy explained in an intercepted conversation in 2013. "You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself."

There are two other reasons the disclosure of a FISA intercept is so rare, beyond avoiding tainting a potentially innocent person as a spy, or alerting a spy to FBI surveillance. In his testimony to Congress, Comey also called leaks about FISA orders "a breach of our trust with the FISA Court that oversees our use of those authorities." In other words, Comey seems to be worrying, judges might challenge the FBI's claims that all this spying needs to be so secret if it keeps getting leaked to the press.

Finally, the FBI has always liked to keep such things secret for one more reason: While the FISA law permits a defendant to review an application if it is "necessary" to decide whether the surveillance was legal, that has never once happened in almost 40 years. In his statement on the confirmation of the FISA wiretap, Page predicted, "It will be interesting to see what comes out when the unjustified basis for those FISA requests are more fully disclosed over time." If Page ever gets charged pursuant to what has been leaked as FISA surveillance, he might be the first defendant to challenge the functionality of the system by which the government secretly claims people to be spies.

That may ultimately teach us more about how the United States conducts surveillance on its own people than it does about Donald Trump.

Follow Marcy Wheeler on Twitter.

Whereas any remaster of a past-gen game is bound to carry with it dated visual qualities however good the added gloss, as is absolutely the case with the returning PaRappa the Rapper, Mad Fellows' brand-new Aaero is immediately cool on a cursory impression. It's packed with big, busy polygons, bright particles that pop and sparkle across the screen, and fantastical, futuristic landscapes to fly into. You're a little spaceship thing, impossibly small against the odds, locking onto and destroying enemies of all shapes and sizes—some of which shoot back, so you'll need to eliminate those projectiles, too, by sweeping a target around with the right stick, Rez style.

It looks like a slick shooter, but is actually a rhythm action affair—your missiles impact in time to an array of bass-heavy tracks, and all the while a racing line of sorts must be stuck to, or else a substantial part of the song in question simply falls away to silence. So then, it's more than Rez in feel—when it's properly singing, tasking the player with navigating their ship on the left stick and lining up shots with the right, there's a rising whisper of Gitaroo Man to proceedings, just with more Katy B and Flux Pavilion, and less "Legendary Theme".

Continue reading on Waypoint.

The ocean interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus may have the "temperatures and chemical energy sources necessary for habitable conditions," according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

This major finding is the result of an extremely tight flyby of Enceladus conducted by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the ringed gas giant since 2004. The data sourced from this close encounter adds to Enceladus' growing reputation as one of the solar system's leading candidates in the search for alien life, and hospitable worlds beyond Earth.

"We feel pretty fortunate that we got this information about habitability," said J. Hunter Waite, the principal investigator of the mass spectrometer (INMS) onboard Cassini and the lead author of the paper, in a phone interview with Motherboard. "It will continue to build an interesting case for going back [to Enceladus]."

Continue reading on Motherboard.

The weirdest thing about reaching your mid to late 20s is the slow dawning realization that you are no longer that youthful. I'm sorry to break it to you dude, but there's a whole generation out there who are old enough to drink and fuck, but who do not care and cannot remember loads of stuff you do, like pre-Justin Timberlake era MySpace and low-rise jeans and the Olsen twins. People are born and then they get older and the world keeps spinning: that's just how it works.

To that end, if you were a teenager during the early to mid 2000s, there is a high chance you are well-versed in a bunch of indie tracks that now feel depressingly distant. You will remember a time when problematic boys in skinny jeans who play guitars didn't make people wince. You will remember when one of your mates earnestly carved the words "gin and tea cups" into their arm with a Stanley knife from the art department. You will remember when Dev Hynes wasn't a New York pop producer but the heavy-fringed lead singer of Test Icicles. You will remember when Preston from the Ordinary Boys walked off Never Mind the Buzzcocks in a cardigan made from sequins. You will remember when the indie subculture was an integral part of the teenage experience, rather than a genre for un-woke dads.

But what do actual teenagers today think about all the indie hits of the 2000s? Do they think Kate Nash is, like, totally relatable or does she just seem like someone's kooky cousin who makes nursery rhymes in a mockney accent and a floral dress? Does anyone smoke weed to The Horrors anymore? Are Bloc Party an actual thing for people who've not finished school yet? Did we dream all that up? Where have the years gone?

Continue reading on Noisey.

The Liberal government's long-anticipated plan for legalizing cannabis in Canada focused heavily on criminality while being scant on details about how weed will be produced and sold.

The government unrolled the Cannabis Act Thursday and said that its priorities are keeping the Canadian public safe, by restricting access of weed to youth and making a dent in organized crime.

In summary, the Liberals have set a federal legal age limit for purchasing pot at 18 years of age, though provinces can alter that as they see fit. Possession of 30 grams of cannabis will be legal. Edibles will be legal with restrictions. And Canadians will be permitted to grow four plants per residence. Producers must be licensed with the federal government. But the retail model as to how weed is sold will be left up to the provinces.

In the meantime, there are new proposed laws and changes to laws that could yield serious consequences.

• Selling to a minor (under 18) or using a minor to commit a cannabis-related offence could land you up to 14 years in jail for an indictable (more serious) offence. The minimum penalty is a $15,000 fine and/or 18 months in prison for a summary offence. By comparison, establishments who sell liquor to minors in BC are subject to $7,500-$10,000 in fines or a brief suspension.
• Possession of more than 30 grams of dried flower; knowingly possessing weed that comes from outside the legal system; possessing a flowering plant into a public place is punishable by up to five years in jail for an indictable offence or a $5,000 fine and/or six months in jail for a summary conviction
• Possessing more than four harvesting plants could result in 14 years of jail time for a summary conviction or 5,000 and/or six months in jail for a summary conviction; possessing more than four non-flowering plants is punishable by up to five years in jail for an indictable offence or a $5,000 fine and/or six months in jail for a summary conviction.
• Selling cannabis without a license could land you up to 14 years in jail for an indictable offence or a $5,000 fine and/or six months in jail for a summary conviction.

In addition, the government is aggressively tackling the issue of stoned driving.

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould told reporters the new regulations will make Canada's impaired driving laws among the toughest in the world.

This will include the use of "roadside oral fluid drug screeners," which police officers will be equipped with. Cops will be allowed to demand saliva samples from anyone they suspect has consumed drugs.

If a cop has "reasonable grounds" to think a crime has been committed they could then demand a drug evaluation (by another officer trained to execute them) or a blood sample.

The laws will include THC limits, not unlike blood-alcohol limits, though officials said Thursday that it's difficult to determine how much THC has to be consumed for a person to be impaired.

Penalties for driving violations are as follows:

• Having between two to five nanograms of THC per millilitre of blood within two hours of driving would be punishable by $1,000 fine.
• Having five or more nanograms per millilitre of blood within two hours of driving could be considered a summary or indictable offence, punishable by a fine of $1,000 on the lower end to a maximum of 10 years in jail for repeat offenders.
• Having booze and THC in your system would also be a hybrid offence (indictable or summary) and would again be punishable by a fine of $1,000 on the lower end to a maximum of 10 years in jail for repeat offenders.

The government expects the provinces to begin working on how to roll out legalization with the goal of enacting the new laws by the end of next June.

With files from Justin Ling

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Renting in Toronto is a nightmare. If you don't already know this in your heart, there are plenty of stories out there to support this claim. That's why we will be bringing you the Toronto Rental Opportunity of the Week.

This week, we have this incredible walk-in closet (erm, bedroom) going for $850/month located near University of Toronto campus. It's a great location!

Screenshot via Craigslist

Here's some highlights of the rental:

-It comes with a "closet storage system," which could be either describing the clothing rack hanging over the end of the bed, or the room in general
-A used bed (twin-size of course)
-$850 monthly rent (which seems pretty high for a closet, I dunno) and does not include utilities except hydro
-The "bedroom" (aka closet) is windowless
-A mirror to look in and wonder to yourself wtf you are doing with your life
-"Newest apartment building on Spadina Crescent" (slightly less chance that it's infested with cockroaches)
-Sublet from May 1 to September 1, with the possibility of extending the lease after (but why?)

The ad ends with the following statement:

"There could not be a better location for a student in the summer!"

There you have it: An $850 large closet without windows, air conditioning, and most certainly with random roommates who are not mentioned whatsoever in the listing is an ideal living situation for a student in the summer.

Follow Allison Tierney on Twitter .

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Here's how you'd do your taxes this year if you lived in Sweden. By now, the Swedish Tax Agency has likely mailed you a return preprinted with all the information that employers, banks, and public agencies have sent to it—salary, pension, interest income, and the like. The return also shows what you owe, because the government has done the math for you. You check the return for accuracy, then can use the tax agency's app on your phone to approve it.

All of that takes 53-year-old Stockholm resident Magnus Alvesson perhaps two hours. He's got a more complicated financial situation than most, involving interest deductions and stock transactions. He also spends time looking for errors. "I usually try to find mistakes that work in my favor but so far to no success," he told me by email. His daughter filed for the first time this year. It took her half an hour, but 20 minutes of that was her father explaining how taxes work.

You, however, are in America. That means you have to enter all of your financial information—likely distributed over several documents from every job you had in 2016, your student loan company, and probably a few other places. You then enter those numbers into confusing forms or pony up for software or a tax preparer to make it easier. On average, taxpayers spend 13 hours and more than $210 to tell the government what they owe, the IRS says. Even those with the simplest returns— those who filled out the 1040EZ—spend five hours and $40.

For many critics of this system, it's not just the time and money involved that maddens—it's the illogic. The US government, like Sweden's, already has statements from employers and banks. Yet we have to pull together our copies of those same statements, transfer the data to the tax forms, and send it all back to the IRS, which then compares what we've sent against what it already knows.

A 1998 reform was supposed to change all that. The IRS Restructuring and Reform Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton, included a section requiring the IRS by 2007 to institute a "return-free" system under which some or all taxpayers would get pre-filled returns that they could simply approve. The law didn't specify how many people this streamlined process would apply to, but the agency was to report to Congress every year on its progress toward the new system and the additional money it would need to implement it. The idea had bipartisan support—Ronald Reagan had touted it as part of his tax overhaul plan in a 1985 radio address.

But the companies that make tax software—H&R Block, Intuit, and others—would have none of it. Return-free filing threatened to shrink their customer base. So starting in 1998, they began making campaign donations and lobbying Congress in earnest to block return-free filing. By 2013, Intuit had spent more than $15 million on lobbying; H&R Block had spent $9 million. Dozens of their disclosure forms list the purpose of their spending as "oppose IRS government tax preparation," according to the Sunlight Foundation.

Those efforts bore fruit. In 2002, under the second Bush administration, the IRS signed an agreement with a consortium of tax software companies that included both Intuit and H&R Block. The group agreed to create an online "free file" system that would give lower income taxpayers access to some of their software at no cost. But there was an important catch: In return, the IRS promised not to "compete with the Consortium in providing free, online tax return preparation and filing services to taxpayers" by creating a return-free system.

That's the last we've seen of pre-completed tax forms that taxpayers can simply check and approve, which 36 other countries, like Sweden, already have.

The IRS's sleight-of-hand—substituting "free filing" for "return-free filing" as required by the law—hasn't gone unnoticed. In 2012, the National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent office inside the IRS, criticized the agency for being five years overdue in implementing the system. Now it's ten years late.

No one has challenged the IRS over the issue in court. That's likely because the language of the 1998 law may be "precatory," says Joseph Bankman, a leading scholar on tax law at Stanford—it expresses a wish or advice, not a demand. Still, "I don't think [the free file system] is compliant with the spirit of the law," he told me.

Taxpayers aren't exactly going wild for the free-file option. Fewer than 3 percent of eligible taxpayers used the IRS's Free File Program in 2014. The 12 software packages available on the program website have a maze of eligibility requirements. As Forbes noted last year, only people in 18 states can use ezTaxReturn.com's free product. H&R Block lets you use its free software only if you're younger than 50. TurboTax requires an adjusted gross under $31,000 unless you're active-duty military. And so forth. The IRS has to provide an online navigator just to help people sort it all out.

The program is purposely complex, Bankman told me. If your situation changes year to year, you might have to buy the same software you used for free the previous April. The year you turn 51, H&R Block may send you an email pointing out that your information is loaded into their software, but to use it this time you have to pay, Bankman said.

Beyond blocking the IRS from developing return-free filing, critics charge that Free File's secondary purpose is to upsell customers into fee-based products. "It is a free-to-fee-based model," Dennis Ventry, a member of the IRS Advisory Council and tax policy expert at UC-Davis, told me. "It's really a bundled marketing package."

That's not a new charge. At a 2006 hearing, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said that "the industry appears to be using the Free File program as an opportunity to bolster its revenue through the sale of ancillary products at taxpayer expense."

But Free File continues to block the possibility of return-free filing. Tax software companies argue that the government's conflict of interest—serving as tax preparer and tax enforcer—is reason enough to oppose allowing the IRS to send out pre-completed forms. "The IRS's inherent interest is to get as much tax possible. Are they going to find every deduction?" Tim Hugo, executive director of the Free File Alliance, said in March.

"Total baloney," replies Ventry. Under return-free filing, the government "is just giving you all the tax information they have about you based on information you provided last year, that employers and others provided, and plugging it into your tax form. It's transparency of the best kind." Plus taxpayers can check the numbers just as they'd do if they paid a preparer, he adds.

Hugo's hypothesis hasn't worked out back in Sweden. There's as yet no evidence that return-free filing has made Swedes question their government's motives: A 2015 survey found that the Swedish Tax Agency is the country's third-most-popular department.

Steven Yoder writes about criminal justice and domestic policy issues. His work has appeared in Salon, Al Jazeera America, the American Prospect, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter.

With a lot happening in the news right now, I feel like it's my duty to warn you about something: The third week in April is about to start, and that's when horrible shit happens to America.

I'm not the first person to notice this. Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post wrote in 2013, "It seems that the third week in April has become our time of calamity."

To be clear, when I say "third week," I'm referring to the third seven-day period, beginning with the 15th—which is technically the "Ides" of April according to the Romans—through the 21st. The period covers just under two percent of the year in sheer time, but after I spent some time looking into it, it became clear that way more than two percent of America's worst catastrophes fall in this little time window.

Here are 14 horrors and horror-adjacent events from past third weeks of April:

The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

The earthquake struck on April 18, followed by city-wide fires that lasted for several days. 3,000 people died. It was the second worst natural disaster in United States history.

The Sinking of the Titanic

It actually hit the iceberg at 11:40 PM on April 14, 1911, but all the worst stuff came after midnight on the 15th. 119 Americans were among the dead.

The Port of Texas City Explosion

On April 16, 1947, a cargo ship full of improperly-stored ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded just off the coast of Texas, causing a chain reaction that blew up other ships and freight. The explosion killed at least 581 people, and set the stage for the very first class-action lawsuit. It was the largest industrial disaster in US history.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

On April 17-19 of 1961, 1,500 Cuban soldiers trained by the CIA invaded Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, under the assumption that the US military would provide air support. When the invasion became global news, President John F. Kennedy decided not to provide air strikes. The operation failed spectacularly, and Fidel Castro was hailed as a military hero.

The United States Embassy Bombing in Beirut

On April 18, 1983, a member of the Islamic Jihad Organization, with ties to Hezbollah, drove a car bomb up to the US embassy in Beirut and blew himself up, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. It's considered the first time Islamists ever intentionally targeted the United States.

The Elijah, Missouri Siege

From April 16-19, 1985, the FBI surrounded the headquarters of a group of white supremacist Christian terrorists called The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. The standoff ended peacefully, but the event allegedly helped inspire the Oklahoma City Bombing exactly ten years later.

The Ruby Ridge Helicopter Incident

The confrontation between a group of isolated doomsday preppers in Idaho, and some overzealous federal agents didn't turn deadly until August of 1992, but the event used as the primary justification for the standoff occurred on April 18, 1992. A helicopter working for Geraldo Rivera flew over and its crew reported hearing shots fired toward it. A later grand jury report called the accusation "grossly unfair." Ruby Ridge partly inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing.

The Branch Davidian Fire

On April 19, 1993, the 51-day siege of a compound associated with an oddball sect of Seventh-Day Adventists in Waco, Texas, concluded when the FBI attempted to raid the facility, resulting in a fire that consumed 76 people.

The Oklahoma City Bombing

On April 19, 1995, a Gulf War vet blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, using 7,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, killing 168. The terrorist intentionally staged the bombing two years to the day after The Branch Davidian Massacre. It was the deadliest act of terrorism in US history until 9/11. It's still the deadliest act of domestic terrorism.

The Columbine Massacre

On April 20, 1999, 15 people died in the worst high school shooting in US history.

The Virginia Tech Shooting

On April 16, 2007, 33 people died in the second-deadliest single-shooter incident in US history. The perpetrator referred to the Columbine High school shooters as "martyrs."

The BP Oil Spill

This event is best remembered for the expanding ecological catastrophe that seemed like it would never end, but an explosion on April 20, 2010 set the oil spill in motion. It resulted in the deaths of 11 workers, and, yes, the worst environmental disaster in US history.

The Boston Bombing

The Boston Marathon Bombing on April 15, 2013 killed three people, and set in motion events that would claim three more lives by the end of the week.

The 2013 Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion

In the aforementioned article for The Washington Post, Joel Achenbach pointed out that on April 17, 2013, 15 people died in an ammonium nitrate fertilizer factory explosion in Texas, 66 years and one day after the Port of Texas City Explosion, but it was overshadowed by the madness going on in Boston. The 2013 incident was sparked by an intentional act of arson.

I can't claim there's anything special about this part of the year that makes people violent. Some of the events—the two school shootings for instance—appear to have fed into each other. And it's worth mentioning that Christians commemorate an act of violence on Good Friday, and that Jews do the same on Passover. Those holidays fall around the third week of April occasionally—though certainly not always.

It's also not trivial that April 17 (or sometimes the third Monday in April) is a little-known holiday called Patriots Day, and it commemorates the start of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775. CNN noted in 2013 that militia groups in the US—groups associated with no less than four of the tragedies mentioned above—seem to have noticed the Patriots Day connection. Oh, and April 20 was Hitler's birthday.

Anyway, I don't know what the deal is with this week. It's all probably a coincidence, but I'm not taking any chances. Beware the Ides of April, everybody, and stay the fuck home.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

There are two types of journalists : those who want to tackle the serious issues of the day, like the War on Terror, and those who know what their readers/viewers really want, which is to talk about the National Hockey League playoffs.

Richard Latendresse, a correspondent for Quebec's TVA network, knows which category he falls into. During a White House press conference to discuss the first-ever use of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the United States' arsenal, Latendresse decided to uh, change the narrative, with a question about the start of the NHL postseason:

"Will the president cheer for the Rangers or the Caps?" Latendresse asked.

White House spokesperson Sean Spicer promptly seized the opportunity to act like a normal human being and informed TVA's inquiring mind that's really not been a subject that's come up too often at the White House.

And everyone laughed and laughed like they didn't have a care in the world and everything is fine. The end.

In any other season, Connor Brown's rookie campaign would have been the talk of the town. Only four other rookies—Auston Matthews, William Nylander, Sebastian Aho and Patrik Laine—had more goals than the 20 Brown scored. When two of those players (Matthews and Nylander) also played in Toronto, however, and you throw in Mitch Marner's 19 goals and 61 points, Brown picked a tough year to have a strong rookie season with the Maple Leafs.

As a result, the spotlight did not shine in his direction as much, but Brown was cool with that.

"I definitely don't mind it. I almost enjoy it a bit," Brown told VICE Sports. "It's kind of nice just being able to go about my business. With them being so good, they deserve all the spotlight they can get so it's nice that you've got guys to kind of share the experience."

Read more on VICE Sports.

Martin Luther King Junior's final message to the world got an awkward rewrite this week. A Green candidate running in British Columbia's provincial election delivered a decidedly partisan version of the civil rights leader's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, complete with a faked black southern drawl.

In a video uploaded to social media, Mark Neufeld, a white politician who is running for the BC Greens in Saanich South, told a Victoria rally crowd he too "went to the mountaintop."

Neufeld repeated this phrase throughout his two minute version of the iconic speech, imitating King's vocal crescendos, and prompting a few giggles from the crowd.

Neufeld jokes the mountain he went to wasn't nearby Mount Douglas, it was Pkols, the Vancouver Island summit's Indigenous name.

"I went to Pkols, y'all," he told the rally. "And I looked over, and I seen the promised land, because the promised land, it's here. It's here in British Columbia."

Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech one day before he was assassinated, on April 3, 1968. In it, he references threats on his own life, and said he is not fearful of death or any man. Neufeld uses many of these lines in his own speech.

"I don't mind, I'm not fearing anyone," Neufeld said. "My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Greens."

On social media, critics called out the speech as racist. "This is so problematic on so many levels I just can't," tweeted Broadbent Institute director of policy Jonathan Sas. "Anti blackness alive and well in BC!"

"Pepsi ad round 2?" tweeted Alex Betsos.

When reached by VICE, Neufeld apologized for the speech and said he "meant no disrespect to anyone." 

Neufeld said he was inspired by Dr. King, a personal hero and great orator in history. He noted non-white people in his family and campaign team, and talked about working closely with "the African community," then added, "I don't want that to sound like a bunch of excuses, I shouldn't have gotten carried away."

Story updated with comment from candidate Mark Neufeld 7:55 PM PST.

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First off, anyone who says Vin Diesel isn't a hipster is wrong. In XXX, a 2002 documentary about Vin Diesel's life that was erroneously mislabeled an action-adventure movie by the studio, Vin Diesel wears Vans sneakers, drives a convertible off a cliff to make a political statement about the societal worth of violent video games and rap music, hangs out with Bam Margera in a loft that has a half pipe in it, buddies up with an evil anarchist by quoting Vandals lyrics at him, goes to two raves, parachutes four times, evades a hailstorm of bullets by doing dirt bike tricks, and causes an avalanche with dynamite then races said avalanche on a snowboard. I think we all know only a true hipster would do this stuff.

Even if I told at least two lies in the above paragraph––Vin Diesel is definitely not a hipster, and, as much as I want it to be a documentary, XXX is no more than your run-of-the-mill extreme sports/spy movie––there is one greater truth to be hard here, and that truth is this: Despite being a 50-year-old bald dude who became a millionaire by appearing in beautifully absurd movies about cars and explosions, Vin Diesel is almost as real hip-hop as Ludacris, one of his many costars in The Fate of the Furious, the new Fast and Furious movie that comes out tomorrow and is stylized on the poster as F8.

Continue reading on Noisey.

After revealing the title of the next Star Wars installment in January, fans have been patiently waiting to get a first glimpse of The Last Jedi. Friday that wait was over, as Disney released the first trailer for the upcoming film to coincide with the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando.

The Rian Johnson-directed installment is set to be released December 15.

People have found many reasons to protest Donald Trump since his election: his anti-feminist rhetoric, his attempted travel ban on citizens of several Muslim-majority countries, his administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But on Saturday, thousands will march to demand something simpler: the release of Trump's tax returns.

During the presidential campaign Trump broke with tradition by refusing to make his tax returns public. These documents could shed light on how Trump makes his money, what write-offs he claims, and how much he donates to charity, all of which were things his opponents and the press questioned. Trump's failure to release the returns also points to his administration's anti-transparency attitudes. For months Trump claimed he couldn't release the returns because he was under audit, but shortly after his inauguration his adviser Kellyanne Conway said that the real reason for the secrecy is that people didn't care about the returns.

Frank Lesser, a comedy writer who worked on The Colbert Report for eight years, gave voice to what a lot of people were thinking in a tweet immediately after Conway's statement. Lesser's sentiment—let's show Trump just how many people care about his return—was shared by a few people, including Vermont law professor Jen Taub and New Yorkers Wes Shockley and Liz Tura, who also took to social media with similar calls to action. That gave rise to a protest movement that is becoming a reality on Saturday, when protesters will gather in DC, New York, and elsewhere for rallies sparked by Lesser and Taub. (Lesser is quick to point out that he is one of many who had this idea.)

In advance of the march, I spoke to Lesser about his role in all this, what he wants to come out of the protests, and how the whole thing started as a joke.

VICE: How did your famous tweet come about?
Frank Lesser: The world falling apart instigated it. I was actually in the coffee shop, trying to revise a screenplay I've been working on for awhile. A big part of the writing process is the procrastinating process, so I went online and saw that Kellyanne Conway went on all the morning shows saying, "Oh, he's never gonna release his tax returns, people didn't care." It angered me and I jotted down a quick angry tweet that in my defense was kind of a joke. People have been asking if I was really calling for [this protest]. Absolutely not—it just felt better to get that off my chest, but it instantly started getting a lot more retweets and likes than anything else that I've ever tweeted. Within about 15 minutes Dan Savage was saying, "This is not a bad idea." The next day Michael Moore, Sarah Silverman, and Elizabeth Banks—a ton of different people were retweeting it and I started thinking, Oh maybe this will actually become a real thing, which is sort of terrifying. I did not really mean to do this.

That's how the most viral things happen, huh? It's not premeditated.
Yeah. As a comedy writer I was thinking, Why couldn't this be an actual joke? I would just be so much happier. It actually goes to your head, though. For a moment I was like, Yeah, maybe I should be the leader of this movement. Then I was like, Oh my God, I'm Donald Trump, I get it: Every single tweet of his goes as viral as this.

I somehow accidentally help start this, but there were other people who were thinking about it and it's good it all caught on. It resonated with a lot of people, but I'd like to say the person who truly inspired the Tax March is Kellyanne Conway.

Have you ever helped organize anything like this before?
Well, when I was writing on the Colbert Report that was when we did the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with Jon Stewart, but that was a full-on parody of this sort of thing. Actually I think there were some people in the audience who wanted to be more of a real thing. But absolutely not, I've never done it and I'm not sure I'll ever do it again.

How involved have you been with the rally?
I'm working primarily with the New York group, but I've also been sort of giving some advice to the national/DC group, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, trying to help out where I can.

So you're pretty involved?
Yeah. I initially wanted to be the quiet, secret advisor in the shadows of the back room. I was saying I want to be the Tax March's Rasputin—or, to reference a more contemporary man who also looks like he's been poisoned and drowned, Steve Bannon.

What do you hope comes from the Tax March?
I think it's important that we hold Trump to the same standards that we've held every other modern president to. It's not a ridiculous demand—we're not asking for his birth certificate, his returns are something that actually gives a window into what his business dealings. A the same time, I don't think we'll actually get any of this. My favorite thing is that Richard Nixon's big famous quote, "the American people have to know whether their president is a crook, well, I'm not a crook" was in relation to his tax returns. He was forced while under audit by Congress to release his tax returns.

How do you suggest people resist Trump in general?
I think a really big part of it is using humor, not even as a political tool but as a coping mechanism. You really do need to sort of laugh because it's a littler harder to be scared when you're laughing. With this march we have these giant inflatable chicken Trump balloons. Its an easy way to get more people into it—politics and political activism isn't always the sexiest and most exciting thing. It can be a little scary, so if you make it a little entertaining or amusing you rope people in with that a little bit. One of the things I really liked at the Women's March was seeing all of the really funny signs. Yes, they were angry, but many were using humor.

What's the next step after this march?
I think one of the next steps is to support some of the legislation that's in both the Senate and the House to force at least future presidential candidates to release their tax returns. But in general I think its just about continuing questioning what is he hiding that's so damaging. We'll figure out the final tally of how many people show up and how many cities it was in and we'll see if he'd rather face this many people in a massive country-wide demonstration rise up against him instead of just releasing some simple forms.

The Trump administration decided to break with another Obama-era rule on Friday and announced it would keep all the White House visitor logs private, meaning the public won't have access to who's stopping by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue until after the president leaves office, TIME reports.

The administration sees the Workers and Visitors Entry System, which usually falls under the care of the US Secret Service, as "presidential records" and ineligible for Freedom of Information Act requests. The move was confirmed Friday by White House communications director Michael Dubke, who told TIME that the decision to keep the logs under wraps was due to "the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually."

During Obama's term, the administration voluntarily published more than 6 million records containing most of its visitors on the website Open.gov, which became available about three months after they had stopped by. The only exceptions were some celebrity visitors, top donors, or those in for a private, personal meeting, like potential nominees. That website also published the salaries of various White House staff, as well as appointments, in an effort to promote transparency.

Not only is the Trump administration shutting that website down, promising to transfer some of that info to WhiteHouse.gov, but members of the public won't be able to request to see the visitor logs for at least five years after Trump leaves office.

It's not clear, however, if the same rules will apply to visitors of the "Winter Whitehouse," or Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where he's spent 17 days since taking office. Democrats in Congress are after the club's visitor logs with a bill they've appropriately named the "Making Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness Act," or MAR-A-LAGO Act.

Seemingly out of the blue on Thursday, the US military for the first time deployed a bomb called the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), the third-most powerful explosive that America has ever used in battle after the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. The MOAB, or "Mother of All Bombs," is a ginormous, and somewhat crude, conventional bomb, weighing about as much as four Humvees and producing a small, nuke-style mushroom cloud when it blows up.

The target? An Islamic State affiliate stronghold in eastern Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump, some quickly argued, was just keeping a campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" ISIS, and intelligence reports from the Afghanistan government say that's just what he did—36 dead ISIS guys, and no reported civilian casualties. But the decision is still puzzling: If using an almost unimaginably powerful weapon was meant as a promise kept to voters who craved ISIS blood, why shed it several countries away from the primary ISIS stronghold and de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, in a place where ISIS isn't even the biggest problem? And if Trump is so proud of the MOAB attack, why is he being—especially by his own standards—downright cagey about telling us whose idea it was?

To find out how the use of this bomb fits into the larger geopolitical scene right now, I talked to Faisel Pervaiz, who analyzes South Asian affairs for the Austin, Texas-based military intelligence firm Stratfor. Our conversation shed light on how a demonstration of might serves US diplomatic aims—particularly at a time when Russia is increasing its involvement in the region. But Pervaiz cautioned not to expect this bomb to shift the tide of America's longest war.

VICE: For starters, it's probably helpful to talk about how long we've been in Afghanistan.
Pervaiz: I always like to remind people about how long of a war this has been. I want to remind people that this war began October 7, 2001. Meaning this was before there was ever YouTube, Facebook [so] keep that in mind.

This bomb has been in the US arsenal since 2003, so almost that whole time. Why did the US suddenly use it against ISIS when the Taliban have been there for ages?
I think people think about the Islamic State, and their minds naturally go to Syria and Iraq, and reasonably so. That's where the most intense fighting has been, [but] this bomb, which was dropped in Nangarhar province in Achin district, was specifically dropped on tunnels that were being used by the Islamic State. So the first significance, from my standpoint, is that IS has branched beyond Iraq and Syria into Afghanistan, and they're a very real and resilient presence there.

So why MOAB them, if we're using that as a verb now?
When they go underground, of course, it becomes more difficult to attack them from the air. Part of the rationale in using a 21,000-pound bomb is that when you're using that bomb, you're almost creating a mini-earthquake. Your intention is to have the ground buckle and cave in on itself, and basically crush the people underneath.

Is there maybe any deeper significance to this move?
I think if you sort of move the dial along the spectrum, there are other events which are a bit more ambiguous in their interpretation. When I look at this bombing, I think about how something's going to be happening [Friday] in Moscow. Obviously, recently, we had those chemical attacks that happened in Syria. Of course, the two big countries that are sparring over the meaning of those attacks, and who is culpable, are the US and Russia: [Friday] in Moscow, Russia is going to be hosting talks on the war in Afghanistan. These are going to be the third talks that Moscow is hosting ever since December, and that's significant because that's showing that Russia is now deepening its involvement in another theater of war to try to gain leverage against Washington.

Say more about that connection—between the talks and the bomb.
When we drop a bomb that weighs 21,000 pounds—that's so big. I think a part of it, or some part of it, is the messaging and the symbolic significance that the US is sending out to countries such as Russia: that we are the premier military in the world. We are the biggest power. We have the tools and weapons to show you that this is the case.

What does Russia want out of this?
Russia is threatened by the Islamic State. Keep this in mind: sometimes it's important to add the nuance here, which I think your readers will appreciate, and that is not all insurgency is cut from the same cloth. When we talk about the Taliban, specifically the Afghan Taliban, it's a nationalist movement which is focused on conquering Kabul. Their focus is on Afghanistan. But when you look at the Islamic State, that is a transnational jihadist movement, meaning they want to lead a group across borders, and as a matter of fact, that's what they've done by getting into Afghanistan to begin with. So, yes, Russia and United States see a similar threat, but the problem—and this is where you're seeing both sides butt heads—is that Russia is also playing geopolitics. Why is Russia involved in Syria? It's because Russia is trying to increase its influence so it can use it as leverage with Washington in other situations that Russia and Washington disagree with.

So the US might be hoping this big bomb shakes Russia's confidence a little?
That's right. These events in international politics can have many shades of meaning, and it's always a challenge to figure out what factor carries the greatest weight. I think that is one factor.

What's another?
Just last week, for the first time this year in Afghanistan, an American soldier was killed. This was a US special forces soldier. And that person was killed in the same province in the same district. [Though] I'm not saying that itself was the part of the decision making calculus.

Is a move against ISIS or its affiliates in Afghanistan also a move against the Taliban?
Absolutely! Mid-April is usually when the Taliban launch what they call their spring offensive. They do this every single year. When the weather gets warmer, the fighting across Afghanistan intensifies, and usually that means you're gonna see some big attack. In Kabul—in one of the urban centers, that's usually where you see some opening salvo in the year's spring offensive. [So] any action the US takes in Afghanistan, even if it's technically against another group like the Islamic State, it's also sending a very clear signal to the Taliban that we're still in the fight, and we're in it to win.

And would you guess that this will turn out to be a successful strategy?
I think this is an example of a tactical victory, but it's not going to by any means blunt the intensity of the war. You have the full fury of the world's most powerful military in that country for a decade and a half, and that has not ultimately extinguished the insurgency, so at the end of the day, this war is not going to be won through military means. All the sides know that. At the end of the day, the war ultimately will be won through politics. It's going to be a negotiated settlement, where the Taliban and the Afghan government, and all the parties involved are going to have to talk things out. That's the way it's going to end. And right now, the war is essentially in a stalemate.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Travis "Teddy" Walton, the 24-year-old producer behind track ten on Kendrick Lamar's new album DAMN., sits comfortably in his Beverly Hills home, anticipating the debut of his single, "Love." As the song begins, our chat halts as the light keys fluctuate softly in the background, broken up intermittently by trap drums. An angelic male voice echoes behind Kendrick's, and in tandem they envelope the beautiful melody and upbeat percussion. Walton then digresses briefly from our conversation to consult with his manager, who informs him that a hook he had suggested the rapper use made it onto the album in a different song. "Hold on, something crazy just happened," he says excitedly. "[Kendrick] used my phrase, 'This what God feel like' for track 13."

Through a viscous Southern accent, the Memphis native amicably recalls wanting to get into music as a child because he particularly enjoyed the sounds in cartoons. "I used to watch TV a lot, so I started getting into music really then. I was actually trying to download a game, but then I made a mistake and downloaded FL Studio," He jokes. "Since then I stayed on there just really fucking around until I started taking it seriously." The time eventually came for Walton to pursue music more earnestly when he began to produce for his brother, June, who helped him craft his unique sound. "I would describe it in three words: Three Six Mafia, Tame Impala, and SWV. I bring a psychedelic, yet soulful sound to most of my music."

He adds, "I knew that I could be a big producer after [we] dropped [June's] first project, EVOL. It was definitely a huge underground project. He helped me out by making me fuse 90s and R&B. I would say everybody knows me from that," he says with animated reverence. "Really, before like everybody started doing trap and R&B, I was the first person to do that. ASAP Yams found that out on the internet." Walton and Yams eventually met when he skipped school to go to South by Southwest in Texas with his brother, who was playing shows at the festival. "Yams actually knew about my brother's music. So he was a fan of my work," Walton said. "He actually like, pulled up on me and my friend and [said], 'Hey I think I know you. We've been trying to work with you for a minute.'" A year later, they reconnected via Twitter, conversing back and forth about working with A$AP Rocky, and in 2015, Teddy produced "Electric Body" for AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP. Since then, Walton has been curating and developing his eclectic sound through several new personal projects and collaborations—namely with GoldLink, Freddie Gibbs, Nipsey Hussle, Bryson Tiller and now, Kendrick Lamar.

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For Catholics, hosts are potent manifestations of faith. The crackers consumed during Communion are part of a ritual that goes all the way back to the Last Supper. Once blessed, these bits of altar bread are believed to become the body of Jesus, or at least carry his divine essence.

But for all their spiritual resonance, these wafers are also totally mundane. They're made simply by heating unleavened flour and water between two iron plates. And they're so ubiquitous that most Catholics never even question their origins—they seem to just magically appear on the altar.

In reality, though, if you're an American Catholic, your communion host likely comes from Cavanagh Altar Breads, a secular, industrial baker.

Based out of Greenville, Rhode Island, the company specializes in mass-produced sacramental wafers. Although they make altar breads for many Christian denominations, they dominate the Roman Catholic Mass market, churning out (according to one oft-reported figure) up to 80 percent of the hosts used by the Church in the US.

It might strike some as odd that intimate, holy objects like sacramental wafers would be mass-produced in a secular facility. Until the late 20th century, priests, members of a parish, or nuns prepared hosts for their community or nearby churches. Cavanagh didn't come into the picture in the US until around 1943, when a Jesuit priest visited nuns making wafers in the Greenville area. He felt their conditions and equipment were miserable, so he asked a local Catholic inventor, John Cavanagh Sr., to help the sisters out. In his life, Cavanagh had developed several new devices, including a patented mechanical stapler and a roofing hammer. To help the nuns of Greenville, he worked alongside his sons to adapt waffle irons and humidifiers to make hosts. Then he created special host-making machines. Three years later, local clergy permitted the Cavanagh family to produce their own altar breads, ostensibly to help the sisters meet expanding regional demand.

For years, Cavanagh just served the New England Catholic community—until the Vatican II overhauled Catholic life in 1962, specifically voiding some old recipes by mandating that hosts be thicker and have a breadier flavor. Its wider adjustments also expanded the market for hosts by making changes that kept Baby Boomers from leaving the Church and helped revive communion rituals in some Protestant communities, who use hosts with different ingredients, shapes, or sizes than Catholics. Protestants didn't have monastic communities to produce hosts for them, while existing capacity couldn't keep up with the expanding Catholic market.

Around this time, the idea of locking yourself away for life in devotion to God was losing some of its appeal and social utility. According to Sister Ruth Starman of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, an order or official grouping of nuns in Clyde, Missouri, that still makes altar breads, American nuns started getting older and less numerous. As orders fully disbanded or became too small and frail to handle the work of making altar breads, the number of American host-baking monastic orders dropped from a couple hundred in the 1960s to a few dozen in the 1990s. Closing nun orders shifted their customers to other groups of nuns. But according to Starman, "Many communities just didn't have the sisters to do the work."

Cavanagh used its generous capacity to supply low-cost breads in massive quantities to nuns who could package and sell them to local parishes for income. As of 2012, Rowan Moore Gerety, writing in the online religious magazine Killing the Buddha, reported that this distribution mechanism accounted for about 70 percent of Cavanagh's host sales.

Eleven cloistered Carmelite nuns baking 300,000 communion wafer breads for Pope John Paul II's giant Mass in San Antonio. Photo by Bettmann / Contributor

Orders like the Passionist Nuns of Ellisville, Missouri, reportedly buy enough from Cavanagh to supply the parishes they work with, but they still make some breads as spiritual work on the side. Cavanagh was also a logical fit to provide bulk supplies to religious goods chain stores that popped up to service Protestant and Catholic communities, like CM Almy or LifeWay. "With the decline of local convents to buy bread from," explained Starman, "it's easier to go to the local religious goods store to purchase breads than have them shipped from a distant community… shipping costs rising has not helped [nuns]."

Starman's order continued producing altar breads—rather than becoming a Cavanagh distributor—because, as she told me, it's what they've done since 1910 and fits well with their ideals. "Contemplative religious communities need an income producing work that is consistent with their life of enclosure and prayer," she explained. "Altar bread production is one of the most perfect works."

But the orders that stay in the business now have to compete with a secular firm that brought mainstream business savvy into a holy space. Cavanagh developed a proprietary flour blend, a process to seal the wafer edges to prevent crumbs, and automation that allowed batches to be "untouched by human hands," a quality they started to promote in ads and press. They produce wafers in cutting edge (for the industry) machines capable of embossing them with little symbols and aggressively market them to churches. "These points have successfully sold the Cavanagh bread over those simpler, less showy packaged breads produced by contemplative religious communities," said Starman. It also can't hurt that they're able to produce for Protestants in dedicated machines and sell wafers not just to religious organizations, but also to people who eat hosts as snacks, which is apparently a thing in Quebec.

Some altar bread producers, like the Poor Clare Nuns of Bernham, Texas, were reportedly driven out of business by what they called "that big monstrous secular competition." Members of that now-defunct order were apparently most offended by Cavanagh's marketing bids. Gerety noted that before the Poor Clare Nuns went under, their website carried a message that explained they'd ended their baking after Cavanagh "had the audacity to send samples and a price list to every parish in the United States… Priests started calling to say they preferred the 'other' breads… Obviously, our breads were no longer wanted."

Even existing orders bristle at the contents of Cavanagh's marketing, which they seem to see as redefining the meaning of communion hosts in their financial favor. Sister Rita Dohn, also of Starman's order, told the Chicago Tribune in 1999 that marketing around the fact that the company's wafers were untouched by human hands got her "dander up," since she sees the human work and prayer that go into their hosts as integral to their value.

Most of the few orders that still make altar breads serve one or two hundred parishes each and produce about 100,000 wafers a month. Starman's order leads the pack, having acquired industrial equipment, hired lay staff to work with the few sisters, and invested in marketing, web, and sales capabilities to compete with Cavanagh in the 1990s. Prayer and holy production are their (and most surviving nun operations') main selling points, while established relationships are their lifeblood.

As the largest religious supplier left in America, Starman's order has tried to put on seminars to lend advice to other communities of nuns who still want to make bread. And according to Starman, they "began producing breads for communities that could no longer do so and thus helped them and ourselves distribute altar breads" to stay in business, kind of like Cavanagh. They make up to eight million wafers a month—while Cavanagh can produce up to 25 million a week with a similar sized staff.

Still, as Starman explained, the greatest challenge to the US market for altar breads isn't competition from secular wafer producers or the challenge of technological advance or innovation. It's a slow decline in the size and number of parishes. "Many young Catholics don't go to church as often and regularly as previous generations," said Starman. "Or they leave the church altogether."

Of course, that's a bigger problem for Starman and her sisters than it is for Cavanagh.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

These are not happy times for Republicans. Though their party controls Congress and the White House for the first time since the days of George W. Bush, they haven't so far passed any landmark legislation and, after weeks of stumbles and embarrassments, GOP legislators are spending the Easter recess facing irate constituents. While the ruling party languishes in turmoil, progressives have been oddly hopeful for the past couple of weeks. Their pep stems in large part from the fact that everyone's favorite socialist uncle, Senator Bernie Sanders, is back in the limelight, pushing his lefty legislative agenda and commanding a newfound prominence as the most popular Democrat (although he's technically not a Democrat) in America.

Sanders drew attention towards the end of last month when he vowed to introduce a bill proposing a wholly government-run (a.k.a. single-payer) healthcare system after the failure of the GOP's big healthcare plans. At the start of April, he and several allies got great press for a new bill that would make public four-year colleges and universities free for Americans from families making less than $125,000 a year. Other progressives have similarly articulated legislation that'd expand Medicare or paid family leave, and Sanders has been barnstorming for issues like raising the minimum wage and improving union protections.

None of these proposals are new—Sanders hasn't really changed his views over the years. What's changed is that more Democratic lawmakers are now backing his and other progressives' bills. Sanders's proposals obviously won't become reality as long as the GOP controls Congress—but the Vermont senator's sustained push for his legislative agenda will likely have a real effect on national politics moving forward, however slowly that process occurs.

Some progressives imagine a universe in which a chastened and pragmatic Trump works with Sanders toward providing healthcare for all Americans. Trump—or so this vision goes—has endorsed a single-payer system in the past (see his 2000 tome The America We Deserve) and some polls show that most Americans would embrace such a scheme. Trump's said if he can't work with the GOP on healthcare, he'll work with Democrats, and Sanders has offered to reach out to the White House.

That universe seems a long ways away. In reality, Trump is often uninformed and erratic; his policies and actions to date do not indicate a willingness or ability to move towards Sanders's views. The people in the Trump orbit who care about healthcare—from House Speaker Paul Ryan to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price—would never endorse a Sanders-esque plan, and a Republican Congress wouldn't pass it. "Even if they did" want to advance a Sanders talking point, said Michael Heaney, a University of Michigan expert on social movements and party politics, "they still wouldn't want to get behind it for partisan reasons."

Sanders has admitted his agenda likely won't fly as is in this climate. But, explained Democratic strategist Jonathan Tasini, "you have to view this [legislative push] and Sanders's role as a long game," aiming to change national political dialogue years down the road.

"The long-term strategy is to build support within the Democratic Party itself, among both elected officials and Democratic primary voters," for progressive policies, expanded Boston College party dynamics expert Dave Hopkins, "so that the party's legislative agenda-in-waiting is further to the ideological left for the next presidential election in 2020."

Though Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton in last year's primaries, he's remained popular—thanks in part to the common belief among progressives that "Bernie would have won." He's moved from the political fringes to a leadership position among Senate Democrats and had success promoting progressive candidates. He's held rallies, launched a podcast and a Facebook Live show, and generally remained in the public eye far more than most unsuccessful presidential candidates. Which is to say, he has real and substantive political clout these days.

This doesn't mean that Sanders and his allies can take over the party, cautioned Heaney. The limits of Sanders's powers were on full display when Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, his pick for Democratic National Committee chairman, lost out to the more centrist Tom Perez a few weeks back. (Perez and Sanders are currently on a "unity tour" to show there's no bad blood between the two wings.) Even if Ellison had taken charge, Heaney noted, the Democratic Party tends not to fall into line behind leadership as readily as the GOP, and centrists have a host of pragmatic reasons not to go full socialist.

"The dominant style of governing in the Democratic Party is technocratic incrementalism, not ideological revolution," added Hopkins. "There just isn't a broad enough constituency within the party, to say nothing of the American electorate, for Sanders's kind of politics to become the favored approach of the national party any time soon."

But Sanders can—and likely will—drag the Democratic agenda leftward. The party is reportedly developing a new platform that is more progressive and populist on issues like trade, and Heaney suspects that individual Democrats will pick up at least some of it in future races.

For his part, Sanders seems fully aware of and content with the fact that he's helping with a slow leftward shift. Heaney suggested he's trying to float as many ideas as he can, airing them out in vital swing states to give Democrats a sense of what issues might gain traction and how to package them in the future. So far, however, it's too soon to say what will stick, especially since the most powerful (and probably effective) issue uniting Democrats at the moment is hatred of Trump.

But sooner or later Democrats will have to put forth a statement of what they're for, not what they're against, which is why Sanders still matters. "All of this is incredibly important," concluded Heaney, "because it's laying the groundwork for an insurgent candidate to come along and take on Donald Trump."

Follwo Mark Hay on Twitter.