On Monday, the New York Timesreported that Brett Talley, President Trump's nominee for Alabama's federal district judge, had failed to disclose that he was married to a White House lawyer. But aside from his potential conflicts of interest, and general lack of experience for the role, there was another detail about the 36-year-old lawyer that made headlines Monday—his work as a horror novelist and ghost hunter.
As Gizmodo points out, Talley first shared his supernatural interests in a 2014 Washington Postinterview, where he talked about his novels of "true ghost" stories and going out with the Tuscaloosa Paranormal Research Group to hunt for the paranormal, armed with thermal cameras and digital voice recorders. According to its website, the group "uses a strictly scientific approach to determine the extent of the paranormal activity" and uploads photos and audio from some of its expeditions.
"I tend to believe there’s a good scientific explanation for the weird things people see and hear," Talley told the Post. "But I’m open to the idea, and it’s fun."
According to the Daily Beast, Talley even co-wrote a book with the founder of the group, David Higdon, called Haunted Tuscaloosa. It apparently explores "tales of haunted houses and shadows moving through university buildings."
"We will enter abandoned insane asylums, antebellum homes and ancient cemeteries," the authors write, according to the Beast. "We will review stories of long-dead Civil War soldiers, of women driven insane by the death of loves, and of some leading lights of Tuscaloosa who still walk in the massive homes they constructed."
It's not clear if Talley has ever actually come across a ghost, considering Higdon told the Beast the group usually doesn't find any paranormal activity and ends up sitting "in the dark and mostly wish[ing] something does happen."
Still, it doesn't look like Talley's ghost-hunting abilities will stand in the way of his judicial aspirations. According to the Times, he's already been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee even though the American Bar Association unanimously deemed him "not qualified."
Last week, the internet had a conniption over Juli Briskman, a rogue bicyclist who was fired from her job after giving Trump's presidential motorcade the finger. Now, those who were inspired by Briskman's act of resistance are helping her get back on her feet—to the tune of $62,000.
More than 2,000 people have donated to a GoFundMe set up on Briskman's behalf, aimed at reaching $100,000. Rob Mello, who launched the fundraiser last week, called Briskman "an inspiration to us all" and wrote that his free-speaking, Trump-bashing hero is now officially slated to receive the money he raises.
Briskman, a 50-year-old mother of two, lives in Sterling, Virginia, not far from Trump National Golf Course. She was out for a bike ride one Saturday afternoon in October when a massive line of black SUVs careened by her—which she recognized as the presidential motorcade, headed back from a pleasant day on the links.
“My blood just started to boil,” she told the Huffington Post. "I'm thinking, DACA recipients are getting kicked out. He pulled ads for open enrollment in Obamacare. Only one-third of Puerto Rico has power. I'm thinking, He's at the damn golf course again."
She said she flipped off Trump's entourage "a number of times" before it overtook her, and figured that was that. But unbeknownst to her, a photographer in the press pool had captured her single-fingered protest. It took only a matter of days for the photos to go viral, for Briskman to transform into an anti-Trump hero, and—once word reached her employer, government contractor Akima LLC—for Briskman to lose her job.
Still, Briskman says she doesn't regret what went down. She's said it "felt great" to get a chance to give the leader of the free world a piece of her mind, even if doing so cost her a job. And if her GoFundMe keeps barreling toward its goal, Briskman might not have to worry about finding a new gig for a while.
“I’m angry about where our country is right now. I am appalled. This was an opportunity for me to say something," she told HuffPo. "I'd do it again."
A version of this article originally appeared on VICE Mexico. Leer en Español.
On a six-day tour through the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas last month, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez Marichuy transgressed traditional Mexican politics by making her struggle against machismo apparent—and indigenous girls and women visible.
In a country that registers an average of seven femicides per day and is governed by a male political class in crisis over high levels of corruption and impunity, the message of the first indigenous woman candidate seeking the presidency in the history of Mexico is reverberating.
In the closing event in Oventic, Chiapa—home of the Zapatista Army of the National Liberation (EZLN) rebel group—covered by mist and intermittent drizzle, Marichuy, a representative of the Mexican government's Indigenous Council (ICG), said that women are the ones who feel the deepest pain due to the murders, disappearances, and imprisonments arbitrarily committed in the country.
"But it's precisely because we are the ones who feel the deepest pain, because we [experience] the greatest oppressions, that we women are also capable of feeling the deepest rage," she said. "And we must be able to transform that rage in an organized way in order to go on the offensive to dismantle the power from above, building with determination and without fear, the power from below."
The historic character of that pain in Mexico was palpable at the event. On the stage was Regina Santiago Rodríguez, a member of the legendary Eureka Committee of the Disappeared—a group of mothers whose children were abducted and systematically tortured during Mexico's Dirty War, a shadow government campaign waged against left-wing dissidents between the late 1970s and 1980s. Regina was mother to Irma Cruz Santiago, who disappeared in 1977. Standing next to her was Hilda Hernández, mother of César Manuel González, one of the 43 Mexican students at a teachers' college who notoriously disappeared in 2014.
On her way through various peasant communities, Marichuy was equally forceful in her defense of the natural resources that are being threatened or have already been ravaged by the government or powerful multinational companies.
The Oventic Caracol. Photo by Adolfo Vladimir for Cuartoscuro.com
Marichuy—a native Nahua woman born in Tuxpan, in the western state of Jalisco—was clear about her feminist politics throughout her speech. That stance was also on display throughout her various campaign actions in the marginalized southeast region of Mexico, where especially profound gender inequalities exist thanks to a persistent cultural tradition of men dominating decision-making at every level.
Fifty indigenous councilors—all of them women—from the ICG, and hailing from different parts of Mexico, accompanied the candidate at each of her events, sharing the microphone and seats on stage. And it was exclusively women and girls from ethnic groups such as Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tzotzil, Choles, who participated during the welcoming and artistic presentations.
The voice of the military command of the EZLN was also delivered exclusively via its female commanders: Everilda, Amada, Rosalinda, Miriam, and Hortencia (Zapatista tradition is to use only one name).
Yes, this was a special time for women. Not a single man took the microphone during the tour, which was held from October 14 to 19. When men were visible—especially in the security cordons of Zapatista militiamen, who were equipped with nightsticks—there was usually a female presence among them. The scene was dominated by indigenous girls who expressed their anti-capitalist positions, and offered performances reflecting their empowerment in the fields of health, education, and other essential jobs in their communities.
Perhaps even more remarkable than the gender dynamics on display was the presence of non-partisan indigenous families and even supporters of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). This despite the fact that there was no distribution of food or souvenir posters—a well-known political practice known in México as acarreo.
On the night before the start of the final event in Oventic, for example, we came across a young couple who have previously supported the PRI and hailed from San Andrés Larráinzar, a neighboring community that upholds traditions such as caciquismo—essentially a local version of machine boss politics where power is maintained over a rural region through corrupt means. They sold coffee and atole, a traditional warm cornmeal drink, on the road. The woman, Karla, was 18 years old and making her first incursion into Zapatista territory to listen to Marichuy's speech. Her parents were non-partisan and her in-laws were supporters of the PRI party. But all of them were on hand for the campaign event.
Marichuy, accompanied by the councilwomen of the ICG. Photo by Adolfo Vladimir/Cuartoscuro.com
Living in autonomy
Marichuy toured the five Zapatista Caracoles, the name given to the administrative headquarters in which the EZLN exercises a form of autonomous government. The rebels have severed all institutional and partisan relationships with the Mexican government to create their own systems of education, health, justice, government, and security.
These five Caracoles bring together some 30 autonomous municipalities dating from 2003 in which around 250,000 indigenous people make a living from their production of coffee, corn, and various other micro-enterprises.
The caravan of vehicles moving from one Caracol to another was slow, due to potholes, roads that weren't fully paved, raging downpours, and intense heat. But in each place people waited for Marichuy's arrival, sometimes spending upwards of five hours outside, as was the case with the Caracol de Morelia.
In the Caracol events, each of the Zapatista commanders gave speeches around similar themes: a critique of capitalism arguing it destroys the country and extends impunity to those who commit femicides; a historical account of sexual violations and mistreatment their grandmothers endured at the hands of the region's landowners; and the daily violence confronted in their own families and communities.
And unlike many speeches delivered in support of other presidential candidates. Commander Hortencia explicitly called upon female professionals, students, scientists, employees, and artists, urging them to join the cause and to confront neoliberalism. "We have to unite our struggle with those who have their own struggles and ensure that politics don't divide us. As if we need to ask for permission to exist, to be, to fight. The status quo political institution is ashamed of us: We women of color, gays, lesbians, transgender people, and everything different."
Commander Hortencia pointed out that "the world is very big and all of us fit, all of us. The only thing that does not fit is the capitalist system because it dominates everything and doesn't even let us breathe. Worst of all is that capitalism has no end—no death, destruction, misery, or desolation is enough. No, it wants more: More war, more death, more destruction."
Zapatista women with their nightsticks at the ready. Photo by Adolfo Vladimir/Cuartoscuro.com
The tour of the healer
Marichuy was accompanied on her tour by 156 women and men of the ICG, hailing from 63 of Mexico's indigenous regions, encompassing more than 39 original languages, such as the Wixárika of Jalisco, the Rarámuri of Chihuahua, the Mazahua of the State of Mexico, and the Yaqui of Sonora.
The Council, which is part of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI, in Spanish), forms a front of resistance against mega-mining, hydroelectric, and energy projects, as well as other types of business and public construction, like the new international airport being erected in Mexico's Texcoco city.
In May, the 1,480-member Council elected Marichuy as a presidential candidate in a selection process that lasted six months. During that time, they consulted their communities about whether to support a candidate at all in the presidential elections. Not only did they conclude the answer was yes, but they decided to make a special kind of history along the way.
The 53-year-old Nahua standbearer, who works in herbal medicine, was selected because of her participatory and inclusive work in CNI over the course of the past 20 years.
Young tzeltales demanding their rights. Photo by Adolfo Vladimir/Cuartoscuro.com
In search of what's needed
Marichuy needs to collect 866,593 signatures in 17 states to be included on the ballot as an independent candidate for the Mexican presidency. The deadline is February 12, 2018.
The candidate has said that although she's obtained the support of 1,480 volunteers to collect electronic signatures, the app created by the National Electoral Institute (INE, in Spanish) to gather the signatures was blocked during her visit in Altamirano and Ocosingo, two municipalities in Chiapas.
But Marichuy isn't giving up. She has plans to traverse Mexico to gather signatures, including university centers such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
During her speech in Palenque, in northern Chiapas, Marichuy announced she was currently trying to double the number of volunteers. In the central plaza of the Mayan city, under a searing sun, the indigenous trailblazer warned that she won't relent in her efforts to generate a groundswell of popular support.
"Above all," she said, she intends to "amplify and strengthen the organizational structure of our rage and pain, so that throughout the country, we make the earth tremble at its center and allow the survival of the native peoples and the reconstruction of a Mexico that has been intentionally torn apart by those who have the power."
The electoral infrastructure of Marichuy's campaign is sustained by the indigenous communities themselves, as well as by her supporters, all of whom believe "it's time for the flourishing of peoples" and include writer Juan Villoro, political scientist Pablo González Casanova and anthropologist Sylvia Marcos. The challenge is covering the campaign's expenses, as the wannabe candidate and the ICG decided to reject the financing of the campaign from INE—electoral authority in Mexico—in keeping with their autonomy from the government.
Thousands of people receive Marichuy in La Garrucha. Photo by Rafael Castillo/VICE News
For the 39 percent of LGBTQ adults who have experienced rejection from a family member or friends, or the whopping 40 percent of homeless youth who identify as queer, Thanksgiving might mean not seeing one’s biological family at all. The statistics are a stark reminder that many LGBTQ people, despite enjoying more rights and visibility than ever before, still deal with overwhelming amounts of personal homophobia and abuse.
But in the face of rejection from one’s family or friends, queer people have built chosen families since time immemorial: families we construct by hand and heart, in an effort to seek out the support and love one’s biological or legal family might not be able to provide.
The concept of a “chosen family” bears many different meanings to different people. One need not lack a biological or legal family to join one, they don’t necessarily have to be queer, and in practice, they can look like or be most anything. Some 64 percent of LGBTQ baby boomers say they have one; in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, legislation protects one’s right to use paid time off to care for their chosen family. Many families come together through different artistic practices; My Parade, based in Seattle, is a chosen family band comprised of five queer and trans punks of color, who are carving out a space for themselves in their majority-white punk scene. The Carnival Kings of New Orleans are a 30-member drag king family who host the longest-running drag king show in Louisiana.
But for all the different purposes they serve, chosen families may be most important for homeless LGBTQ folks. Take the Amerasus, a chosen family of three queer and trans artists living in Oakland, California, all of whom have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. Star Amerasu, a 25-year-old musician, multidisciplinary artist and mother, founded the family when she met her sister-daughter Davia Amerasu Spain at her band’s first musical performance in San Francisco in 2015. While the family doesn’t live under the same roof, they share meals, shelter, and connections to the art world, and the family was forged after Star escaped dire circumstances in her hometown of Austin, Texas.
“In high school I was living with a homophobic uncle who gay bashed someone,” said Star. “He said ‘I bashed them because they didn’t tell me what they were. I need to know... what are you?’ I ran away. Then, after coming out as trans at 18, someone I was staying with gave me two weeks to leave. At 19, I got a one-way train ticket to San Francisco.”
See how a teen deals with life after leaving his family's polygamist cult:
Star found herself homeless at age 20 after facing struggles with housing and employment. But that didn’t stop her from finding her kin. “I was cast in a queer cabaret—I lived in a shelter and went to rehearsals,” she said. “When my time was up at the shelter, I was able to get a sublet through my new connections.”
As Star performed around the Bay Area, she met Davia, a Bay Area born-and-raised dancer. ”Davia hadn’t transitioned [by the time I met her], but I could tell that’s my sister—my daughter,” Star recalled. “We collaborated on an art piece and had deep conversations about coming out, trans femme identity and drag. Later, Davia came out as trans.”
Davia was raised by a deeply religious family; she too left home due to changes in her gender presentation, and like Star, she experienced homelessness and housing instability in San Francisco. “[My parents and I] got in a fight, and the last thing they said was ‘don’t become a woman,’” Davia said. “I left home for my own stability and safety.”
Star promised to teach Davia everything she knew. “I wanted to give her all the support and love that maybe her real family wasn’t giving her,” said Star. “I encouraged her to make music, because I wanted to show her off to others—I’m a show mom! She wanted to go-go dance at Pride, so I called people and said ‘book my trans daughter because we need more trans girls doing anything.’ She got the gig.”
Star and Davia met the youngest Amerasu, Tavi, when Star performed at San Francisco Trans march in 2015. Star took to mentoring the 19-year-old, sharing her meals with her, and allowing Tavi to stay at her house when she was away.
“We’re trans womyn of color, navigating our lives under white supremacy and oppression,” said Star. “My goal with having daughters is giving everything I get with them so they can feel something.”
Though “chosen family” may be a relatively new neologism, queer and trans people have been coming together in similar ways throughout history. Starting in the 1860s, the Harlem Drag Balls functioned as secret gatherings where queer and trans people of color could safely come together. To escape discriminatory policing, ball-goers dressed in drag to “pass” as straight couples, and participants self-organized into “houses”—groups that would compete for prizes and prestige through dance, drag, and performances that would play on the idea of gender. These balls later evolved into the vogue balls of the 1980s and 90s, a culture still alive and well today, which often give Black, Latinx and Asian folks the opportunity to empower themselves and find social support where they otherwise can’t.
Today, chosen families come in all shapes and sizes; for example, the Amerasu family does not walk balls and resists affiliation with any one particular artistic scene.
The Amerasus also share another family heirloom: housing. Star connected Davia to the same homeless youth program she graduated from years ago. “I ended up living in the same house Star lived in for two years,” says Davia. “And when Tavi was experiencing homelessness, Star and I helped her find housing.” Today, Star lives in a queer household in North Oakland, and Tavi now lives in the space where Star and Davia once lived. “One day, I’d love to have a nice big house for us” to live together in, said Star.
The Amerasus have turned the idea of one’s “family” into a radical political formation, one made in the face of intolerance and uncertainty. Said Davia: “Whatever you do, be true to what you need. Don’t be afraid to shape what that looks like for you.”
Late last month, two photographs on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art PS1 disappeared from the exhibition space in Long Island City. But a few days later, the prints made it back without the museum even having to go looking for them, thanks to a mysterious package that showed up on PS1's doorstep.
According to the New York Post, a woman in her 20s mailed the photos—worth a combined $105,000—back to PS1 from a shipping store in Brooklyn early this month. Police aren't sure if the mysterious FedEx-er actually jacked the photos in the first place, but they're hoping to figure out who she is and question her about how she got a hold of them. Their only lead on her identity, according to the Post, is surveillance footage from the shipping store she hit up to return the stolen art.
Museum sources told CBS New York PS1's alarm was set the night the photos were swiped, but somehow it never went off. While there's no word on exactly how the prints were stolen, one theory is that the thief took a page out of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: camping out in the museum until it was closed and jacking the photos in the dead of night.
Both photographs came from a retrospective exhibition of Carolee Schneemann, a performance artist PS1 called "one of the most influential artists of the second part of the 20th century." Schneemann poses nude in both prints, which were snapped by Alex V. Sobolewski back in the 60s, according to the Post.
Investigators haven't said what could've motivated the theft or the equally baffling return, though folks who checked out the exhibition seem to have a lot of theories. Patron Kelvi Diaz told CBS the thief might have been "really just in love" with the photos, and—like Theo Decker in The Goldfinch—decided to keep the work for themselves. In a more creative take on the heist, artist Jenny Morgan said the crook might have actually been a visionary: a fellow artiste looking to make a statement about security or possession or whatever.
"I would guess that it’s someone else's own artistic reaction," Morgan told CBS, “a reaction to the performance art that she's seeing."
When it comes to high-profile theft, it's impossible to say why people try the crazy shit they do, from sneaking into the Parisian catacombs to snatching a giant gold coin with a wheelbarrow. And while it might seem like a bad move to return a bunch of expensive stuff you stole, this anonymous Brooklynite might've had the right idea, since selling stolen artwork is pretty much impossible.
It’s Tuesday, so some estate agents are telling us – us vile millennials – how to save for a deposit. This happens every week or so. The advice is normally: stop eating sandwiches. The average deposit in London is £96,000 currently, so I for one would like to echo that advice: if you are buying and consuming £96,000 worth of sandwiches, then yes: you need to stop that. That’s far too many sandwiches. If you eat that many sandwiches you will die. You, bloated and enormous, too large to heave yourself up off the sofa: “ONE… MORE… EGG MAYO.” No. No more sandwiches for you. Buy a house instead.
Millennial couples priced off the London housing ladder could save enough for a deposit in five years by giving up six “luxuries” ranging from phone upgrades to overseas mini-breaks, it was claimed today.
New analysis suggests that potential homeowners from “generation rent” could accumulate the £64,000 they need for an average London deposit — after help from parents — within half a decade by making “relatively small changes” to their lifestyles.
According to the calculations from agents Strutt & Parker, giving up a night out once a week could save more than £6,000 a year, and cutting out takeaway meals would knock £2,640 off household spending.
Simple, lads: all you need to do is give up sandwiches, nights out and holidays, for half a fucking decade of your life, plus be one half of a couple, plus get money from your parents, and you too could afford a deposit on a flat in London. What, a little hard work and sacrifice a bit too much for you? Does the prospect of a peanut butter sandwich for lunch for 1,300 consecutive working days of your life with no fucking holiday in between fill you with dread, does it? Suck it up, millennial. Life isn’t all takeaways and enjoying being alive, you know.
Anyway, we have to run the numbers here, because the maths above suggest all of us are somehow spending £115 a week on a single night out, and £50 a week on takeaways, somehow, and that somehow estate agent Strutt & Parker (mad how an estate agent might put out a press release urging millennials to save money so they can finally get a foothold on the precarious housing ladder and make said estate agents money, isn’t it? Almost like they have an ulterior motive here; almost like they see a dreadful future where their businesses are dying) are the only ones to have noticed this information, that millennials are complaining bitterly about not being able to afford houses, but also somehow spending twelve grand a year in Pret, and that hey, just stop spending money on things you like, for the thick half a decade in which you are young and life is actually fun, and instead save away for an ever more unrealistic dream, and you too could have a house one day, freezing cold and tiny, and in which you can’t actually afford to service the boiler or have anything other than a single IKEA bed and a desk lamp. Anyway:
Preparing lunch at home rather than buying sandwiches or salads saves £2,576 on average—
This is the classic avocado equation rearing its ugly head again ("Just stop buying brunch, millennial!" dudes with two Audis and a well-curated stock portfolio say. "Save up and buy a house, god!"), and while yes, "make your sandwiches at home" is sensible enough advice, I’m not going to do it because: i. the ingredients for sandwiches are not, despite your calculations, free, and once you’ve actually spent money on, say, bread and ham and cheese, you’re not actually vastly up on money you would have spent on just buying one at a shop anyway; ii. I am just never going to personally be organised enough to make a sandwich in the morning and remember to bring it in, deal with it; and iii. if you live with housemates they will steal all of your bread by Wednesday and not replace it. That’s never in the calculations, is it. The emotional labour of having to send a pass-agg message to the house WhatsApp asking where 60 percent of your Cathedral City went. You don’t get that with a Pret baguette.
—and cutting out an annual foreign city-break could be worth another £700 a year
I personally don’t consider holidays a luxury – I consider them a necessity, and anyone who says otherwise is chatting shit. Chart a graph of my general happiness levels through the four-year period in my mid-twenties where I straight up forgot holidays could exist (I was earning very little and literally did not consider the idea of going away) (also, and I will be honest: I lost my passport) and now, when I go away once a year, and my mental health is demonstrably better. You expect me to live, for a whole year, in a city that is trying to kill me, without once going to Barcelona for a long weekend and having some tapas? You want me to do that for five years without respite? Just to save some money? Honestly, Strutt & Parker; honestly, mate: it’s not worth it. I might have a house by the end of it, but I’ll also have a death wish.
Finally, Strutt & Parker suggests that the average annual Lottery habit, costing £832 a year, could be sacrificed.
Ah, millennials, famed for their £16-a-week lottery habits
According to the calculations from agents Strutt & Parker, giving up a night out once a week could save more than £6,000 a year, and cutting out takeaway meals would knock £2,640 off household spending.
Apologies, but I had to do a hard U-turn and come back to this paragraph, because £115 a week on drinking and socialising is an absurd number – unless you are literally, every Tuesday, like "LET’S. GET. ON. THE. BAGS." and getting bottle service in clubs, and not, as everyone I know is, cheerfully drinking in Wetherspoons and Wetherspoons only because it’s the only place where pints are the right price – and the £50-a-week takeaway figure is also completely insane (by my maths, this means you are having two large takeaways, per week, just for yourself – you are doing a Domino’s fours-up and having it, alone and weeping, back at your flat – or you are buying one takeaway a week for everyone in your share flat and they, for some reason, are not paying you back at all for this food), plus add in the idea that we all have raging lottery habits, plus this quote, from Strutt & Parker’s Stephanie McMahon: "Those lucky enough to have family that can help will receive an average of £29,400 towards their goal, but that still leaves £64,000 to find", all of which begs the question: have you ever met a millennial? Have you ever met, like, another person? You are preaching financial advice to people you know absolutely nothing about. This is like me telling the moon to stop spending money on things, or advising a large ship on which ISA to take out. Please, allow me to tell the concept of envy about interest rates on savings accounts. I know nothing about fuck all and I still know this advice is garbage.
It’s very tiring, being a millennial, knowing that everything that ever went wrong in the world – most especially a housing market busted and corrupted by a bent financial system and a buy-to-let mortgage free-for-all that all boomed and busted when we were all early teenagers – is somehow our fault. In many ways, the "just give up eating sandwiches for five years!" conversation is just a reworking of the "benefit claimants shouldn’t have big TVs, then!" discourse that keeps cropping up: those ostensibly With, more through luck than judgment, telling those Without exactly what to buy and how to live. How many times and ways can we say this: the national average house price is £226,367. The average in London is £471,761. The average deposit in London is quoted as anywhere between £96,000 and £150,000. That is what’s stopping under 35s from buying houses. Not fucking sandwiches.
What is it? Okay, right: remember when you were in Year 5, and your school took a trip to London? Perhaps you already went to school in London: skip this bit if so. The rest of us, some time around Year 5, did a big trip to London: 30 kids on a coach, off to spend a day and a night and see Cats, or something. Kids in matching hi-vis vests, snaking down London streets among a caravan of teachers. Someone smuggled a share-sized bag of Skittles away from home and got as high as it is possible for a ten-year-old to get by huffing on the sugary fumes. We all had the same trip, just scattered around different primary schools. And for some reason, the hotel rooms you stayed in were like this: tight, long, white-walled corridors, two single beds opposite each other with a gap in between. And it didn’t seem weird at the time, but: when have you ever stayed in a hotel with that room layout since? Where even was that hotel you stayed in? You remember the room. You remember the lights-out afterparty in one of the cool boys' rooms a corridor down. You remember sitting on the bed and playing cards and eating Pringles, long past 10PM. But when, ever, in your adult life, have you ever booked yourself into a hotel with two single beds opposite each other? Did the hotel ever really exist? Did you remember it wrong? Do hotels have special floors, for mass primary school bookings? Where did the rooms go. Where did the rooms go. Did the rooms really ever happen at all. Anyway, in answer to your question: that, but for £1,400 a month, in West Hampstead. Where is it? In a Bermuda triangle between West Hampstead, Kilburn and Kilburn High Road, so somewhere equidistant between paradise and a shithole What is there to do locally? I don’t know why we keep this section in because nobody in London sees their local area during the week – you either commute directly home after work to a load of laundry and watch iPlayer, or you go to the nearest Wetherspoons to the office and drink there. Those are the only two options – and at the weekend you are probably too hungover to leave the house, unless you’re not, in which case you’ll get a bus into town and walk around the Tate a bit, no deviations, so on balance it doesn’t fucking matter what there is to do locally, because you’re never going to do it, never in your life. Anyway, there are some bakeries. Alright, how much are they asking? £1,400 per calendar month. Pounds. One-thousand-four-hundred-pounds.
For all the things that America has that we do not – an astronomically diverse candy selection; bullets and bullet-firing machines; Hulk Hogan; Chick-fil-A – the one thing they have that I am not jealous of is a college culture that is completely OK with sharing rooms. Consider, please, every single coming-of-age American college comedy (or horror film! It could be a horror film too) you have ever seen: they co-habit, the Americans, in dorms, in tiny white rooms in a maze of other white rooms, and two strangers are introduced to each other – tentative, at first, one of the strangers has made a land-grab for the shared dormitory space, they have put up posters and lit incense, and the other stranger, the fish-out-of-water one, is nervous (over the next 90 minutes this stranger will taste vodka for the first time, have penetrative sex, discover Who They Really Are and possibly have their neck scythed open at the arteries) – and nobody, at any point in this interaction, says any of the following things:
"Hey so: can you play white noise music every time I shit or piss? I am extremely paranoid about you hearing me shit or piss."
"So should… should we peg, like, a, uh, sheet? A little sheet up? Peg a sheet up between our beds to sort of waffle and distort the nightly sounds of sobbing or wanking?"
"Yeah, so how on earth does sex work. In here. Because we are, both of us, in the most lurid and intense physical horniness moment of our entire lives. We are going to fuck and fuck nasty. With multiple partners. For the next three years. How do… I mean, do we set a little, like, rota up? I can’t not fuck right now. I can’t have you watch me fuck from a single bed opposite me. We have to work something out."
America has always, for some reason, been OK with this, and I consider it a cultural rift, a fracture between our two great nations that can never truly be knitted together. But oh? What’s this? Is this the Great American-style Dorm Room, transposed over to Kilburn, and available for you to rent? It… it is? All praise to the most high bless up:
Why yes! Those are two single beds crammed so close together that you and your room mate – who are both, remember, paying £700 per month for this experience – can feasibly reach out across the void and knit your sweaty little hands together, holding out for comfort in the middle of the long dark knight!
Why yes! Both of those beds are built in to the very fabric of the flat and supported by walls that are encompassed in the floor plan, so no, this isn’t just a small flat repurposed by a landlord to accommodate two single occupants: this is a flat designed, from the ground up, to occupy two people without any consideration for privacy or their personal needs!
Why yes! The flat is dotted with seemingly a thousand angled reading lamps, curled monstrously away from the floor!
Why yes! There is a single TV mounted up high in the corner of the shared-space bedroom, which presumably the occupant of Bed #2 has territory over (Bed #1 owns the desk), and just think: imagine paying £700, per month, to argue with another human being – three foot away from you, the human being, so close you can hear them breathe – argue with them over whether to turn the TV off after 11PM because you have to sleep and they don’t!
Why yes! This sink, mini-fridge, microwave, six shelves and no cupboard doors is described in the literature as being a "full fitted kitchenette"!
Why yes! The aforementioned literature does boast that the flat has "strong Virgin's fibre broadband", and yes, I am going to make a strong Virgins joke about that! You would have to be a virgin! To live here! Because nobody is going to fuck you! In a single bed! While your flatmate watches!
Why yes! I am increasingly starting to worry that the fuck life of London’s renters is doomed by the landlords who enforce it, because increasingly these London Rental Opportunities are almost actively designed to deter sex, with people, and if we see the national birth rate start to dip over the next couple of years and nobody can figure out why, come find me – I will be 32 and living in a garage and will not have seen a titty for years, galactically wise in my monastic unhorniness – and I will go, "Aha (I will have not fucked in so long my voice will be cracked and gnarled) – Aha: I told you. I told you. I told you all. Blame the landlords!"
Why yes! This advert does boast "electronic key card for extra security", as if anyone would break into this flat looking for anything other than a heavy gas-like feeling of despair!
Often, with these LROTWs, I get a juddering, uncomfortable feeling that I am peeking, somehow, at an ugly vision of the future: that, in five years or ten, London will be populated with plaster-skimmed kitchenette-with-no-cupboard £700-a-month dorm spaces and we will all sleep like this, head-to-toe with strangers in a small slice of Kilburn real estate, and that we will not blink about it: it will be normal, like college kids in America, and that I, I am the insane one, that history will judge me unkindly for thinking this is anything other than good. But I am pretty sure I am right about this one: it’s just two single beds in a studio flat that isn’t even big enough for one person. Crush London to dust and build something better in the space left behind.
Is there anything scarier than a teenage boy? While watching The Killing of a Sacred Deer you wonder why more horror films don’t make villains out of troubled young men. In it, young actor Barry Keoghan (you might recognise him from Dunkirk) plays Martin, a vindictive 16-year-old who is creepy from the outset—although director Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t reveal his true capacity to terrify until the film is more than halfway over.
To answer the question though, there is a horror trope more terrifying than an angry adolescent with a vendetta: the haunted hospital. And The Killing of a Sacred Deer has one of those, too. It’s a large, clean, expensive-looking hospital, inhabited by world-class heart surgeons like Steven Murphy, played with appropriately clinical precision by Colin Farrell. These surgeons have godlike powers but human fallacies, and somehow a random teenager knows all about Steven’s very private flaws and is out to blackmail him.
To reveal more about this strange and unsettling plot would ruin it, but suffice to say the immensely privileged life of Steven and his family—Nicole Kidman plays his wife Anna, also a doctor—gets totally fucked up by a kid with acne and a perverted sense of justice borrowed from Greek mythology.
The film takes its title from Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis, in which the Greek army commander Agamemnon accidentally kills a sacred deer belonging to the goddess Artemis. In order to repay the debt, Artemis demands that he sacrifice his own child. Colin Farrell’s surgeon—a man who, you get the feeling, has never before lost control of his very comfortable life—comes up against a similar dilemma at the behest of Martin.
The similarities aren’t accidental, but Lanthimos isn’t a Classics scholar so much as a writer and director asking age-old questions, and trying to do so (often very successfully) in weird new ways.
“We referenced the story in the film as a reminder that many people have questioned the same issues that are mentioned over time, and many of them we weren’t able to resolve them in any satisfactory way,” he tells me over the phone, forced to try to explain himself to journalists in fifteen-minute increments as part of a press junket.
Lanthimos, who received an Oscar nomination for his first English language feature The Lobster in 2016, is a gifted oddball. He and writing partner Efthymis Filippou build their screenplays from tiny scattered details. “Smaller things like fragments of a story that seems interesting for some reason, elements of human behaviour,” he says. “Rather than an end point or main question.”
While The Lobster (which also stars a ridiculously on-point Farrell) was an absurdist black comedy, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is straight up horror. So those elements of human behaviour it examines are less cheerful—don’t expect quirky meditations on modern romantic relationships. There’s human blood in the opening shot, and things only get more distressing from there. You’re going to feel some discomfort, and Farrell has subtly switched gears from charming to menacing. As in real life, it’s a fine line.
A master of atmosphere, Lanthimos sustains a two-hour horror film by revealing its intentions painfully slowly. Even the camerawork is artfully measured out to maximum effect. “I wanted the camera to be like almost another entity in the film, something following the characters and observing them from above and hovering above them and creeping from below, to get a sense of otherworldly presence,” he explains.
In fact, every element of the film is heavily stylised and deliberate. The script, for example: Farrell, Kidman, and Keoghan must all contend with dialogue that is almost comically detached and cold. They don’t speak like real people, except that somehow they do. Lanthimos insists he doesn’t do much to direct his actors—rather, they’re forced into certain corners by the way they’re written. The result, he hopes, “is precise, awkward, funny, dark, and honest.”
Farrell and Kidman slip into their roles perfectly, mimicking the stiff coldness of America’s suburban elite. They unravel as their pristine lives are disrupted by the unwelcome presence of the all-controlling Martin, and while now more than ever I’m predisposed to enjoy watching rich and powerful people get what’s coming to them, things aren’t quite so clear-cut. Sure, the movie’s central couple are insufferable, out-of-touch, upper class posers who force their dull children to join choirs and aspire towards high-powered medical careers—but they don’t totally deserve the level of physical and psychological stress that Lanthimos and Filippou impose on them. Or do they?
The Killing of a Sacred Deer offers up a smorgasbord of crooked, uncomfortable symbolism. It has only just enough in the way of a traditional narrative to keep the audience hooked, and is otherwise cloaked in an immense, troubling sense of ambiguity perhaps designed to discomfort Hollywood audiences who are familiar with tidy endings and a strong sense of right and wrong. Who expect crime and punishment.
Don’t try and pin any of this ambition on Lanthimos, though. In our interview, he’s opaque about his intentions. The director will admit only that he wants to make something affecting—and that he wants to cede autonomy to the audience, who can make their own meaning of his twisted, endlessly beguiling scenes.
“I never think in metaphors, or fully make those kind of associations myself,” he insists. “I just lay down a complex situation and hope things arise from that. The most important thing is to allow gaps and openings for people to make up their own minds—I don’t want my film to be pretending to have one important truth to tell anyone.”
Remember T-Pain's big-ass chain? You know, his unbelievably huge chain that said: "big ass chain." Well, the story behind that bling is just as ridiculous as the jewelry itself.
When T-Pain visited Desus & Mero on Monday night, he told the hosts the wild story behind the chain, which he calls "the dumbest shit I ever did in my life." Long story short, apparently that $400,000 purchase was made on a dare. Just another perk of being rich and famous.
You can watch Monday night’s Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
For most people it’s difficult to imagine a life without visualising images. We visualise on a daily basis: what’s left in the fridge, the crinkled face of a lost grandparent. We not only use these images to aid our everyday lives and recall the past, but also to imagine our future. Who hasn’t pictured the tiny flat they hope to one day afford?
So, what’s it like for someone who can’t picture these things? Who can't even picture a tree when they think of one.
Arfie Mansfield, a 32-year-old analyst, has Aphantasia – a phenomenon that means he cannot picture images in his mind’s eye. This phenomenon first came to light in 1880, but was only recently named in a study, in 2015, by Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology. It’s possible it affects as many as 1 in 50 people.
Like most things, people’s ability to visualise lies somewhere on a spectrum; some imagine things vividly; the logo on the milk carton, every crease and wrinkle of nana’s face, every nook of the tiny flat. And there are some for whom images are a vague outline. Arfie has something more akin to Total Aphantasia, which – according to the website aphant.asia – means it is pretty much impossible "to create images, sounds, tastes, smells or touch" within his mind.
VICE: You can’t see pictures in your mind? Arfie: Correct, I can’t.
How do you think? What do you think in? I don’t know – not words, either. Sometimes I do, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. I’ll have to deliberately think in words; it’s not default.
If you don’t think in pictures or words, is it more like concepts? I’ve always just thought that I thought in thoughts. I think it might be in relationships – I can think how things relate to other things.
Have you always known the way you thought was significantly different to other people? A friend said that a friend of theirs was Greek but had lived in England for ten years, and they were wondering whether he thought in English or in Greek, and until that moment I had no idea that anyone thought in languages at all. The same goes for mental images: when people said a "mental picture", I didn’t realise they were being literal – I thought it was poetic. When I found out it wasn’t, a bit of the poetry of the world disappeared. I’ve only known for a few years, so it’s taken some time to get used to the notion that not everyone thinks the same way. Which seems facile, but…
No, not at all. That’s quite alienating in a way. Yeah, it’s massively alienating, because when it comes up people are always very surprised and weirdly defensive.
READ:
Defensive how? It strikes me that by mentioning that I don’t think in pictures or in words I’m somehow attacking their approach. The fact that there is another way makes people uncomfortable. Everyone is always asking questions like, "Can’t you tell me what your dad looks like?"
Can’t you tell me what your dad looks like? I know what my dad looks like, I know what my entire family looks like, but the only reason I could tell you what colour my dad’s eyes are is because I checked once after someone asked me. A friend asked me to describe my family and I was telling her all about who they were as people, and she said, "But what do they look like?" I just said, "I don’t know."
Do you think that means appearances are less important to you? I’d like to think so, but no. I think I’m about as shallow as everyone else.
Have you ever visualised an image in your mind’s eye, ever? After getting a little bit high I saw pictures in my mind, which to me was a very novel concept. And as soon as it happened I went [clicks fingers] 'Oh, that’s what people mean!'
Now that I have experienced it vividly once I’ve been able to push and try to see things. Now I know it’s a possibility I just about can. I suspect it might be a skill that I could work on and eventually I’d be able to see things in my mind, like "normal" people.
When most people read a book they build that world in their head pictorially. What happens when you read a book? The words go in and I understand them. I’ll focus on the relationship between people, concepts and places. I won’t picture characters, even if they’re vividly described. I won’t go, 'Oh, yes, I imagined he’d be played by Brian Blessed.'
"I know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, I just can’t recall it in the form of an image. I can think about aspects of it."
How do you fantasise? With events and relationships and concepts, I suppose. The same as I think. I can imagine things happening. I just don’t imagine how it looks, feels, sounds or whatever.
Does it affect your memory? I can remember what things look like; I just can’t see them that way. It’s like it’s stored in machine code. It’s not processing in there [he points to his head] as visual stuff. I know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, I just can’t recall it in the form of an image. I can think about aspects of it.
Do you think it makes some things more difficult? I imagine so – it’s just I haven’t experienced the other side.
Are there benefits to it? It frees me up to think things that aren’t necessarily easily expressible in the English language. That does mean that I then have trouble expressing them in the English language.
It must be frustrating to translate a thought into language if that’s not how you think. Yep – I can sometimes describe it. I’m describing something outside of language, using language; that’s what language is for. If we don’t have an exact word for it in English, we have words that point towards it.
Isn’t that all language ever does? Words have different connotations for everyone. What one word conjures for me won’t conjure the exact same thing for you. No, the word "pictures", for instance.
Monday afternoon, the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe revealed that WikiLeaks sent messages to Donald Trump Jr., who responded to some of them. While not proof of the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with Russia, let alone any actual crime, young Trump’s apparently cordial relationship with a group that leaked hacked Democratic emails is just the latest piece of evidence that is adding up to one inescapable conclusion: Junior is just not very bright.
The oldest of the president’s children at 39 years old, the “Fredo” of the Trump family has a prominent position in life thanks to his family fortune—he currently runs the Trump Organization with his brother Eric, and was heavily involved in his dad’s presidential campaign, which he still brags about on Instagram—but particularly on social media he’s a bumbler and a bully, exactly the kind of person you don’t want to have anywhere near power.
That bumbling was on display last Tuesday as well, when he tweeted out an encouragement to Virginia voters:
The problem being, of course, that the election for Virginia governor, a hotly contested race between Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie, was happening the day of his tweet—”today” rather than “tomorrow,” in other words. Lil Donald was using his platform of over 2 million followers to encourage Republicans to miss Election Day. Oh, and Gillespie ended up losing.
There’s nothing wrong with being a bit of a jabroni, and if Junior confined his ambition to being a bro-y real estate scion no one would care about him. But involved as he is in national and even international politics, it’s a little worrying how many blunders he makes. While Junior’s tweets pre-election were mostly of the frat-bro variety (example: “I have some hookups I don’t remember”), he is very bad at taking criticism, and the pressures of his dad’s campaign and presidency seems to have driven him straight into the arms of the internet’s most fawning, conspiratorial, and Trump-obsessed idiots.
He follows Alex Jones of Infowars, former actor and current raging lunatic James Woods, and a slew of alt-right denizens and online foreign troll accounts. He was well-known for retweeting posts by the popular (and now suspended) account @TEN_GOP, which was recently revealed as a Russian troll. His “likes”—catalogued by the Trump universe–tracking account “Trumpsalert”—reveal that he endorses the idea Hillary Clinton should serve the rest of her life in prison. He now follows "Pizzagate" promoter Jack Posobiec, who recently tweeted a photo of the woman who accused Roy Moore of molesting her when she was 14, revealing where she worked.
Junior has also liked some posts about an alt-right smear claiming NAMBLA and Antifa were protesting unhinged weirdo Mike Cernovich for being too anti-pedo (don’t ask), and said that Weird Mike (as he is known online) should win the Pulitzer. This month he brought up the long-debunked conspiracy theory that the Clintons were responsible for the suicide of Vince Foster in 1996. And he was an enthusiastic supporter of the “Hillary has Parkinson’s Disease” variety of nonsense during the campaign.
The list of baffling decisions goes on: When he was contacted by an acquaintance of his and offered damaging information on Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” he replied, “If it’s what you say, I love it,” then set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer—a series of events that, when later revealed, contradicted a bunch of his previous denials about contacts with Russia. Then, when the New York Times got ahold of those emails, Junior released them on his own. (Just hours before, according to The Atlantic, Wikileaks tried to persuade Junior to send them to them instead.)
He’s more connected than your average Trump fan, but his posts are of the variety that anyone who calls themselves a “deplorable” in their online bio might send into the world. He hates SJWs, and loves triggering the libs. And much like his father, pretty much everything he posts about ends up being a fairly transparent attempt at projection. He loves to talk about Harvey Weinstein, but his attitude toward predatory men seems more motivated by partisanship than anything else, as he may not have the most enlightened attitude toward women himself:
In between hunting trips where he gleefully kills rare and beautiful animals for sport, Donald can be found flouting rules that apply to everyone else—as when Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance decided not to bring fraud charges against him after a timely visit from his dad’s lawyer, a Vance donor.
At the end of the day, Donald Jr. is very much his father’s son. He loves posting (who doesn’t, honestly), and he really loves drama. The problem is that he is both somewhat dumber than his father, and several hundred times more online. While President Trump is regularly worked into a big hot wet mess by the three hosts of FOX and Friends, Donald Jr. is online all day, interacting with thousands of complete nutjobs in good faith. Watching him redpill himself has been hilarious, but then you remember he has access to his dad, the most powerful and impressionable human on the planet, and it’s a lot less funny.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that retired general Michael Flynn was under investigation for allegedly taking part in discussions about a plot to kidnap and extradite a controversial Turkish cleric in exchange for $15 million. Both Flynn’s lawyer and the Turkish regime quickly denied knowledge of or involvement in any such plot, which one source told the paper might involve use of a private jet and a Turkish prison island. But word of the investigation, reportedly part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, represented just the latest humiliation for the man whose stint as national security advisor was, at 26 days, a historically short one.
Amid indictments of various men in Trump’s orbit, it’s easy to forget that Flynn, who left the White House on February 13 after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with a Russian official, has long been as wrapped up as anyone in the sprawling Russia investigation. Indeed, last week, NBC News reported Mueller had enough evidence to charge him (and his son) with something. But until now, Flynn’s questionable financial dealings with Russian and Turkish interests—and how they might have impacted his work in the government—seemed to pose the biggest threat to his freedom. Being accused of scheming to whisk away a would-be political prisoner in the dead of night would dramatically raise the stakes, however, and could make it easier for Mueller to lean on Flynn in hopes he might flip on the president who hired him.
Gulen is a Sunni cleric from Turkey who preaches interfaith dialogue and founded a popular movement, Hizmet, that runs hundreds of schools, hospitals, and aid programs in over 100 countries, including the United States. In 1999, he moved to America and managed, after some complications, to secure a green card. He lives in in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, and, at least until recently, rarely showed up in the domestic press.
Gulen and his followers were once allies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They shared skepticism of the country’s deeply secular military, and, at least for a time, goals of political inclusion and moderation. But by 2013, the two had become open enemies, with their supporters battling in the Turkish court system over alleged corruption in Erdogan’s government. In 2014 and then again in 2016, Erdogan accused Gulen of orchestrating failed coups against his regime from his perch in rural Pennsylvania. Erdogan’s administration has been purgingGulen’s allies outof the governmentand major private businesses ever since.
The president has also been eager to extradite Gulen back to Turkey, personally pleading with Barack Obama to do so in the summer of 2016. So far, the Department of Justice has not complied with those asks.
Meanwhile, though he does not appear to have ever delivered his anti-Gulen video, Flynn nonetheless put out some incendiary rhetoric—suggesting, for instance, in an Election Day op-ed last year that America was harboring Turkey’s version of Osama bin Laden. He ultimately got $530,000 for his efforts, but didn’t register as a foreign agent during his lobbying work for this Turkish proxy and may have misrepresented his income from the contract. The FBI reportedly started investigating these alleged lobbying improprieties about a year ago, and Flynn was said to have informed the White House about the situation before the inauguration.
Not long after, the FBI appears to have received a request from the Trump administration to reconsider the case for extraditing Gulen, despite the fact that Turkey had not provided any new evidence. It is unclear if this request came from Flynn himself, but in March, former CIA director, Flynn associate, and Trump campaign advisor Jim Woolsey told reporters the ex-general had discussed ways to engineer an unusual (and possibly extra-legal) extradition of Gulen at a meeting with Turkish officials in September 2016. Woolsey said he was concerned by this talk and raised the matter with then-Vice President Joe Biden through a friend. Reports since suggest there may have been a second meeting in December 2016 in which sone kind of kidnapping plot was discussed—after Flynn was chosen to be Trump’s National Security Advisor.
Henri Barkey, a Turkish-American affairs expert at Lehigh University, told me that, if such a plan were in fact seriously hatched, officials in Turkish government likely did not sanction it directly. That, he said, would be too much of a risk for the Erdogan regime if it ever came out.
But if proof were to emerge that the deal was serious, no matter whose idea it was, and that Flynn was involved, the result would be a clear case with the prospect of serious prison time behind it. That such a deal would have had nothing to do with Moscow trying to tilt the election toward Trump is besides the point.
“It is not clear that there is a direct link between the allegations of Flynn’s involvement in a plot to kidnap or extradite Gulen to Turkey and collusion with Russia,” said Alex Whiting, a Harvard legal scholar and criminal prosecution tactics expert. “But Mueller’s appointment as special counsel permits him to pursue any matters that arise during the investigation.”
Flynn’s Turkish interests would likely have come up pretty quickly when Mueller started looking at him, added Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor and former special counsel at the Department of Defense. Even if it were totally unrelated, it would have been difficult for the Mueller team to turn away from “potentially outrageous criminal conduct," Goodman said.
And Mueller may view this seemingly obscure mini-scandal as a brick in the wider case. After all, Goodman noted, if Mueller can show Trump was aware that Flynn may have had shady dealings with Turkey when he asked then-FBI director James Comey to drop his investigation into the ex-general the day after he left his National Security Advisor role, that could help build a case the president obstructed justice. Such a case would get stronger the more serious the illegal activity he might have been trying to cover was. And a plot to kidnap a lawful American resident at the behest of a foreign power for a massive cash payout would, if proven and known, amount to a really serious crime to be obfuscating. (VICE reached out to the White House to clarify what, if anything, the president knew of Flynn's meetings related to Turkey before Comey's firing, but had yet to year back at the time of publication.)
Mueller could also try to spin a strong Turkey case against Flynn, or his son, who worked with him on lobbying deals, into an incentive to flip and start proactively collaborating with the wider Russia investigation. “As a senior figure in Trump’s administration,” rather than just a member of his campaign up to a point, “Flynn may be in a position to know high-level details regarding alleged collusion with Russia,” Whiting told me.
The chances he might flip would get stronger the more severe the potential case against him gets, the professor added.
How useful could Flynn be in trying to prove collusion between Trump and Russia? He had to leave the White House because he misrepresented the nature of phone conversations in late December 2016 with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which he may have discussed sanctions. Flynn was also present at a December 2016 meeting between Jared Kushner and Kislyak at Trump Tower in which the two discussed setting up a secure line of communications between the Kremlin and the Trump transition team. Of anyone Mueller could try to turn state’s witness, then, Flynn is among the more tantalizing candidates.
That’s especially true because Flynn connects the investigation to the sitting administration and things that happened during the transition. It’s (relatively) easy for the White House to distance itself, or Trump, from people like Paul Manafort, whose alleged improprieties took place before his involvement with the campaign, or already-convicted former advisor George Papadopoulos, who can be (however credibly) dismissed as a minor figure without strong contacts in the actual administration. It would be harder to shake off any charges against Flynn, a leading surrogate during the campaign who assumed a top job in the White House.
At this point, no one—except people like Michael Flynn and Robert Mueller—know where this goes next. It's plausible that, like Papadopoulos, Flynn has already been indicted and started talking—and that we just won’t know about it until much later on. It’s also entirely possible he has been leaking news of these developments himself to court a presidential pardon before Mueller can act. And of course Mueller may never actually find enough evidence to file any charges against the guy.
But the cloud hanging over Michael Flynn right now speaks to the broad mandate of Mueller’s Russia probe—and the potential for seemingly irrelevant backroom dealings that have nothing to do with the Kremlin to reshape the course of Trump’s presidency.
There is nothing more beautiful in the small hours of a drunken night than a piping hot donair.
Strips of moist, spiced beef bundled with lettuce, tomato, and onion, smothered in sweet white sauce, wrapped up in a soft, warm pita. Across the street from my apartment in Edmonton—the Other Donair Capital of Canada—there was a donair shop attached to a liquor store, making the building a necessary pit stop on a particularly good (or bad) day.
But the donair was born in Halifax, and there in its castle at King of Donair it reigns supreme. It punctuates and bookends of the late-night triumphs and tragedies of a Maritimers’ misspent youth. The Halifax donair is an institution and one of Canada’s great culinary triumphs. The only thing better than eating a donair is sitting in the shop watching the tall column of mystery meat rotate hypnotically on its vertical spit. It is at once tantalizing and soothing and primevally unsettling, like country music, or the adult baby sexual subculture.
Fortunately for those of us unable to hang out in person to gawk at spinning meat, Nova Scotia Webcams has teamed up with King of Donair to bring us a 24/7 live feed of their beef tower. The internet has been redeemed.
Just look at this. There is a majesty about this meat. Tall and sturdy, bronzed and glistening in the heat, swiveling in slow motion with blessed indifference to the world. As it roasts from a golden ochre to a burnt umber, you can watch it sweat shimmering fat that drips down the spire into a pan below.
Every now and again someone comes to carve the column down. Traditionally this was done dramatically with a long sword-like knife but here it is accomplished with a hand-held deli shaver. Thin cuts of beef tumble gently into the grease pan before they’re thrown onto a nearby grill, a great mound of donair meat piled up, tossed and fried in its own juices. The fresh cut surface returns to a dry, pale ochre and the roasting process begins again.
Over the course of hours the pillar of beef is whittled down to a thin and crooked pole. It gets sweatier as it slims out, with thick streaks of bubbling grease tracing the ridges of the cuts. A thick, blackened crust of roast meat shaving sits at the base of the tower like a sponge. It is impossible not to wonder what kind of hamburger you could make out of that.
I have been watching this video for three hours and never want to stop. The sweaty meat is meditative. I am holding out to see them change the skewer over because I have stared this long behind the curtain and I want to go all the way. Give me a livestream of the dish pit; put a dashcam at the regional shipping hub. I want a livestream of the abattoir and the staple where they birthed the cow. I want a webcam that takes me out of myself and into the meditative minutiae of human drudgery and the tedium of nature, the rhythmic breathing of the world, the only thing that can soothe my scatterbrained soul, th—oh my God, the guy stopped the machine and took all the meat away. There’s a moment of anxious emptiness before he returns with a robust column of frozen beef. The elements glow to life and we have come full circle.
Damn. I may never eat a donair again, but right now I really need a dart.
Only about 40 percent of those surveyed about anxiety issues in their youth said they’d sought help. Half of those who’d tried to get help found it challenging—most commonly because of services not offering what they needed (44 percent), that they didn’t know where to go (39 percent), and long wait times (34 percent).
For the survey, 18- to 24-year-olds were asked about their current experiences; 25- to 34-year-olds were asked about their youth experiences.
An even higher percentage of youth said that they were concerned about their school performance due to anxiety: 61 percent.
“There is a child and youth mental health crisis that Ontario families are facing and that continues to be ignored by the government of Ontario,” Kim Moran, CEO of CMHO, said in response to the findings. “Kids can’t keep waiting for help.”
Moran said that in some areas of the province kids are waiting 18 months, or worse, not getting any help at all.
CMHO’s survey also showed that a number of parents are missing work due to their kids’ mental health problems: about one in four.
Democrats won off-year elections across the country last week for many reasons, but let's pause for a second and give Bernie Sanders some credit. Among the historic victories Democrats earned in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere were a handful of out-and-proud actual socialists who won local office. It could be a precursor to an upsurge in leftists scoring bigger wins in next year's midterms, but it's both a validation of Sanders and proof that the movement he built during the heated 2016 primaries isn't going away anytime soon.
Other than Sanders himself, the most powerful socialist in America might now be a 30-year-old Marine vet named Lee Carter, who unseated Jackson Miller, one of the Republican leaders of the Virginia House of Delegates. He decided to run after he injured his back while working in 2015. "The treatment I got at the hands of my former employer, and at the hands of the Virginia's worker compensation commission was so horrible that I thought, I can't stand for this, I have to step up," Carter told me over the phone.
But he also took inspiration from Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, he explained, which he saw as "a concrete example of how taking a strong inclusive message of economic empowerment can motivate people who have never been that interested in politics before to get up and get involved."
Carter attributes his nine-point victory to his campaign's ability to inspire the formerly uninspired. "We were going out with a strong economic message and talking to people at their doors, and telling them that there's a reason to believe that this election can make your life better in real measurable ways," he said. "We were able to get folks who have become disillusioned with the political process, people who vote infrequently, people who don't vote at all, typically, to go out there and stand in line at the polls on a 40-degree, rainy, miserable day."
Carter is one of the 15 members of the Democratic Socialists of America who were elected to local and state government last Tuesday. (Full disclosure: I am also a member of the DSA.) The DSA's success indicates a shift in the way Americans understand socialism—it was not too long ago, in a pre-Bernie Sanders America, that "socialist" was a smear, used against Obama by his adversaries. But Sanders embraced that label, and to the terror of conservatives, more and more Americans are OK with saying they support socialism—and, apparently, voting for socialists.
Vanessa Agudelo, a DSA member who won a seat on the Peekskill, New York, City Council last Tuesday, told me she "was very much inspired by Bernie Sanders and the movement he created."
"After he had the primary taken from him I realized that the only way we would be able to successfully change the system would be from the bottom up, starting local," Agudelo, who ran as an independent, explained to me in an email.
Tristan Rader, a former field director for Sanders, was another DSA member to nab a city council seat, this one in Lakewood, Ohio. "Bernie won here by 10 percent during the primaries, so I knew that I had a pretty warm welcoming, a sort of community as a DSA member, and a democratic socialist," Rader, told me. "We unseated two democratically endorsed incumbents. So, pretty huge change in this community and government."
Carlina Rivera, a Democrat elected to the New York City Council from Manhattan, joined the DSA last April, while she was campaigning for her seat. "[I was] looking for their endorsement, to be very honest," she explained, but when she began to attend meetings, she found a very supportive community.
"When you’re talking about running for office and campaigning, people are already trying to tell you that your ideas are too radical. You’re not even elected yet and people are already saying, You know you’re never going to get that done," Rivera told me over the phone. She found that DSA members encouraged her to stick to her convictions, and proved that there are many people who want to see leftist ideals enacted on a legislative level.
Fifteen socialists winning relatively minor offices is a long way away from seizing the means of production, but it's hopefully the beginning of something larger. Carter, who like many socialists wants a federal single-payer healthcare plan, told me that in the meanwhile, he wants to "step up and do it at the state level," as well as advocate for Medicaid expansion. "Medicaid expansion is step one, it's a very very important one. It's also important to recognize going into the fight that it is not the end goal," he told me.
And at a minimum, these new generation of candidates seems determined to embrace progressivism more aggressively than most Democrats. To Rivera, who was inspired by Sanders, his 2016 campaign was a rare moment where a politician ran on a platform that actually spoke to her. It "was about climate change, mass incarceration, racial injustice and healthcare for everyone," she said. "It’s going to make me a better council member."
I gave up smoking cannabis eight years ago. I’d been promoted – from Telemarketing Supervisor to the noble heights of Telemarketing Manager – and I couldn’t turn up with a head wrapped in cotton wool any more. My abiding memory of the ensuing week was a nightly stream of terrifying dreams. It was like I was dreaming in stereo, as my brain experienced the novelty of truly deep sleep for the first time in years.
And then the dreams pretty much stopped. Within a week, once the night terrors and the cold sweats had desisted, my short-term memory started to improve. I had more energy. I was more sociable in and outside work. I left the job within a few months and started doing something I loved. Everything about my life improved. But giving up weed isn’t so easy for everyone, and for some it’s fraught with acute problems – physical, mental and emotional.
"Stopping my consumption of cannabis used to mean a lot of pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and not being able to sleep or eat," says Alex Fraser, 26. Alex has Crohn’s disease, which was diagnosed when he was 19. He just had an an ileostomy, in which a diseased part of his bowel was removed. This has drastically improved his quality of life, but he’s still hugely reliant on cannabis to keep his motor running.
"Despite the surgery, I still have issues with eating, nausea and sleep," he says. "If I don’t have cannabis, I end up using Pharma meds: zopiclone for sleep and oxycodone for pain. But nothing particularly helps my nausea or appetite, except cannabis."
WATCH: The Safest Possible Way to Use Weed
Alex, who generally vapes but occasionally smokes and eats marijuana, also relies on it to keep his mental health in check. "It’s extremely helpful with the mental health issues I’ve had since surgery. Anxiety attacks, self-esteem issues and energy levels are all improved or eliminated with cannabis," he explains.
Jon Liebling is a Director of the United Patient’s Alliance, which is currently lobbying hard for the legalisation of medical weed in the UK. Jon has a long history of profound mental health issues and has recently been diagnosed with complex PTSD.
"I've been managing my anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts most of my life, but have kept myself relatively happy with the use of cannabis," says Jon. "About two years ago, I had a number of traumatic events take place in a rather short space of time. I realised I needed a bit more help, so I asked my doctor to refer me for talking therapy. When I informed him I used cannabis he refused to refer me unless I stopped using. He prescribed me prozac and diazepam. I’ve always had suicidal thoughts, but what’s kept me alive is my dissatisfaction with them. Prozac made my thoughts happier, but also made me happier with those suicidal tendencies. So I acted on them for the first time in 20 years."
Jon went back to the doctors and found that a locum was working that day. She immediately removed him from his prozac prescription and referred him to talking therapy. She also told him to return to managing his condition with cannabis, and he’s thankfully still here to tell the tale.
Photo: VICE
Unfortunately, beyond anecdotal evidence it’s quite hard to back up Alex and Jon’s comments with science as, at the time of writing, there just isn’t much out there. Plus, their personal health conditions – despite being undoubtedly severe – are not indicative of the population as a whole. A 2010 paper called "Assessment and management of cannabis use disorders in primary care" suggests that, to differentiate between a psychiatric disorder and chronic cannabis intoxication, a patient should cease cannabis use for two to four weeks. In a small 20-person impatient study of withdrawal it found that "mean baseline depression symptom scores reduced to normal levels after four weeks of abstinence".
One of the study’s creators was Professor Adam Winstock, founder of the Global Drug Survey – a study of how the world consumes drugs – and a Consultant Psychiatrist and Addiction Medicine Specialist. Between these two roles he’s analysed the drug-taking habits of approximately 500,000 people, and 300,000 cannabis users. He’s extremely well-placed to advise on dealing with the more established effects of cannabis withdrawal. For most people, as it was with me during my Big Promotion back in the mid-2000s, that means: a) insomnia and vivid dreams; and b) nicotine withdrawal. A huge part of the first problem comes from an unlikely source.
"Lots of people who smoke lots of weed drink too much caffeine. Tea, coffee, fizzy drinks, Red Bull. This is often to offset the sedating effects of their weed. If you keep drinking 15 cups of tea when you’ve given up weed, this is going to worsen your insomnia, which will make you agitated," says Winstock.
To Take Part in This Year's Global Drug Survey, Click Here
If you’ve grown up smoking spliffs with tobacco in them, there’s a good chance you will also experience cravings from the nicotine withdrawal. For those looking to give up weed, Adam advocates giving up cannabis and nicotine at the same time – but adds that, crucially, you should gradually reduce your tobacco intake in the run-up to quitting. This will have an unexpected second benefit in the fight against withdrawal sleeplessness.
"Tobacco metabolises caffeine. It breaks it down," he explains. "So when you stop smoking tobacco, your caffeine levels go through the roof. You're left with this double whammy: not only taking a stimulant drug [caffeine] that you likely drink too much of anyway, but you're taking a stimulant drug whose levels are going to go through the roof because tobacco is no longer breaking it down."
Adam also says that the intensity of your withdrawal will likely be affected by the type of weed you smoke. "If you smoke a high THC cannabis, like skunk, then I think the insomnia would be worse – your weird dreams would be worse, your craving would be worse, your low mood would be worse."
Withdrawal symptoms with weed peak around day two or three and are generally over after seven. Sleeplessness and vivid dreams may last for two weeks, but Adam’s absolute gold standard advice for giving up is to "get into good sleep hygiene". Admittedly easier said than done, but there are some common sense habits that will help.
"Exercise is probably the best thing you can do," he says. "Obviously don’t over-exert yourself, but if you’re tired out when you go to bed, you’re much more likely to sleep well. Turn off screens a couple of hours before bed, avoid caffeine. And don’t give up and call your dealer if you get a bad night’s sleep! It will get easier soon."
It’s been hammered on you since your childhood: drugs are bad. If your parents were telling you this first and foremost to protect you and your precious brain cells, now science is saying this to protect the planet. While 15,000 scientists around the world agree, once again, that we are running out of time to save the planet, it is pertinent to question one of the North Americans' favourite drugs: cocaine—it’s a real environmental dick.
Cocaine production is destroying the forests of South America at an alarming rate. Look, I’m not here to preach and tell you that you should not do this or that. But it's important for you to know everything that's going on before you take your keys in the bar's bathroom. (And yes, there are ethical and societal reasons not to do cocaine, but that’s another article.)
As you probably know, cocaine is derived from coca leaves, a plant that grows naturally in many South American countries, including Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. But coca leaves produce very little of the alkaloids necessary for the production of cocaine. To support global demand, many coca leaves must be grown and many illegal pesticides are used that are harmful to native flora.
Only some people have the right to cultivate coca whose leaves are used in traditional ceremonies or chewed by Indigenous people to combat the effects of altitude living in the Andes. As most of the cultivation of these leaves is illegal, producers have to grow their coca in the forest, and the rainforests of South America are an important ecosystem.
Put on your lab coat, Heisenberg, I’m about to give you a brief crash course on cooking cocaine. The most common way to produce "pure" cocaine is as follows. The coca leaves are ground very finely before being mixed with water, lime, carbonate and kerosene (or gasoline, or diesel). Let that marinate for a few days, stirring from time to time. But the cocaine is still stuck in the solvent, so we warm that mixture up and add sulfuric acid. The mixture is then filtered and pressed. To the mixture of cocaine sulfate is then added caustic soda, which separates the sulfuric acid from the cocaine paste.
And what do you think we do with all the residues of the chemicals used? They are dumped into the nearest body of water, of course, and that may end up in drinking water for endangered wildlife and the inhabitants of the riparian villages, making them sick (or worse).
And the damage does not stop there. In many of the producing countries, the cocaine market is a vital economy, and studies show that people tend to settle around the places where it is produced, hoping for better living conditions. Although most settle there to take part in essential and perfectly legal activities such as agriculture or commerce, the construction of new homes for this growing population accentuates deforestation. These sites were formerly havens of peace for several endangered species.
So yes, there are certainly countless choices that contribute to the destruction of the planet—every day is a battlefield of environmental regret—but we can start by asking questions about the little, damaging things we do that can be avoided. So, it may be fun, but if you forget to text Johnny Snow at midnight on Saturday, the Amazon rainforest will thank you.
Tinder for primates may not be a totally new phenomenon, but it's not every day you see one actually swiping through suitors. Over the weekend, Sierra Anderson apparently caught a gorilla at the Louisville Zoo doing just that, directing some man hovering outside his glass prison through photos of female apes, the Daily Mailreports. As the man brings up each photo, our bachelor ape, Jelani, seems to quickly pass them over, like some kind of Tinder lothario.
While it might seem depressing that a gorilla in a zoo is drawn to some tiny screen over the company of his roommates—fellow gorillas Bengati, Kicho, and Cecil—Jelani is pretty up-to-date on the little rectangles we spend our days staring at. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the silverback loves watching videos and looking at photos on guests' phones, similar to how infamous gorilla Willie B liked to watch TV.
Jill Katka, supervisor of the Gorilla Forest exhibit, told the Courier-Journal the zoo can't give Jelani his own phone since "he would take the phone apart to see what was inside of it."
For now Jelani will have to rely on good ol' Mother Nature to find love, rather than using the crushing void of the internet like the rest of us.
Ronald Felton wasn’t a member of the New Seasons Apostolic Church, but pastor Samuel Washington could always count on the 60-year-old Florida construction worker to lend a hand. For more than ten years, Felton woke up before dawn every Tuesday and every Friday to help prepare a food pantry at the church in the Southeast Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa.
“We normally open at 5 AM to set up and sort the food,” the pastor told me. “Ronald would go pick up donated food from different locations and help unload trucks.”
But Felton never made it on Tuesday. According to Tampa Police, he was crossing an intersection around 4:51 AM at North Nebraska Avenue and East McBerry Street, about two blocks from New Seasons, when he was approached from behind and shot to death. Witnesses described the shooter as a black man roughly six feet tall, wearing all black clothing, and toting a large pistol.
Washington said homeless people who were waiting in line for food heard four shots ring out. “He was going to get there early today and that is when he was killed,” the preacher said.
Almost immediately, local officials suggested the murder was more than likely linked to three other killings in Southeast Seminole Heights that took place within a week of each last month and ignited speculation a serial killer might be haunting the quiet suburban neighborhood. That theory seemed to gain fresh support from national experts on homicidal maniacs—as well as local officials—with Felton's killing.
“Right now, we are treating it as though it is related until we can rule otherwise,” Dugan said at an impromptu press conference near the latest crime scene Tuesday morning. “I believe that this person lives in this neighborhood and we need everyone’s cooperation. We need everyone to pay attention to what is going on.”
Buckhorn told assembled reporters the latest tragedy had renewed a local sense of urgency to solve the case. “We need to catch this killer before we have to notify another family that their loved one is dead,” he said. “We are going to stay on this until we catch the guy.”
After responding to the site of Felton’s murder, officers quickly set up a perimeter that remained in place through the late afternoon. Nebraska Avenue was closed to traffic in both directions between Hillsborough and Osborne avenues, according to Tampa Police spokesman Eddy Durkin.
“Officers are still out there actively checking the neighborhood,” Durkin told me. “We want to make sure we are thorough by checking every area and talking to as many people as we can.”
If there is a serial killer on the loose in the city, police believe he struck first on October 9, when 22-year-old Benjamin Mitchell was shot and killed waiting for a bus. Two days later, 32-year-old Monica Hoffa disappeared; her body was found on October 13. A week later, officers who heard gunfire found a lifeless 20-year-old Anthony Taino Naiboa. Like Mitchell, Hoffa and Naiboa were both shot to death.
Brianna Fox, a University of South Florida criminology assistant professor and former FBI agent, was convinced Tampa Police were dealing with a serial killer after Hoffa’s murder. Felton’s death simply reinforced her belief, she told me. “It’s the modus operandi,” Fox said. “He is picking random people, the victims were alone, and all the murders have taken place within the same area of Southeast Seminole Heights.”
She added that the killer is likely a male in his early 20s to early 30s who is very familiar with the neighborhood. “He is not willing to go outside his comfort zone,” Fox said. “It’s part of an insecurity he has.”
There is only one aspect of the case that diverges from traditional serial killer conduct, she said: This murderer does not seem to want any intimacy with his victims. “Most serial killers will strangle or stab [people]” she told me. “Serial killers really enjoy that rush of power and feeling a connection with their victims.”
Whatever the murderer’s motives might be, community leaders in Southeast Seminole Heights insisted the killings would not compel residents to cower in their homes. Stan Lasater, president of the neighborhood’s civic association, told me he and his neighbors are going about their normal routines. “We have been very defiant,” he said. “We are not going to let this guy scare us. Of course, we are using common sense. If you need to go somewhere, call a neighbor to go with you.”
He also advised people in the area to be extra cautious with their cellphone use. “I tell them don’t text or go on Facebook while you are out walking,” he said.
Washington, the New Seasons pastor, said that before Tuesday, he had not been as vigilant as he might be. “I’ll probably look twice now,” he said. “But, honestly, I am not feeling scared. I believe in a higher power.”
National Republicans have been abandoning Alabama Senate hopeful Roy Moore in droves as an expanding list of women say he pursued romantic relationships with them as teens when he was a prosecutor in his 30s. Two women allege he sexually assaulted them, with the latest accuser coming forward Monday to say Moore groped and attacked her in 1977 when she was barely 16. But despite widespread condemnation from many GOP leaders, including Alabama senator Richard Shelby, Moore is refusing to quit, calling the allegations "absolutely false” at a Monday campaign event. “This is a political maneuver, and it has nothing to do with reality, it's all about politics," he said.
Normally, a campaign would be mortally wounded by credible allegations that its candidate, as a 30-something man, had pursued teenagers and sexually attacked two girls. But in a deeply conservative, fundamentalist, and solidly Republican state (President Donald Trump won Alabama by 28 points in 2016), Moore still is considered likely to win December's special election.
One big reason is abortion. Nearly six in ten Alabamians oppose abortion rights, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study, making it one of the most pro-life states in the country. Moore, whose fundamentalist views can be extreme (he has called homosexuality criminal and suggested the 9/11 attacks were punishment for America turning away from God), is strongly opposed to abortion. His opponent, Democrat Doug Jones, is pro-choice, which in the view of many voters who oppose abortion is akin to tolerating murder. Those looking at the big picture may consider that sending a Democrat to the Senate will make it harder for Trump to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court who would back the overturning Roe v. Wade.
Jones, a former US attorney, is best known in Alabama for getting murder convictions against two Klansmen decades after the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four black girls. One of Jones’s campaign slogans, calling for voters to be “on the right side” of history and justice, now takes on extra meaning in some minds. But he still faces a Himalayan climb to win statewide office in Alabama as a Democrat.
The state Democratic Party is splintered and shattered. Lucy Baxley was the last Democrat elected statewide, winning a seat on the Public Service Commission in 2008 and losing a reelection bid in 2012. Alabamians have not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1986. That was Shelby, a conservative “Dixiecrat” who switched to the GOP in 1994.
Few gave Jones any chance to win the special election before last week’s report in the Washington Post in which four women went on the record with detailed allegations that Moore tried to date them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. One accused Moore of partially undressing both him and her and trying to initiate sex when she was 14.
But even after those allegations, Alabama’s GOP, which has gained total control of state offices over the last quarter century, has mostly maintained its support of Moore. One state lawmaker even said the accusers should be prosecuted. A few elected and party officials vowed to vote for Moore even if he was a proven a molester, given the alternative is a Democrat. Governor Kay Ivey has said she found Moore’s accusers trustworthy but indicated Monday she still plans to vote for her party’s nominee “based on what I know now.”
This gives Democrats a tricky wire to walk. They are afraid that the national party pouring money and resources into Alabama will spark a voter backlash over outside interference—especially among Moore’s dedicated base, generally estimated to comprise some one-third of state Republicans. Jones’s latest ad references the allegations only in the vaguest, most oblique way. On campaign stops he is sticking to his “kitchen-table issues”: improving health care and the economy, reforming the criminal-justice system, and protecting the environment and civil rights.
When his campaign has made references so far to the allegations against Moore they've been relatively subtle, such as when Georgia Congressman John Lewis said Jones “will not embarrass you” at a Friday rally. Jones issued his most direct statement Monday afternoon: “We applaud the courage of these women. Roy Moore will be held accountable by the people of Alabama for his actions.”
In Alabama, the announcement Monday morning that another accuser would come forward created the sensation of standing in the Gulf surf, feeling the water being sucked offshore and knowing a big wave is coming. But the latest polls are inconclusive, and some show Moore still leading even after the Post story.
National Republicans were reportedly considering drastic action to prevent Alabama voters from sending Moore to the Senate. But Ivey says she will not delay the special election, and a state GOP official says party action to strip Moore’s nomination is very unlikely. The state GOP party head likewise is squashing calls for a write-in campaign—either for Luther Strange, who was appointed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s vacant seat in February but lost to Moore in the primary, or for Sessions himself.
A split GOP vote could hand the election to Jones. But barring that scenario, Jones’s best bet is that the tsunami of allegations against Moore are so revolting to mainstream urban and suburban Republicans that they either stay home, or hold their noses and vote for a Democrat as the lesser of evils.
Even before the Post story, Moore’s yard signs were rare in Mountain Brook, a suburban Republican stronghold outside Birmingham and the state’s richest ZIP code. Jones signs are everywhere. But yard signs don’t vote. The question on December 12 will be whether those residents and their neighbors, one way or another, will help Jones upset Moore.
Eric Velasco is a freelance writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. A journalist for 35 years, he has covered numerous Alabama judicial elections, and has researched the influence of money and advertising in judicial elections nationally.
