Erykah Badu might be one of the most prolific artists out there today, but she has another job she's passionate about—being a doula.

When she visited Desus & Mero on Thursday, the singer, who's hosting this year's Soul Train Awards, shared what inspired her to become a doula, a role in which she helps people at the beginning of their lives through childbirth, and the end of their life, in death.

You can watch last night’s Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

2017 is the year of the youth vote. From the stunning surge of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in the UK elections to Ralph Northam’s victory in Virginia, the power of young voters to influence political outcomes is increasingly clear. It is often absurd to speak in terms of “generational ethos,” but the cohort that voted so strongly for Labour in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US do have shared memories. Coming of age during a cataclysmic recession caused by the excesses of the 1 percent, millennials have experienced a political system that prioritized assets over human beings. They’ve watched as failures of the elite class resulted in the further accumulation of wealth in the hands of the ruling class, even while pundits declared that the system worked.

The Boomer generation, secure in the post-war welfare state, felt no compunctions pulling up the ladder. They voted for white supremacists devoted to the destruction of the social safety net while secure in the knowledge that their own healthcare would remain cheap—and indeed, Medicare has not been threatened by the Republican Party like Medicaid has. Yet despite the clear leftward lean of young people, caused in no small part by the Great Recession, pundits have frequently overlooked their electoral power, and too many Democrats still don’t know how to energize them.

Starting in 2004, American political parties began diving across age lines, meaning that low turnout among young voters increasingly spells doom for a Democratic candidate. For all the analysis below, I use two-party vote share of presidential elections (meaning excluding third-party voting) using American National Election Studies (ANES) data. That data points to three eras of age polarization in voters by age. Between 1952 and 1972, the average difference in Democratic performance in between those aged 18-34 and those 65-plus was 9 percentage points (Democrats won, on average, 51 percent of the vote among those 18-34 and 42 percent of the vote among those 65 or older). In the ‘60 and ‘64 elections, there were 13- and 17-point age gaps, respectively. In the ‘72 election, the gap was 12 points.

From 1976 to 2000 these gaps disappeared: The average Democratic difference in performance between 18-34 and 65-plus over this period was only 2 points. In the ‘80, ‘84 and ‘92 elections, Democrats actually performed worse with young voters than older voters.

But after the 2000 election, these gaps came back with a vengeance. Between 2004 and 2016, the average gap in Democratic vote share between old and young has averaged 15 points. In '08, Democrats won 65 percent of the vote among 18-34 year olds, but only 45 percent of the vote among the 65-plus cohort. You can see what these trends look like in the chart below—the higher the number, the better Democrats performed with young voters:

But Republicans have quite clearly lost whatever youth appeal they once had. In last week’s elections, Democratic wave victories in both Virginia and New Jersey were driven by youth turnout. In Jersey, Governor-elect Phil Murphy won 18-29 year old voters by 48 points (compared to 36 points for Barack Obama in the state in ‘08). In Virginia, Northam—a moderate Democrat—won 18-29 year olds by 39 points and youth turnout surged from 26 percent in 2013 to 34 percent in 2017.

Republicans might comfort themselves with the old mantra, “Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” The problem is the data doesn't fit the cute aphorism: The most extensive research shows that partisan attitudes are formed early in life and remain sticky for an individual’s life. In other words it’s not likely young voters will switch sides en masse.

Democrats may be aware of this trend, but the party as a whole doesn’t act like its fate hangs in the hands of young voters. There has been endless handwringing about the white working class and Obama-to-Trump voters, but far less attention is paid to how to court millennials and get them to turn out—which could have won the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton just as surely as a better result among older Midwestern whites would have.

Far from investing in the electorate of the future, many Democratic pundits want to recreate the electorate of the past. If Democrats wanted to really court millennials, their stances on certain hot-button issues would shift.

To delve into some of those issues I used the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies 2016 survey. The large sample allows me to analyze subgroups of millennials and compare them to older generations. For my purposes, I define millennial as an individual who was 18-34 during the survey.

To begin let’s look at a question that asks respondents whether they agree or disagree with the statement, “White people in the US have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.” Respondents could answer on a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree,” with “neither” in the middle. Below I show the percent saying that they “strongly” or “somewhat” agree with the statement, White millennials are more liberal than their parents but less liberal than millennials of color, a divide that has been consistently observed in research:

Millennials are also less likely to support identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants. This demonstrates the same pattern of white millennials being more liberal than older whites, but less liberal than millennials of color:

Finally, millennials are much more supportive of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, specifically (via the survey language) those “who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years, and not been convicted of any felony crimes”:

Obviously, this should not be construed as evidence that white millennials are fully or universally committed to racial justice. Preliminary research suggests that reminding young whites of demographic change pushes them in a more conservative direction on some measures, which is also true of older whites. Spencer Piston, a political scientist who studies racial attitudes, told me, “The available survey data strongly suggests that racial prejudice is widespread among white millennials." As white supremacist YouTube videos channels have shown, many prominent young people harbor deeply racist views.

Electorally, the effects are obvious. White millennials were less likely to vote for Trump than older whites, a trend that holds true across education levels:

The implications of the increasingly powerful youth vote are clear, if Democrats want to embrace them. Though elections are often decided by turnout among young people, many Democratic strategists have spent their time concerned with winning back older whites. The tactics Democrats have been advised to pursue to attract Obama to Trump voters, such as criticizing “sanctuary cities”, ceding ground on immigration enforcement, and rejecting “multiculturalism,” won’t play well with young people. Millennial independents are more racially liberal than non-millennial independents. While moving to the center on race may have helped Democrats win "independent" voters in the past, the strategy will have diminishing returns.

The diversity of the millennial generation can be see in the young candidates running for office across the country. The down-ballot races in 2018 will build the next generation of political talent. Daniel Squadron, a former New York state senator and executive director at Future Now Fund, argues that Democrats have often missed opportunities down-ballot. "For the first time, people see the potential in state races, but the seeds that are planted take time to sprout," he told me. "The focus has to be maintained in 2018, and in accountability after candidates are first elected."

“Young people are ready to take back our democracy, to build the future we’re going to live in. It’s time our politics and our politicians reflect that,” Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who transformed a public health department eviscerated by privatization, told me. He highlighted policies like “tuition relief, universal healthcare, environmental protection and clean energy,” that he felt would mobilize young voters.

That sort of platform has been used by politicians who have successfully mobilized the youth vote. The potential of young voters is powerful, as Tammy Baldwin showed in 1998 when she organized University of Wisconsin-Madison students to win a narrow victory over the establishment’s choice, Dane County Executive Richard Phelps, in a tough Democratic primary. Her narrow victory was referred to as a “youthquake,” and in her subsequent bids she courted student newsletters, always made sure her campaign signs would fit in dorm windows, and made college affordability one of her central issues. (She is now a US senator.)

In 2006, Jon Tester courted young voters to win an upset in the Democratic primary for a US Senate seat in Montana. He frequently denounced the Iraq War and the Patriot Act while running a grassroots campaign in which he branded himself as a populist farmer. He was rewarded with a massive 13-point surge in youth turnout that delivered him a win in a general election decided by less than 4,000 votes.

More recently, Bernie Sanders took a page from the Tammy Baldwin playbook of using populist pocketbook policies to energize young voters. Enthusiasm seems to have carried over to Virginia, where campus turnout increased by 8 points from 2013, ushering in candidates like Jennifer Carroll Foy to the House of Delegates. Foy, one of the first black women to graduate from the Virginia Military Institute, ran on a platform of education, healthcare, and criminal justice reform. She told me that millennials are “are tired of heartless Republican policies that deny thousands of people healthcare, that prioritize corporate interests over hard-working families, that take away women’s healthcare, and that yank immigrant children away from their families.”

If Democrats can form a generation of voters who are energized and mobilized, the world—or at least a greater share of the government—is theirs. But without unless they inspire young voters, turnout, they will fail at the ballot box.

Sean McElwee is a researcher and writer based in New York. Follow him on Twitter.

Slant whispers and looming stares pass through the prison yard around 3:30 PM. It’s July, and hotter than usual on Michigan’s upper peninsula.

Gatherings of inmates begin to form: eight by the pull-up bars, four on the basketball court, nine behind the phones. The air is barely breathable with all the tension, which has built up ever since an act of disrespect—the breaking of a gang sign—earlier at chow.

Everyone here has their war story. We’re all long-conditioned by a street life, the hustling, the fistfights. Seasoned from past penitentiary wars, time in the hole, lifting law books in laundry bags for exercise, one thousand push-ups a day. Institutionalized.

But when I look at my friends and homeboys whom I’ve known for awhile, or grew up with, what I see is fear, confusion. Expressions I know too well from staring in my own mirror, trying to remember myself, trying to remember my home. I know there was something before this: my family, an old life. But to think that far back, to try to reconstruct my own innocence and even frailty, would hurt my soul—and a memory of home shouldn’t hurt.

Suddenly, my group of inmates storms one side of the yard.

I feel nothing further as I dash across the court and plunge a self-made shank into a combatant’s jaw, neck, and chest; then into another’s, feeling the rusty metal penetrate flesh with every swing and whack.

“Wassup now!” I yell, as a barrage of my wild punches meets another victim.

Officers with squawking walkie-talkies soon position themselves to regain control of the yard. A gas canister bounces onto the basketball court, spewing out white, thick smoke. It’s followed by another, until the yard is fogged with tear gas. “Get on the fucking ground!” I hear. Inmates scatter, coughing blood—but I never learned how to stop when I got started.

My eyes and face burn as I prowl through the smoke, looking for the rest of the fight. Someone else’s blood is crusted on my knuckles.

I’m not thinking. I’m not human. I’m what a prison made of me. “Get the fuck on the ground!” the officer yells, pointing his taser at my body. I don’t comply. I keep that slow, dragging saunter, striding over the defeated inmates. “Don’t move!” another officer says, before positioning himself to shoot.

Then, in one swift motion, my body stiffens before I smack the ground, the volts bouncing violently inside of me until everything is black.

Dizzy and distraught, I awake in a single-man cell with a yellow piece of paper resting on my chest. I’m naked, and my body, all of a sudden, is cold and aching.

There’s a blue jumpsuit on the green mat; the cell itself has not been cleaned since the last occupant.

I put the jumpsuit on slowly, then begin to read what’s on the paper: “This prisoner is unmanageable in G.P. (General Population). Loss of all privileges. No TV, books, sheets, no hygiene products. 24-hour watch.”

It is Saturday. I won’t see administration until Monday. I pace around the small quarters, calming and conjuring the self.

My war story began early, and peaked around the time my son was ready to come into this world. He was seven pounds, four ounces, and I knew then that I had to do what was necessary to take care of my family.

I sacrificed to provide for them—to make money—but got lost in it. My baby momma and I argued nonstop about my being in the streets. She said I was giving too much to something that was sucking the humanity straight out of my body, taking me away from the family.

I didn’t disagree. I knew that when I opened myself to a violent way of life, I would be vulnerable to that violence entering my heart.

Back in my cell, amid the unit’s mix of rap battles, trivia games, and disagreements about Cardi B’s gang affiliation, I hear the news that a few people died earlier in the melee. “That nigga bugged out on them boys,” one inmate says out of the corner of his door. “They shot ’em with that—uhh, uhh... Damn!”

“A taser, old fool,” another inmate says.

“Yeah, yeah. I know, muthafucka,” the inmate declares. “They hit ’em three times and he still wouldn’t stay down!” The inmates riff on the officers’ use of force. “You know they gonna charge them boys for murder… Yup. And over what some young dummy did.”

“What he do?” the other inmate asks.

“He broke a gang sign, with his hands.”

My stomach turns. I think about the charges the facility will try to trump on me. What the hell did I do? If it’s true, what the inmates are saying, then I can’t take back what I’ve done.

Later, I learn no one died in the fight that day. But even when I thought they did, I didn’t feel much remorse. Death is too common in prison to feel anything for someone who would take your life too if they had to.

It’s Sunday morning and the wing officer decides to bring me a third of my property: pictures, hygiene products, and bedsheets. I immediately clean my cell. I clean myself. I scurry my hand over old scars and flinch at new ones on my abdomen and chest; the burnt flesh feels rubbery, like it’s not a part of me anymore, not even real.

Whatever I’ve become has nothing to do with me. Nothing, I think to myself before saying the word into the metal mirror above the steel sink. Nothing. I don’t stare too long at myself, though, out of a fear of what my reflection will tell me.

Solitary confinement is meant for one thing: breaking. The paint peeling off the walls, the scuffed floors from years of pacing, the smell of piss and feces—it is all a message to the soul that it is trapped.

10 o’clock. Count time, I hear.

Automatic lights blink on. As soon as the officer hits the steps, the young brother in the cell next to mine begins to beat rhythmically on the steel door. This continues well into the evening.

The night lends solitary its brutality. I pace my cell, awake. Cry. Scream.

I haven’t seen my family or friends in 10 years, nor spoken to them in six. My son could end up here, lost in prison, the same violence driving him to the end.

My heart turns now. The system is hungry for my child’s soul. What can I do to stop it? Can I stop it? I have to reject all emotion—I can’t be human, won’t be, I say out loud over and over, my hands pressed against my face. But what about your son?

My neighbor beats on the wall again, but this time asks if I’m working on a rap. “Something like that,” I say.

His name is Marcus, he says. He wants to be a rapper and his sister thinks he’s as good as Gucci Mane.

I listen to him ramble about his family problems.

Marcus’s baby momma is in a serious relationship with one of his friends; his family is not supporting him mentally or financially, even as he keeps on getting jumped by gangs.

“Young dog, don’t let the world call your bluff,” is all I say.

The quietness lingers between us, though outside the unit is loud as usual.

Then, in a low voice, Marcus says that tomorrow morning he is going home.

Home.

Home.

I pause. Then I tell him to stay focused and that it’s a blessing to make it out of prison in one piece; I also remind myself of it.

First thing in the morning, Marcus will be free. I’m happy for him.

After 3 AM shift change, I hear the young homie packing up, a struggle with his luggage, too heavy maybe, but why so much? Is that the tightening of a bedsheet?

No!

It sounds like his body is beating violently against the wall, a slight change of direction—his decision that it’s too late. I scream out, but all the while I try to block it out, try not to understand why he would choose this, why he would fear his family, the world.

The muffled struggle echoes in my mind. Is he hanging there now, suspended?

In another 30 minutes, the unit is full of officers and nurses, as it was after my fight. Officials want to know, again, what happened. But the inmates behind the steel doors can't explain it, the violence, so they pay no attention to the officials’ requests, nor to the young boy, Marcus, being hauled out like a stillborn out of a woman.

Demetrius Buckley, 32, is incarcerated at St. Louis Correctional Facility in St. Louis, Michigan, where he is serving 18 to 30 years for 2nd-degree murder and two years for a weapons charge.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Corrections (DOC) confirmed that the author was involved in a fight in July 2014 at Baraga Correctional Facility that broadly meets the description in this essay. However, the DOC had no report of stabbings during the altercation, and the spokesperson said there were no suicides around this time at the facility.

Jamu is a kind of traditional Indonesian medicine supposedly made from all-natural ingredients. It comes in a ready-mix powder, and you can find the stuff in little packets everywhere, all designed to treat a variety of ailments ranging from diabetes to impotence. It also reportedly does things that have nothing to do with treating ailments, like vagina tightening.

Jamu is said to date back some 1,300 years, which is why there are bas-reliefs of jamu drinking scenes carved into the walls of Borobudur Temple from the 8th century. A few decades ago jamu was seen as hopelessly old-fashioned, but now it’s experiencing something of a revival in part due to the current Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, who apparently drinks a glass every morning and has done so for the past 17 years.

I don’t really get jamu, but I figure it must be popular for a reason. There are enough shops peddling the stuff to suggest it does something, so I decide to trial a few different varieties and see for myself. And of course, I start with the strangest one.

Sari Rapet: The Vagina Tightener

Mixing up a batch

Yes, I’m going to try a medicine that supposedly shrinks vaginas, and will therefore enhance sexual pleasure. Because surely this is every woman’s dream, right? And yes, there are some wanky misogynistic overtones about all this but I decide not to think about it.

I start by visiting a doctor, just to get his thoughts. Dr. Aznan Lelo, is a professor of pharmacology at the University of North Sumatra and all-round expert on jamu. When I meet him, Dr. Aznan highlights the subtle difference between jamu and other kinds of herbalist concoctions. He explains that traditional jamu recipes are handed down from generation to generation, whereas most other herbal medicines lack the charm of historical lineage.

On that basis, I hate to lower the tone, but I ask him whether jamu can indeed constrict women’s vaginas.

Dr. Aznan Lelo

“Well, whether it works or not scientifically isn’t really the point. Women buy vagina-tightening jamu because they think it works.”

A placebo effect for your vagina then. This doesn’t fill me with confidence.

To get started I visit a rather swanky jamu shop in Medan, North Sumatra, which is close to my house in case anything goes wrong and my vagina spontaneously combusts. There I drink the foul concoction, which somehow manages to be sour, herbal, and bitter all at the same time.

The only way to test if jamu works is to have sex and see what happens. So that’s what I do, to discover it’s had no effect. I imagined my vagina would now have taken on a life of its own and that my husband would struggle to escape its vice-like grip. But not so.

“Maybe you need to drink it over a long period of time,” he ponders aloud.

I tell him the stuff is disgusting and that won’t be possible.

Pegal Linu: The Muscle Soother

Eka in her store

I go back to the shop and ask the shopkeeper, Eka, what their most popular kind of jamu is and she tells me it’s Pegal Linu which soothes aches and pains. Eka mixes the jamu powder and presents it to me with a glass of hot water close by, presumably to take the edge off. If I were being charitable I’d say it tastes like a cinnamon latte if the top accidentally came off the cinnamon. It’s so heavily spiced that it’s tough to swallow.

Almost as soon as I drink it my heart starts racing and I vibrate home. I’ve never taken speed but I imagine this is what it feels like. I suspect this has something to do with the six ginseng pills I was directed to pound back at the end of the ordeal. Do my muscles still hurt? I‘m so jacked on jamu that I have no idea.

This brings me back to Dr. Aznan, who points out that jamu is not to be messed with. In recent years unscrupulous jamu producers have been mixing jamu with other things like steroids to give them a bit of a kick. Dr. Aznan also mentions a kind of jamu that is meant to make men more virile but which many producers just mix with crushed Viagra to make it seem like it actually works.

I also ask Dr. Aznan if it’s true jamu can help you to feel less tired and he blinks wearily,

“If you’re tired, why don’t you go to sleep?”

Quite. So far all his answers point to the fact that jamu doesn’t do much at all.

Rapet Wangi: The Sweat Sweetener

Udin the jamu connoisseur

Allegedly this makes women’s sweat smell sweeter. As I’m British and Indonesia is a tropical country, I spend most of my time looking like I’ve been boiled, so this seems like it could be useful.

I need an even spread of jamu shops as part of this experiment so l try a smaller and more rustic establishment run by a man named Udin who is a jamu enthusiast. Udin has owned this shop since 2006 and I ask him if jamu is a good business to get into.

“It’s not a good business, it’s a great business” he beams.

Udin tells me he makes good coin flogging jamu, which I find amazing as he sells me a glass for IDR 3,000 (A$0.28). He must sell a lot of it.

Udin sold options

I thought sweat sweetening jamu would be a good idea. It isn’t. The previous jamu was bitter but manageable. This jamu is like drinking liquid compost. To make matters worse, it makes me start sweating profusely almost immediately. Is that the point? Maybe it’s supposed to make me sweat so much that people around me become immune to it.

At Udin’s jamu shop I meet a patron called Fandi (34) who swears by jamu. He has been drinking it all his life and likes it because it’s ‘all natural’ and makes him feel ‘fresh’. I’m certainly not feeling that fresh myself but everyone assures me it’s because I’m just not used to it yet.

Sehat Badan: The Pick Me Up

Yanti

An even more traditional approach is in order so I try a small jamu stall by the side of the road owned by Yanti. She puts everything in a glass then gets to work with some egg beaters. She’s really giving it some welly.

It arrives and looks like manure. There are even little bits of what look like straw floating on the surface. God, it’s bitter. Thoughtfully she has prepared a small shot glass as a chaser which has warm ginger in it mixed with honey. I want ten more of these and hold the jamu. The ginger is delicious and reminds me of a hot toddy.

...And it was gross, like always

As soon as I leave I feel like there’s an alien inside my stomach fighting to get out. I start burping loudly which is, according my delighted Indonesian friends, a sign that wind trapped inside me (called “masuk angin”) is coming out.

I spend all night feeling like a walking whoopee cushion. Do I feel better the next day? Yes, but mostly because I’ve finally stopped expelling gas.

So did any of the jamu have any effect?

Some pre-fab varieties at Yanti's store

Well, I can say with confidence that every glass of jamu I drank produced some sort of short-term reaction, be it sweating, palpitations, or just an extreme sense of nausea. On that basis it seems that the herbs and other ingredients in jamu definitely have some kind of effect on the body. But just not necessarily the right ones, as it definitely didn’t aromatise my sweat or give me a daintier vagina.

Perhaps the key to jamu is just believing. And maybe that’s enough for all the people who buy and drink it regularly, including the president himself.

Follow Aisyah on Twitter

The world wasn’t ready for Smiley Face. Director Gregg Araki’s hilarious movie about an out-of-work actress who accidentally eats an entire batch of her creepy roommate’s weed cupcakes opened on a single American screen on November 16, 2007. It ended its short run with a domestic gross of $9,397. Although many critics praised Anna Faris’s lead performance, they also pigeonholed the film as a “midnight movie” or “mumblecore through a marijuana haze.” Most people I mention it to have never heard of it, much less seen it.

That probably explains why Broad City, which began as a web series in 2009 and moved to Comedy Central about four years later, is so often credited with pioneering the female stoner comedy. Smiley Face made such a small impact when it premiered that it’s usually omitted from celebrations of the lady potheads who’ve recently invaded pop culture and timelines of the archetype. No disrespect to Abbi and Ilana—who’ve been making one of TV’s most purely pleasurable shows for four seasons now—but their young, white, overeducated, underemployed, adventure-prone hedonist characters have an obvious ancestor in Faris’s Jane F.

Shot over about three weeks in Los Angeles, Smiley Face recounts a spectacularly disastrous day in Jane’s neurotic, aimless and frequently intoxicated life. After her roommate Steve (Danny Masterson), who may or may not fuck human skulls in his spare time, leaves for work, she can’t resist eating one of the homemade cupcakes he is saving for a gathering of his nerdy friends. Then she devours all of them. Just as she’s hatching a plan to bake new cupcakes without missing a big audition, Jane realizes she’s dangerously stoned, and will be for hours.

Of course, her every drug-addled attempt to make things right only exacerbates the situation. Jane’s dealer (Adam Brody, a good sport in garish white-guy dreads) says he’ll take her furniture if she doesn’t pay off her debt to him—today. While baking, she burns the replacement pot. When she finally makes it to her audition, she not only bombs, but tries to sell the uptight casting director (Jane Lynch) her prized possession, a bag of the once-coveted “government weed” that Californians can now easily buy with a prescription. By the afternoon, despite making a courageous journey across LA with the help of a dozen acquaintances and strangers (John Cho, John Krasinski, Danny Trejo, Jim Rash, and Brian Posehn all appear in small roles), she’s on the run from the cops. It goes without saying that she’s no closer to making those cupcakes.

If there’s ever been a better physical comedy performance than Faris’s in Smiley Face, I haven’t seen it. She breaks into fits of laughter with no warning or explanation. When she’s not drawling her way through some confrontation or other, she’s using increasingly shoddy stoner logic to plan her next move. We watch expressions of confusion, fear and wonder cross her slack-jawed, glassy-eyed face as a stream-of-consciousness voiceover reveals what she’s thinking. (In the best one, Jane rubs her belly and giggles through a reverie that takes her from lasagna to Garfield the cat to President Garfield.) At one point, the sounds of drills and crying babies in a dentist’s office have her tripping through the waiting room like a soldier under fire.

Because she’s beautiful and blond, Faris has played cheerleaders, Playboy bunnies and dream girls of all varieties. But Jane, in her T-shirt and baggy hoodie, is no sex symbol. Like Abbi and especially Ilana, she’s a sensualist, more interested in satisfying her own desires than stoking others’. Instead of making her an object for a room full of dudes to drool over between bong hits, Araki and screenwriter Dylan Haggerty build the movie around her thoughts. The decision to relegate men to minor roles makes sense for Araki, a New Queer Cinema veteran who’d spent 20 years subverting tired tropes about young people before making Smiley Face.

For all her zany antics, Jane turns out to be surprisingly complex. We watch her do incredibly stupid things, but it’s clear she’s actually pretty smart. Her college years as an economics major are a running joke; she corrects her dealer’s misunderstanding of Reaganomics and stumbles upon a first edition of The Communist Manifesto. Her monologues are as eloquent as they are unhinged. And as she tells it, at least, her past is littered with ruined friendships, breakups and nervous breakdowns.

Jane certainly wasn’t the first visible female stoner in pop culture. Centuries before the birth of Christ, Sumerians associated cannabis with the goddess Ishtar. You can thank Gertrude Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas and her hashish fudge recipe for opening up a whole new world of edibles. Janis Joplin, the prototypical debauched hippie chick, sang an ode to “Mary Jane.” Women of Faris’s generation grew up listening to Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch” and singing along to Lil’ Kim’s boast that “my girls rock Chanel and smoke mad marijuana.” By 2012, there had been enough “hot stoner girls” on film and TV to inspire a Complex ranking. (Here, I’ll save you a click: Faris is #12. Milla Jovovich in Dazed and Confused is #1. She must be so proud.)

But most of those characters are love interests or bit-part punchlines. Smiley Face was the first female-driven entry in a filmography that includes Cheech and Chong, Dazed and Confused, Half Baked, The Big Lebowski, Friday, and the Harold and Kumar trilogy, to name just a few beloved male stoner movies. Haggerty’s script, Araki’s direction and Faris’s performance established those characters’ women counterparts as intelligent, laid-back, fun-loving, and simultaneously adventurous and lazy, with a hint of underlying sadness. A few years later, this persona started popping up in music. Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus were suddenly potheads. Courtney Barnett found an audience outside Melbourne with songs about smoking and lying around in bed. Although Rihanna is the queen of carefree girl tokers, most of these women were white—which should give anyone celebrating this new female stoner renaissance pause.

What Broad City added to the archetype was an overtly sex-positive, feminist sensibility and the ingredient that’s conspicuously absent from Jane’s life: friendship. The result isn’t necessarily funnier than Smiley Face, which holds up incredibly well ten years later, but it is more optimistic. As imperfect as they are, Abbi and Ilana never have to face the consequences of their many fuckups alone. Like Harold and Kumar, Cheech and Chong and those two bros from Dude, Where’s My Car?, they don’t just have weed—they have each other.

Follow Judy Berman on Twitter.

A Durham detective who used slurs, called Islam “the religion of violence,” and shared police information on Twitter is facing professional discipline over his online comments.

Detective Constable Richard Cain pleaded guilty to one count of professional misconduct earlier this year in connection with posts on his personal Twitter account. Cain scrubbed the account, but several tweets are quoted in an agreed statement of facts from an ongoing disciplinary hearing, released to VICE.

“Nigga please.”

“The religion of violence #islam. #Mohamedwasapedophile.”

“Prophet Muhammad. Police be upon him.”

“Export islam back to where it came from. #bruxelles”

In one post, Cain referred to actor Chris Burke, who has Down syndrome, as a “gimp.” Others are the kind of statements common among the breed of right-wing Twitter user convinced of Islam’s supposedly dangerous and creeping influence. Cain tagged the Gatestone Institute and The Rebel, whose former staffer Faith Goldy was fired after appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast.

The disciplinary proceedings reveal Cain’s posts at a time of anti-Islamic fervour, both online and in public, as well as credible allegations of racial profiling by Ontario’s cops.

A veteran officer in the Durham region of Ontario just east of Toronto, Cain is also the author of several novels about policing and crime. The statement of facts includes a long list of tweets related to Cain’s police work, but notes that “a portion...were fictitious and sensationalized to create an interest in Richard Cain; ‘the author.’”

ECW Press co-publisher Jack David said Cain completed a three-book contract with the press. David said he had not spoken with Cain in several years, and that ECW was unaware of the material posted on Cain’s account.

“We had never seen this material before,” David said on Tuesday.

Cain’s tweets sometimes described the mundanity of police work, like attending traffic court, but also included more serious material.

He wrote about “strolling thru the woods with [his] M4 carbine”; he warned that showering in prison without slippers would result in a beating.

After 14 hours of surveillance in December 2011, he wrote, he was “starting to get a little punchy.” Later that month, he claimed to be tweeting from a hospital with someone who had slashed her wrists.

While Cain works in Durham, the investigation into his social media was sparked when Toronto Police Staff Sergeant Darla Tannahill marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a picture of female civilian employees.

“Push the brown girl to the front,” Cain replied from the account @RDCainWriting. “#photo #op #diversity points. ”

Tannahill identified Cain as the user behind the account, and contacted Durham’s Professional Standards Unit. The unit got to work reading Cain’s tweets, according to the statement of facts.

Sameeha Karim, who appears in the foreground of the photo, told the tribunal last month that she learned of Cain’s comment through Tannahill.

“I had tears in my eyes,” Karim said. “I find this comment very rude, very insensitive.”

Defense lawyer Sandip Khehra said Cain is remorseful and wants to apologize. According to the statement of facts, Durham police advised him not to apologize amid an ongoing investigation. Cain also donated $500 to Doctors Without Borders, according to the agreed statement of facts.

During cross-examination, Khehra claimed Cain’s colleagues have said the police service uses them as props to promote diversity.

“He actually was upset for you,” Khehra said.

Karim told the tribunal she would not accept an apology from Cain, and believes the officer’s words suggest an ongoing pattern of behaviour.

Khehra told VICE Cain’s Twitter following was small, and suggested that the investigation had amplified the impact of his words.

“Had they not told her about it, she wouldn’t have been upset about it. Now, I’m not saying they shouldn’t have told her,” he said.

Khehra told the tribunal on Monday that Cain is dealing with a mental health issue, having surrendered his personal and work-issued firearms to police. The matter was adjourned until November 24.

A sergeant from Durham’s Professional Standards Unit said the service is not seeking Cain’s dismissal. Khehra believes Cain should forfeit pay and “probably do a sensitivity course.”

“Here’s someone who knows his own biases but has never let it affect his work,” Khehra said.

As for the question of whether Cain believes his own words about Muslims, Khehra said he has not asked Cain.

“That would be something you need to talk to him about.”

For now, he said, Cain is unavailable to comment.

Follow Stephen on Twitter.

The Punisher showrunner Steve Lightfoot seems to have a thing for oddly, complicated individuals. It of course began with NBC’s Hannibal, featuring a cannibalistic serial killer that you could root for. And now, it continues with a gun-toting vigilante, Frank Castle, aka The Punisher. His character has long been the antithesis to the Captain Americas of the comic-verse. He’s not a red, white and blue kinda guy, but rather the man that favours black, skull clad fittings. With him, we don’t get a 1920s heroism and idealism, but instead, the coarseness of a war veteran’s loss over a murdered family.

For those not yet in the know: Netflix’s The Punisher, which debuted today, picks up shortly after Daredevil’s second season. Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), is now attempting the normal life thing since everyone believes him to be dead. He goes for the blue collar job, tries to blend in while dealing with a dose of PTSD that makes the boy scout routine go stale. And throughout these moments of honest struggle and eventual violence, the show sandwiches itself during a real-life period around issues of gun-violence.

In time for the release, I wanted to speak to its creator and writer, Steve Lightfoot, about the unique challenges in the timing of a show like The Punisher, and find out how he managed to handle a difficult character like Frank Castle in the light of our current debates.

I of course recognize your name from your writing and producing role in Hannibal, which features its own complicated, serial killing character. Looking to The Punisher, what was that initial attraction around a Frank Castle?
Steve Lightfoot: You know, I felt like he was a complicated protagonist. Not the varnished hero type. Very gray, and a morally complex anti-hero, in the classic sense, the western movie sense. I’ve always been fascinated by those types. And I’ve always been drawn to writing about men and they deal with their emotions, because generally, most of us are terrible at it. So with every show, you want to find something that feels universal. Talking about Hannibal, you had these two characters that were just a couple of guys looking for a friend that understood them. Beyond that, they were really just lonely and wanted a friend. It’s that element that people could connect to, even though one of them was a serial killer while the other was an incredibly damaged guy.

Much like Frank.
Yeah. When I first saw Jon Bernthal's performance in Daredevil season 2, he had this visceral violence to him. To put it plainly, he was a scary guy, but he was also so human. It’s so rare as a writer to be able to see beforehand who’s playing the part you’re writing for, and to of course seem them deliver it. Jon didn’t seem scared to lose the audience, but he also had this essential humanity that meant that he could always win them back. It allowed me to really go to depths with this guy, to get to the heart of the performance, which involved grief. Look, I haven’t been in the military, I haven’t been a special forces soldier like Frank Castle, but we’ve all lost someone. We all know what that’s like. So I hooked into that through Jon, and in a way like so many men do, Frank supplemented all those other emotions into rage, stating that as long as he was mad, angry, and pretending, he didn’t have to deal with his feelings. I was really excited about what would happen if you picked up Frank from The Daredevil a year later when he no longer has that facade. Now he’s having to process how he really feels.

And I think one of the things was a bit impressive about Frank the character. A proper balance between what was sympathetic and bad about him. He’s not a guy to be celebrated. But we also have to like him throughout 13 episodes. As a writer, how did you find that balance with a character that frankly needs to liked despite his wrongs.
It definitely starts with character. You gotta get under the skin. Frank is a complicated guy, because like you said, on one hand, he’s incredibly loyal, he’d lay down his life for you and he doesn’t lie. He can be the best friend that you can have. And on the other, between his skills, and his essential nature, he’s also the guy that if you cross him, he might as just well kill you for it. His sense of what’s okay to do because you did him wrong is incredibly problematic. My job was to make the audience at least understand and empathize with where his logic came from. Even if they couldn’t always condone it. It was a lot of work to illustrate his head and just offer up a feel of him. On that note, the joy of the Marvel/Netflix show format, which some people dislike, is that I’m given the leeway to do the slow burn. There’s room for me to actually explore character, not just him, but all the other characters of the show. Yes, the narrative can slow down, but it also allows the audience to care on a far more deeper level, rather than wasting through a story.

Frank Castle and Karen Page. | Image courtesy of Netflix.

Elaborate on that. Was there a difference in challenges/advantages with working with a television network vs. a Netflix format?
I mean we did Hannibal and had a great time on NBC, so my experience was a good one. But there are some simple differences, like not having to deal with ad breaks. It makes writing feel so much more organic. You’re writing a whole chapter every time without having to write some cliff hanger to drag viewers back. In addition to that, when you’re working in a Netflix format, you’re banking on people running straight through to the next episode, so you don’t have to worry about recaps, or reminding people what happened last week. You can write in a more sophisticated way simply by letting things hang in the hopes that the audience will continue the watch. Often, when you see television failures, it’s because networks don’t realize how sophisticated the audience is now, and how they’re switched onto every nuance. Sometimes we over spell things out, or we don’t give the audience the respect it deserves.

So when I got into the writer’s room, one of the things I stated is that we’d write it like a novel, a 13 chapter book, so that hopefully, someone would want to read it in one sitting, and if they didn’t, we’d make sure that at the end of every chapter, they couldn’t wait to pick up the book again. This format allows you to do that. It’s not about coming back to wonder what Frank is going to blow up next, it’s about leaving the characters in emotionally charged places, so that you had to come back to these characters, absent the promise of something blowing up.

Now we’ve had several versions of The Punisher, some ridiculous, some childishly violent in past films, but the timing of course, with the gun debate included, is probably the most challenging aspect for this show. Knowing what the comic book was originally about, what was the game plan to remaining sensitive to all that?
I’ve been asked about this of course because of recent events. There are two things for me. The comic book of course is more violent because its cartoonish roots. With Marvel/Netflix, they’ve aimed to ground these people in character, so they were super hero shows but they still existed in a very real world with realistic settings and situations. In terms of the nature of the violence, Daredevil season 2 set for us a good template to carry on from. That’s all a separate thing.

In terms of the bigger issues surrounding it...look, what happened in the last few weeks was just sickening and horrifying. Like everyone else, I look at it all with despair, sadness and in amazement that this keeps happening. But it’s also important to note, that in the light of that, I wrote this show a year ago. We didn’t exactly write it last week or in the scope of all this. People would ask me about it, and I’d say, well my show isn’t even out yet. A year ago, it was someone else’s show that was attached to the debate. I admit that I’m no politician, but what I did try to do with the show, since it is an ongoing issue, is try to let the characters have those debates among themselves. Some would say, Frank, what gives you the right? If everyone would be like him, we’d have anarchy. What a good drama should do is ask the questions, but it’s not my place to preach the answers. I hope the show stimulates debate at the very least. But in the end, it’s a comic book, fictional adaptation in the action thriller genre that’s been popular since cinema began.

I can’t honestly say that it was an over-glorification though. Even within the first few episodes, I rarely saw Frank handle a firearm. Just aesthetically, was that intention as it relates to how things came off, or was that just me?
Well it was intentional in two ways. I’ll be honest, when you get to the back half of the show, there’s a lot of it (laughs). It goes from being real, grounded in our relationship to Frank. The story builds, and as it builds, there’s just more people for him to aim at. With the first gun he gets, he has to steal it, and that one gun becomes another. It was more about building this character, which is why in the first episode, it’s pretty much all him. I wanted viewers to get under his skin before we started the ride.

Another thing, is that with 13 hours of this genre, naturally, gun fights can get pretty ridiculous and boring with repetition. A slow build helps with that, and you want all your action in every episode to feel different. My attitude to action scenes, or violent scenes in general is that unless something changes in them, they should move the story in every bit of a way as a really deep conversation. The best level of a fight scene is a conversation between the two people fighting. We approached it that way. Everything had to be different, and it couldn’t be a fight for fight’s sake. Can’t be a guy in front of a door, the guy in front of the door has to mean something, which can further the emotional story.

Image courtesy of Netflix.

And action aside, you were also dealing with issues like PTSD, especially with characters like Lewis Walcott. These are things that require a certain sensitivity and accuracy to comment on. How did you guys manage to approach that in a respectable manner?
The first thing I wanna say, is that the phrase PTSD, I was wary of the term. We use it very little in the show, mostly because it means different things for everyone. That something that we boil many issues down into. Through talking to people, reading memoirs, we learned that if you’ve met one veteran, you’ve only met one veteran. The show speaks to varying experiences, not just one. Everyone has a different story. We had a military advisor also read every script, and former special forces people who came in and talked to the writers in the room. The veteran’s room that Curtis Hoyle runs in the show, most of the extras were actual veterans. So the scariest thing about those scenes for me, was the potential reaction we’d get from them, like, what the hell is this? But they were supportive. A few of them after the premiere actually told me that we really got it right. That meant a lot to me. I couldn’t tell a story about The Punisher without it somehow being a show about the aftermath of war. We’ve been sending men into conflicts for over 16 years now. It’s a whole generation. And a lot of them come back profoundly changed, how could you not?

Just as an outside spectator, or fan, expand on how necessary it was to have a person like Jon Bernthal take on a role that required that kind of range.
What was great getting to see him do it all before hand. I went from, hey, this’ll be a fun thing, to, I really want this job, and it was all based on watching Jon do his thing. I’ve been a big fan since The Walking Dead along with his other roles, and what’s really interesting him on screen is that he’s not scared to go to these really dark places, and lose the audience. Apart from that, there’s also a fundamental vulnerability and humanity in Jon. He’s an incredibly decent man in person, and a lot of that shines through. You can let him become really bad, because there’s something in their that people will recognize and he’ll be able to pull them back. As a writer, that’s paramount, because it allows me to push him and not worry about him not being able to do it effectively. He was just a fantastic partner and collaborator.

You being the creator, is there an underlying message that you hope people take away from The Punisher?
I hope it entertains, and I hope it provokes thought. As a storyteller, all you want people in the end is to go on the journey with you and hopefully be moved by it. Naturally, entertainment is one goal, but I also hope that audiences somehow become moved by Frank Castle and the journey he's been on. If we've done that, we've been pretty successful.

Follow Noel on Twitter.

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

US News

Trump Decides Al Franken's Alleged Sexual Misconduct Is an Issue
The president criticized the Senator on Twitter after he was accused of forcibly kissing Leeann Tweeden and groping her while she slept. Trump said a photo showing “Frankenstien” touching Tweeden was “really bad," adding, "Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?” Franken apologized Thursday and said he would “gladly cooperate” with the Senate ethics committee.—The Guardian / VICE News

Russian Diplomat Admits to ‘Long’ List of Trump Contacts
Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s former ambassador to the US, reportedly told Russian TV that he could not name all the Trump officials he had contact with because “the list is so long that I’m not going to be able to go through it in 20 minutes.” He also dismissed the idea that Russia swayed the outcome of the US election as “very sad.”—CNBC News

GOP Wins Key Votes for Tax Bill
The Senate Finance Committee voted 14-12 in favor of a major tax reform bill late Thursday, with a vote on the Republican legislation now expected in the Senate after Thanksgiving. The win came just after the GOP passed its tax bill in the House. “Now the ball is in the Senate’s court,” Vice President Mike Pence said.—CBS News

DHS Official Quits After Racist Remarks Unearthed
Rev. Jamie Johnson was forced to resign from his role leading the Department of Homeland Security’s community work after comments he made on Accent Radio Network in 2008 were revealed. Johnson said America’s black community “has turned America’s major cities into slums because of laziness, drug use, and sexual promiscuity."—The Washington Post

International News

Mugabe Makes His First Outing Since Military Takeover
President Robert Mugabe made an appearance at a university graduation ceremony in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare Friday, accompanied by a military escort. He had not been seen in public since the army seized power earlier this week. Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition figurehead who recently returned to Zimbabwe, urged 93-year-old Mugabe to quit and called for the establishment of a “national transition body."—BBC News / Al Jazeera

Russia Obstructs Inquiry into Chemical Weapons
Russia’s UN representatives vetoed a resolution aimed at allowing investigators more time to establish responsibility for nerve gas attacks in Syria. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said the veto meant Russia had “killed” the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) looking into the attacks. “In effect Russia accepts the use of chemical weapons in Syria,” she said.—Reuters

Wounded North Korean Defector Has Parasites
The North Korean solider shot and injured when fleeing into South Korea has an “enormous number of parasites,” according to the South Korean surgeon treating him. Lee Cook-Jong said one of the roundworms was 11 inches long. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.—AFP

Sicilian Mafia Boss Dies at 87
Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Cosa Nostra leader given 26 consecutive life sentences for multiple killings, has died after a period of poor health. Known as the “boss of bosses,” Riina was shown by Italian prosecutors to order the killing of judges and cops.—AP

Everything Else

Actress Accuses Jeffrey Tambor of Sexual Harassment
Trace Lysette alleged the star told her “I want to attack you sexually” while on the set of Transparent. She claimed Tambor later held her and “thrust back and forth against my body.” Amazon Studios said Lysette’s accusations would be “added to our ongoing investigation.”—The Hollywood Reporter

Tesla Reveals New Electric Truck
Elon Musk paraded his Tesla Semi at an event in Los Angeles Thursday, claiming the electric prototype could travel 500 miles on a single charge. Musk said the vehicle would go into production in 2019.—Los Angeles Times

‘Despacito’ Triumphs at Latin Grammys 2017
The Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee track won four awards at Thursday’s night ceremony in Las Vegas, including song of the year. Fonsi denied he had fallen out with Daddy Yankee after his collaborator did not turn up for the show.—Billboard

Keystone Pipeline Leaks 5,000 Barrels of Oil
At least 210,000 gallons of oil spilled from the pipeline in South Dakota Thursday, the TransCanada Corporation revealed. The company, close to achieving full approval for the Keystone XL Pipeline, claimed the spill was isolated in 15 minutes.—Motherboard

Showtime Drops Trailer for ‘The Chi’
The network revealed a first glimpse at the drama about Chicago’s South Side, produced by Lena Waithe, winner of an Emmy for her writing on Master of None. Waithe said The Chi would explore “the humanity behind the headlines.”—i-D

Father John Misty Reveals Track Titles for New Album
The artist said his upcoming release would feature songs titled “Ouch, I’m Drowning” and “Mr Tillman, Please Exit The Lobby.” He said it was a “heartache album” written during a period in which he was “kind of on the straits.”—Noisey

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we delve into how Danica Roem became the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature.

The world’s largest mass suicide took place on November 18, 1978 inside an isolated compound in Jonestown, Guyana. There, more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple cult ingested a drink mixed with cyanide. The horrific event was orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones, a charismatic and manipulative preacher from Indiana who gained prominence in the Bay Area.

Jones established the Peoples Temple in 1964 in Redwood Valley, California. He quickly gained a following that made him a powerful political force with connections to men like California Governor Jerry Brown. From the outside, the church seemed to embody the spirit of the 60s, extolling socialism and championing black radicals like Huey Newton. They offered free services like food for the indigent. And they had a diverse congregation. But behind closed doors, Jones manipulated his followers into giving the church all of their assets. He ruled over them with humiliation, coercion, and physical abuse. Paranoid that the media and lawmakers would expose the brutal side of the Peoples Temple, Jones moved the church to Guyana, where he claimed he would establish a socialist utopia. Instead, he led his followers to slaughter in the name of “revolutionary suicide.”

Deborah Layton is one of the few people who followed Jones down to Guyana and survived. While she suffered from the abusive tactics of Peoples Temple, she plotted her escape, which involved subterfuge of Jones’s armed followers and procuring a new passport. She fled by plane on May 12, 1978, leaving behind her brother and her mother who would eventually die of cancer in the camp. Back in the US, she testified before the State Department, warning of the potential for mass suicide. Unfortunately, she was too late. Inspired by her address to the State Department, Congressman Rep. Leo Ryan (D-Calif.) led a fact-finding mission on November 15 to investigate the religious settlement. On November 18, the politician and several others were murdered by Peoples Temple followers when they tried to leave Guayana—Layton’s brother Larry, was arrested and later convicted for his role in the killings. That same day, Jones ordered the mass suicide—those who didn’t drink the poison willingly were stabbed with syringes of cyanide.

Translated copies of 'Seductive Poison' by Deborah Layton

It’s a story that still haunts the American psyche. But Layton’s book, Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death In the People’s Temple, gives an insightful look into what drew people to the church and how it all devolved into death and suffering.

While some people might wonder why Layton would write a book like Seductive Poison, I can totally relate. Like her, I was raised in a religious, cult-like movement. Several years ago, after I broke all ties with my traumatizing “spiritual” upbringing, I started a band called King Woman, and used it as a vehicle to work through some of my own pain. The project has helped free me from my past and essentially, saved my life. As we approach the 39th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, I reached out to Layton to talk about her experiences overcoming psychological trauma.

VICE: What drew you to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple?
Deborah Layton: I was searching to be a part of something. When I was 17 and I went to a Peoples Temple meeting and Jones kept on saying, “You have qualities your parents don't recognize.” Suddenly a grown-up thought I was special. That was the hook. That was the beginning.

What were some of the red flags you noticed once you were immersed in the Peoples Temple?
No one was allowed to smoke or drink. At the great age of 18, I thought this was going to be difficult. I had just come home from boarding school in England and was still a troubled kid. My parents thought the Peoples Temple’s college campus was a great place because they had a dormitory. But unbeknownst to them, we were driving all the way up to Ukiah, California for all-day meetings... The intense indoctrination had begun. With Jones, it was, “Can’t you give up a little bit of your own life and not be so selfish?” He preached as if we were joining the Peace Corps.

How’d you get to Jonestown, Guyana?
First, you had to fly down there from America. He had paid Guyana millions of dollars to have this piece of land in the middle of nowhere. If you tried to get out, you couldn’t find your way back. The jungle became our bars.

A photo of Jim Jones (center right) and family, taken January 1, 1976. (Photo by Don Hogan Charles / Getty Images)

Why did you decide to escape the Peoples Temple?
It was terrifying. The minute I got there, I knew I wanted out. I knew I had made a really scary decision: I had taken my mother, who was previously in Nazi Germany, into yet another concentration camp.

The people I had known as so vibrant in the United States looked like a leper colony. Once you were in there for awhile, you were not the same person. Jim Jones was so fucking scary. He knew how to lure people in and then frighten them to death.

For example, every grown up was subjected to “the box.” It was used to frighten us into shutting up and abiding by frightening rules. Plus, there were armed guards and you only had rice water soup. [I couldn’t even] spend time with my mother because that would show I was weak, and I had to prove otherwise.

You were subjected to humiliating “catharsis meetings,” where everyone would criticize whoever was “on the floor.” What was that like?
Catharsis meetings were to break your spirit. He wanted me not to trust anybody but him. He wanted me to lose all faith in myself so he could come back in and say, “What they made me do to you is horrific.” It’s all an evil mind game. You become so afraid, you try to live within these frightening borders that they’ve created. My god you want to run away. But you think that if you run away, they are going to find you.

What was the worst thing you saw in the meetings?
There was one inner-circle meeting when one of the husbands had molested a child. When it was found out, he was brought in. The whole thing was filmed so that he could be blackmailed with it. We all had to whip his scrotum and penis with a rubber hose. But he was never taken to a hospital. The man was cared for in Jonestown so no word would get out. Jim Jones subjected people to stuff like this when he wanted to teach them a lesson, or he thought they might want to leave. Jones was the closest thing to God that we knew.

What was it like after you left the People’s Temple?
When I returned to the United States, I started working at an investment banking firm that was all about following the rules, keeping your mouth shut, and working long hours. All the guys who worked there were into Erhard Seminars Training, which was an empowerment cult that took you on these long retreats where people would scream and yell at you. People could spit in your face. After seeing this, I thought, What is the difference? Everyone is susceptible to getting involved in something like this.

Victims of the Jonestown Massacre in the jungle of Guyana in November 1978. (Photo by Matthew NAYTHONS / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Since Jonestown, what have been your most powerful tools for wellness and recovery?
I think I was very lucky in that my father never turned his back on me. I took my mom, his wife, away from him to some place where she died. When I returned, he would cry. He would say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” But then he would hold me and say, “I got my baby girl back.” He was so conflicted. He loved me. In a lot of these places, these people have nobody to run to because their whole family is in there. But he never turned his back on me.

After being around an overwhelming amount of religious abuse, what does spirituality mean to you?
I would say I’m spiritual. I do not partake. I don’t like group stuff anymore. I don’t want to do that every Sunday. I did that for so many years. I just can’t do it now.

Yeah, church gives me the creeps. I can’t be there. Did the process of writing and releasing a book bring you a sense of closure?
It did. My book was just going to be about Jonestown, but when my editor saw it, she said, “Wait a minute, Debbie, you can’t just write about that! You need to go all the way back. People need to understand where you come from and why you were susceptible.” Then it became really hard for me to write.

Dead bodies surrounding the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

Was there any information that you wanted to leave out at first?
When I got on that plane to escape from Guyana, I had to compartmentalize that I was leaving my mother behind. I felt I could not ever go back and visit it. When I was writing Seductive Poison, my editor said, “You have to write about your mother,” and I stopped writing for several weeks. I had a six-year-old. I found her little acrylic paints. I went outside and I started painting our chairs and our planter boxes. It was a super hot day. There was no wind. And the back door of our house blew open and I felt as though my mother was saying, “It’s time to come back and say goodbye to me.” That’s when I went back in and started writing about my mom.

Even after writing the book, has it been hard to talk about it?
When I finished the book, I went to Stanford to speak. That was outrageously cathartic. I thought the students were going to say, “Shut up!” But I got this standing ovation. I spent 20 years so afraid for anyone to know who I was and what I’d done, even though I blew the whistle, even though I was the one who went to Washington D.C. I spent so much time afraid that everyone would hate me. That shame is so vile.

Have you been back to Jonestown?
Right before my book came out, I was asked to fly down to do a documentary. When we got into Jonestown, I was going to go and find where my mother had been buried. Well, the jungle had completely retaken everything except for one area that had no plants in it. That was where the pavilion was, and that’s where all the people had died from cyanide poisoning. No plant had grown back.

Did you feel her spirit there?
I was intent on finding her essence and apologizing for leaving her, and then I realized she wasn’t there. I felt no spirits there. If you die in Auschwitz, your memory is not in Auschwitz. Your memory is where your wife was, where it was made before these horrific events. I felt relieved that I didn’t feel her or anybody else’s essence there. They had all fled… if there is such a thing.

Looking back, what is the single thing you want people to understand about this tragedy?
Nobody ever joins something they think is going to kill them. Nobody joins something that they think will rip them from their family forever. It happens over time. By the time you recognize it, you do not know how to extricate yourself because you have children, you have loved ones, you have family inside that you will never be allowed to see again. That’s why for so many of these organizations, there are people that want out, but they know if they leave, they will never see the people they care about. If we can figure out how to let people know they won’t be harmed if they run away, and that there’s some place for them to run to, I think we can save more lives.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

To purchase Deborah Layton's book, visit her website.

To listen to King Woman, visit their BandCamp.

It was a Thursday like any other in Okanogan, a small town of about 2,500 souls in central Washington, until 2 PM rolled around. Up in the sky, a jet dragged contrails through the air like a brush on canvas. As a few locals gazed up in wonder, the plane finished its portrait. And thus, this masterpiece was born:

According to local CBS affiliate KREM, the Picasso behind the stunt turned out to be a Navy pilot stationed at Whidbey Island, a Naval air base a few hours from Okanogan. Military airplanes crop up in the sky above the small town for training operations pretty regularly, the Drive reports—but Thursday's display wasn't exactly part of the official regimen.

"The Navy holds its aircrew to the highest standards and we find this absolutely unacceptable, of zero training value," Navy officials told KREM. "We are holding the crew accountable."

A gigantic dick miraculously appearing in the heavens would be a big deal in any town, but for a hamlet the size of Okanogan, it was front-page news. Local resident James Farmer told VICE that when his brother called him about the contrail dong, he didn't believe it was real. Then he saw the photo.

"I was in shock," Farmer said. "I was just thinking, That dude's wild as fuck for doing that."

Pretty soon, word about the massive aerial Johnson had spread through town. One woman called KREM to complain about it, saying she didn't want to have to explain what was in the sky to her kids.

"There were tons of stories on Snapchat that had a picture of it," Farmer said. "Everyone was just in shock that there was a huge dick in the sky."

KREM reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration to see what the agency might be able to do about the pilot who drew the giant schlong, but apparently, it's out of their hands. An FAA spokesperson told the station it "cannot police morality."

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

A new poll reinforces a bleak truth that many of us have probably known for a long time—almost half of Canadians have a negative opinion about Islam.

It's not hard to see this sentiment having a real world impact, whether it be the rise of a far-right looking to “counter terrorism,” the many anti-Islam rallies across the country, or recent laws specifically targeting Muslims being passed.

Photo via Angus Reid Polling.

The poll, conducted by Angus Reid in October and published this week, shows that while Canadians feel like Canada benefits from the Judeo-Christian religions (the biggest benefit being from Catholicism,) the country also feels negative impacts are arising from Sikhism, Atheism and Islam.

However, the percentage of Canadians thinking Sikhism or Atheism is hurting the country is under 25% while Islam sits at 46%.

“Twice as many Canadians say the presence of Islam in their country’s public life is damaging as say the same about any other religion, a finding that follows a well-documented pattern in Angus Reid Institute polling in recent years. Namely: if Islam is involved, a significant segment of Canadians will react negatively,” reads the write up accompanying the poll.

Photo via Angus Reid Polling.

Another major question that showed the prevalence of Islam in Canadians mind, was when they were asked what religions were gaining influence was growing within Canada. Again, for this questions, Canadians overwhelmingly singled out Islam among the other religions—65% of Canadians think it's influence is growing.

Overall, it seems like Canadians are of the belief that the influence of Judeo-Christian religions are waning and being outpaced by the other religions in the country, mainly Islam. There are many reasons why this could be, but the mainstreaming of the counter-jihad conspiracy and hucksters using scare tactics in regards to Sharia law almost certainly play a role.

Further findings of the poll indicate that a quarter of Canadians think that religious diversity is a net negative for Canadian society (44% thought it was a mix of good and bad.) It also found that Canadians seem to be souring on the idea of freedom of religion as only 55% of those responding said they believe it makes the country better—14% said it made it worse and the rest said no impact.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

Looking for some stuff to catch up on this weekend? Whether it's TV, movies, books, or anything in between—VICE has you covered. Read on for our staff recommendations on what to take in during your downtime:

Search Party

The first season of TBS's surprise-breakout black comedy Search Party started as an excruciatingly funny analysis of millennial entitlement and became... well, we won't spoil it for you, but just know that it packs a killer twist that transcends gimmickry. (Looking at you, Mr. Robot.) And the second season of Sarah Violet-Bliss and Charles Rogers's ingeniously dark creation ups the ante in every level, putting an at-times truly detestable group of people in situations where, just when you find yourself rooting for them, you're forced to reconsider your stance. Just like life, right? —Larry Fitzmaurice, Senior Culture Editor, Digital

The Breadwinner

If there's one thing 2017 has made explicitly clear, it's that his world is pretty fucked up for women. Still, it's worth something that humans can deliver hard truths within a heady stew of beauty. So head to the IFC this weekend to catch The Breadwinner, Irish filmmaker Nora Twomey's adaptation of the internationally best-selling children's novel of the same name. When Parvana's family begins to starve after her father is jailed by the Taliban, the 11-year-old girl cuts off her hair and earns her keep through various odd jobs under the guise that she's a boy. I haven't seen the film yet, but if the trailer is any indication, it's a tender blend of animation styles new and old that sees the lengths people will go to ensure their family's survival through the wide eyes of a child. If you're in NYC, catch a Q&A with director Twomey at IFC tonight. —Emerson Rosenthal

The School of Life

Some pray when they're looking for guidance; others find their answers on the internet. The School of Life is a YouTube channel founded by best-selling author, philosopher, and all-around chipper British dude Alain de Botton. He's written 13 books detailing his compassionate, thoughtful answers to tough questions about love, religion, and human behaviour. Through the animated videos on his channel, he offers crash courses in history and philosophy, parses out the modern meanings of overused words, and outlines his tips for vital skills like, "How to Make a Decision" and "Finding Your Mission." Anyone can spew unsolicited platitudes on these topics for hours, but de Botton's genius is that he lays out actionable ideas in concise, 3–7-minute bursts. Check out more of School of Life videos here. —Beckett Mufson

Show #30: Kristin Lucas

For its 30th show, and/or gallery in Pasadena, California, is handing over the reins to media art maverick Kristin Lucas. Those involved in the VR/AR/net art spheres will recognize the name, but for the rest of us, Lucas has been hard at work for more than 20 years pushing the limits of what artists can do in the digital spheres. For this exhibition, opening tomorrow at 7 PM, Lucas has created an "immersive, mediated environment of electronic and computational works that express her intense fascination with flamingos and her deep concerns about climate change." Come for the augmented reality flock of flARmingos (above), and stay for Lucas's unshakably haunting visions of rising sea levels. —ER

It isn't all that easy to smuggle drugs into the US. Strapping it to your body doesn't seem to work, the underwater tunnel method is a little risky, and customs agents appear to have caught on to the whole drugs-disguised-as-produce-and-dick-candles scheme. So drug traffickers have recently taken to trying to fling their products over the border.

One drug smuggler—and apparent medieval siege weapon enthusiast—built a giant catapult to huck bushels of weed over the wall, and police caught a group a few years ago with a drug-shooting potato gun. Now, it looks like someone heard about the potato gun and decided to take things to the next level.

Last week, Mexican authorities seized a massive, marijuana-firing bazooka near the Arizona border, the Arizona Daily Star reports.

According to Mexican police, the bazooka was stashed inside a cargo van along with around 1,800 pounds of weed and 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Authorities believe that the bazooka was supposed to fire through the van's sunroof and shoot packages across the border into Douglas, Arizona. The find might explain the strange security footage authorities in Douglas noticed last August, catching a 100-pound bushel of weed flying over the border.

This is the second drug-smuggling bazooka police have found in Mexico. Authorities found a similar weed cannon—also built inside a van—in the same town of Agua Prieta in 2016. ABC News released a video of this bazooka and the modified van, which is missing all seats except for the driver's and looks like a car from Twisted Metal come to life.

It's unclear whether the same people made the two homemade bazookas, or if everyone is getting into the drug-cannon game these days. Whatever the case may be, the drug smugglers could consider just sticking with drones, since those are a little easier to replace than a decked-out car with a built-in cannon.

It’s Francia Camila’s day off from her job at a Tijuana beauty salon, so she’s spending her day at another beauty salon—this time, as a customer.

It’s a small room awash in sunlight and the smells of hair dye and nail polish. Customers and employees chatter in Spanish. A little boy watching Pokémon holds one end of a hot pink leash; at the other is Nikki, a dog with long, tangled fur and a yellow hair bow.

A woman cups Francia’s head in her hands, guides it into the sink, and massages her scalp, rinsing out excess brown dye. Francia closes her eyes. She and the stylist, Daniela Colucci, are old friends, both from El Salvador. Observing this peaceful scene, it’s hard to imagine the journey that brought them to this salon, in this city, in this country.

Francia, getting her hair washed by Daniela

El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world that’s not an active war zone, and for years, the country and surrounding region have suffered a refugee crisis of staggering scale and scope. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, gang violence, economic unrest, and government corruption drove a 658 percent increase in asylum applications from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras citizens between 2011 and 2016. The problem is particularly acute for Salvadorans, who submitted more than 17,000 asylum applications to North and Central American countries in the first six months of 2016—a 76 percent increase from the previous year.

According to activist Karla Avelar, of the El Salvador-based Association for Communicating and Training Trans Women (COMCAVIS Trans), El Salvador is a particularly dangerous place for transgender women like Daniela and Francia.

Averlar said her organization has documented more than 160 cases over the past two years where queer Salvadorans, most of whom were transgender, have been forced to seek asylum abroad. Contributing factors include “persecution by gangs and uniformed police officers”; “psychological, physical, sexual [abuse]”; and “extortion, murder attempts, or persecution,” she explained.

Hate crimes against El Salvador’s transgender community take place with remarkable impunity. COMCAVIS, which tracks LGBTQ hate crimes in the country, has recorded more than 600 such murders between 1993 and April 2016. A representative of Colectivo Alejandría, a Salvadoran trans advocacy group, told the Washington Blade that their organization records an average of 16 murders of transgender Salvadorans each month. Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring project counted 30 murders of trans and gender-diverse people in El Salvador from 2008 to 2016. If those numbers vary by a wide margin, it may be because these murders frequently go unreported, for fear of retaliation by the police or gangs, who are often the perpetrators.

“People say Tijuana is dangerous,” Francia said, “and I’m like, ‘You should see El Salvador.’”

In 2015, El Salvador took a step to protect the LGBTQ community by passing laws that would penalize hate crimes more heavily. But, as in many countries, transgender Salvadorans are left particularly vulnerable to violence by a dearth of opportunities for jobs and education. Though the country has taken steps to mitigate gender-based discrimination in recent years—it passed an Equality, Equity, and Eradication of Discrimination against Women law in 2011—gender nonconforming individuals are technically not protected under the law, because the state doesn’t consider transgender women to be women.

These economic disadvantages are compounded by legal obstacles. Salvadorans are rarely allowed to legally change their names, and typically are able to do so only if the new name corresponds with the gender on their identification documents. So the IDs of transgender people are often inaccurate, making it more difficult for them to “vote, study, and work,” according to a COMCAVIS study.

“We do not have access to academic training,” Avelar said. Though Francia went to high school, she ended up turning to the underground economy to make money.

In her early teens, Francia said, she was a sex worker. But according to Francia, sex work in El Salvador is often closely tied to gangs, and she said she was forced into the dangerous drug trade. Her sister eventually paid to put her through beauty school, and Francia became an in-demand stylist. But she still feared for her life, and said she received at least one death threat.

So in September 2016, Francia left El Salvador, along with her 23-year-old niece, Rosa Elena España, and Elena’s three-year-old daughter, Melissa Nicet Gaitan. Elena fled for her life as well: She had been in a relationship with Melissa’s father, a gang member who eventually threatened to kill her. The three traveled by bus to the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. They asked for temporary asylum immediately, but Francia said documentation took three months. She tried to work as a stylist in Chiapas, but said she was told that salons would “only hire women,” so she turned back to sex work to survive.

Rose Elena España and her daughter Melissa sit in the salon as Francia gets hair extensions put in.

Francia’s day off is a Wednesday; weekends at her own salon are so busy, she sometimes doesn’t have time to eat. She’s a hard worker, she said, so it suits her.

“The time goes so fast,” she exclaims.

Back at the salon in Tijuana, Francia holds a shiny pile of hair extensions in her hand, her fingernails life jacket orange. Elena sits in a chair by the front door, calmly watching Melissa careen around the room in tiny black ballet flats.

The process of applying hair extensions takes hours. At one point, Melissa clambers into her great-aunt’s lap to cuddle; Daniela, her focus on Francia’s head, is unfazed. Lazily, Francia braids Melissa’s ponytail and wraps it into a high bun. For a few moments, they form a stair-step chain of women, holding each other’s hair.

Daniela used to work as a stylist at a television station in El Salvador. Though she took hormones and identified as a woman, Daniela said the station made her dress like a man at work. She hasn’t been able to afford her hormones in Mexico, and said she’s researching options to get the treatments she needs.

Daniela Colucci, a trans woman who made the treacherous journey to Mexico from El Salvador. Dani identifies as a woman, but hasn't been able to afford to keep up her hormone treatments in Mexico.

Transgender women are an especially vulnerable population in Mexico (and, it’s worth mentioning, in the United States too). A July 2016 study in The Lancet found that nearly half of transgender people there used hormones without medical supervision. The country’s transgender community is also subject to frightening levels of violence; according to the most recent report of Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring project, Mexico trailed only Brazil in the incidence of transphobic crimes in Latin America between 2008 and 2016. (On a per capita basis, however, El Salvador had the region’s highest rate of anti-trans murders.)

And a 2016 human rights report by the Transgender Law Center and Cornell University Law School LGBT Clinic found that police and military officials do not adequately protect transgender women in the country, noting that these officials are, as in El Savaldor, “often the perpetrators of violence” themselves. Five out of sixteen Mexican women interviewed for a UN Refugee Agency study who had experienced police abuse were transgender.

Francia, Elena, and Melissa did try to leave. Francia has a sister in the US who told them to cross the border. In mid-January 2017, they came to Tijuana and, in search of a better life, asked for asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry. According to Gabriela Martinez, a journalist who accompanied them, they were immediately rejected by US Customs and Border Protection officers, who did not know they were asylees in Mexico and therefore would have no legal reason to reject an asylum claim. Such rejection of asylum seekers have appeared to increase this year in the wake of President Trump’s inauguration.

Because Francia, Elena, and Melissa technically already had asylum in Mexico, it’s not clear how far they would have gotten with their asylum process in the US. Instead, the family stayed in Tijuana and began to assemble their lives in Mexico.

They’re not alone in that decision: With fear of deportation driving a decrease in asylum seekers at the US border, thousands have chosen to stay in Mexico and build lives there instead. And though Tijuana has seen a recent uptick in overall violence, mostly drug-related, Francia said she feels safer here compared to the country she left behind.

“People say Tijuana is dangerous,” Francia said, “and I’m like, ‘You should see El Salvador.’”

On the Right, Rose Elena España sits with her daughter Melissa in her lap, finally asleep after hours of waiting in the beauty salon for her aunt Francia.

Over the course of the afternoon, the women chatter and gossip. They talk about how cops and gang members kill each other back home. They discuss how expensive it was to live in El Salvador, because Salvadoran prices are in US dollars. Francia said she used to spend $130 USD on groceries every week, but in Mexico, her grocery bill runs about 600 pesos, approximately $31 USD.

Elena offers everyone plates of Chinese food, and Daniela and the other salon employee take a break from Francia’s hair to eat. They huddle around Francia’s cell phone, flipping through photos and smiling. They’re looking at pictures of Salvadorian food. They say they miss pupusas, that the enchiladas are different here.

For now, Francia plans to stay in Mexico. Things are far from perfect, but despite the hardship she has faced, she seems genuinely content and happy there. She lives in a little house with Elena and Melissa and Daniela. She has friends and a social life. She can pay for groceries with a job she loves.

The sun drops in the sky. Daniela heats up a curling iron and goes to work on Francia’s long, new locks. Francia clasps a hand mirror and watches, holding her head carefully, the way people do when they look at themselves in mirrors.

“I came to Tijuana to start a new life,” she says. “I love it so much here, the life that I started.”

Follow Amanda Ottaway on Twitter. Follow Meghan Dhaliwal on Instagram.

Gabriela Martinez contributed reporting to this story.

The International Women’s Media Foundation supported Meghan Dhaliwal and Amanda Ottaway’s reporting from Tijuana as part of the Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative.

Dave Chappelle's third stand-up special of 2017 will drop on Netflix right in time for the New Year, the streaming service said Friday.

The December 31 release date was announced on Twitter in a Stranger Things–aping video, which also revealed the special's title: Dave Chappelle: Equanimity.

Chappelle's first two comedy specials for Netflix debuted back in March to mixed reviews. His jokes got some heat for seeming mean and lazy and offensive for all the wrong reasons, but the pair still managed to become the most-watched comedy specials on Netflix, so the hefty sum the company shelled out to Chappelle turned out to be worth it.

Also, the first two specials weren't actually new—they were shot in 2015 and 2016 but only released to the public this year. Equanimity, on the other hand, is all brand-new and shot specifically for Netflix, so it will be interesting to see how or if Chappelle will adjust to the controversy of the first two.

Give the Equanimity teaser—which drops Chappelle into a scene from the first season of Stranger Things—a watch above, and catch the whole thing on Netflix when it drops on December 31.

Welcome back to Can't Handle the Truth, our Saturday column looking at the past seven days of fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.

Republican Roy Moore is still a contender for a US Senate in Alabama despite a total of eight women accusing him of behavior that ranges from romantically pursuing them when they were teenagers to outright sexual assault. Members of Moore's own party, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have called on him to drop out of the race.

Moore maintains that the accusations are "fake news," and wrote an open letter to Fox News host and pro-Trump propagandist Sean Hannity in which he claims to have been "attacked by the Washington Post and other liberal media in a desperate attempt to smear my character and defeat my campaign." He accused his accusers of lying, and even claimed that what looked like his signature in an accuser's high school yearbook was the result of "tampering."

But lest we forget, something similar happened to the president. A month before his election, Donald Trump was revealed to have bragged into an open mic in 2005 that he grabbed women "by the pussy," and that he kissed them without permission. He was also accused of predatory behavior by more than a dozen women. Then he won. But though he maintains that all of his accusers are lying and though he has not yet joined the Republican outcry against Moore, he has responded to fresh accusations against Democratic Senator Al Franken—who posed for a photo of himself grabbing a sleeping woman's breasts, and is accused of kissing her without permission—by accusing him of even worse behavior on Twitter:

My point is, Moore still has a real shot. If he wins, it may be because enough Alabama voters were convinced by some of the shadier fake news items spread in the wake of these accusations. Most of these hoaxes were given a push by Moore's wife, who will post seemingly anything online if it seems to bolster her husband's tarnished reputation.

One of Roy Moore's accusers works for Michelle Obama

"Second Roy Moore Accuser Works For Michelle Obama Right NOW," the headline says, and gosh, I know some Facebook uncles who are eager to hit the share button on a story like that. Indeed, according to the counter on the site that published it, Lastlineofdefense.online, 20,000 people did share it online.

But hold the phone! This isn't real news, and we can be sure of that because according to a disclaimer at the bottom of every page, Lastlineofdefense.online is "satire." So those thousands of people who shared this fake post about a fake accuser working for the former first lady? Don't worry, they just enjoyed the article for its sidesplitting humor!

Reporters are bribing women into accusing Roy Moore

Roy Moore often connects two dots with regard to the Washington Post when he talks about the press:

1. The Post broke the initial story about statutory rape allegations against Moore, and
2. The Post editorial board has endorsed Moore's opponent, Doug Jones.

Of course, the story about Moore's accusers wasn't a piece of opinion journalism but a carefully reported documentation of what women were saying about the candidate. Nevertheless, Moore said of the Post shortly after the initial story, "I think they have a political agenda," and added that the public should expect "revelations about the motivation and the content of this article."

Then last weekend, a rumor circulated on the right-wing internet that someone was paying women to dish dirt on Moore.

A reporter was supposedly taped while offering a woman $1,000 to provide sexual allegations about Moore. The origin of this story was the Twitter account @umpire43—an account that has since been either temporarily or permanently shut down.

The Daily Beast dug through some of the other information @umpire43 has helpfully provided thanks to the many jobs the account's owner has claimed to have had: a Navy SEAL, a Reuters pollster, a State Department worker based in Calgary, a voter fraud expert, and an associate of Reince Preibus. The account frequently posted fake claims of expertise designed to discredit polls or prove the supposed validity of Trump's more outlandish statements, like the one about thousands of Muslims celebrating after 9/11 in New Jersey.

In short, the bribe story was sourced entirely from a Twitter account that just constantly posts lies.

A Jewish reporter is cold-calling Alabamans with bribe offers

Then, like a bolt from the blue around November 15, a robo-call claiming to be from the Washington Post started ringing phones in Alabama. Initially reported by a pastor named Al Moore (no relation), the calls to the homes of potential voters seem to be coming from a reporter named "Bernie Bernstein," a name that doesn't match the name of anyone on staff at the Post. "Bernstein" claims to be paying sources enormous sums of money for information that he "will not be fully investigating." Before hanging up, he gives the email address of someone named Al Bernstein instead of his own. Oh, and he has a Jewish name, and the exact speech pattern of my Jewish grandmother, so I think it's safe to say his name is meant to be spelled "(((Bernie Bernstein)))."

It remains a mystery who exactly is behind this robo-call, but it seems designed to discredit the Post and thus the story about the women. As ruses go, it's pretty obvious—but it seems clear that it's not necessarily for Moore and his allies to prove the allegations against him are false, they are just hoping to sow enough doubt so that his voters don't desert him.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

After 11 strange weeks, a mistrial was declared in the corruption case against New Jersey senator Robert Menendez on Thursday. The saga has been closely watched for its potential impact on the balance of the power in the US Senate—and the ability of prosecutors to convict politicians for any form of bribery less blatant than a briefcase of cash left on an office desk.

Menendez pleaded not guilty to bribery, conspiracy, and fraud after being accused of trading gifts and campaign donations offered by his friend, a Florida eye doctor named Salomon Melgen, for political favors in a scheme stretching over seven years. (Menendez also allegedly attempted to conceal some gifts from his financial disclosure forms.) But according to the defense, the gifts were a natural expression of their decades-long friendship, and Menendez’s lobbying on Melgen’s behalf stemmed from his genuine concern as an elected official—his advocacy just happened to benefit his pal.

It speaks to the bipartisan chicanery consuming Washington in the Trump era that Menendez was represented by Abbe Lowell, who is also a member of White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s legal team. And the mistrial suggested corrupt power-players have little to fear from the law in the age of Trump.

The Menendez case was specifically seen as a test of the stricter legal definition of bribery established by the the Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling on McDonnell vs. United States. According to the McDonnell opinion, public officials aren't breaking the law if they pick up the phone, make an introduction, or organize an event on behalf of a donor who plies them with gifts—they simply can't take an “official action,” using the power of their position directly and explicitly to make something happen.

When former NY State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver saw his corruption charges overturned this July, the court cited the McDonnell ruling, and this September, the corruption conviction of former NY State Senate majority leader Dean Skelos was vacated for the same reason. Federal prosecutors have moved to retry both cases, but the bar for proving corruption has, so far, proved insurmountable.

Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor in Illinois, suggested this new, narrower definition of bribery impacted the Menendez case, too.

“I think the McDonnell ruling and the subsequent reversals in New York have put a chill over prosecutors’ presentations and the jury instructions that are given,” he told me. “I don’t want to say the prosecution was arguing with one hand tied behind their backs, but it wasn’t as full-throated an argument as would be made pre-McDonnell.”

“It’s going to take one stupid politician to get himself or herself convicted from here,” Cramer added.

Jeff Hauser, executive director of the good-government Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the outcome of the Menendez case is best understood in the broader context of corruption in the Garden State and in White House. Hauser attributed Governor Chris Christie's low approval rating—recently pegged at 14 percent—to the Bridgegate lane closure scandal, which he described as “a crime that he very evidently committed in plain sight and was never charged for.”

Hauser continued, “You have a president who’s leading the most corrupt administration in American history, and you have the representatives of the federal government, which is controlled by Republicans, going after a Latino Democrat.” Christie was never indicted in the Bridgegate scandal and has repeatedly, loudly denied involvement, but two of his aides were convicted for their role in the scheme last year.

Hauser does not think Republicans are unfairly singling out Menendez, but did argue the jury’s unwillingness to convict reflects a trend of impunity for corruption. “In a context in which Christie never gets charged, and Trump never gets charged, I think people might have a hard time seeing this messiness as the sort of thing you go to jail for,” he told me.

Over almost nine weeks, jurors learned that Menendez liked to drink orange juice, cranberry juice, and Evian on the private plane trips; they learned about the luxury amenities at Casa de Campo, the exclusive Dominican resort where Melgen hosted the senator. (Melgen’s wife, Flor, maintained that Menendez did not take advantage of most of these amenities.) They learned that, in two instances, the timing of Melgen’s campaign donations corresponded with Menendez’s favors—in 2012, $60,000 in political donations came through the same day Menendez sent an email about a port security issue that would impact Melgen’s business interests, and later that year, Melgen made a $300,000 donation a week before Menendez met with then secretary of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius to argue his friend’s side in the Lucentis billing dispute.

Menendez and Melgen—who has since been convicted of Medicare fraud—did not dispute that most of these actions took place. But the evidence was circumstantial, and with a higher standard for bribery, jurors didn’t find the facts convincing enough for a conviction. "I just wish there was stronger evidence right out of the gate," said Edward Norris, a juror. "It was a victimless crime, I think, and it was an email trial. I just didn't see a smoking gun.”

Norris claimed that the jury was split ten to two, with ten jurors supporting acquittal—not exactly encouraging for the prospect of a re-trial.

“I think the real issue was proving corrupt intent beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who is currently a law professor at George Washington University. “That’s not strictly a McDonnell issue… This is more a general bribery issue. it’s always a challenge in a bribery case to prove the quid pro quo, to prove that what happened was because of the corrupt deal.”

The mistrial was an inglorious end to a trial with its share of frustrations and blunders. In a separate mistrial hearing on October 26, Menendez lawyer Abbe Lowell complained that Judge William Walls interrupted him too often, saying, “I feel sometimes I can’t even finish a sentence before you interrupt and say, ‘but go on. But I can’t go on, because you’ve interrupted the flow.” And on November 9, juror Evelyn Arroyo-Maultsby was dismissed to take a long-planned vacation and immediately told the press what had happened behind the closed doors of the deliberation room, correctly predicted a mistrial, and accused the feds of “trying to throw a good man under the bus.”

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Menendez issued this extremely New Jersey warning to his opponents: “To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat, I know who you are and I won't forget you.”

The outcome eliminated one nightmare scenario for Democrats: If Menendez had been convicted and compelled to leave office before January, Republican governor Chris Christie would have appointed his replacement—giving him a better note to end on than squabbling with voters in his posh Northern New Jersey town. Christie would have appointed a Republican, shifting the Senate balance in the GOP’s favor. But if the feds decide to retry Menendez, which they probably will, the second trial may overlap with the Senator’s 2018 reelection bid.

In keeping with their state’s long and colorful tradition of tolerance for imperfect leaders, New Jersey Democrats show no sign of breaking ranks to find a candidate less compromised by corruption scandals—a heavy lift in in the Garden State, but theoretically possible nonetheless.

"Should he decide to seek reelection, he will have my full support," governor-elect Phil Murphy, a Democrat who long worked at Goldman Sachs, said in a statement.

Follow Erin Schwartz on Twitter.

On Thursday, Democratic senator Al Franken was accused of forcibly kissing a woman and groping her while she slept, prompting calls for the high-profile lawmaker to step down. He's since asked for a congressional ethics investigation into his own conduct, and while his Democratic colleagues have backed the idea, they're still unsure of how to handle the revelations.

On Friday, Ohio Supreme Court justice Bill O'Neill demonstrated one surefire way not to tackle the issue. O'Neill, a Democrat who plans to run for governor in the state, took to Facebook "on behalf of all heterosexual males" to defend Franken by detailing a few of his own (ostensibly consensual) sexual escapades. The post reads like a hack—but as Cleveland.com reports, it's totally earnest.

Screengrab via Cleveland.com

Aside from being flat-out bizarre, O'Neill's post conflates professed consensual trysts with sexual assault. The "feeding frenzy" he mentions seems to allude to the flurry of stories recently released about men all throughout Hollywood, in politics, and beyond accused of sexual misconduct. What O'Neill describes, however, are just his sexual experiences with "50 very attractive females."

Another thing he suggests, intentionally or not, is tabling a discussion of sexual misconduct in favor of issues he's vocally pursued in the past, like "legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis."

In an interview with Cleveland.com, O'Neill confirmed he wrote the since-edited Facebook post, and added that he wasn't positive if he'd been intimate with exactly 50 women because, in his words, he "doesn't keep count." He also defended Alabama Republican Roy Moore, a Senate candidate several women have accused of sexual misconduct dating back to when they were teenagers.

"Roy Moore apparently seems to be a challenged individual when it comes to morality," O'Neill told Cleveland.com. "He's been convicted of nothing and he's never had the opportunity to defend himself and that violates due process in America. The media is about to determine the election of a United States Senate campaign."

Ohio lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for O'Neill's resignation, criticizing his post as "crass" and "terrible."

As of this writing, O'Neill's Facebook post is still up, and he's made no indication he'd resign—a decision that, if he ever made, would likely end with a final, declarative "peace."

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

A new bid to cripple Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act apparently has legs. It took shape in late October, when conservative members of Congress started pushing the idea of using the big tax bill as a vehicle to eliminate the ACA’s “individual mandate,” which puts a tax penalty on people who don’t purchase healthcare. Early this month, President Donald Trump started stumping for the idea as well. Far-right groups in the House even tried to muscle a mandate repeal provision into their version of the bill this Tuesday, before a Thursday vote. The bill that passed the House on Thursday didn’t end up touch the individual mandate. But the Senate’s latest version, released on Tuesday, included language that would wipe it out starting in 2019.

Congressional Republicans have repeatedly tried to slash the ACA, and failed—thanks, more often than not, to opposition from moderate GOP senators. Fear of another such failure in the Senate was reportedly a big part of why the House held back on axing the mandate in its own bill. It seems odd, then, that the Senate decided to include anti-ACA language the House shied away from. So why did they decide to go for it?

The most obvious answer is that they need the money. Republicans have been struggling to make their tax cuts seem friendlier to poor and middle-class Americans without having to scrap big breaks for the wealthy and corporations. But they’re bumping up against a self-imposed limit of adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that killing the mandate would save $338 billion over ten years. So conservatives sold the provision as a means of freeing up resources to use to bolster tax cuts for the middle class.

However those savings are a direct result of the fact that millions would drop out of the ACA marketplace without the incentive of the mandate’s fine. (The CBO estimates 13 million more people would not have health insurance by 2027 as a result of the mandate being wiped out). These dropouts would mostly be the young and healthy, who often don’t feel the impulse to buy insurance on their own. But losing them would presumably boost the costs for older and sicker people remaining in the ACA market’s pool, resulting in an estimated average 10 percent premium hike for people with individual marketplace plans.

Killing the mandate also psyches up some on the right who could have opposed the bill for other reasons, Joe Antos, a health policy wonk at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me. That’s the kid of chit-trading that usually moves big, divisive bills forward.

But “there are a whole bunch of other things you could change,” Antos pointed out, to make the tax legislation appealing to the right number of legislators. And many of them would have been less risky. As long as this provision is intact, it kills what was a very real hope that Republicans could attract red-state Democrat supporters. So why, of all the tweaks they could have made for cash or appeal, did they target the mandate?

“This whole issue is driven largely by the failure of the Senate this last year to do anything on repealing and replacing Obamacare,” said William Hoagland, a former Senate Budget Committee staff director and current analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “They’re looking at this not so much from the policy perspective as to being able to hold onto the majority in next year’s elections.”

Senators may not fear as much backlash or internal division about axing the mandate alone as it’s always been the least popular part of the ACA. Republicans also doubt, and have been working to discredit, the CBO’s numbers. So, Hoagland said, “the majority of them probably don’t see that it really will cause 13 million people to lose coverage.” They’ll likely try to sell America on that doubt, too.

Discrediting that 13 million figure could pose an issue for them, though, Hoagland pointed out, because “if they didn’t lose 13 million, they wouldn’t have $338 billion to spend on tax reform.” It remains to be seen whether the public will accept the GOP’s cognitive dissonance on this.

The choice to add the provision was, reportedly, not unanimous among Senate Republicans. But there’s been no real outcry against it, not even from folks who balked at coverage-dropping attacks on the ACA earlier this year. In fact, earlier this week Republican Senator John Thune claimed they’d done a whip count on the new version of the legislation and it was looking good.

This may stem from the fact that Senate Republican leaders reportedly struck a deal to final allowing compromise legislation that would stabilize the ACA’s individual markets temporarily to get a floor vote in exchange for putting the mandate provision in the tax bill. The reconciliation process that allows Republicans to pass this bill with a simple majority vote in the Senate also contained language mandating that it include provisions opening arctic preserves to oil drilling, something Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the Republican no votes on previous ACA attacks this year, backs. Hoagland suggests this may blunt some of her expected outcry. And Senator John McCain, another previous ACA repeal no vote, may be pacified by the fact that the bill is moving through regular order, his big ask.

Knowing the likely wouldn't face as much friction on this provision as on past ACA-related votes, Senate Republican leadership faced no major restrictions to at least testing this language out before they had to lock in the legislation's text.

Liberals are gearing up to bash the GOP for trying to nix the mandate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said Democrats won’t vote for the Alexander-Murray compromise legislation if it’s put on the table in exchange for cutting the mandate. But Republicans don’t seem to be afraid of that. As Hoagland pointed out, they can vote on this version of the tax bill before Schumer would have time to tank the Alexander-Murray compromise legislation. This might put pressure on Schumer to cave and take some vote protecting the ACA’s marketplaces, even if it plays right into Republican hands. “It’s all timing,” said Hoagland.

It remains to be seen whether the mandate repeal will remain in the bill. It may get taken out as negotiations advance in the Senate, or when the two chambers of Congress their bills in the reconciliation process. At any point it could be sacrificed to secure a vote or two endangered by a tweak to another priority.

“This is all very fluid,” said Antos. He doubts anything that’s in the bill now will definitely be in the final Senate bill, much less the bill that comes out of a compromise between the final House and Senate versions. “I’ll believe it more when the Senate takes it up seriously,” he added, “which is not going to be until after Thanksgiving.”

So the Senate’s decision to jam an attack on the mandate into its latest tax bill is a test balloon, floated in light of a new balance of wants and accommodations. There’s a good chance that it could actually pass delivering a win to the GOP and Trump at last.

But that balance is fragile. It could fall apart as any of the thousands of moving pieces in or surrounding the tax bill shift slightly. If the Senate does just drop this provision again, after reviving mass attention on the Republican healthcare agenda, that could read as another, if minor, failure for them. Floating this provision is a gamble. And, as Hoagland told me, “it’s terribly risky.”

Follow Mark Hay Twitter.

Reverend M. Barclay, who is ordained within the United Methodist Church, admits there’s not a lot of work out there for gender non-binary trans queer pastors. That’s why, after feeling a sense of professional dissatisfaction earlier this year, they sat down and asked themselves that all-important question: “What do I really want to do with my life?” (Honestly, same.)

The self-examination led Barclay to revisit a long-running dream they’d held with friend and fellow queer theologian Rev. Anna Blaedel, and they decided to launch Enfleshed earlier this month, a non-profit organization that helps faith leaders and parishioners make their practice queer-friendly. Offering everything from LGBTQ-friendly liturgy for weddings, funerals or retreats to individual consultation as one navigates the often murky holy waters of one's queerness and faith, Enfleshed aims to help bring churches and faith practices into the 21st century.

Barclay said they and Blaedel both shared frustrations with how Christian leaders were approaching topics like sex and race relations; the hope is that an organization like Enfleshed can help address the schism between a longstanding institution like Christianity and modern-day society. We spoke with Barclay about their own journey toward self-acceptance, the difficulties faced when preaching to queer people, and the future of LGBTQ ministry.

VICE: Why “Enfleshed?” It’s an incredibly loaded and powerful word, especially for a Catholic, like myself—I think of Communion, or the Body of Christ.
Reverend M. Barclay: The word means so much to us. For Anna and I, putting flesh onto our faith is not only obviously rooted in Christian tradition—God takes on flesh—but we would say that God is continuously doing that. And the places where there’s the most pain in the world, and the places that we, as a society, call perverse (like our sex lives), we think God is dwelling. And we’re committed to diving right into it. It makes what we’re doing particularly important to us.

Your group’s tagline is: “Bringing what matters back to the gospel for justice, liberation, and delight.” But what is it, exactly, that matters?
When people started following Christ, it was a movement for liberation, for wholeness. We certainly recognize that Jesus Christ was crucified by the state because of his radical commitment to the marginalized and all people. It’s really unfortunate just how difficult it is to see a commitment for that same set of values by churches today. We’re looking forward to re-centering that movement aspect; not just social justice, but our internal spiritual lives as well.

You’ve always been in tune with your spiritual life, correct?
I grew up extremely conservative and very fundamentalist in my faith. And I was really into that for a while. It wasn’t until I went to college that I was pushed in very important ways, and I had to rethink my faith. That propelled me into the seminary, and it wasn’t until my early twenties that I realized I was queer, and then came out as trans later. It was both perfect timing and the worst timing. But I feel very fortunate to have gone through my own coming out process while I was surrounded by feminist and queer theology. And, honestly, since then, it’s my faith that makes my commitment to being proud of my queer and trans identity really solid.

A vast majority of LGBTQ people shudder at the thought of religion, mostly because of past hurt from the Church. How difficult is it ministering to them?
It’s been the most difficult, in the sense that I have queer and trans folks reach out to me because they struggle to find a Christian community that either shares their beliefs or accepts them for who they are, or even integrates their identity into their Christian faith. It’s deeply angering and upsetting that this is still happening every day. The good part is that there are a lot more people that they can turn to these days. And it’s not impossible to find queer and trans pastors. In the last six or seven years, LGBTQ ministry has grown so fast; it’s wonderful. Just among Methodists, there are more than 150 out queer clergy members, and that’s considering we’re a discriminatory denomination! But given the massive size of Christianity and all of the different ways it’s being embodied, there’s still a lot of harm being done to people who want to live in their faith.

Watch VICE visit an LGBTQ church in Texas to find out why Houston doesn't have an equal rights protection ordinance:

What will Enfleshed do for those who do show interest in pursuing their spirituality?
One of our dreams is to be able to build a whole team of queer and trans pastors, especially of color, from different places who can speak to the ways people have been marginalized and how they, themselves, have found liberation in their own faith. As Enfleshed grows, we can have a whole team of people that will be able to offer meaningful pastoral care that’s well-rounded. I never had that growing up. We’re also making sure that traditional liturgies can be queer inclusive, and not patriarchal, by rewriting some and crafting new ones.

How are people reacting to Enfleshed and its mission?
We’ve gotten a lot of thank yous. I think people are really hungry for spirituality that matters, that speaks directly to their lives, and isn’t afraid to say the things that need to be said. There are so many people who are afraid of getting in trouble or that their radical politics are supposed to fall outside of their faith. People are finding our services meaningful.

What do you say to that skeptical parishioner, though?
I would encourage them and tell them that they’re not only tolerable and OK in the eyes of God, but that they’re to be celebrated for exactly who they are. Even if no one is around to tell them that, they’re surrounded by a queer ecclesia that is rooting for them deeply.

Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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