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How Do You Know if Your Neighbors Are Torturing Their Kids?

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Last Sunday, 13 siblings in Perris, California, were rescued from their parents’ house after a teenage girl escaped to call 911. When Riverside County sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home of David and Louise Turpin, they found their children shackled to beds, badly malnourished, and urgently in need of medical care.

The Turpin parents now face a host of charges including torture, child abuse, abuse of dependent adults, and false imprisonment; the father, David Turpin, also faces a charge of lewd act on a child by force. The couple were allegedly tormenting their children for years, possibly dating back to their time living in squalor in Texas. But at the time of their arrest, the parents weren’t holed up in some remote locale—the siblings lived in densely populated Southern California suburbia, surrounded by neighbors. Even so, thanks in part to many of the children being home-schooled, their conduct appears to have gone essentially undetected. That only makes this situation all the more disturbing. Of course, it also begs the question of what can be learned from such a harrowing episode, and how Americans might try to keep an eye out for red flags in their own communities without making things worse.

For some perspective—and some alternatives to calling abuse hotlines—we reached out to Dr. Ronald E. Brown, the president & CEO of the Children’s Bureau, a nonprofit based in Southern California that describes its mission as one to “protect vulnerable children through prevention, treatment, and advocacy.”

Here’s what we talked about.



VICE: What can individuals do in their own communities to help prevent something like this—or something on a smaller scale—from happening, or at least make it less likely?
Dr. Ronald E. Brown: California’s law for mandated reporters hit in the 80s, so firemen, nurses, doctors, teachers [are legally required to report suspected abuse]. But for the rest of us, we can engage with our neighbor if we suspect something, or we can call an anonymous hotline with the county and report what we saw. It’s the county’s job to send somebody out to check and verify these claims, or decide that they are unsubstantiated.

Here’s the conundrum: look at the family from Perris. Before Perris, they lived in Murrieta [also in California]. Before that it was Fort Worth [Texas]. Families that want to isolate, move when they feel there’s exposure—it’s hard to surface families like that.

What might help people get over their initial hesitation to intervene, especially if they aren't legally required to do so?
It’s unfortunate, but this situation in Perris might help people get over their hesitation. We say, “It’s their child, it’s their home, they’re the parent and they have full control of the child,” so we don’t intervene. But in actuality the skill sets for being a parent don’t just show up when you have a child. You don’t get a booklet or a DVD or a YouTube video about what it means to be a parent. You get nothing.

The reality is that [abuse] happens. We don’t always know why. So we can help parents understand what appropriate parenting is: What does it mean when you spank your child? What does it look like when you verbally abuse your child? How do we stand up for children as a community? These are tools we don’t get anywhere, so how do we instill those in our neighbours and create relationships so that families don’t isolate, like this family did? There’s got to be some community education, some platform for the community as a whole to educate our children. All children are vulnerable in all economic circumstances, as this situation proves.

What would that platform for community education look like?
It could take the form of educational programs on good parenting in the community; it could be as simple as putting PSAs on the news. Since 9/11, we’ve used the slogan, “If you see something, say something”—there’s a strong parallel there. We need a public education process on “saying something” about child abuse as well. We need education on universal parenting skills. In the state of California, we have tobacco tax funding for First5 programs, which educate [parents and teachers on how to best address the mental, emotional, and physical needs of children between zero to five years old]. We could use that as a platform for education, or maybe we can use the AMBER alert approach.

Aside from bruises and obvious signs of physical trauma, what kind of things should neighbors be looking out for?
The biggest problem in many cases isn’t the physical abuse, it’s the neglect. Neglect is actually much more pervasive, because that’s more obvious and it’s harder to hide. This might mean children aren’t going to the doctor, haven’t had dental care, or are malnourished. If you see a child and think, Gee, they’re looking a little thin, did they get breakfast in the morning? Do they look like they slept? How does a child respond to you when you say "hello"—do they look down at the ground? Do they shy away? Of course, that might just be their nature, particularly if you’re a stranger, but if you know them, you have to look at changes in their behaviour.

Social service agencies are traditionally and famously overburdened. Are there other avenues people can take to protect kids?
Yes. My work focuses on primary prevention—that is, how to prevent these things from happening in the first place. We don’t have anything for that right now in our society. Up until 20 years ago, our whole system for engaging with children began in kindergarten, and now there’s emphasis on preschool, which starts around age three. But we know that [at least] 70 percent of a child’s brain is developed by the time they’re three, so we’re missing all the formative years. Part of parents’ frustration that may cause them to engage in neglect or abuse is their lack of understanding of child development, the educational processes they need to expose their child to, and a child’s need for bonding in the very earliest moment of those first three years.

I firmly believe that every parent wants the best for child. At least, they start out that way. It might change when they get caught up in their day-to-day, they’re frustrated, they have financial difficulties, or if they have post-partum depression. We need to create a platform for parents to be successful in the first three years and to set a tone of engagement and embracing their child.

What exactly would that platform look like?
Again, it’s really about building parent education and building social support in communities that tend to be isolated. We work in communities where there tend to be a lot of families living together but they don’t know their next-door neighbour. How do we create an environment where parents have an outlet to share their everyday woes, connect, build mutual support in the community? We really want to change community outcomes, not just family outcomes, but we have to do it at the family level. We have to tap into that passion they have for their child when it’s born, and give them the information and skills they need right at the beginning.

How do you connect with families who might need that information?
Primarily we’ve been doing it through word of mouth. Our goal is to get community to help community. We train a group of families, and then the families who have embraced it, we ask them if they want to take it out in the community. So they go give these trainings in parks, in libraries, churches, synagogues, homes, schools. We’re trying to create a groundswell because our resources are limited, but if we give the skills to community members to help themselves, it could be potentially limitless.

And how do California’s social services compare to the rest of the country’s?
I think we’re doing an adequate job. The problem is, we’re just doing an adequate job. But few people are thinking about true prevention, before things happen. So there’s gigantic investment in systems that help kids that have been abused—that’s what the foster care system is. It’s hard to say that you’ve prevented something, it’s hard to quantify that, although there is [research] that claims that for every dollar spent on prevention [and early-childhood development], it’s [many more] saved.

Do you foresee a cultural change in social service agencies toward a focus on prevention, rather than treatment after the fact?
Well, I can dream, can’t I? I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t believe it could happen. I don’t know that it will happen, but I’m going to give it everything I’ve got to make it happen. Children’s lives depend on it.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Follow Lauren Lee White on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.


Trump Is Pissed His Commerce Secretary Is Sleeping on the Job, Report Says

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Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is the latest member of Trump's Cabinet to make headlines for winding up on the president's bad side, according to a new report from Axios. One reason the old pals have had a falling out? Apparently Ross can't manage to stay awake in meetings.

Unnamed aides on the Hill told Axios the 80-year-old tends to nod off in the sit-downs pretty regularly, a habit the president can't stand. According to one former administration official, "Wilbur is good until about 11 AM"—which, apparently, is right around the time Trump actually starts working.

His rumored low energy performance was even caught on camera back in May, when the commerce secretary appeared to be taking a power nap during his boss's address in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has reportedly been ticked off at Ross since about halfway through 2017, when the president tore him apart for botching his trade deals with China—negotiations the former Wall Street tycoon had taken the lead on.

"These trade deals, they're terrible," Trump reportedly said to Ross in a meeting. "Your understanding of trade is terrible. Your deals are no good. No good."

The White House has denied the beef, but Trump's reported roasting of Ross doesn't seem too surprising, considering he reportedly once ordered his former chief of staff Reince Priebus to off an annoying fly during a meeting. Now it looks like Priebus's replacement might be on the outs, following a Vanity Fair report that Ivanka is on the hunt for someone to take John Kelly's job.

It doesn't seem like anyone in the White House is safe from Trump's, uh, fire and fury. Rex Tillerson was rumored to be on his way out after the secretary of state allegedly called Trump a "fucking moron," and Trump has publicly shamed Attorney General Jeff Sessions so many times it's a wonder he's still around.

Ross is apparently hoping to save himself from going the way of Steve Bannon, the Mooch, Omarosa, Sean Spicer, and a whole lot of other folks who found themselves up against a guy who made a career out of firing people on TV.

"Wilbur’s been sucking up for months, trying to get back in the president’s good graces,” a source told Axios.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Guys Tell Us What They Think About to Not Cum

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Premature jizzing is common. In fact, here in Australia, untimely jizz affects 31 percent of biological males—which is a lot, really, and explains why many of us have a cooling-off strategy.

So what do guys think about when the sex gets too much and it's only been 12 seconds? Well, lots of stuff—as we discovered by asking dudes around Melbourne.

Lukey, 34
Runs a club and books bands

VICE: Hey Lukey, when you’re having sex and trying to calm down, what do you think about?
Lukey: Concrete. Thinking about concrete is one of these things I’ve always had. When you think about something neutral and non-sexual, it helps. So, I just think about concrete.

How effective is thinking about concrete?
It all really comes with experience more than anything. Being bisexual myself, when I started doing stuff with women at a young age, that was really prominent. But when I was older and started doing stuff with men, it was prominent as well but over time, it relaxed off a bit. Experience is the main thing. If I’m still thinking about concrete when I’m 50, then I’ll be devo.

So you don’t find concrete sexy.
No. Hell no.

Is there anything else natural that you think about if concrete isn’t working? Rocks? Trees?
Landscapes maybe? Like a really average landscape painting. I grew up in Port Macquarie so it was always seascape paintings. I remember going past the picture frames shop and it was just all beachscapes. Why the fuck would you paint a picture of the beach when you live by the beach?

Michael, 30
Works as a builder

Michael. When you’re having sex and you’re feeling like you’re about to cum too early, what do you do?
I just stop, hold it in inside, and tell them to stop moving.

Do you ever get uncomfortable asking your partner to stop moving?
My partner I’m with now is my wife so it’s fine. When you’re in a relationship with someone who’s either your wife or a long time partner, and you have that connection with someone, it’s easier to communicate.

What about the times you had sex before you were married?
In the past with say, a one night stand, I’ve lied. If I had a condom on and couldn’t stop myself I'd just cum. This one time in the past, I came really fast and then went “ahh we shouldn’t be doing this” and pretended I hadn't.

Did you have a thought process to calm yourself down?
Nah I didn’t. I’ve never really had any thoughts about my grandmother or something, because I don’t think that works.

Why do you think that?
It’s not that simple. You know the saying that you guys think with their penis? Well, sometimes your penis has a mind of its own. Even if you think of something, your penis can have a completely different thought. If you give your penis stimulation and sensation while you’re trying to have a thought, it doesn’t work because of the physical sensation.

Clay, 39
Works as a barber

Hey Clay, what do you do to calm yourself down?
It’s a communication thing for me and focussing on my partner’s needs. Other times it’s just simply slowing it down, doing something a little different or trying to change it up a bit to relax. Just taking it easy.

Okay so how do you communicate that to your partner? Do you say, “Woah slow down I’m about to cum”?
[Laughs] I’ll say “Let’s hold up a minute” or it can be communication in the sense of how our bodies connect. I’ll change the way we’re moving, or I’ll concentrate on her, rather than me. That way you can have a moment to have a breather.

So it’s really just mindfulness?
Yeah, I feel you should actually think more about what’s happening rather than less. When I think of needing a thought to calm down, it reminds me of, you know, American frat boys thinking of their grandmas naked, or some other ridiculous thing.

Is there a reason why you never needed a thought?
It just wasn’t something I really dealt with or needed when I was younger. Most of the sex I’ve had has been with a partner, or someone I’ve known so it’s been easier to have that communication. And the more sex you have with the same person, you know their body and how they react and what works so it’s comfortable.

Amre, 26
Studies English

When you’re having sex and trying not to cum, what do you do?
For me, I try to think about really bad things.

What kind of bad things are we talking about?
It can be anything that’s bad. One I think about for example is that I imagine that the girl I’m with is shitting.

You know, some people might be into that. You don't think poo is sexy?
I’m not too sure how I feel about it. I suppose, yeah, a girl shitting could be seen as sexy. But not to me. I mean, she's shitting!

Moudy, 25
Student/traveller

When you’re having sex, what calms you down?
For me, I try to think about bad experiences with girls. That makes me not want to cum.

What are those bad experiences?
One I tend to think about a lot is one time, when I was having sex and my condom broke. That was pretty bad. Another example is thinking about having sex with a girl who isn’t into it. That tends to make me not want to cum.

How effective are those thoughts in making you not cum?
Pretty good. Like, really good.

Follow Sam on Twitter

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

A Eulogy for Spike TV and Its Godawful Internal Manifesto

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Nearly 15 years ago, in April 2003, media conglomerate Viacom announced that its country music channel, the Nashville Network, would be rebranding as Spike TV, “the first network for men.” While, obviously, men had been in no short supply of TV channels catering to their tastes, Spike would be the first to actively celebrate the baser elements that come with a Y chromosome. Perfectly exemplifying the dumb machismo and unwarranted confidence that was ubiquitous in the Bush era, the network spent the next few years courting the “boobs, sports, and barbecue” type of man who we’d today find too insipid to even put in a beer commercial.

Though its schedule was padded with Star Trek reruns and TV-edited James Bond films, the network churned out a surprising amount of original programming in its early era. While some of that content was craven nostalgia-bait (Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon") or puerile quasi-smut (Stripperella), a few diamonds were sprinkled into the rough. Take, for example, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, where the conceit of dubbing comedic commentary over a retro Japanese obstacle course show was genius enough for most people to ignore some of its more problematic jokes. Then there’s the ahead-of-its-time blend of reality TV and satire to which Nathan Fielder owes an enormous debt, The Joe Schmoe Show, which had a regular dude cluelessly compete against paid actors in what he thought was a reality contest.

The network fiddled with the formula and focused its targeting over the next decade, dropping the “TV” from its name and trying out new logos in 2006 and 2015. Though Spike continued to experiment with original programming throughout the years, most viewers likely regarded Spike as that channel with 24/7 MMA fights by the end of its run. In early 2017, Viacom announced plans to take the aging channel to the woodshed and start fresh in 2018 with a top-to-bottom rebrand as the Paramount Network.

Finally succumbing to its long battle with relevancy, Spike TV passed away on January 17, 2018, its death rattle taking the form of a (presumably fake) Twitter meltdown.

While it’s unlikely any tears will be shed over the dissolution of a brand that really has no place in the flourishing #MeToo era, for better or worse, Spike played somewhat of a role in shaping our collective culture. And those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. So, let us properly send off the network dedicated to toxic masculinity by taking a peek at this internal manifesto passed out to staff after the 2006 rebranding.


All photos by the author


Lent to VICE by Jordan VanDina, who recently revealed this existence of this artifact on Twitter.


The opening of the "manifesto" describes the brand's personality as "loyal, reliable, confident, funny, action-oriented, unapologetic, testosterone-driven, non-preaching, celebratory, unpretentious, no bullshit."

Unable to formulate meaningful, committed relationships? Fucking your way through the loneliness? Spike feels you, broseph.

The biggest takeaway here is how far vampires have drifted away from any kind of association with "action."

The first of five "Spike Promises" is a strong rebuke to the entirety of human history where women got everything. Time for men to stand up and claim their fair share.

Speaking of women, isn't it annoying how they always be, like, caring about stuff? Stuff that doesn't even have touchdowns or boobs or guitar solos!

Spike's got your back, even when the "PC police" show up to harsh your buzz. Hey, officer. If she didn't want us to secretly snap that slammin' keister, maybe she shouldn't have worn a bikini to the pool, k? AM I BEING DETAINED??

Imagine how much better the world would be if PC-ing someone to death was actually possible.

Truly the apex of bravery in media. Je suis Spike.

Consider this a friendly reminder to go back and delete all of your early Facebook profile photos.

Burnt out from job hunting and getting no interviews? Have you considered adding "proficient in throwing and catching babies" to the old résumé?

Partners: "Cool. So... just play the commercial after each episode of Manswers, as per the contract, please."

Today, in a world run by beta soyboys, true alphas like Spike and this dollar store Jeremy Piven are in short supply. Adieu, Spike. May flights of Victoria's Secret angels sing thee to thy rest.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

Decoding the Strange Mysteries of 'Phantom Thread'

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By the time Daniel Day-Lewis finished shooting Phantom Thread, a funny feeling had come over him. “Before making the film, I didn’t know I was going to stop acting,” he told W Magazine. “I do know that Paul [Thomas Anderson] and I laughed a lot before we made the movie. And then we stopped laughing because we were both overwhelmed by a sense of sadness.” He hasn’t even seen the final cut of the film: “It was hard to live with. And still is.”

Given the amount of work he put into his role, one would think he’d want to share in Phantom Thread’s near-universal acclaim: As part of his preparation for the role of Reynolds Woodcock (the character of which he named himself), Day-Lewis learned to cut and sew a Balenciaga dress as part of an apprenticeship to the New York City Ballet’s costume designer. A film is usually a collaboration between a director and his crew, but for Phantom Thread Day-Lewis figuratively drew the carriage while Thomas Anderson eased the reins.

But weeks after announcing his retirement, Day-Lewis was in a painful motorcycle accident that nearly cost him his arm. He made an early exit at Phantom Thread’s NYC premiere, and at the Golden Globes he hovered like a sad-smiling shadow. Anyone who’s seen the film recognized the look drawn over his face: At its heart, Woodcock’s story is a fairy tale about the power of love warming even the most shriveled of hearts—a complicated hero wrestling with and besting the curse that bestows him with genius and existential dread. Given the toll some roles have taken on the actors who have performed them, it’s not entirely unfair to ask if the curse hovering over Phantom Thread’s plot came over the actor himself.

A note on curses—whether you believe they are mystical truths, self-fulfilling prophecies, or dogshit. My extremely fundamental definition comes from Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, which states that a curse is as such: “an unfair theft of strength. Whatever is attempted in the way of improving your position brings back less than the effort exerted.” Can’t succeed even when your aim is true? There might be a curse on you.

What is the curse, and where did it come from? The film’s first few minutes shows Woodcock after the successful debut of a new dress—but all he can talk about is the presence of death, looming over him. At his sister’s request, he takes a journey to his house in the country where he encounters Alma, the waitress who will become his model, muse, and eventually the mother of his child (that is, if we can trust the film’s final few moments, but more on that later). Throughout their honest attempts at courtship, they’re constantly thwarted by his thanatic restlessness; in the canvas of a wedding dress for a foreign princess, he sews the words “Never Cursed,” a blessing for her good fortune—and a longing after his own.

This angst is visible in Day-Lewis’s expressive features, so that when he and Alma first lock eyes, it’s as if the sudden psychic shift in the weight of his heavy heart moves the room, causing her to stumble. From the simple directions given in Anderson’s screenplay (“He looks at her. She looks at him.”), we know not whether the stagger—an exclamation point mark in a film of flowing gestures and punctilious edits—was staged, improvised, or accidental until we witness the breaking of what we might call the film’s sixth wall: The appearance of Woodcock’s mother’s ghost in a wide, static shot of his bedroom clues us into the fact that there’s indeed another plane of existence in Woodcock’s world—a land of the dead superimposed over that of the living, one that’s been having its way with him.

To any Paul Thomas Anderson fan, a ghost story might sound like unusual territory for the resolutely earthbound director, whose closest previous flirtation with the supernatural came in the form of Magnolia’s infamous storm of frogs. But taboos and superstitions are all too common in the world of the real-world fashion designers who inspired the character of Reynolds Woodcock. “I do think fashion people are naturally superstitious and definitely very spiritual, much more so than any other industry,” Kristin Knox, author of Alexander McQueen: Genius of a Generation, told the New York Post in 2011.

Beyond McQueen—who’s rumored to have secretly sewed the words “I am a cunt” into the canvas of a coat made for Prince—there’s also Christian Dior, who had perhaps the most notorious superstitions in fashion and whose real-world death took place only two years after the events contained within Phantom Thread. There’s Charles James, the openly gay British courtier whose last words to paramedics included one of the best humblebrags of all time: “I am what is popularly regarded as the greatest couturier in the Western world,” he told paramedics, before dying relatively friendless and six months behind on rent; the French designer Paul Poiret once said to James, “I pass you my crown. Wear it well,” dying penniless a few years later.

Andy Warhol—whose documented frailty mirrors that of Woodcock at his most vulnerable—had a curious relationship with death; an emotional turn that has been said to be the impetus behind the birth of Pop Art as a form, he “gave up caring” after the sudden passing of a beloved cat he and his mother cared for early on in his career.

“To hear him tell it, the death-by-surgery of a female cat spayed him of tender feelings,” according to Andy Warhol: A Biography author Wayne Koestenbaum—but it also gave Warhol the ability to imagine “an afterlife in which Julia Warhol and their beloved kitties survive.” And Julia Warhol’s death was also a major traumatic event for the artist, to the point where he neither attended her funeral nor even admitted it took place. (He later told companions that his mother had simply gone shopping.) Warhol himself would later pass due to complications related to a botched operation.

These artisans who made an indelible mark on fashion each shared a canny connection to the afterlife—a relationship all creators share with the work that lives on long after they do. Perhaps this is the true fiber woven into Phantom Thread: an invisible line that stretches from our ancestors to our children’s children—a deeply Anderson-ian conceit—that goes beyond the constraints of the corporeal. “Sometimes I jump ahead in our life together and I see a time, near the end... I can predict the future... and everything is settled,” Alma says after the film’s theoretical curse has been broken, and the narrative timeline is broken. “I finally understand you—and I care for your dresses, keeping them from dust and ghosts and time.”

In conjuring Reynolds Woodcock, it’s possible that Daniel Day-Lewis grasped a strand from the tapestry of touches and tastes that makes Phantom Thread transcendent, affixing it to his own theoretical suit. In “Powers of Horror, an Essay on Abjection,” philosopher Julia Kristeva writes, “In psychoanalysis as in anthropology one commonly links the sacred and the establishment of the religious bond that it presupposes with sacrifice.” One doesn’t need to believe in superstition to witness the impact it can have on others—so what if Day-Lewis quit acting because he believed that pushing himself any further into character would have cost him his own life?

Anything could’ve ultimately led to Day-Lewis’s decision to retire from acting; on a practical level, it could be that both the acting world and the real world have lost their sparkle; it could be that the burden of negativity that comes with rejecting what comes naturally is weighing particularly heavy at this point in his journey; or it could just be dogshit, as Anderson himself hopes. But by quitting acting, Day-Lewis is challenging his mortality—his curse—by charting a quest to find meaning beyond life after death. If he does find it, we should all hope he’s as willing to share the secret as he was with his own soul in Phantom Thread.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

She Was the Last Woman Executed In Canada. She May Have Been Innocent

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The plane was late. Canadian Pacific Flight 108, originating in Montreal, was delayed only by a few minutes before it took off from L’Ancienne-Lorette airport outside Quebec City en route to Baie Comeau. But the bomb that had been placed on board had been perfectly timed, so when it detonated shortly before 11 AM on the morning of September 9, 1949, the DC-3, with its 19 passengers and four crew, slammed into the bluffs overlooking the St. Lawrence River at Sault-au-Cochon northeast of the provincial capital, killing all on board. According to the bombers’ plan, the explosive device was supposed to go off when the plane was over water. That would have made proof that it had been brought down impossible to find, and clear the architect of the mass murder of any wrongdoing.

If everything went according to plan, newly widowed Albert Guay, then only two weeks shy of his 31st birthday, would have been free to marry his teenage mistress. Instead, he, along with an employee at his jeweller-watch repair business and the employee’s sister, were hanged at Montreal’s Bordeaux prison. The sister, an eccentric named Marguerite Pitre, would go to the scaffold denying any prior knowledge of the crime.

When Pitre was hanged on January 9, 1953, she would make history as the last woman to be executed in Canada. But, decades later, the evidence that condemned her is hardly ironclad. In fact, it is certainly possible that her version of events was true: that she was duped by an evil man into playing an unwitting part in a mass murder.

The story of CP Flight 108 is little known among most Canadians now, but at the time it was a bona fide sensation. It generated international headlines, inspired a movie by one of Quebec’s greatest directors and remained Canada’s worst air passenger crime until the Air India Flight 182 bombing killed 329 people in 1985.

While Marguerite Pitre’s guilt remains questionable nearly 70 years later, there is little to no doubt that Albert Guay was responsible for the murder of 23 men, women and children. Born in September 1918, the youngest of five children and supposedly doted on and spoiled by his mother, Guay would grow into a horrible person: violent, abusive, serially unfaithful, self-absorbed, and entitled.

During the Second World War, Guay worked at the Saint Malo arsenal in Quebec City. Still in his early 20s, he met Rita Morel, whom he would marry in 1940. In his 1974 book Causes célèbres du Québec, the late Quebec judge Dollard Dansereau describes Morel as “plump, rather small, with large eyes, a sensual mouth, pretty teeth and a thick dark mane of hair.” Guay “was of medium stature, rather slim; his face was oval-shaped and pleasant, his manners polite… Also, he owned his own car, a luxury during wartime.”

According to their neighbour Roger Lemelin, a journalist and novelist who covered the subsequent trial for Time Magazine, they were in the early days of their marriage a happy couple. They were affectionate in public and called each other pet names. After the war, Guay opened a jewellery store in Quebec City. He sidelined in watch repair, despite knowing little about the actual mechanics of timepieces. He hired Généreux Ruest, a man disabled by osseous tuberculosis but whom he would later describe as a “wizard with his hands,” to do the technical work while Guay worked the business end.

The marriage cooled with the birth of the couple’s first and only child, Lemelin would write. There were fights and infidelities and reconciliations, but the warmth had gone. And despite the unhappiness on both sides, divorce was out of the question, thanks to the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church.

Albert Guay and his wife Rita Morel. Image via Canadian Press

In the spring of 1947, Guay fell in love with Marie-Ange Robitaille. She was 17, he was 29. He met her while courting another young woman then boarding at her parents’ house, and they began seeing each other soon afterwards. They lied to her parents from the outset, with Guay going by a false name and telling them he was still a bachelor.

Their affair carried on for about 18 months, until, in November 1948, Rita Morel, well aware of her husband’s philandering, confronted the Robitaille parents. Mortified, they kicked their daughter out of their house. Luckily for her, her lover had a room lined up: Marie-Ange became a boarder in the home of Marguerite Pitre, the sister of his watch repairman Généreux Ruest, where she lived with her husband and two children.

Guay’s domineering and controlling side exerted itself over Marie-Ange and her new home. She became a virtual prisoner at the Pitre house. He forbade her from travelling or moving back in with her parents, threatened her repeatedly, once vowing to kill them both with a revolver—for which he was arrested—and slapped her on at least one occasion.

But despite the tempestuous nature of the relationship and Guay’s violent outbursts, the affair continued into 1949. In the spring, Guay and Robitaille left Quebec City for Sept Iles, about 650 kilometres downriver. It was around that time, it emerged at trial, that Guay decided his wife had to die.

The couple stayed in the small industrial town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence for several months, but by mid-summer they decided to return to the provincial capital—he to his wife, she to her parents. But, he told her in a letter, he would soon be free of Rita Morel.

It was obvious to Guay that his wife had to die if he wanted to continue his affair with Marie-Ange. He couldn’t divorce Rita Morel, thanks to the Church, but he could kill her. But how to do it, and, more importantly, get away with it?

He asked an acquaintance to poison her, but was turned down. (That would-be assassin didn’t bother alerting police at the time.) Eventually, he decided on a bomb. If a bomb detonated on board an airplane at the right time, he figured, the wreckage would be would be unrecoverable. No wreckage, no evidence; no evidence, no charges against a suddenly unencumbered widower flush with insurance money and eyes on a young woman not yet out of her teens. The lives of the other passengers and crew on board were barely considered.

Guay turned to his own in-house wizard, Généreux Ruest, to build the lethal device. The 50-year-old watch repairman would tell the courts that Guay approached him in August 1949, a few weeks before the crime, for help dynamiting rocks on property he owned in Sept Iles. Ruest agreed, and also agreed to build a timer for the dynamite. He didn’t say or speculate why a precision time-bomb was needed to clear rocks.

Guay got Ruest’s sister Marguerite Pitre to buy ten pounds worth of dynamite. She signed for it using a fictitious name, and would also be tasked with bringing the bomb to the airport on the fateful morning of the flight to Baie Comeau. She cooperated largely because she owed him $600 (roughly $6,000 today), and asked no questions. Once she delivered the package, she testified, the debt would be cleared. That was the arrangement.

According to court testimony, Guay convinced Rita to fly to Baie Comeau to pick up some items related to his work: jewellery and watches left behind during his months-long sojourn on Quebec’s north shore with Marie-Ange that summer. The couple met that morning at Quebec’s landmark Chateau Frontenac, where three days earlier Guay had purchased a Quebec City-to-Baie Comeau return air trip in his wife’s name and a $10,000 life insurance policy on her, naming him as the beneficiary. A witness testified that on the morning of the flight, Morel appeared reluctant to fly without her husband. The couple argued, and Morel relented. She went on to the airport alone.

Pitre meanwhile delivered the package to L’Ancienne-Lorette airport. But Marguerite was not a character easily forgettable by those who met her, especially that morning. She’d always been an oddball: she was heavy-set, loud and, according to Dansereau, “of mediocre intelligence.” She was also in the habit of dressing all in black, so much so that her neighbours in the St-Roch neighbourhood of Quebec City gave her the nickname of “Madame Le Corbeau” (“Mrs. Raven”).

Shortly before 11 AM, she rushed to the Canadian Pacific counter, arriving out of breath and demanding the package be placed on board the Flight 108. She would tell the court that she believed that Guay was sending a statue to a Mr. Plouffe who lived in Baie Comeau. The investigation would reveal that the address was a fake and there never was a Mr. Plouffe.

The plane took off just a few minutes behind schedule, with its four crew and 19 passengers, including three children: two babies and a five-year-old boy. Above the municipality of Sault-au-Cochon, witnesses say they first saw white smoke coming from the plane and then heard an explosion. They watched in horror as it plummeted out of the sky and then slammed into the escarpment on Cap Tourmente northeast of Quebec City.

Speaking to a reporter from the Montreal Gazette, CN railway section man Oscar Tremblay said, “It was the most awful scene I have ever come across… They all died outright. There were arms and legs and even heads torn from the bodies. There were mangled bodies of little children. The front of the plane seemed to be in one piece and it was jammed with broken and twisted bodies as if they had been thrown forward in the crash.”

But the plane didn’t explode or burn, and it didn’t take forensics experts long to determine that a bomb in the front left storage compartment caused the crash. Nor was it long for word to get out via the newspapers that investigators were looking for a “mystery woman” who had the package placed on board the doomed plane.

Guay was not one to let things take their course calmly. According to her testimony at his trial, on the morning of September 19, ten days after the explosion, he barged into Pitre’s home and told her the truth: the package she delivered contained the bomb. She protested her innocence and ignorance to him, but he was relentless: the best thing for her—for all of them—would be for her to commit suicide and leave a note saying she tried to kill him over the $600 she and her husband owed him.

Guay was arrested on Friday, September 23. Around the same time, Pitre swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and would have died had police interrogators not found her near death in her home. It was during her recovery that she agreed to tell police everything she knew.

In the months following Guay’s arrest, Pitre turned briefly into a weird minor celebrity. Crowds formed outside her building. A cop told a reporter at the time, “People were there like it was a baseball game, pushing, hedging to get a better look at the house and maybe of Mme. Pitre.” She even began charging photographers who wanted to take pictures of her.

Albert Guay in custody shortly after his arrest. Image via Canadian Press

Guay’s trial began in February 1950. Of the 150 witnesses who were expected to testify, Pitre was among the most important. She stuck to her story, that she believed she was doing Guay a favour in return for expunging a debt, and denied any knowledge that the package she delivered at the airport was anything other than a statue. The Crown prosecutor, wrote a Canadian Press correspondent, “questioned Mrs. Pitre in a loud voice, and Mrs. Pitre shot back in a voice just as loud.”

With Pitre’s testimony, along with Robitaille’s, the forensic evidence and the insurance windfall all stacked against Guay, it took the jury all of 17 minutes to return a guilty verdict. Judge Albert Sevigny, wrote the CP reporter, “wept” and called Guay’s crimes “diabolical,” and sentenced him to hang on June 23.

But Guay wasn’t going to go down alone.

Généreux Ruest, the bomb-maker, was arrested on June 6, 1950. Police and the Crown doubted his story about building bombs to clear rocks, especially since Guay was spotted at his home on the evening of September 8 and the morning of September 9, asking about the package and testing the timing mechanism.

Guay’s execution was delayed so he could testify at Ruest’s trial in November 1950, but his cooperation didn’t save him. He was hanged at Bordeaux prison on January 12, 1951. The 32-year-old’s last words are said to have been, “Well, at least I die famous.”

His erstwhile employee was also sentenced to death, thanks at least in part to his testimony. It emerged during his trial that he knew the bomb’s target was Rita Morel and that it would go off while en route to Sept Iles. Though he never admitted to knowingly participating in the plot, he was found guilty on multiple murder charges. Due to his osseous tuberculosis, Ruest was transported to the gallows in a wheelchair, and was hanged on July 25, 1952. He was 54 years old.

Guay didn’t testify at Pitre’s trial, though. She was arrested on June 14, 1950, at her brother’s preliminary hearing, initially on charges of intimidating a witness. “She sobbed and shrieked loudly as she was taken by two burly Provincial Police officers from a corridor near the courtroom and carried to the cells,” according to the Montreal Gazette.

But the case against Pitre was always thin, and Dansereau, the judge and author, was skeptical of her guilt. He describes her as somewhat dim, a “busybody who took pleasure in being of service to others.” He was also doubtful that Guay would have confided his true intentions to a known blabbermouth like Pitre. But it made no matter: on January 9, 1953, Marguerite Pitre was hanged at Montreal’s Bordeaux prison, becoming the last woman to be executed in Canada.

A last known photo of Marguerite Pitre before her execution. Image courtesy Kristian Gravenor

Almost 70 years later, with Air India and 9/11 defining the new perils of air travel, the CP Flight 108 tragedy is barely remembered. It was however very loosely adapted into a film. Denys Arcand’s Le Crime d’Ovide Plouffe (1984) starred his brother Gabriel Arcand as the titular character in the Albert Guay role. But Ovide Plouffe is a very different man. He’s portrayed as a tormented cuckold who falls into the arms of a beautiful French-from-France waitress after learning of his wife’s infidelity. The bomb plot is conjured up by the Généreux Ruest character, who in the film is spurned by Plouffe’s wife. Marguerite Pitre doesn’t feature in it all. A writer named Richard Donovan also based a novel on the crime.

The last executions in Canada took place at Toronto’s Don Jail on December 11, 1962, with the hanging of two men convicted of murder. Lester B. Pearson’s government instituted a moratorium on capital punishment in 1967, and the practice was formally abolished in 1976 by the Pierre Trudeau government. It would remain theoretically on the books under the National Defence Act as punishment for mutiny and treason until 1998. It’s believed Canada executed 710 people, including 13 women, between 1859 and 1962. Pitre was surely one of the last, but her guilt remains far from certain.

Follow Patrick on Twitter.

Here Are the Nominees for the 2018 Oscars

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Today, the latest leg of the awards season will undoubtably launch us into weeks of debate with the announcement of the nominees for the 90th annual Academy Awards. Will Get Out get a shot at Best Picture? Will Greta Gerwig be recognized for her directorial debut with Lady Bird? Will Sufjan Stevens make us all cry uncontrollably with a performance of a song from Call Me by Your Name? And which films will rival the front-runner, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri , after its recent awards sweep?

Find out who will have their chance at taking home a mini gold guy on March 4 during Tuesday's live announcement on the Academy Awards' YouTube channel. The two-part broadcast will kick off at around 8:22 AM EST and wrap up just before 9 AM, but if you like sleeping in, we'll have the whole list of nominees printed here below.

Best Production Design:
Beauty and the Beast
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water

Best Cinematography:
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Mudbound
The Shape of Water

Best Costume Design:
Beauty and the Beast
Darkest Hour
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Victoria and Abdul

Best Sound Editing:
Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: the Last Jedi

Best Sound Mixing:
Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: the Last Jedi

Best Animated Short Film:
Dear Basketball
Garden Party
Moo
Negative Space
Revolting Rhymes

Live Action Short Film
Dekalb Elementary
Eleven O'Clock
My Nephew Emmett
The Silent Child
Watu Wate/All of Us

Best Original Score:
Dunkirk
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: the Last Jedi
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Visual Effects:
Blade Runner 2049
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
Kong: Skull Island
Stwar Wars: the Last Jedi
War for the Planet of the Apes

Best Film Editing:
Baby Driver
Dunkirk
I, Tonya
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Makeup and Hairstyling:
Darkest Hour
Victoria and Abdul
Wonder

Best Supporting Actress:
Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Alison Janney, I, Tonya
Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

Best Supporting Actor:
Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Foreign Language Film:
A Fantastic Woman
The Insult
Loveless
On Body and Soul
The Square

Best Documentary, Short Subject:
Edith and Eddie
Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405
Heroin(e)
Knife Skills
Traffic Stop

Best Documentary Feature:
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Faces Places
Icarus
Last Men in Aleppo
Strong Island

Best Original Song:
"Mighty River," Mudbound
"Mystery of Love," Call Me by Your Name
"Remember Me," Coco
"Stand up for Something," Marshall
"This Is Me," The Greatest Showman

Best Animated Feature Film:
The Boss Baby
The Breadwinner
Coco
Ferdinand
Loving Vincent

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Call Me By Your Name
The Disaster Artist
Logan
Molly's Game
Mudbound

Best Original Screenplay:
The Big Sick
Get Out
Lady Bird
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Actor:
Timotheé Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
Gary Oldman , Darkest Hour
Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Best Actress:
Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post

Best Director:
Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk
Jordan Peele, Get Out
Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread
Guillermo Del Toro, The Shape of Water

Best Picture:
Call Me by Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

These Democratic Senators Should Be Afraid for Their Jobs

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Chelsea Manning’s recent announcement that she would challenge incumbent Ben Cardin in Maryland’s Senate primary set off a flurry of debate about the legitimacy of her challenge. Beyond the specifics of Manning’s run, there’s a larger question: Should progressives try to unseat Democrats they judge to be to be too centrist, or should they hold off in the name of party unity? Already two other Senate Democrats, Dianne Feinstein (California) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia), face primary challenges from Kevin de Leon and Paula Jean Swearingen, respectively, both of them left-wing insurgents. How should progressives determine where to allocate time, attention, and money when choosing incumbent Democrats to challenge from the left?

Let’s pursue an answer to this question in the most progressive way possible: by looking at a bunch of data.

There are a number of reasons why progressives might want to primary a particular member of Congress. But for the sake of our analysis, we’re going to assume that for any given seat, the Democratic electorate will want to nominate the most progressive candidate who can regularly win it. By this standard, the best targets are incumbent Democrats who are significantly more conservative than a generic Democrat from their constituency would need to be in order to win re-election.



We can start by comparing incumbent Democrats who are from the same state, and as a result are in theory accountable to the same general electorate. By this standard, it isn’t shocking that Cardin drew a primary challenge. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score, Cardin votes with the Trump administration noticeably more often than Chris Van Hollen, Maryland's other senator (26 percent of the time for Cardin, compared to 21 percent for Van Hollen). This difference between the Maryland senators is not limited to the Trump era: Cardin’s first dimension DW-NOMINATE score, a measure of relative ideology over the course of a member’s career, (-.328) is far more conservative than Van Hollen (-.399). Cardin also drew ire from the progressive base when he voted against the Iran deal, Obama’s signature second-term foreign policy achievement.

All this suggests that Cardin, who hails from a safely Democratic state, has room on his left flank such that a primary challenge isn’t all that surprising. The challenge to Feinstein is also predictable. Feinstein votes with Trump 31 percent of the time, while her Democratic colleague from California, Kamala Harris, votes with Trump only 17 percent of the time.

However, this simple method won’t work for all Senators or House members. Since Joe Manchin’s counterpart in West Virginia, Shelley Moore Capito, is a Republican, it wouldn’t make sense to directly compare their roll-call voting to see if primarying Manchin is a good use of the base’s time and energy. Moreover, it could be the case that Cardin and Feinstein, while being the more conservative of their states’ two Democratic senators, aren’t out of step with their states’ electorates—perhaps Van Hollen and Harris are more liberal than their constituencies.

To address these potential issues, we've specified a model to help progressives understand who it’s most worth their time to primary. Though there are many measures, such as Progressive Punch and DW-NOMINATE, we use the Trump Scores for votes cast in 2017, something that is immediately relevant to the Democratic base. Our model predicts Trump Score using four constituency-level variables: Trump’s margin of victory (or loss), white share of the voting age population, the percent of the constituency over the age of 25 with a bachelor’s degree, and median household income. For each senator, we temporarily removed them from the dataset, re-specified the model using all other Democratic senators, and used that re-specified model to generate a predicted Trump Score for the missing senator. The result is an estimate of how often a hypothetical replacement Democrat that emerged from any given electorate would vote with Trump based on that electorate’s political, racial, educational, and economic profiles.

Comparing these replacement-level predictions to reality reveals which constituencies could likely sustain more progressive senators. The chart below shows the results: The X-axis represents each senator’s replacement-level prediction, the Y-axis is their observed Trump Score, and the black line represents replacement-level voting behavior. Democratic senators who are 5 percentage points above or below their replacement-level Trump Scores are labeled:

So that gives us a list of targets that looks like this:

  1. Angus King of Maine has a predicted Trump Score of 27 and an actual score of 45. (+18)
  2. Mark Warner of Virginia has a predicted Trump Score of 27 and an actual score of 43. (+16)
  3. Patrick Leahy of Vermont has a predicted Trump Score of 12 and an actual score of 27. (+15)
  4. Dianne Feinstein of California has a predicted Trump Score of 19 and an actual score of 31. (+12)
  5. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland has a predicted Trump Score of 21 and an actual score of 27. (+6)
  6. Tim Kaine of Virginia has a predicted Trump Score of 28 and an actual score of 34. (6)
  7. Bill Nelson of Florida has a predicted Trump Score of 32 and an actual score of 38. (+6)
  8. Joe Donnelly of Indiana has a predicted Trump Score of 42 and an actual score of 47. (+5)
  9. Brian Schatz of Hawaii has a predicted Trump Score of 22 and an actual score of 27. (+5)
  10. Michael Bennet of Colorado has a predicted Trump Score of 26 and an actual score of 30 (+4)

King is a special case in that he runs for office as an Independent, only joining the Democratic caucus once the congressional session convenes; his score is closer to an estimate of the anti-Trump value progressives would realize by having a Democrat beat him in a general election. King and Warner are deficit hawks, with both touting the 2010 Bowles-Simpson plan that would have made deep cuts to Social Security. According to the 2016 American National Election Study, 68 percent of Democratic primary voters want to expand Social Security, and only 3 percent support cuts (the rest want spending to remain the same).

Bennet also appears on our list—progressives may remember his vote against the filibuster of Gorsuch. Then there’s Leahy, with a Trump Score of 27—far higher than Bernie Sanders (14), who represents the same electorate. Manchin, despite the ire he raises from progressives, does not crack the top ten in terms of Trump Score Above Replacement. While his Trump Score is higher than any other Democrat, he also represents a more conservative electorate than any other Democrat, putting his Trump Score almost exactly in line with what our model predicts a hypothetical replacement would have. Tom Carper, a senator from Delaware who is quite conservative on Social Security, barely misses our list at number 11.

Who Not to Primary

  1. Cory Booker of New Jersey has a predicted Trump Score of 28 and an actual score of 14. (-14)
  2. Jeff Merkley of Oregon has a predicted Trump Score of 26 and an actual score of 12. (-14)
  3. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has a predicted Trump Score of 21 and an actual score of 9. (-12)
  4. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin has a predicted Trump Score of 33 and an actual score of 21. (-12)
  5. Ron Wyden of Oregon has a predicted Trump Score of 26 and an actual score of 18. (-8)
  6. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a predicted Trump Score of 18 and an actual score of 11. (-7)
  7. Tom Udall of New Mexico has a predicted Trump Score of 30 and an actual score of 23.
  8. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has a predicted Trump Score of 26 and an actual score of 20. (-6)
  9. Sherrod Brown of Ohio has a predicted Trump Score of 36 and an actual score of 30. (-6)
  10. Kamala Harris of California has a predicted Trump Score of 21 and an actual score of 16. (-5)

The list of more-progressive-than-replacement Democratic senators doesn’t surprise. Booker, Merkley, and Gillibrand, who have distinguished themselves with their anti-Trump votes, stand out. Booker and Gillibrand are both seen as Presidential contenders (as is Harris, whose Trump Score Above Replacement is limited by California’s liberalism). Merkley has opposed Trump particularly on civil liberties grounds. Baldwin, Udall, and Brown are liberal Democrats who represent reasonably swingish states. Warren and Blumenthal mostly don’t appear higher on the list due to how liberal their electorates are.

Our model should not be the end of discussion. For one, measures of roll call voting are imperfect for analyzing aggregate liberalism and the Trump Scores are limited in many respects. Specifying models with scores like Progressive Punch or DW-NOMINATE could produce different results.

Even if progressives agreed on who to primary, finding viable candidates could be a key problem. For instance, while Angus King is the worst member of the Senate Democratic caucus according to our model, there isn’t a sizable bench of progressive candidates who could run statewide in Maine—a problem that doesn’t exist in Florida, full of ambitious relatively young politicians eager to move up.

In addition, politicians could be strongly above-replacement on issues that they take seriously, or be deeply effective legislators, or have other assets we have not accounted for in our data. Cardin, for instance, was instrumental in requiring dental benefits be covered in the CHIP program after Deamonte Driver, a 12-year old boy from Maryland, died when a cavity became a deadly brain disease. And, on the flip side, a candidate who is otherwise a round replacement but took one particularly conservative vote may be worth a challenge.

Finally, it’s worth at least noting that a similar method of identifying Republican candidates suitable for primary challenges would be impossible because Senate Republicans’ Trump Scores are not meaningfully associated with their general election constituencies. So it may be that Democrats are acting irrationally by allowing their voters to determine their votes—that LOL nothing matters and every Democrat should vote like Gillibrand and Booker. Here's a graph of Trump Score and Trump's statewide margin of victory in the Senate broken down by party:

With these caveats, our model suggests that there are several Democrats ripe for primary challenges in the Senate. Even if they are not ultimately unseated, facing pressure from their left may bring them back in line with the constituencies from which they have emerged. Indeed, Dianne Feinstein has made some more anti-Trump actions since her challenger announced, such as releasing the Fusion GPS transcripts (some have attributed the move to her facing a primary). By reframing primaries away from simply who are the least anti-Trump Democrats to who are the Democrats whose seats could sustain a more anti-Trump senator, progressives can win primaries and influence policy.

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

Jon Green is a Ph.D student in political science at Ohio State University. Follow him on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.


Megyn Kelly and Jane Fonda Are Feuding About Plastic Surgery Again

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For whatever reason, NBC host Megyn Kelly and 80-year-old actress Jane Fonda are in an all-out feud.

It started back in September, when Fonda went on Megyn Kelly Today to promote her film Our Souls at Night and the host asked the Grace & Frankie star about her plastic surgery. As expected, Fonda wasn't too enthused, and made snide remarks about the interview afterward.

Well, it looks like Kelly has had enough of Fonda's shade, because she started her show on Monday by defending her original question and then calling the actress "a woman whose name is synonymous with outrage," bringing up her controversial history during the Vietnam War.

On the latest episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts waded into the bizarre feud and broke down the case of "white-on-white crime."

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Talking Trump's Diplomacy With Obama's Ambassador To The UN

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The new documentary The Final Year shows a year in the life of the Obama administration as it wrestles with seemingly impossible foreign policy crises. The civil war in Syria, the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, climate change and North Korea. The oncoming wind of Trump is barely felt by the administration during the election campaign until it arrives with a jolt and makes the administration's remaining months in the White House feel all the more crucial.

Many of the film’s central protagonists are well-known: National Security Advisor Susan Rice, John Kerry and the President himself – but Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the UN, takes centre stage. Her manner seems more human than her colleagues who've spent their lives in electoral politics. Having spent much of her life as an academic and critic of US foreign policy.

Power becomes something of the focal point of the film, travelling to Nigeria to comfort the mothers whose daughters have been kidnapped and delivering a powerful speech to new immigrants receiving American citizenship.

VICE spoke to her at the end of last year, about her reflections on her time in the White House, how it felt being in on the outside looking in at the Trump administration and where American foreign policy can go next.

VICE: Hi. You're promoting a film. I imagine that 's nothing compared to the kinds of schedules you’re used to.
Samantha Power: It's true but things have gotten a little cushy in my new life. I was out late with some London friends. You’re catching me on fumes a little bit but I’m going to rally for you.

Do you find it strange watching the film back now?
To me it’s motivating, it’s inspiring but audiences – some audiences – have a different reaction to it. It feels like a period piece, like a lost generation. But it’s totally within our power to lead on foreign policy again.

Indeed if anything, by the end we’re wiser about how to use our power and more plugged into the international system. 2015 was probably our best foreign policy year and that was on the heels of the ending the Ebola epidemic, but that was when we did the Paris agreement, [reinstating diplomatic ties with] Cuba, Iran [nuclear agreement] – it was an amazing and then 2016 you try to lock down what you’ve done, but you know people want a silver bullet and there isn't one.

You went from being a critic and a policy advisor to having a crucial role in the administration. How much did that change you?
I mean, my objectives stayed from what I can tell. I’m too self-aware not to admit the possibility of self-rationalisation, but the things I was fighting for the last day in office were very similar to what I was fighting for in the first place.

Where have I evolved? Just getting much more efficient at building coalitions among my fellow cabinet members. You really do come to realise that the most important discussions you have are outside the room, where the policy debate is happening because that's when you align yourself up with people so you come in and you’re part of a mini-team.

Basically, so much of policy is just about winning, it’s about trying to win the argument. It’s about trying to get your ideas embraced as the policy of the United States.

So the internal battles were the hardest ones?
Completely. In many ways, they are so much more important, and so much more challenging. Take the fate of the ebola epidemic, that was massively impacted by President Obama’s decision to send troops and health workers into the eye of the storm. There was a huge internal debate about that: Congress were calling for a wall to be built up and health workers not to be allowed back into the country. Then, once Obama had made the decision [to send US personnel to West Africa to assist], then that’s the easy part. Now I’ve got the ability to go to other countries and say “we’re putting 3,000 troops in harm's way what the heck are you guys doing?” So there was nothing better than being an advocate when we had made our minds up and we were in a strong position.

The climate negotiations were similar. We had to formulate what we were willing to do, what skin we were willing to put in the game. After that it’s a lot easier to go to China, go to India. So the most stressful part of my job as a member of the cabinet was the internal fights because they’re with my friends, my colleagues you know? It’s not stressful to fight with Russia about Aleppo. It’s stressful to have big differences with people whose values you share and who are equally loyal to the President and the country.

"In my articles, I could sympathise with the characters and be proud of how it’s written but you don’t care how something’s written in government, it’s all about how you prevail."

When you’re meeting with 50 people a day, and the people that you’re meeting are meeting with 50 people a day – how do you make sure that your message is heard and make sure that you’re being as persuasive as you can be?
It’s hard. I think just preparation, I mean I worked, I was reading intelligence and other sources of information every morning before I really started going in the day. Knowledge is a comparative advantage. I also always try to bring in the voices of people, whether it was NGOs or survivors or refugees – to hear their stories and project those experiences into these otherwise kind of sterile debates. So that was also kind of an important way of making people stop and get it out of their comfort zones a little bit.

I suppose like most laymen you read something that seems spot on in the New Yorker or whatever and think, well they should just put this writer in charge? And you are in a lot of ways that person, you are the academic you’ve thought about these issues. But do you change a lot when you stop being an outsider?
Well, I’m writing a book called The Education of an Idealist which is about: what does one learn? What I will say is that I found being on the outside kind of easier on the soul in the sense of: I could write a New Yorker piece on Darfur, what I thought was a great piece and then I would hope that Condoleezza Rice read the piece.

But the problem when you’re inside is that you’re reading someone’s article about whether or not your ideas are prevailing. When they don’t, there’s no other country that’s going to be the team captain to figure this thing out. So, to the degree that you are actually moved by the suffering of people on the ground, you are heartbroken because you know that if it’s not us, it’s not happening pretty much.

I mean again we have a lot of other countries, the British especially, but others as well, a huge amount of the international system, but mobilising a coalition, building movements and really strong policy responses – the US kind of had to be at the centre of that. In my articles, I could sympathise with the characters and be proud of how it’s written but you don’t care how something’s written in government, it’s all about how you prevail.

You had such a wide set of foreign policy goals, from responding to civil war in Syria to the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, climate change to the rising power of China and Russia. You can’t help but compare to the Trump administration, which not only seems to antagonise the rest of the world but also seems to have no desire to deal with many foreign policy questions at all. What do you think the bigger issue is – hostility or inaction?
I mean the only algorithm I can identify that seems to define what Trump himself wants to do is “tell me what Obama did and I want to do its opposite”. That’s a kind of action. So pulling out of the TPP, that’s action. Pulling out of the climate agreement or seeking to do so when the time has come is action. Then there is this malaise or passivity towards contemporary conflict which is pernicious inaction: so not mobilising, not being the leader on the Rohingya being systematically ethnically cleansed.

I mean Rex Tillerson, Trump's secretary of state, has said some things, but you know it’s so hard to build diplomatic coalitions, to put pressure on people to change their calculus, it requires more than a statement, it requires working the phone, having a summit, pulling people together trying to figure out incentives and disincentives for the people who might be abetting the Burmese government. I don’t see any diplomacy out of these people. So I think it really is both.

Is there anything positive that has come from the Trump administration?
I’ll be the first to say when Trump does something good. It makes me happy to know he helped get Aya Hijazi an Egyptian-American prisoner out of jail, someone whose fate I had been championing unsuccessfully for months that was a good thing and I applauded him. He got Joshua Boyle and his wife out of Pakistan, that’s a good thing. The strike against the Assad regime against their chemical weapons use was a good thing. I wish it had been better thought through and had more of a tail to it but that’s kind of it. I can’t think of a lot, just a few individuals here and there that have ended up benefiting from some of the relationships he’s built and then a single strike. It’s very hard to point to things that are net positives for the US in our interests.

So do you think that talented, smart people – if they’re offered a post in the Trump administration – should take one?
That’s a great question, I don’t think anyone can make that choice for anybody else. I do not judge people who say no, I don’t judge people who leave but my hope as a citizen is that good people go in. There is controversy on this some of my very close colleagues are adamant and very public in demanding that his whole economics team should resign.

I think it’s different is in foreign policy. If these people leave I don’t think it would that convince anybody that Trump is less... whatever they like in him. Whereas at least my friends who are economic experts believe that if the whole economics team bailed that that actually would have an effect on some of Trump’s supporters. So that's one difference.

But also I do think Trump’s complete lack of foreign policy experience means that there’s at least some scope for foreign policy experts that speak to the country to influence, if not Trump directly, the people around Trump in a way that is kind of less about do this, do that but just basic facts. There’s just so much ignorance and there hasn’t been a great respect for expertise by him and his people, but still the moment can come where they turn around and actually are curious for the first time. I mean George W Bush’s first term was very uncurious and then shifted. So it scares me to think of so many of these great people leaving and also it scares me to think of who would fill those spots because they’re long-term positions but Trump could fill them with political hacks.

So it’s probably not good to think in hypotheticals like this, but were this an Obama third term, and you were continuing to serve as ambassador to the UN, what kind of foreign policy goals do you think you’d be looking at?
Well like Cuba, the Trump administration is undoing what we did but as far as I can tell they don’t have a new Cuba policy. In other words; if our goal is democratisation then let’s see your plan. What’s the alternative, other than building more walls? I think on refugees, even though the courts have struck down the Muslim ban multiple times, that’s having a knock on effect on how many other countries will take refugees, whereas we would have been continuing to seek to build a global coalition to take more and more and more and probably would have had our numbers up even higher. I don’t know, I could go through issue after issue...

I wonder about things like the Atrocities Council, which you were instrumental in setting up, to make sure countries didn’t fall off the policy agenda. That just seems so far removed from what is currently going on in The White House.
They don’t think in those terms anymore I doubt that would still exist.

Does it still exist?
I doubt it. It was meant for the Burundis, the Ivory Coasts, you know the sort of smaller countries where those countries are not well known at the highest level and those issues wouldn’t traditionally rise. And the APB sort of ensured that even a small country would have its day in court like among senior policy makers. So it’s a shame to lose it because it was sort of a way of fighting gravity to make sure that people are fighting on those issues.

So is the answer that we grin and bear the next four years and wait for another election or do you feel like there are people outside of US government that should be doing a lot now? Can some other body take on some of the kind of diplomatic responsibilities that the US seems to be forgoing?
Well there’s a lot in that. You know I think the US is leading now, so we’re always leading, no matter what we do because no matter what you do, when you’re big you can just lead. So what Trump is doing and saying is a form of leadership, he’s into sucking up to autocrats, he’s projecting that around the world.

But other parts of American society are leading too. It’s a form of US action when we take state legislatures or when we make a Liberian refugee Mayor of Helena, Montana or a transgender state legislator. So, I wouldn’t discount that. and We’re so used to looking to the President to define, but we’re finding this other sort of more pluralistic sense of what America is.

The Final Year is in selected cinemas, and avaliable on iTunes, now.

@samwolfson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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

US News

Earthquake Off Alaska Coast Triggers Tsunami Watch
A magnitude 7.9 quake miles off Alaska’s south coast early Tuesday led officials to issue tsunami warnings and evacuation orders. Authorities sounded sirens on Kodiak Island, and residents were warned via cellphone to seek higher ground or move away from the coast. The warnings were later lifted.—CBS News

Progressives Angry at Dems for Folding on Shutdown
Liberal groups railed against Democratic party leaders for agreeing to end the government shutdown without any deal on DACA and the fate of DREAMers. Democracy for America's executive director called the move “a stunning display of moral and political cowardice,” while the pressure group CREDO's political director said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had “failed” DREAMers. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vaguely pledged to allow debate on an immigration fix if Congress can't reach a deal on it as part of the next funding bill.—NBC News

Man Arrested for Threatening Gun Attack at CNN HQ
A Michigan man has been arrested after allegedly making 22 abusive and threatening calls to CNN headquarters in Atlanta over a period of two days. According to a FBI affidavit, the unnamed caller said: “Fake news. I’m coming to gun you all down. I am on my way right now to gun the fucking CNN cast down.”—CNN

FBI Director Reportedly Threatened to Quit
Trump appointee Christopher Wray warned Attorney General Jeff Sessions he would resign if FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was ousted, according to anonymous sources. President Trump has made his disdain for McCabe clear, attempting to link him to Hillary Clinton, but White House lawyer Don McGahn has reportedly advised against forcing Wray to fire his deputy.—Axios

International News

Turkey Pledges More Action Against ‘Terrorists’ in Syria
The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said his country’s military wished to avoid conflict with Russian, US, and Syrian government troops as it attempted to take control of northern Syria’s Afrin district from Kurdish YPG fighters. Yet Çavuşoğlu also promised to take “whatever step I have to” to stop the “terrorist organization” in the Afrin and Manbij regions.—Reuters

Avalanche Hits Japanese Resort After Volcano Erupts
One Japanese soldier died and roughly 12 civilians and soldiers were injured when the Kusatsu-Shirane volcano erupted near a ski resort in Gunma. None of the injuries were believed to life-threatening.—The Guardian

Pakistani Police Arrest Rape Suspect in High-Profile Case
Cops arrested a man suspected of raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl in Punjab province earlier this month, a crime that incited outrage and protests across the country. A police official said the suspect, initially held and then released due to lack of evidence, has confessed to killing the young girl, Zainab Ansari.—Al Jazeera

South Korea to Stop Anonymous Bitcoin Trading
Authorities in Seoul will introduce new regulations next week banning digital currency traders from using bank accounts without identification. The new measure was said to be designed to deter money laundering. Non-citizens will also not be allowed to open digital currency accounts in South Korea.—BBC News

Everything Else

Bill Cosby Performs in Philadelphia
Ahead of an upcoming retrial on sexual assault charges, the disgraced comedian played drums and told jokes at LaRose Jazz Club Monday. The lawyer for Cosby’s accuser Andrea Constand said “the arrogance of this man leaves every decent person speechless.”—NBC News

Netflix Valuation Passes $100 Billion
The company’s latest quarterly report sent its value beyond the landmark sum for the first time. Netflix added more than eight million customers last quarter, taking its international customer base to more than 117 million people.—Bloomberg

Snoop Dogg and Colin Kaepernick Give $35,000 to Texas Activists
The rapper agreed to give $10,000 to Mothers Against Police Brutality as part of the former San Francisco 49ers star’s “Million Dollar Pledge” to match every $10,000 donated with $10,000 of his own. Snoop pledged to give a further $15,000 to the Dallas, Texas group.—Billboard

Americans Believe Sugar More Harmful Than Weed, Poll Finds
Only 9 percent of US residents judged weed to be the most harmful substance when asked about the respective dangers of alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and marijuana. Tobacco was judged most harmful, taking 41 percent of the vote.—VICE News

Slayer Announce Last Ever Tour
The thrash metal legends have revealed that a series of forthcoming shows will be their final tour together. In a YouTube video stating “The End of Days Is Near,” the group promised to share North American dates soon.—Noisey

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re looking at how the Nisenan tribe of the California Central Valley are fighting to regain recognition from the federal government.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Chloë Sevigny Held a Séance in Lizzie Borden's House

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Chloë Sevigny’s first close-up in Lizzie reveals only the back of her head, but there’s no doubt who we’re looking at—the purpose of her movement and the deliberateness of her gait is unmistakable. Lizzie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend, features Sevigny as Lizzie Borden, the young woman who famously, allegedly murdered her father and stepmother with a hatchet in 1892.

Written by Bryce Kaas and directed by Craig William Macneill, the film saves the murders for the end of the film, elsewhere exploring both their aftermath and what came before them. A key component is Bridget (Kristen Stewart), who comes in to the Borden household as a servant but becomes a friend—and, perhaps, more—to the headstrong Lizzie.

Sevigny is an indie stalwart; her very first film, the notorious 1995 cause célèbr e Kids, was also her first film to play at Sundance. Since then, she’s appeared in such modern classics as The Last Days of Disco, American Psycho, Zodiac, and Boys Don’t Cry (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award), in addition to her work as a series regular on Big Love. She's also a producer on Lizzie, so when she sat down with VICE during Sundance, we discussed not only how she developed her character, but the project itself.

VICE: In Lizzie , you’re playing a real person surrounded by over a century of iconography, legend, and folklore. How do you engage with that to create a real human being? Or do you?
Chloë Sevigny
: I read so many books, watched so many things, and went and stayed in the house on three separate occasions—it's a bed and breakfast. They give you a tour, and tell you the whole story. You can have a séance, which we did. How could you not? I went to the courthouse in New Bedford, the cemetery where she's buried, and the Fall River Historical Society to look at documents and old objects that were in the house. I really immersed myself in the world.

Once [screenwriter Bryce Kass] and I decided the story that we wanted to tell and how we wanted to tell it, I had to stay true to that. There are so many aficionados that will say, "Well, that’s not how that happened"—this is our interpretation of the myth, and the myth keeps growing. It's an unsolved mystery. When I first started developing it, I thought it be interesting to do it as a game of Clue, where you played out all the different scenarios. That didn't happen, but I thought that would've been an interesting concept.

How was the séance?
[ Laughs] The frigid air came in. There was some communicating with [Lizzie Borden's father, Andrew Jennings]. It was terrifying. The first night, I was there with an ex-boyfriend who's a pretty practical guy, and he got really terrified in the middle of the night. He felt a presence pushing down on him. On all three occasions I’ve been there, it's been unnerving.

They get a lot of business—on the nights of the murders, those rooms are auctioned off because it's such a hot commodity. They say that guests will come and sleep on the floor where Abby's body was found. People are fanatical! And that's part of the reason we wanted to develop it—there's already a built-in audience. I'm not an idiot! I wanna make a movie that people want to see!

She's a brand!
Yeah, and so am I! I felt a kinship, in a misfit kind of way. Young people that feel possibly misunderstood or gravitate to my films and the kind of work that I've put out—I wanted to honour a woman who was an icon of that type.

The film is surrounded by all of that iconography, but it feels so grounded and naturalistic. The house and the cell felt like you actually lived in those places. Was there anything in particular that the crew did to create that space for you?
We emptied a hoarder's house in Savannah and rebuilt it—reset all the wallpaper and painting, repaired things, madeg the kitchen period. It was our interpretation of the Borden house, because the bed and breakfast is their version—but we wanted it to be more austere. [Production designer Elizabeth J. Jones] and Craig had an idea of the elegance they wanted to bring to the film, because it can so easily go camp. We wanted there to be real restraint—a real groundedness—and not having to go from one location to the next helps you immerse yourself in the world.

I want to talk about working with Kristen Stewart, because I love the way your characters and your performances counteract each other. Much of the film is about Lizzie's strength and how that balances Bridget's vulnerability, but there are key points where those roles are reversed and they need to be the other thing for each other. How did the two of you develop that dynamic?
She's very aware of filmmaking—the camera, lighting, everything. She's a very self-aware person, and she's also very free. She wants to try stuff, and it's very immersive and emotional. She brought this real energy. Any day she was on the set, it was like, "All right! Now shit's gonna happen." [ Laughs] She's such a present force.

Kristen said it was her first time doing period, and an accent, so I think that she struggled with that at a bit. The costumes were really hard for her [Laughs]. She would, like, take off her skirt and she'd be in her Vans and her jeans, and smoking cigarettes and being all disgruntled [ Laughs]. She's a cool lady, and that's part of the reason we wanted to cast her: we really believe in her as a person—what she puts out there, the kind of films she chooses to do, and the kind of work that she wants to represent her.

You're at a point where you take a more active role in the kind of work you want to do. I'm really interested in what kind of work you see yourself doing in the future.
I'm still seeking directors that I admire. I'm in Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete, and I'd like to maintain working with accomplished directors who I can put my trust in. I'd like to be thought of even more as a character actor, because that's what I think I am—and people never recognize me as that, recognize women as that.

I'd like to play someone like a gun moll—that's something I've never done before! [Laughs] Someone glamorous, bossy, and ballsy, a Mae West kind of character. Which there aren't a lot of anymore!

There's been more conversation over the past couple of years about female representation in film—including behind the camera. Do you think that talk will translate into a discernible difference in how we see women treated on-and-offscreen?
Only when women are put into positions of power—running studios. I don't really follow the trades, but it feels like women are getting more opportunities. Megan Ellison is such a heavy hitter. I'm doing my third short film in April, I've done female-driven projects, and on this movie I had two female producers. Of course, [we have] male director, male DP, male writer—we went out to some women, they were developing their own stories. But I'm hopeful.

Follow Jason Bailey on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Bill Cosby Is Doing Stand-Up Again for Some Reason

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On Monday night, Bill Cosby took a break from making #MeToo jokes over pasta to do a comedy set in Philadelphia, his first public performance since dozens of women accused the actor of drugging and sexually assaulting them.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Cosby was added last-minute to perform at the LaRose Jazz Club, where he kicked off the set by sitting in with the band and scatting a little bit before hopping on the drums. A crowd of about 50 people in the 80-year-old's hometown looked on while he stumbled through a vaguely Bossanova-sounding number.

He eventually made his way to a stool onstage, where he riffed on losing his eyesight, reminisced about his childhood, and spoke about his wife and daughter. At one point, he brought up an 11-year-old boy, who, when asked if he knew who the actor was, said that Cosby "used to be a comedian." And, for some weird reason, Cosby kept a jar of peaches next to him on a chair throughout the entire set.

Cosby steered clear of mentioning his fall from grace at the gig, but he's been on a bizarre publicity tour ahead of his retrial on sexual assault charges in April. Last week, the celebrity invited the press to watch him eat at an Italian restaurant, and he's hit up a few other local haunts with cameras in tow—a shift from his previous plan to go on a nationwide speaking tour to talk to young men and athletes about what "can be considered sexual assault."

"He's reintroducing himself as that old comedian, that funny guy," David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told NPR. "He is that hometown person who we all knew and loved, and that's how he wants to be thought of now."

Cosby faces three counts of aggravated incident assault for allegedly drugging and molesting Andrea Constand in 2004, which could land him in prison for up to ten years. His first stint in court ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, and he tapped a new, all-star legal team for round two. But Cosby's prosecutors are coming out swinging: They're hoping to have 19 of his accusers testify at his retrial.

Still, it doesn't look anything is stopping Cosby from trying to return to showbiz.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

The Guy Who Played Barney the Dinosaur Now Runs a Tantric Sex Business

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A full session with tantra massage specialist and spiritual healer David Joyner lasts three to four hours and costs $350. For that price, female clients—the only kind he accepts—can expect to receive a ritual bath, chakra balancing, and a massage. Also on the menu: cosmic, mind-blowing orgasms.

The latter can be achieved through massage alone. But the goal of a session is to fully release a woman’s blocked energy.

“When the lingam [penis] and the yoni [vagina] meet, there’s a certain energy that takes place that hands on the body alone cannot create,” says Joyner, 54, whose yogi-like presence is often accompanied by a warm smile when we meet for the first of several interviews. “Even through G-spot massage, it’s still not the same energy that flows.”

Today Joyner’s tantric massage practice boasts 30 clients—or “goddesses,” as he calls them—and he unblocks the energy of two to four women a week, he says. It’s a tad different than his work as a software analyst at Texas Instruments, a job he held for six years and landed shortly after graduating from ITT Technical Institute. But, Joyner says, his current work in tantra does share many similarities to another job he held from 1991 to 2001, that of Barney, the beloved purple dinosaur on the hit PBS children's show Barney & Friends.

“The energy I brought up [while] in the costume is based on the foundation of tantra, which is love,” he explains. “Everything stems, grows, and evolves from love. Even when you have emotionally blocked energy, the best way to remove it is to remove it with love, and then replace it with God’s divine love. Love heals and allows you to continue to grow.”

Barney, of course, radiated pure, joyful love. It was part of what children, still full of innocence, found so appealing about him. And it’s what many parents, beaten down to various degrees by the sobering realities of the world, found so goddamn cloying. Joyner gave expression to that love through his physical portrayal of the exuberant T-Rex. (During his stint, it was mostly actor Bob West who gave voice to the character.)

“Before I got into the [Barney] costume, I would pray and ask God to allow his loving divine spirit to flow through me through the costume and let that draw the kids. That energy would always draw them in,” Joyner says. “Children are more connected spiritually than [adults]. A lot of times when I see infants and I’m out and about at the grocery store or whatever, they start staring at me. I make the joke, ‘You know who I am.’”

Joyner says he also used his tantra training to maintain his energy during long days on the set where he wore the hot (temps could reach 120 degrees inside it), 70-pound costume for several hours and numerous takes for various scenes. Tantra helped him "maintain an abundance of joy during the process,” he says.

For many in the West, the word "tantra" conjures up images of Sting engaging in seven-hour marathon sex, but the practice has roots in both Buddhism and Hinduism going back thousands of years, and contains many facets.

“Tantra is a spiritual science of consciousness. Its goal is to liberate us from the unconscious programming that keeps us from recognizing the divinity in ourselves and all beings,” says Matthias Rose, a certified tantra educator with the Source School of Tantra and founder of the Moksha Tantra Center in Seattle. Classical tantra included sexuality as one practice among many designed to help us expand our consciousness beyond the ordinary reality of the “ego” self, says Rose. He adds, “If there is corruption, it came about in the marketing of books, videos, and ultimately escort services that all began to use the word tantra as a shorthand for 'mindful sexuality.' Sex sells, so... there you have it."

“When you go down on a woman (orally), it should be just like you’re saying grace, like blessing the food you’re about to receive." — David Joyner

How Joyner speaks about tantra today won't help clear up any confusion. He's the type of guy prone to spitting out a quote like this: “When you go down on a woman (orally), it should be just like you’re saying grace, like blessing the food you’re about to receive. No food in the world can compare to goddess nectar because spirit is involved. Before you taste the goddess nectar, give thanks. Say grace. I would love women to understand how powerful that energy is.” And the mission statement on his website tantraharmony.com reads: “Connecting your mind, body and spirit together as one, in perfect harmony. Achieving a higher and more blissful state of awareness to your sexuality, and who you are as a spiritual being.”

For clients, this "higher and more blissful state of awareness" is often best achieved through penetrative, ideally unprotected sex, according to Joyner. Condoms "block the energy,” he says, and he prefers not to use them. Joyner provides his STD test results to prospective clients, who are asked to disclose any STDs in a signed consent form prior to their first session. These methods, according to other tantra coaches, are highly unorthodox.

Kaya Kwan Yin is a tantra life coach with more than 100 hours training and a full-time tantra business that sees her working primarily with male clients. She says the idea that condoms could “block energy” sounds “shady” and “ridiculous." “Tantric sex can happen with your clothes on. What typically looks like penis and vagina penetration is often referred to as 'full union' in contemporary practice. Sexual energy penetrates clothes, condoms, countries, and beyond. Having sex with clients in the world of tantra is more of an anomaly than the norm,” Yin said via Skype from her home in Tokyo.

But Joyner very much believes in his practice. “Once the lingam is inside the yoni, there’s a technique where you don’t even move. You’re harmonizing spiritually and consciously, as you’re looking into each other’s eyes, and you’re feeling each other’s energy take place. This is about energy moving up.” This goes beyond the realm of the merely physical, says Joyner, and into the spiritual. “A lot of women have never really had spiritual sex.”

“I strongly disagree with this," says Rose. "I can’t say there’s never a place for intercourse; it’s part of the tantric tool set, but in a client/practitioner relationship, it’s almost always never needed—particularly for healing purposes." Rose goes on to say that, energetically, everything you can do for a client can be done with the hands. For aligning chakras, you don’t even need touch. Touch is necessary for releasing trauma the body holds, but that touch is best done with hands, because "our heart energy is in our hands," Rose says. "Beyond that, there’s so much risk to adding trauma when intercourse is involved."

Kimberly Resnick Anderson, a sex therapist and professor of psychiatry at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, says she’s all for people luxuriating in their sexual experiences, but shares Rose's concerns about Joyner’s practice of having intercourse with clients—especially unprotected.

"Even porn stars in California use a condom," she says. "It’s the law. For him not to use condoms is medically unethical and irresponsible. This is outrageous and far outside the standard of care.”

Joyner began his current practice in 2004, and finds clients any number of ways, from word of mouth to converting women he’s met on Tinder into believers. He sees clients in their homes all over LA, from Brentwood to Long Beach to deep in the Valley—and even out of state. His website contains several “Goddess Testimonials,” each more breathless than the last in its effusive praise of Joyner and the benefits of sessions with him. Joyner says that before or during his initial consultation with a client, if he feels they’re not ready for, or can’t handle the spiritual experience—or are simply looking for a physical release—he will not take them on.

One client, Lisa, 50, who like Joyner’s other clients preferred to use a pseudonym to maintain privacy, said by phone that she found Joyner through Tinder. She had intercourse with him around the third session and described it as a “spiritual awakening.” She's now been a client for three years. She says it took her a few sessions before she was comfortable enough with Joyner to have intercourse. “It wasn’t as if I felt like I had to have a full session to get there, but then again it was like, maybe I do,” she says. Lisa has also occasionally insisted that Joyner wear a condom when they have sex.

Another client, Indigo, 53, works as a nurse. She spends her life caring for others, she told VICE by phone, and considers her sessions with Joyner time to focus on herself. “I didn’t go all the way the first time, because he could feel my hesitation," she says. "But after the first few sessions, I started to really let go."

David Joyner during his time as Barney. (Photo by Barbara Laing/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

None of the three clients VICE spoke to, provided through Joyner, say they felt pressured or coerced into sex with Joyner, who also vehemently denies anything of the sort. Joyner has no claims filed against him for sexual harassment or coercion for sex in Los Angeles, according to a statement provided to VICE by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Still, the power dynamic at play here between practitioner and client, healer and student, is hard to square for some. Laura Palumbo is the communications director with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. She says a tantra session like Joyner’s that includes intercourse can muddy the waters of consent. “I think when we are looking at a scenario like this the goal is to not be sex negative," Palumbo tells VICE by phone. "But, taking a deeper look, it does seem like there are dynamics here that make it a little more complicated and less straightforward than two consenting adults."

“There’s always a consideration that an individual could be using their notoriety to in some way pressure or coerce someone into a sexual behavior that maybe is not something they are comfortable with," Palumbo adds. "And the fact that there’s a spiritual component makes this even more complex, because the terms of engagement may have really been influenced by the participant’s desire to be compliant with spiritual standards—especially if they’re looking to that individual for guidance or leadership. It’s not a level playing field.”

It might also be illegal. In the state of California, massage with the intent of causing arousal is considered solicitation. To protect himself, Joyner says he had a police officer friend help him write a contract that he has all potential clients sign during the consultation process stating they’re not law enforcement or part of a sting operation. He says that the first session is free, and, without money exchanged, the session is legal consent. This, he contends, is his legal loophole.

David Joyner today. Photo via David Joyner

Not so, according to California defense attorney Jonathan Kelman. The fact that Joyner charges for subsequent sessions, Kelman says, means if a client of Joyner's happened to complain to authorities, Joyner could be charged with the act of prostitution, if said session did indeed include intercourse or massage with the intent of causing arousal. “You can’t legally have sex with someone in exchange for money," Kelman says. "If I have a client who gets arrested for exchanging a Big Mac for sex, that’s, by definition, prostitution."

“If I had sex with a patient, it would be criminal, and I would be prosecuted and lose my license," says Anderson for sake of comparison.

“Not all of my sessions have sex or ‘spiritual intimacy.’ It’s only in the full-sessions, when someone is ready to take the sexual energy to a higher level," says Joyner. "Because then it’s about understanding that when the lingam and the yoni connect there’s a spiritual exchange that takes place, not physical pleasure. It’s not about sex or trying to coerce someone into have sex. It’s about removing emotionally blocked energy."

Joyner discovered tantra and spiritual sexuality in the 1980s at age 20 while training in Swedish massage, which he took up as a way to make extra money while at ITT. He began connecting the two when, while practicing massage on the side of his main gig at TI, clients began telling him his touch aroused them, he says.

He continued deeper into his studies, and shared his love of tantra openly until he was asked to put a lid on it upon being cast as Barney in '91. According to Joyner, attorneys for the show told him he was not allowed to teach, practice, or talk about tantra while under contract playing the character—he was told it was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Still, he practiced covertly throughout his decade in the purple suit and says his devotion to tantra remained a secret he'd share with some members of the crew. But all who worked on the show, he maintains, could sense a certain energy about him. “They knew I was spiritual, and that I meditated.”

“I often shared with the crew that the energy I brought up in the costume is based on the foundation of tantra—love,” he says.

Stephen White was the head writer of the Barney franchise from 1992 to 2005, and says he just found out about Joyner’s life in tantra a few years ago. He can see how the pieces fit. "I did know David was a very spiritual guy, very positive guy—he radiated energy,” he says. “He was a positive person to be around.”

"When I found out the detail of what’s involved in tantra, I was surprised,” White continues. “I thought it was an interesting transition for Barney. It’s kind of still the ‘I love you, you love me’ deal, but different. I don’t judge or anything, but that’s a side of David I didn’t know.”

"David was eccentric and wonderful and into things that I wouldn’t have been privy to given my age at the time," says Leah Montes, now 39, who played “Luci” from age 9 to 15 on Barney & Friends (credited in all her appearances under her maiden name) for much of the time Joyner was in the costume. “He was a normal, funny, really energetic, and happy guy.”

Joyner says he wants to spread the word of tantra and the power of the goddess energy. He does it now as a tantra massage specialist. For a decade, he did it across TV screens all over the nation as Barney the purple dinosaur. He sees many similarities between the two.

“I always said it was never an accident, and that I was meant to do this character,” he says. "Because a lot of the elements of Barney were a lot of the things I was training with in tantra."

Follow Rebekah Sager on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Sexy Photos Seemingly Got a CP Train Conductor Fired (Again)

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It seems that one of Canada’s bigger rail companies isn’t a big fan of their employees posting sexy photos of themselves.

The CBC has reported, after viewing an evidence package, that Stephanie Katelnikoff was let go from her job at Canadian Pacific Rail (CP) in November for, at least partially, posting some racy photos. Katelnikoff is a model, so yes, the photos on her Instagram are of a sexy nature. Some of them are of her pretty much in the nude, and the CBC reported that one now deleted photo featured her on railroad tracks, and others show her with whips and similar BDSM tools.

The evidence viewed by the CBC indicated that Katelnikoff was fired for violating CP Rail's “code of ethics and its internet and email policy.” Katelnikoff said that the term “graphic” was used by the investigator and that “it seemed their main concern was that my social media content was damaging to their reputation.”

This is actually the second time that Katelnikoff has been let go from the railway company in a high-profile manner. In 2014, Katelnikoff was at the controls of a train when it derailed in Banff, she was dismissed from her job as a result. Katelnikoff took her wrongful dismissal case to arbitration and won. It was found that Katelnikoff was actually fired for filing a sexual harassment complaint against a fellow employee and that a faulty track was responsible for the derailment.

“Overall, the Arbitrator finds that the grounds cited for Ms. Katelnikoff’s dismissal are factually inaccurate and unfounded,” Maureen Flynn, the arbitrator in the case wrote in her decision. “Furthermore, those allegations appear to be a camouflage of the Company’s actual reasons that are discriminatory and in bad faith.

Photo via Katelnikoff's Instagram posted with caption “Photographer Brian Fordyce.”

So fourteen months after initially being let go, Katelnikoff got back to work—she did say, at the time, that she felt there was “a giant target on my back” but went back nevertheless. During this time, Katelnikoff has made her grievances with the company well known in several social media posts as well as a YouTube video. She states that this most likely played into their decision as well.

"I think it was a 50/50 split between the two. When I got dismissed, they blanketed everything together and said I was being dismissed for my inappropriate social media content. So I'm not sure what of my content they've deemed appropriate and inappropriate," she told the CBC. "The investigative officer called my social media content graphic."

Katelnikoff told the CBC that she will be taking a wrongful termination case to arbitration yet again. VICE has reached out to both Katelnikoff and CP for comment but, at the time of publication, has yet to hear back.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter


A Depressing Dispatch from the Edge of the World—Newfoundland

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Hello Mainland Canada. We are going to talk about Newfoundland and Labrador a little bit right now. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record these days, but things at the eastern fringe of Confederation are emphatically not OK.

They have not been OK for some time. Arguably they have never been OK—combing through the wreckage of Newfoundland history to find the exact moment everything first went off the rails is a popular pastime/coping mechanism—but they are extremely not-OK right now. Things appear to be so shagged up that the primary public discussion in this province now surrounds how bad it’s going to be when we go bankrupt.

When, not if. We moved past the speculative stage some time ago; the idea that the provincial state will collapse into insolvency in the reasonably near future (i.e. before 2030) is already a foregone conclusion for many. Brand new trucks may still be flying off the lots on Kenmount Road, but so are personal bankruptcies and consumer proposals. The Bank of Canada may or may not need to start ratcheting up interest rates to cool off the molten markets in Toronto and Vancouver, but it’s going to put this province on ice.

It’s a shame sometimes that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But dassit, as the old folks would say. We’re past the point of hushed, haunted, hopeful whispers outside the operating theatre wondering why the doctors won’t look us in the eye. The patient is now in palliative, and her children are in the hallway strangling each other over the inheritance.

A localized class war is already threatening to explode in St. John’s. When news broke that the provincial government had struck a tentative agreement with the Newfoundland Association of Public Employees that included a no-layoff clause, the St. John’s Board of Trade and the NL Employers’ Council erupted. It was week of unhinged radio rants: the government has doomed us all. The clause will never be negotiated out of future contracts and the government will never be able to sack another bureaucrat. We’re borrowing $2 million dollars a day to make payroll and the union thugs at NAPE have just tied Leviathan’s sword-arm behind his back at the exact moment we need him to start gouging out his guts to please the banks.

In retaliation, the union held its own press conference to denounce the Board of Trade as a cabal of vampires, a ruthless band of wreckers who would see the whole provincial state smashed and slashed and burned for private gain. NAPE president Jerry Earle later mused on Facebook about whether or not the union’s 30,000 members should consider boycotting local businesses as a means of flexing their muscle. Say what you will about the black-hearted businesspeople hungry for our bones, but threatening to bury the province’s depressed economy alive just to prove a point is some Sopranos-level shit in its own right.

Desperate times, I suppose. Grief does tend to make people do strange things. The local priests of capital and labour were more than happy to work together on nailing together the Muskrat Falls-shaped coffin we’re all going to get buried in, so I am hopeful that at least we’ll all come together in time for the wake.

If not the wake, then at least the reckoning. This is at least the furtive hope of the judicial inquiry into the Muskrat Falls megaproject. We’ll never get that money back, and we’ll be shackled to that poisonous concrete nightmare forever and a day, but maybe we can at least crucify somebody along to way to appease our temper. No one important, of course: the real supervillain architect of Newfoundland’s demise will live a long and happy life selling shitty luxury homes on the south end of St. John’s to the very people ruined by his government.

The Muskrat Inquiry will grant the cold comfort of catharsis. But you’ve got to wonder how much even that is worth now that you’ve got former premiers on the record expecting a federal bailout as the best case scenario. It’s rarely stated, but our worst case future involves handing over the Treasury keys to the boys at Goldman Sachs so that they can starve the baymen from the coves according to The Market’s timeline.

Oh, yes. Resettlement is back on everyone’s lips. Ten or even five years ago you’d still find those in the St. John’s metro who would lament the alleged brutality of the Smallwood years. Resettlement back in the 1960s was a cruel destruction of culture, uprooting and scattering our people to the four winds was an utter disaster of government-driven social engineering. But now there is a demand that every ferry and rural hospital and outport be justified down to the dime, or else we should shutter the coasts and ship all these pre-modern peasants out to enjoy the alienated suburban nightmare we’ve come to demand as a birthright.

Mark my words: before the provincial government has spent the federal disaster relief money it needs to address the devastation on the island’s west coast last week, someone’s going to raise the spectre of resettlement. Why not just move these people instead? Why spend millions of dollars to rebuild dying communities? Why not just close them all down and ship all these aging Newfs off into one of the island’s many nightmarish nursing homes and be done with the whole damned thing? The Atlantic Institute of Market Studies is probably preparing its briefing note on the matter as we speak.

Again, this is where public discussion in Newfoundland and Labrador is lurching right now. We are not talking about if: we are talking about when. Once upon a time Sonny used to stand by the roadside and dream of the world beyond his claustrophobic little inlet, waiting for his long-lost father to return home and relieve him from the duty of tending to his mother. A generation later and Sonny’s sitting in the Health Sciences lobby tweeting that the old bag deserved it, LOL! She’s old and fat and diabetic and she’s costing the provincial treasury too much money for her morning toast and beans. Bring on the euthanasia, ol’ man: I gotta catch a Jesus plane up to Fort McMurray.

The world has ended here before. This is Newfoundland’s fourth great constitutional experiment. First we were an English fishing station; then we were a Dominion; then a bureaucratic dictatorship; and now we are a province of Canada. Perhaps we are merely nearing the end of our government’s natural lifecycle. Historically, we got about 70 years of responsible government before the British decided that we were a country of degenerate paupers unfit for the rigours of self-government. Confederation turns 69 this year.

We will soon find out the real value of the 1949 union. Maybe Joe Smallwood’s ultimate triumph wasn’t the immediate and revolutionary extension of Canada’s robust mid-century welfare state to a population stuck in the 17th century. Maybe it was securing a federal bulwark to shore us up through the next spectacular collapse of Newfoundland’s self-government.

Anyways, that’s all I really wanted to say. I’ll let you get back to arguing about free speech on campus or Tim Hortons or the appropriate amount of racism needed for strong borders or whatever else it is that you Mainlanders care about.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here staring into the sea half in the bag on Alberta Premium, wondering whether I can make a life and start a family and build a future for myself in the only place I’ve ever felt at home, or whether I’m weeks or months or a few short years away from lowering Sonny’s mother down into her grave in the shadow of a U-haul.

The 'Mighty Ducks' May Fly Together Again in New TV Series

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Long, long ago, back when Bill Clinton was a presidential candidate and Ghostbusters was a cereal, Disney released a children's sports movie called The Mighty Ducks. The film starred Emilio Estevez as a disgraced lawyer sentenced to coach a kids' hockey team, and it hit all the beats we've come to expect from the classic "troubled adult leads misfit youths to glory" plot.

It wasn't the first or the best of its genre, but the movie was a box office success and spawned a couple of decent sequels during the 1990s. Now, all these years later, it looks like the Mighty Ducks may fly together again.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, ABC Signature Studios is currently developing a new TV series based on The Mighty Ducks franchise—penned by the original trilogy's screenwriter, Steven Brill. Brill reportedly developed the show concept with Mighty Ducks producer Jordan Kerner and is now working on a script with ABC Signature Studios, with plans to attach talent and start pitching to networks sometime in 2018.

The series is still in the very early stages of development so there's not a whole lot of information about its plot, but it seems like the show could go one of two ways: Either we'll get a straight reboot, reimagining the original film with an updated story and new cast, or the series will function as a sequel, set in the same universe as the 90s trilogy.

We don't know which way Brill is planning to go, but hopefully, he takes sequel route and drags Emilio Estevez back in to reprise his role as Gordon Bombay, since Estevez was a big part of what gave the first movies their charm. Plus, Estevez hasn't been doing much lately besides working on passion projects about the library, so he should be available.

A Mighty Ducks TV series is just one of a massive number of reboots and revivals currently in development by the cultural necromancers in Hollywood right now. It's unclear at this stage whether this one will actually make it to the small screen, but let's hope it does, since it would get us one step closer to the Mighty Ducks revival the world has been waiting for—a gritty, live-action reboot of the cartoon.

Related: VICE Sports Explains Hockey and the Winter Olympics

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Ambient Photos of Nocturnal Western Africa

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Barcelona-based photographer Denis Vejas has been travelling off-the-grid for the past 12 years, since he left Lithuania in 2005. According to him, “Most of my photo work have happened in nomadic settings, as a part of my own journey, exploring a wide range of subjects from neo hippies to neo colonialism.”

“With the main emphasis on telling the story from inside out, I am always trying to skip the role of objective observer and be a part of the narrative, throwing myself into it as deep as possible. I have been documenting immigrants from Central America riding the cargo trains on the way through Mexico to the US, van life of weed trimmers in northern California, and the gathering of Voodoo tribes in Benin to name a few.”

According to Vejas, the following photo series is less focused, but still maintains the immersive experience during four months of traveling in Ghana, Togo and Benin. “In the beginning of January 2017 I arrived to Lomé and was spending my first night in a local bar, sipping beer and taking snapshots of the new ambience. A Togolese guy approached me and invited for a drink. Couple rounds later he offered to show me around his neighborhood and it turned to be the beginning of the following photo narrative. These street scenes and spontaneous portraits are portraying the nocturnal Africa the way I have experienced it.”

Follow Denis Vejas on Instagram

This Guy Bit a Smartphone Battery and It Blew Up in His Face

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It should go without saying, but apparently it needs to be said: Do not bite into smartphone batteries. Phones are made with toxic chemicals and are usually teeming with bacteria. But since the risk of ingesting dangerous shit doesn't turn people off these days, a guy in China just discovered another fantastic reason to avoid biting into a battery—they tend to explode.

Footage of the unnamed man has gone viral in China after cameras caught the guy chomping down on a smartphone battery in a Chinese electronics store, causing it to erupt into a massive fireball, the Verge reports.

The accident reportedly happened back on January 19, while the guy was shopping for a replacement battery for his iPhone, and footage from the store's surveillance camera was uploaded a day later on China's Vine-like video site, Miaopai. In the ten-second clip, an employee hands the man a battery, which he then puts in his mouth to take a bite. Seconds later, the battery explodes just inches from his face as nearby shoppers recoil in shock.

It's not clear what possible motive the man had for biting into the thing—Taiwan News pointed out that people sometimes bite down on gold to check its purity, but that pirate method isn't exactly transferrable to electronics.

To be fair, smartphone batteries have been known to explode on their own in pants pockets and cars and under pillows, so it's not clear if the bite directly caused the explosion, but the video sure makes a compelling argument that it had something to do with it.

Give the footage a watch above and try to keep your phone away from your mouth from now on, alright?

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Dark Money, Not Russia, May Be the Best Way to Explain Trump's Win

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For as long as Donald Trump has been in office, the nebulous opposition known as the Resistance has been waiting for the Russia Thing to blow up in the president's face. After all, special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of alleged collusion between the Kremlin and Trump's presidential campaign has already resulted in convictions for multiple former Trump advisors, including disgraced former general Michael Flynn. For many progressives as well as NeverTrump conservatives and centrists, the notion that Russian interference won Trump the 2016 election is a powerful, tantalizing prospect to cling to in a dark and strange time.

But Democrats' problems didn't begin when the Kremlin started taking an interest in American agitprop. In a paper out this month from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), UMass-Boston professor emeritus Thomas Ferguson and two colleagues, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, offer lots of evidence for new ideas about how Trump pulled off the upset of the century. Among other things, they assembled a massive database documenting a late, possibly pivotal infusion of shadowy, barely legal campaign cash—a.k.a. dark money—and detailed the candidate's own willingness to invest his personal wealth in a desperate final push. They also found he received a higher percentage of small-donor donations than Barack Obama did in 2012. They emphasized how much better American alt-right media operations seem to be at reaching Americans than Russians. And they bemoaned a long-term trend away from unionization in some of key swing states, where the emergence of a debt-fueled economy that didn't work for the middle class helped put Trump over the top.

For some perspective on just how little the onset of the Trump era may ultimately have to do with the political machinations of Vladimir Putin—and how much of it was about entrenched corporate interests going all-in on Trump—I called up Ferguson for a chat. Here's what we talked about.



VICE: If a late wave of dark money, along with Trump's own donations, was so important in the election, why aren't more people paying attention to it?
Thomas Ferguson: I don't claim to know what's in the minds of reporters. The truth is the press is terrible on money issues. You've got website after website that claim to do all kinds of detailed voting statistical analysis, and there's nothing equivalent to that on political money. My take is it's a hard subject, and the truth is the publishers of most mainstream publications would just as soon not have it heavily discussed.

It took us almost a year to process this stuff. These [donors] don't give you their real names or they give you seven versions of them. And it's all legal. Somebody should have looked, long ago, at the money coming in after [Steve] Bannon and [Kellyanne] Conway took over [the campaign].

What did that infusion of cash you spotted late in the race actually look like? Where did it come from and where did it go?
Some of it is through super PACs and other parts of it are through the campaign. But it's pretty obvious what they did. The day after Bannon and Conway took over, the Washington Post printed what they were going to do, which was focus on a few industrial states and other states where they thought they could get white working-class voters. And they did exactly that. They stayed focused on it.

They were much better targeted than the Clinton campaign. We all know that.

You point out Trump actually did very well with smaller-dollar donors. How do you explain that? Just his populist rhetoric? And how much did it matter?
Nobody wins on small-donor cash. As late as May, he's telling reporters he doesn't need big money. And then they quickly found out as they make the transition to [the general election] that they do need the money. At that point, Reince Priebus and [Paul] Manafort go out and start, with the tin cup, getting a bunch of money. They get a lot of folks. But nothing like what they need, and it stops and they get stuck again. And then this last wave comes in.

With the small-donor stuff, in the very last stages of the race, that tailed off a bit. But it still added up to a tremendous sum that was just jaw-dropping. [A colleague] and I have been looking at the American National Election Studies. And you can just see how angry people were—they weren't buying into this We should be grateful because the recession is over, and Barack Obama has brought us back. So when a guy comes along and says, "I'll spend my own money," they just went for it. It's bait and switch. It's that simple.

Who were these people taking a chance on Trump when he looked doomed in the polls? That infusion of money, even after re-reading your report, is hard for me to make sense of.
I think it's one of the greatest out-of-the-money options in world history, basically, and they thought they could pick it up cheap. And they'd at least take a flier on it. By comparison, Silicon Valley looks almost sedate next to some of the private-equity guys.

Leaving aside, as you do, the possibility that some kind of deal was struck with Russians—which is probably not going to show up in data—can you explain your beef with how little we know about Russian internet targeting and trolling? Why are you so skeptical Russian internet trickery played a big role in this outcome?
Everybody has been remarkably unforthcoming about [the] data [here]. I'm not sure I believe Facebook and everyone else. I don't understand why Congress has not held them to much harder standards on that, although I in fact quite well understand it and suspect you do, too. We're looking here at murky evidence, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that some more might pop out. But on the face of it, we're talking about $100,000 in Facebook, some Twitter stuff, a bunch of trolls in Macedonia, and then a bunch of other stuff spread around. It's a very tiny amount. Our big point, is the obvious one, it's not original: This stuff is mostly made in America. That stuff is nearly all coming from homegrown right-wing sources.

How do we know we even have a full accounting of the internet mayhem here, though?
We don't, and we say that. But Breitbart and all these other [domestic] sources [of right-wing propaganda] were up for years. They were way practiced. And it just doesn't matter if some Kremlin folks... are bouncing back off Steve Bannon's [output] when Bannon and company are doing 24/7 for three years in advance.

You talk a good bit about voter suppression in your paper. Even if we purged the internet of "fake news" and prevented outside interference of any kind, this would still be a problem and maybe even get worse over time, right?
I think voter suppression needs more attention. We are way over-invested in what I call, technically, "overdetermined models of voting" [as opposed to] undetermined stuff that actually affects it, including money. There's an imbalance here that is deeply troubling to me.

Is the imbalance that the basic obvious thing that we have always known—how hard it is to vote on one hand, the money spent on the other—determines outcomes more than outside events like collusion?
We quoted it in the paper—there was talk about how it was really the Russians who turned down voter turnout in North Carolina. I know a lot about that case. The notion that that was the Russians was crazy. You can't possibly compete with local election officials who are determined to push down African American turnout. That just struck me as so crazy I could hardly believe it.

When Trump goes into a place, he talks jobs, and prosperity, and [Hillary Clinton] comes in with 40-point plan for this, that, and everything else. Other people who did the measurements say this was the campaign that had the lowest level of pure issue discussions ever since the time they started measuring, which was 2000. [Bernie] Sanders showed you what you could bring out when you talked like that. It's obvious that the basic issue in the US is not financial reform or telecom monopoly or something like that—those are important issues. But the basic issue is what are you going to do with this vast low-wage economy and the collapse of public services. Democrats need to address that if they want to have people vote for 'em. They can't just sort of cut corners on stuff and offer, "We'll give you marginal differences from Republicans."

And they can't just blame their problems on Russian hacking or Russian interference.
Oh for God's sake, yes. Yeah.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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