On November 17, 2017, in the small city of Socorro, about a dozen students from the University of Texas at El Paso protested their local congressman. They carried colorful signs, a hand-painted banner that read “Education Not Deportation,” and chanted that those lame enough not to be dancing with them were probably with the Border Patrol. The students ' target was Will Hurd, a Republican who represents a third of the US-Mexico border. They berated him for not advocating on behalf of DREAMers—people brought to the country as children—as well as his ongoing support for deploying military technology on the border.

The modest protest was just one of many pointing to a larger trend of activism led by fronterizxs — young folks who have lived their entire lives on the border and are increasingly joining boisterous, immigrant-led youth movements. In fact, the loud and public demonstrations represent a watermark moment in the longer arc of the movement for immigrant justice. The Texas-based group Soñando Juntos, organized by fronterizxs, is building something special by ensuring their movement is intersectional, connecting the struggle for immigrant justice with queer liberation, racial justice, and a critique of American colonialism.

Soñando Juntos's biggest priority is organizing to demand a clean DREAM act: a permanent legal solution for the roughly 800,000 young people granted a temporary reprieve by Barack Obama in 2012 that doesn't include a border wall or new anti-immigrant policies. They’ve staged direct actions at congressional offices, led marches, and organized fronterizx youth to travel to Washington, DC, to demand changes at the highest levels. Their strength is in getting undocumented youth to build alliances with each other, and in using the personal experiences of their members to inspire collective action.

A s co-leader of Soñando Juntos, Alfonzo Mendoza, 28, put it of the situation under Trump, “Even though I'm not an immigrant, I'm a queer person of color, and my other identities are being attacked."

The youth are banding together to support each other’s rights despite their varying legal status. “When we started organizing it felt like there was nothing in El Paso for immigrant youth. We basically started from zero,” added Roberto Valadez, a 24-year-old college graduate. “We asked ourselves why immigrant youth in an 80 percent Latino community weren’t organized here like they were in Chicago, LA, or New York. And we think that’s because of border militarization.”

Mexicans on the US side of the US-Mexico border have had to keep an eye open for the Border Patrol—known as la migra—since 1924. Yet in the past 30 years, there’s been an unprecedented surge in border militarization. Since 1993, the Border Patrol’s budget has increased tenfold, and the number of agents has doubled. Meanwhile, the border has become a dumping ground for a host of military technologies ranging from “Predator Drones” to heat detection sensors—much of which is repurposed equipment that had been used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And a string of checkpoints surrounding cities like El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico, keep even legal residents feeling watched and unsettled.

Valadez entered activism in the days following Donald Trump’s election, a time of extreme insecurity for immigrants and border communities of all stripes. In El Paso, the local border patrol union had voted to back the national union’s endorsement of the Republican race-baiter. Statewide, legislators pushed through SB4, a law which (if it isn't permanently struck down) would have fined local authorities who refused to comply with ICE and allowed cops to ask anyone about their legal status for any reason at any time.

Valadez and Mendoza quickly organized Soñando Juntos, or Dreaming Together, and began recruiting immigrant youth to join their ranks.

Born in Juárez, Mexico in 1993, Valadez came to El Paso when he was one. He grew up in the early years of intensive border policing, when agents poured into urban border communities during “Operation Hold the Line.” His charisma is subtle. At first glance, he's a normal guy—average height, wears simple T-shirts, blue jeans, maybe a flannel here and there. But when you catch him on the political landscape, he's a different person. His fearlessness attracts people—especially other immigrant youth. He is wholly unafraid of sharing his status, and began doing so at a time when elder organizers were urging him to keep certain details under the radar.

When President Obama initiated DACA, it paved the way for major changes in Valadez’s life. The program enabled him to enroll in school, find legal employment and for the first time, feel confident enough to speak openly about his status and use it as a tool for social change.

Still, recruiting other immigrant activists was not an easy task, one that's become way harder under Trump. “The biggest barrier for us has been finding other undocumented youth that are willing to be vocal,” Valadez said, “We already knew all the stories of abuse and all the disparities in the detainment centers, but this newer climate is terrifying for people.”

Roberto Valadez (left) and Noe Labrado (right) of Soñando Juntos speaking to demonstrators at a protest in El Paso, TX. Illustration by Zeke Peña.

According to Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, “People are afraid to buy groceries or take their kids to school, because if they are confronted by this apparatus the consequence is separation, detention, deportation.”

Still, Soñando Juntos used Facebook and word of mouth to slowly build a network of committed foot soldiers in the fall of 2017. The group is part of the umbrella immigrant-lead organization United We Dream that has an estimated 400,000 members across the country. Their greatest weapon has been collaboration: Valadez helped found a coalition of student groups called Education Not Deportation, which launched a campus organizing campaign.

It was during this feverish time of organizing that he met Claudia Ioli. Ioli, 25, moved to El Paso from Venezuela when she was eight years old. Like Valadez, she grew up in a militarized border shaped by checkpoints and intensified border policing. “We had to be really careful about saying we were immigrants, but because of our accents, it was clear we were not from El Paso," she told me.

As Ioli came of age, she applied for a green card but was denied and had to turn down the chance to go to her dream college due to her ineligibility for federal financial aid, she recalled. In fact, by the time of her entry into the DACA program, Ioli was already in removal proceedings. She channeled these experiences into activism—working not just on immigration issues but also reproductive rights and voter education. When she joined Soñando Juntos, she was already a seasoned activist, ready to recruit others and share her story.

“Because we are a hyper militarized community, ours is a cultural type of work," she explained. "There has been so much stigma around being undocumented, so as young people stepping forward with our stories, we create change.”

At marches, Valadez, Ioli, and Mendoza rally the troops in chants and carry their banner. When Valadez steps in front of the microphone, he enthralls the audience with his honesty: "My name is Roberto Valadez, I am undocumented, and I am a DACA recipient."

Three years ago, it would have been hard to imagine activists making such proclamations publicly in El Paso. But by declaring their reality, Valadez and Ioli are working to destroy the stigma associated with legal status.

Soñando Juntos, along with the group Education Not Deportation, launched a petition for the University of Texas El Paso to designate itself as a Sanctuary University, pledge support for international students, and permanently eject Border Patrol from campus. The latter demand was an especially crucial one for organizers, who were troubled by the increasingly common migra bike patrols disrupting campus life. The students organized a successful walk-out that drew over 100 faculty and staff on November 9, 2017—a remarkable feat at a commuter school without much of an activist presence. For Mendoza, this was a seminal moment.

“After the walk-out, so many people wanted to speak at the rally," he said. It really showed that there’s a lot of interest in social justice with the youth in El Paso and if we cultivate that culture here, it has potential to grow.”

This youth movement is a non-violent one, settling on noisy, public protests designed to demand the attention of the general public, as well as to disrupt "business as usual." Such tactics have also been a mainstay of movements from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, the latter using non-violent direct action to bring attention to police brutality and issues affecting African-American communities. Nonviolence has also long been a staple of Chicano organizing, but in recent memory, many immigration-related organizations took a more cautious approach to protest, opting instead for softer political demonstrations like vigils and press conferences or bringing constituents to city councils.

Despite the danger of arrest and the consequences that could have for some of their own, Soñando Juntos is all about performative, spontaneous, confrontational protest. They actively call out politicians who fail to deliver on promises and intentionally try to create a raucous atmosphere. Their chants are provocative—directly critiquing the system of deportations and consistently slamming groups like ICE and Border Patrol. This unabashed style has put new pressure on local politicians, school administrators, and the press to take them more seriously.

“Historically, a lot of organizations in El Paso have been advocating for immigrant rights, but Soñando Juntos was the first group that really brought young DREAMers and undocumented youth together in the community," Ioli said.

Valadez added, “We’re are creating a culture where people are no longer afraid or ashamed of who they are.”

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In a recent video report from an anti-refugee rally in Germany, former EDL organiser Tommy Robinson sweeps his hand in accusation at a group of journalists.

"Are you all mainstream media? You're all guilty!" he jabs, holding a Rebel Media-branded microphone to his mouth. "You are all guilty of what's happening in Europe. You have done this. You have hid the truth, and you label people unfairly, as fascists, as Nazis, as racists. You've all got blood on your hands."

The report was from Cottbus, a city in northeastern Germany of about 100,000 people, where 3,400 Syrian refugees have settled over the last two years. At the start of the year the city was rocked by violence between refugees and locals: on the 1st of January some German youths broke into a building housing refugees and beat up some Afghans. On the 17th, a Syrian slashed a local 16-year-old's face with a knife. Then a 15-year-old Syrian and his father were asked to leave the city after the teenager was involved in a knife attack outside a shopping centre. The city put a temporary ban on any new refugees and has become a focal point for protests from the far-right and left over refugees' rights.

The report by Robinson – real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – doesn't tell you very much about any of this. Instead, he walks around the press-pack at the protest like David Brent at an employee's birthday party, asking journalists if they will characterise the march as far-right and repeatedly saying "Unbelievable!" when they don't want to engage. At one point he asks a journalist whether it's really fair to report on Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – an avowedly xenophobic party whose leaders warn of an "invasion of foreigners" – by referring to them as "far-right".

The report contains little actual information about any social issues connected to migration, real or imagined, and even less about the nature of the apparent German "fight back". Instead, it turns into a long whine about "the mainstream media" and how they report on protests. For his audience on the far-right Canadian YouTube channel Rebel Media, Tommy is hitting the nail on the head. "The only journalist I saw in the whole video was Tommy," approves one commenter.

It's bizarre that someone who used to lead far-right street protests is now getting kudos as the only "true" reporter for doing puff-pieces for similar events, but Robinson is not the only alt-right personality making his mark as a media figure rather than a political organiser. Tommy Robinson's attack-dog journalist schtick is him jumping on a bandwagon that was already rolling. For a number of alt-right figures, the toxic mixture of ego and bullshit that comprises much of the new-media landscape is the perfect environment in which to push their agenda.

Gamergate was the cultural moment from which a number of right-leaning commentators and journalists emerged. Figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, then of Breitbart News, gained an audience as misogynist video gamers linked up with mens right's activists and anonymous trolls to harass women working in the video games industry.

In the following years, many of those in the Gamergate crowd got involved in the alt-right. The journalists and commentators who had risen to prominence built on their newfound fame by singling out new enemies: Muslims and the hated "Social Justice Warrior". It also saw them making new allies: Yiannopoulos, for instance, got neo-Nazis to contribute their thoughts for his articles.

At the US Presidential election, many of these alt-right media personalities threw their weight behind Trump. Alt-right journalists became phenomenally partisan, inventing rumours to attack Hillary Clinton. Notably, Paul Joseph Watson – who no longer bangs on about the "New World Order", but hasn’t left conspiracy theory completely behind – made a video where he diagnoses Clinton with a variety of illnesses and drug abuse problems, based on conversations with largely un-named "experts".

This is a milieu that trashes the traditional orthodoxies of journalism while claiming to be reporting "the truth". Masquerading as journalists allows these figures to present their controversial worldview based on half-truths and distortions as a set of facts that an elite media class has hidden from the public. It gives their Islamophobic myopia a sense of worldly-wisdom and insider knowledge. It gives their shrieking hysteria the legitimate urgency of a front page splash and their racist provocations the defence of "free speech". Their ludicrous stunts get the cool of gonzo bravado. It gives their infatuation with Islam an apolitical sheen – no longer a racist obsession, but a thoroughly covered beat.

The Defend Europe stunt – where European "identitarians" tried to stop migrants being rescued by NGOs in the Mediterranean – was backed by some of the alt-right journalists, and their reporting often crossed the line into far-right activism.

When Tommy Robinson signed up to the Rebel in early 2017, he took this panto-journalism to strange new places. It was weird enough when he doorstepped the writer of a small blog called "Zelo Street", turning up to his house late at night for a "friendly chat" about why he would label him a "racist". It was a much pettier, more narcissistic version of Channel 4 News appearing at former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie's house to ask him about the "paper's coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy". He did the same thing to a journalist for Wales Online who labelled him "far right", and to a researcher for the Quilliam Foundation think-tank who implicitly linked him to white supremacist movements in an article published by the Guardian. On each occasion, the appeal is in the ambush and the sight of surprised journalists squirming, rather than anything particularly illuminating.

Tommy on a demonstration in 2010 when he was leader of the EDL (Photo by Henry Langston)

Perhaps the highlight of this new journalistic career, though, is his habit of standing outside courts and getting into shouting matches with attendees in order to "expose" alleged Muslim paedophiles, missing the fact that it's not exactly Spotlight when the person you're "exposing" is already standing trial.

After one such misadventure outside Canterbury Crown Court in Kent, Robinson had to apologise in person to a judge and was spared jail, receiving a suspended sentence for contempt of court charges.

Referring to standard reporting restrictions to protect the integrity of the trial, he complained of "what lengths they went to to prevent me from warning people what's going on". He was apparently unaware that journalists are perfectly entitled to report court cases in all their lurid detail, just not gatecrash proceedings with a camera and pre-empt the result. Court reporting is the bread and butter of traditional journalism, and there was no cover-up; local media reported the case. Robinson's "warning" was of questionable use to the people of Canterbury, since the perpetrators were found guilty and jailed for nearly 50 years.

While all that makes Robinson's circus twice as stupid, it also makes it twice as subversive. He's parking his tanks on traditional journalists' lawns and denying them even the legitimacy of their stock in trade. The fact he could have put the course of justice at risk didn't seem to damage his credibility among supporters, who funded a QC, another barrister and a solicitor for his contempt hearing.

Ridiculous though it is, Robinson's media persona serves a purpose. It's not that far-right activists haven't made their own propaganda in the past – of course they did. But in an age when anybody with a smartphone, a YouTube channel, Periscope, Twitter and a Patreon can make a living out of being a content creator, becoming a vlogger seems to be one of the chief MOs of far-right agitators. That alt-right shit-stirring so often dovetails with the agenda of the right-wing mainstream press, allowing them to act as the outriders with legitimate concerns, rather than extremists. Squaring the circle, Katie Hopkins joined the Rebel when she found the MailOnline to be "vulnerable to lobbying [from] the Muslim mafia or from the Jewish brigade".

Robinson is now leaving the Rebel and is going independent, to have "total freedom". His role as a correspondent – someone who makes "real" news – gives the illusion of weight to his catch-all "fake news" defence against criticism. This has come in especially handy recently, as court reports from the trial of Finsbury Park killer Darren Osborne show that he had repeatedly searched for Robinson's material online before the attack, which left one man dead and 12 injured.

In an interview on the BBC's Newsnight, Robinson refuses to accept any responsibility for radicalising Osborne, demanding we only look at the parts of the story which suit his agenda, to the exclusion of all others. Host Kirsty Wark points out that Osborne had two printed-out tweets of Robinson's on the dashboard of the van as he ploughed it into innocent people. Robinson focuses on one tweet – in which he asks, "Where was the day of rage after the terrorist attacks?" – and accuses Wark of "taking it out of context". He then demands to know why she missed the fact he was referencing an irrelevant left-wing protest, while himself ignoring what is clearly the most important context – that this tweet came as part of Robinson's relentless stream of Muslim-bashing.

"Why do you think that he obsessively looked you up online? Because actually it's the case that you were presenting in a way that encouraged him to take action against people," charges Wark.

"Absolutely unbelievable that you're saying that," he says. "Forty-nine million people watched my videos in that four-week period, and 193 million people read my tweets," he boasts with all the swagger of a new-media mogul, as if that's a defence.

"The reason people are searching for me is that I'm giving them the truth, unlike you."

It's tempting to ask why anybody would take that claim seriously, but as Darren Osborne’s obsessive searching of Robinson's output before his murderous attack shows, it is deadly serious.

@SimonChilds13 / @jdpoulter

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I remember getting fucked on the balcony of a seventh-storey South London towerblock at seven on a Monday morning, high on a cocktail of crystal meth and GHB. Gazing down at the milkmen and school-run mums, I felt impossibly far from their world – and absolutely at home in the chemsex chillout.

This intimate thrill is hard to explain to my straight – and queer – friends. It was largely overlooked in the 2015 moral panic around chemsex. The media framed Grindr-organised orgies as the latest horror to befall gay and bisexual men, suffering HIV, psychosis and terminal drug overdoses as a result of recklessness, self-loathing and bad life choices.

Gay cultural theorist Jamie Hakim is no “advocate” for chemsex, and he does not seek to explain away the very real problems it causes. But his paper The rise of chemsex: queering collective intimacy in neoliberal London takes a step back, interviewing 15 members of the scene to “think about why chemsex is joyful for some people and ruins others’ lives – and what that tells us about London.”

Jamie believes London – and the psychology of its residents – has been restructured by neoliberal ideology to the point where chemsex orgies are the only way many queer men find intimacy.

VICE: Some well-meaning people have argued against the panic around chemsex by stating that people getting laid under chemical influence is nothing new. What is “chemsex” in the context of 21st century London?
Jamie Hakim: Men taking mephedrone, GHB, GBL and crystal meth, and – often using apps like Grindr – organising group parties in flats and residencies around London. I’m interested in why this particular phenomenon is happening now, particularly around Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham since 2011.

In Vauxhall, for example, the local council had been encouraging luxury property development in a way which made it far too expensive not only for gay businesses but also for gay people. Looking at migration patterns in London, people are moving into areas where they would have historically relied on gay bars or clubs to meet new people, but they don’t have strong bonds or social networks. People are isolated by a lack of disposable income; by their ability to get work and experience public space.

"The gin-drinking investment banker exists in chemsex spaces as much as the young guy without access to capital."

One guy used to really enjoy going out to Barcode [a nightclub in Vauxhall that closed in 2015], taking a bit of ket and dancing; another in his 50s enjoyed going to landmark sex-on-premises club Hoist – but now those places don’t exist anymore. There’s been a 58 percent reduction in LGBTQ space in London since 2006 – not just gay clubs, but all kinds of space for all kinds of LGBTQ+ people.

Another interviewee, from Slovakia, moved to Cardiff and had a great time, then moved to London and found it much more alienating. He was very depressed. There are fewer material ways for gay men to connect now.

So queer men experience London as a hostile, straight environment?
Neoliberalism encourages us to think of ourselves as competitive individuals in all aspects of our lives, in our sense of self, in practices of intimacy. Chemsex begins to make sense in these conditions – it allows us to be together in very relaxed ways that have become increasingly difficult since the financial crisis. There’s a need to feel together, in historical conditions which do not encourage that.

The Grindr chemsex fiend is one stereotype of young gay men in neoliberal London. Can you explain his opposite, the “city gay” with a nice flat and a Tinder boyfriend?
Well, I spoke to a varied bunch in terms of age, class backgrounds, ethnicity. The gin-drinking investment banker exists in chemsex spaces as much as the young guy without access to capital.

Gay marriage is important, in terms of ensuring LGBTQ+ people are absolutely equal in law. But monogamous marriage, respectable jobs, earning lots of money… aspiring to that has its implications. It’s foreclosing all the other sorts of intimacy gay men have been arguing for since the beginning of the gay liberation moment. One of the important interventions the gay rights movement made was precisely the idea of inventing new forms of intimacy that weren’t to do with marriage.

How does the panic around chemsex compare to the panic around HIV?
[One thing] queer people endure is the idea that the sex we have is disgusting. What was interesting about the chemsex moral panic was that it was well-intentioned, in a way the clearly very homophobic AIDs panic wasn’t. It’s coming from the gay press, people that care about gay men’s health.

"London is very competitive, the amount of money you need to make to live here, the amount you’re encouraged to consume – that’s isolating us."

But when I spoke to people who work in public health, it was actually very difficult to make the connection that chemsex itself was responsible for the spread of HIV. And there’s something troubling about describing gay men as incapable of intimacy.

That intimacy must be long-term and monogamous to be significant is a very straight idea.
Chemsex can be very isolating – I talk about the figure of the guy obsessively scrolling through Grindr in the corner of a chillout – but some interviewees absolutely did experience enduring intimacy. The guy from Slovakia didn’t enjoy sex in chillouts, but went because of the conversation. The interviewee in his 50s lost his job and became HIV+, but he made really good friends on the scene – one had a cancer scare and he supported him all through that.

Gay men build various sorts of intimacy. Previously, recreational drug use was a problem, because it inhibited your productivity – now, under neoliberalism, you can pursue pleasure only if you’re consuming. Chemsex intimacy doesn’t fit either of those, and so it’s difficult to convince mainstream society what good comes of it.

Where might straight Londoners go looking for intimacy in the same way?
I apply Jeremy Gilbert’s idea that “feeling together” is the building block of human experience to chemsex. London is very competitive, the amount of money you need to make to live here, the amount you’re encouraged to consume – that’s isolating us. And historically, sex is an important medium for gay men to “feel together”.

In a very different arena, Corbynmania is a way for people to “feel together” as a response to this moment of profound uncertainty. Even Brexit, as a nationalist response. And of course, people still go out dancing together.

Can chemsex ever be more than a retreat from the “straight” neoliberal world?
It’s not about turning chemsex sessions into consciousness-raising groups, but about thinking about a need for collectivity and being-together in a highly emotive way, in a political moment where that’s generally not happening. Sometimes chemsex doesn’t achieve that, in dangerous ways, but to some people it can produce the possibility of a queer utopia. It’s precisely an experience beyond words. Language fails to capture its intensities.

@hashtagbroom

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

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

US News

New White House Gun-Control Plan Is Heavy on Arming Teachers
The Trump administration was said to back a plan to train teachers and school staff in firearm use—and bolster background checks on buyers generally—but appeared to abandon a previous commitment to raising the age for buying certain types of guns from 18 to 21. A White House official said the idea of age restrictions was "a state-based discussion right now."—The Washington Post

Five People Killed in NYC Helicopter Crash
All the passengers onboard a private helicopter being used for a photo shoot were killed after it crashed into the East River in New York City on Sunday night. Two passengers were found dead at the scene, while three others later died in the hospital. The city’s fire commissioner Daniel Nigron said the pilot survived and was in "OK" condition.—NBC News

Elon Musk Teases Mission to Mars in 2019
The SpaceX founder and CEO revealed his company was aiming to send its first "interplanetary ship" to Mars and bring it back to Earth early next year. Speaking at SXSW in Austin, Texas, Musk said the proposed spaceship has been codenamed BFR for "big fucking rocket" and will be able to do "up-and-down flights."—CBS News

Major Storage Malfunctions at Two Fertility Clinics
San Francisco's Pacific Fertility Center revealed that hundreds of patients' eggs and embryos could have been damaged when a liquid nitrogen storage tank "failed" last Sunday. Cleveland's University Hospital Fertility Clinic said it experienced a similar malfunction on the same day. Both facilities were investigating whether affected eggs and embryos might still be viable.—ABC News

International News

Dozens Killed in Nepal Plane Crash
A Bangladeshi airline's passenger plane crashed trying to land at Kathmandu's airport in the Nepali capital Monday, leaving at least 49 people dead, according to a police official. Another 22 people of the 71 onboard were injured. The plane reportedly attempted to land on an airport runway from the wrong direction.—CNN / VICE News

Myanmar Accused of 'Land Grab' in Rohingya Villages
Amnesty International revealed evidence that Myanmar's military was clearing villages once home to thousands of people from the Muslim minority group forced to flee to Bangladesh. Despite the government agreeing to repatriate Rohingya refugees, the NGO claimed satellite photos showed villages in Rakhine state being cleared as part of a "military land grab."—BBC News

Kim Jong Un Reportedly Wants Peace Treaty with Trump
According to a South Korean newspaper report, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could be after a peace treaty with the US in pending talks with President Trump. One expert noted the treaty would likely be contingent on the US military presence in South Korea being massively scaled back or even eliminated.—Bloomberg

Far-Right French Leader Wants to Change Party Name
Marine Le Pen urged Front National members to vote in favor of rebranding the party Rassemblement National (National Rally). Le Pen, who was re-elected as leader on Sunday, admitted the name of the far-right party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen was "for many French people a psychological obstacle."—Al Jazeera / VICE News

Everything Else

Scientologists Launch New TV Channel
The Church announced that Scientology TV will begin broadcasting Monday on DirecTV, Apple TV, and Roku. Although no schedules had been revealed, an app promised "full episodes of your favorite shows."—The Hollywood Reporter

Duffer Brothers Respond to Verbal Abuse Allegation
The creators of Stranger Things apologized for letting "tempers occasionally get frayed" on set but stopped short of a complete mea culpa after former crew member Peyton Brown said she had seen them "seek out and verbally abuse multiple women."—The Guardian

"Black Panther" Makes $1 Billion Worldwide
The Marvel and Disney superhero movie reached the global landmark over the weekend, taking another $41.1 million in North America and remaining No. 1 at the box office. It became the seventh-highest earner in domestic box office history.—AP

Vladimir Putin Boasts About Ordering a Plane to Be Shot Down
The Russian president said he approved the downing of a passenger plane in 2014 after officials told him it had been hijacked and was headed for the Sochi Winter Olympics opening ceremony with a bomb onboard. The hijacking was then deemed a false alarm.—VICE News

Tech CEO Arrested, Accused of Selling Phones to Drug Cartel
The FBI arrested Vincent Ramos, CEO of Phantom Secure, on racketeering and other conspiracy charges, court documents revealed. The Bureau alleged the Sinaloa cartel used Phantom's customized BlackBerry phones.—Motherboard

Sum 41’s 'In Too Deep' Was Nearly a Reggae Track
Guitarist Ben Cook claimed one of the band's biggest hits was originally recorded as reggae music by Sum 41 producer Greig Nori and Canadian artist Snow. Describing the first version as "amazing," Cook said Nori wanted to "mix pop punk and reggae."—Noisey

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we hear about the forgotten history of the black female inventor who revolutionized menstrual pads.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This year's Sundance Film Festival was bland as hell. Sure, there was a horror movie that will make you never look at dollhouses the same way again, but nothing really stole the show. There was no Whiplash or Get Out or Call Me by Your Name like previous years, no standout film that everyone immediately agreed was destined for greatness or at least a SAG award. But there was one thing that everyone agreed on: Sorry to Bother You—Boots Riley's biting-racial-satire-hidden-inside-a-fever-dream directorial debut—is goddamn bonkers.

Now, in honor of the film's SXSW premiere, Annapurna released the first trailer for the film Vulture touted as "the punk film that 2018 deserves," and it looks like the hilarious, scathing, batshit crazy movie America needs right now.

In Sorry to Bother You, Lakeith Stanfield rises to the top of a secret telemarketer cabal thanks to his ability to do a white voice. The movie is set "in an alternate present-day version of Oakland, [where ] telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success, propelling him into a macabre universe," according to the synopsis, but that barely scratches the surface of everything going on in this clip. Like, Armie Hammer is an evil corporate exec? What the hell is a "power caller"? Who's that eyepatch guy? And David Cross is definitely doing Stanfield's white-guy voice, right? Good Christ, this is going to be wild.

Riley—an activist and member of famed Oakland band The Coup, who's also apparently a genius writer and director—has been working on Sorry to Bother You for a while now. He originally published the film's screenplay in McSweeney's back in 2014, and told VICE in 2015 that he was inspired to write it after taking some film and TV auditions in LA.

"I was in LA and went by there to have the meeting, but all the roles were like cops or dope dealers," Riley said in the interview. "Why would I want to spend hours and hours of my life fulfilling somebody else's fucked-up vision of the world? I'd rather spend hours and hours of my life putting out my own fucked-up vision of the world."

That fucked-up vision of the world is coming July 6, when Annapurna releases Sorry to Bother You in theaters. Until then, bask in the glorious insanity of the trailer above.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This story was produced in partnership with the Marshall Project, which collaborated with the Wichita Eagle.

Amid the farm animals and food stalls at the Kansas State Fair last September, Amy Byers came upon a booth run by the state’s Bureau of Investigation. There was a computer you could use to search your address and find out if you live near a sex offender. You could also search by name.

When her friends began joking that she should type in her own name, Byers panicked. She knew that she was on the list, although not for a sex crime. A decade ago, she was convicted of conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine. She pleaded guilty and avoided prison time. Now 29, she says she lives a clean life in Hutchinson, a small town in the center of the state.

But under Kansas law, having a drug conviction means that her photograph and other identifying details are displayed in the same public registry that includes more than 10,000 convicted sex offenders. Many registrants also appear on third-party websites like “Offender Radar” and “Sex Offender Spy,” and it’s easy for a visitor to miss the single word—“drug”—that differentiates Byers's crime from those the public judges much more harshly. “People who don’t know me are going to look at me like I’m a horrible person for being on that list,” she said.

Lawmakers have long justified sex offender registries as a way to notify people about potentially dangerous neighbors or acquaintances, while critics say they fail to prevent crime and create a class of social outcasts. Over the years, several states have expanded their registries to add perpetrators of other crimes, including kidnapping, assault, and murder. Tennessee added animal abuse. Utah added white-collar crimes. A few states considered but abandoned plans for hate crime and domestic abuse registries. At least five states publicly display methamphetamine producers.

But Kansas went furthest, adding an array of lesser drug crimes; roughly 4,600 people in the state are now registered as drug offenders. As deaths from opioids rise, some public officials have focused on addiction as a public health issue. Kansas offers a different approach, as law enforcement officials argue that the registry helps keep track of people who may commit new offenses and cautions the public to avoid potentially dangerous areas and individuals. At the same time, many registrants say it can be hard to move on when their pasts are just a click away for anyone to see.

The Kansas legislature is currently considering a bill proposed by the state’s sentencing commission that would remove drug offenders from the registry. “It is a drain on resources with no science, studies, or data to justify it,” defense lawyer Jennifer Roth told lawmakers at an early February hearing.

The Kansas law, first passed in 2007, now requires anyone convicted of manufacturing, distributing, or possessing “with intent to distribute” drugs other than marijuana to remain on the registry for a minimum of 15 years (and a maximum of life, for multiple convictions). During that time, they must appear at their county sheriff’s office four times a year, as well as any time they move, get a new job, email address, vehicle, or tattoo. Most of this information is online, searchable by name or neighbourhood, and members of the public can sign up to be emailed when an offender moves in or starts work near them. (In 2013, when businesses expressed fear of vigilantes targeting registrants at work, lawmakers removed employment addresses from the website.)

During the quarterly sheriff visits, they must pay $20 and have their picture retaken; if they work or go to school in another county, they must register there as well. “Any time I get a new job, I have to say, ‘Sorry, I need time off,’ in the first 72 hours,” said Juston Kerns, 35, arrested for involvement in the sale of methamphetamine in 2014.

A few years ago, Wesley Harden—convicted in 2008 of selling methamphetamine after he led police on a high-speed chase—was arrested and charged with “failure to register.” Harden, 35, showed up as required, but he’d recently failed to report a jet ski as a new vehicle. He doesn’t know for sure how the authorities discovered the jet ski, but thinks it has to do with pictures he posted on Facebook.

Harden received three years of probation, but the punishment for failing to register can include prison time, even if the original conviction was handled without incarceration. Last year, 38 people were sent to prison over their failure to register for drug crimes, and the Kansas Sentencing Commission estimates that removing drug crimes would save the state roughly a million dollars each year.

Captain Michael Kolbek of the Shawnee County Sheriff’s Department, which handles registrants in the Topeka area, said the county’s compliance rate is usually above 90 percent. The department often cuts registrants slack if they can’t afford a payment. “A lot of them suffer from mental illness; maybe they went off their medication,” he said. “Those are the folks we don’t prosecute.”

The personal ramifications of being on the registry can be difficult to pinpoint, since having a felony on one’s record can also bring negative consequences. But some registrants say it creates an additional barrier when they look for employment. “If you want a job, you don’t have to tell them you’re a felon anymore, but now they can search for you, and it lowers your chances even more of getting a job,” said Ashleigh Swarts, who was convicted of various methamphetamine crimes, most recently in 2015. “I can’t get a job, period.”

Although drugs do not carry the same social stigma as sexual and violent crimes, some people say that being on the registry takes a toll on their relationships. Holly Bratcher, who was convicted of involvement in meth production after being caught in a raid at a friend’s house, said she had abandoned her drug use, but her new boyfriend’s ex-partner found her on the registry. “She told his mom, told others kids’ moms, and put my business out there for everybody,” Bratcher said. “Anybody who looks at my record, they don’t know me, they are quick to judge me.”

At the same time, Bratcher said the stringent registry requirements have a silver lining. When she was convicted, she lost her nursing license, and she is working to get it back from a state board. “Proving you’re making good choices—that’s next to impossible to prove to people on paper,” she said. Now, she can point to her diligence at keeping up with her registration as proof she has turned her life around.

Many law enforcement officials support the registry on public safety grounds. “People who sell drugs, there tends to be dangerous activity that takes place around their residence,” said Ed Klumpp, a retired Topeka police chief who lobbies for law enforcement at the legislature and opposes the current bill. “If you’re raising children in the neighborhood, it’s good to know there is someone down the street convicted of selling or manufacturing, so maybe they won’t send the kids to get candy there on Halloween.”

In recent years, lawyers around the country have argued to increasing success that registration requirements are unconstitutional. One county in Colorado recently took its registry offline after a judge found it to be cruel and unusual punishment. California recently passed a law allowing sex offenders to be removed from the registry after 10 to 20 years if they have not committed another serious or violent felony or sex crime.

But beyond the legal questions are practical ones. Little is known about whether registries prevent crime, and University of Michigan law professor J.J. Prescott has speculated that they may even facilitate crimes that involve buyers and sellers. “Imagine I move to a new city and I don't know where to find drugs,” he said. “Oh, I can just look up people on the registry!”

Evidence to support this theory is scant—and law enforcement leaders in Kansas say they have not encountered the problem—but at the February legislative hearing, Scott Schultz, the executive director of the Kansas Sentencing Commission, said he had learned of one registrant who found people at her door, looking to buy drugs. They’d seen her address online. “I’ve called it, tongue in cheek, state-sponsored drug-dealing,” Schultz said, describing the registry as an “online shopping portal for meth and other drugs.”

A version of this article was originally published by the Wichita Eagle in collaboration with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A year ago this April, 22-year-old Melinda Vasilije was found stabbed to death in her Kitchener, Ontario apartment.

Soon after, a Reddit post titled “Wanted for Kitchener murder my side” surfaced. It was allegedly authored by Ager Hasan, 24, Vasilije’s former boyfriend.

In what allegedly appeared to be a detailed confession, the post claimed Vasilije was the first to grab a knife. “She comes at me in full force, aiming towards my face... I tell her to stop,” reads part of the Reddit post. “She doesn't, I tried grabbing the knife but ended up cutting my hands. After a few cuts I lost it. I freaked out, I was scared and in a state of shock. Never in a hundred years did I think she would use a knife against me. Out of shock and fear I grab one. I hit her with it, almost blindly. A few times. I didn't know what happened. I was confused, shocked and scared."

Accompanying the written words were Imgur links to photos of the former couple together and screenshots of text messages between them. Hasan went on the run in the United States while a warrant was out for his arrested and was spotted in Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

He was apprehended in Texas two months later, eventually being extradited to Canada. Hasan has been charged with second-degree murder, and preliminary court proceedings are currently underway. The proceedings are under a publication ban.

Cases like Hasan’s garner viral audiences, perhaps because of the possibility of personal interaction: One can easily look up an alleged criminal’s online behaviour on their social media site of choice.

It’s an appetite criminal justice Professor Raymond Surette, of University of Central Florida, described as “voyeuristic” and rooted in celebrity culture.

“This is why they blow up: You no longer simply have to read just a news account of this; you can go online, you can interact, retweet, redistribute, add to the content if you want,” he said. “You’re not only looking over the shoulder—you’re actually participatory in this.”

Surette noted how some people will leave suggestions on social media posts that appear to be connected with a crime: “Turn yourself in, bro!” or “Head to the border!”

Indeed, on some of the Instagram posts Hasan appeared to have authored while he was on the run in the US, people who’d been following the case didn’t hold back in the comments. “I hope, Ager, that you will soon offer to plead #guilty to causing the #death of that ex-#girlfriend whose death you're accused of having caused,” one commenter said.

Another wrote: “I wish there was a different outcome because u two actually made a good couple. Smh... We have to stop letting the devil control us. I say devil meaning anger... It never hurts to walk away. Now this beautiful girl is gone and so is your freedom... I'm sending a silent praying for all involved and hurt by this tragedy.”

But, Surette says, people from the same generation as Hasan may create potentially incriminating content because they’ve accepted and embraced self-surveillance. They’re used to having their pictures taken and posted online, sharing intimate details about their lives, romantic relationships, opinions, and inner-thoughts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

But that’s not to say that crimes that intersect with social media are all just a side-effect of technology’s role in our culture. Performance crime—crimes committed with an audience in mind—have been around for a long time (see: terrorism).

Though it could be argued that social media in itself is performative in nature, Hasan’s purported posts while on the run seemed reactionary rather than motivated by an audience. However, there have been a number of cases in recent years where it’s been obvious that an audience was intended from the very beginning.

Take the “selfie killer” Amanda Taylor, who, at 24 years old, was convicted of murdering her father-in-law, 59-year-old Charlie Taylor. In April 2015 nearby Ironto, Virginia, Amanda took a selfie holding a bloody knife in front of the dead body of her father-in-law. She then posted it on her social media. Allegedly, she also contacted a crime blogger to submit the selfie. The blogger then contacted police. Amanda went on the run. Yet, she still found time to update social media again: a photo on Instagram of a gun in her lap and a note that seemed suicidal in tone. "Alright... It's about that time. I'm going to go find my husband in Hell and finally be at peace."

Amanda is now serving life in prison after being found guilty of first-degree murder.

When asked why she would post about committing murder on social media, she told local media: “I guess I was proud of what I had done and like I got online and saw a couple different news postings and me and Sean, like, we were wanted,” she said. "They were looking for us, and I don't know, I just felt the need… I was excited that I had finally [done] it.”

Though the Hasan and Taylor cases hinge more on the willingness to create incriminating content on social media, such as alleged written confessions or photos that could be used as evidence, sometimes the way social media interacts with crime is less intentional.

In January, Cheyenne Rose Antoine, a 21-year-old woman in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison for killing her best friend. A key piece of evidence that was used to prove she had killed her friend, 18-year-old Brittney Gargol, was a selfie of the two women that had been posted on Facebook the same day she died. In the selfie, Antoine was wearing a belt that was found next to Gargol’s body on a road near a landfill.

Image via Facebook

Gargol died on March 25, 2015. Antoine had originally told police that Gargol had gone home with a man she met while they were bar-hopping that night. The day of Gargol’s death, Antoine took to Facebook to comment on Gargol’s posts, which, in retrospect, may have been an attempt to throw people off her trail: “Aweh, I miss you so much bert! wish heaven had visiting hours so i could come see you… still can’t believe those last two days were going to be the last 2 days i got to be able to hug you, talk to you & laugh with you… You were truely (sic.) an angel, but i guess God needed you up there.”

Lisa Watson, who was Antoine’s criminal defence lawyer, said she’s been seeing social media come up more often in criminal cases since she started practicing law in 2010.

“When I first started out, Facebook was around, but it certainly wasn’t something that was common to be seen referenced in court,” Watson told VICE. “You would often see judges and more senior lawyers struggling to explain what social media was and how it worked, particularly when we had younger people coming before the court—witnesses and accused.”

“It was all very foreign when social media kind of started exploding onto the scene,” Watson said. “Courts now, at least in my experience, are much more familiar with the various social media platforms.” Watson said Facebook in particular is one platform she’s seen progress in recent years.

“It seems there’s more of an acceptance of evidence coming forth from social media in criminal courtroom now,” Watson said.

But, extracting evidence from social media presents its own set of issues. How do you know if screenshots are genuine and not altered? And how do you know who exactly is posting from an account? As was the case with Hasan, for example, police were not willing to tell the public whether or not the social media posts that appeared to be related to the case were authentic.

Watson referenced a case in Saskatchewan where a Facebook screenshot was submitted as evidence. Christopher Donald Hirsch, 40, threatened to choke and shoot his ex in a Facebook post in 2013. His threats were accompanied by a naked photo of his ex. Hirsch later appealed the court’s decision partially on the basis that screenshots were not proven to be authentic.

“The judge listened to the witness, who was able to give various reasons why she identified the screenshot as appearing to be the accused’s Facebook page,” Watson said. “The Court of Appeal said it was pure speculation that perhaps someone would have altered it. Unless the defence could point to something that would take it outside the realm of speculation and into the realm of likelihood, it’s a very difficult argument to make.”

As for proving that social media accounts do belong to an accused or that a post was authored by them, Watson said a number of factors could be looked at to determine authenticity.

One step of verifying who a social media account belongs to includes checking if the email associated with the account is known to have been used by the person. “There needs to be more than just a name attached to it—there needs to be other circumstantial evidence that they can connect to that particular accused in order to rely on it,” she said.

Watson said she has not personally seen full-on social media confessions so far in her work. She is, however, increasingly seeing content from Facebook and Snapchat coming up in criminal cases—though she stresses this is not in the majority of her cases.

“Anything that gets written down or recorded, posted, anything like that, people just don’t realize the amount that it can be used and the ways it can be used in a courtroom,” Watson said.

“What happens with these people, some of them anyway, they create content and consider it aimed at a small circle,” Surette explained. “It’s as if they either don’t realize or purposely forget that the content, once out there, is potentially consumable by millions and millions of people.”

So would deactivating a social media account do anything to help someone out who finds themselves in a precarious legal situation? Watson said that a lawyer may potentially advise you to step away from social media and to not comment further online about anything related to a case you’re involved in.

But, she said, deleting incriminating posts could be different. Though she said it would depend on the circumstances, “it is certainly a possibility” that someone could be charged with attempting to obstruct justice if they intentionally delete posts that could be used as evidence.

“Be cautious about what you post,” Watson warns, “and be aware that it can be used perhaps to help you, but perhaps to form a criminal prosecution against you in the future.”

It must be tough to be a white teacher in such a “multicultural” society. Every September, you dread the moment that you take a look at the attendance list and are greeted with a dozen “Ahmads,” “Khadijas,” and “Mohammads.” At lunch time, you plug your sensitive, white nostrils as they unleash every spice known to man from their lunchboxes, and pray that one day they’ll just bring some Lunchables. You watch their parents pick them up after school, and listen to their tongues flickering in a language that feels like sandpaper against your eardrums. Cue the sweet relief of the English as a Second Language program, a separate world for first-generation and immigrant children to unite and eat their stinky food. You know that Ahmad, Khadija, and Mohammad will be much happier there, among their own kind. And so, “ESL” is stamped next to their names.

In Alberta, ESL students are kids who may be immigrants, or kids who were raised in a non-English speaking home (according to the Alberta Education website). The official purpose of ESL is to help kids who may be struggling with English, which is, for the most part, a noble and inclusive cause. But there are some obvious issues with the vagueness of who exactly can be put into ESL and why. To open up the definition to anyone who doesn’t speak English at home is opening up the opportunity for further marginalization of minority students. It’s the exact type of smiling racism, camouflaged in a cloak of “helpfulness” that we Canadians are famous for.

I was born in Calgary, Alberta to Arab parents. I have lived within five minutes of the hospital I was born in for most of my life, and have met the doctor that delivered me—that’s how “Canadian” I am. Growing up, my parents spoke to me in both English and Arabic; the latter less often, but just often enough to ensure that the language of my ancestors didn’t die with my parents’ move to the West. I was barely bilingual, but that didn’t stop me from proudly teaching my third grade classmates every Arabic word that they could almost pronounce. The next thing I knew, I was in a class of five others, being taught the pronunciation of single-syllable words. When my mother showed up to a meeting with my teacher to discuss the switch, she was greeted by a translator, even though she had already spoken to the teacher in perfect English on the phone.

As a kid I was frustrated, and I didn’t know why. I was bored “learning” material that seemed basic to me, and began to mentally check out of lessons. Thankfully, my mother was able to get me put back into my regular classes. But from that moment on, we only spoke English at home, and when the registration forms came, I watched as she checked “no” next to “does your child speak another language?” The assumption that we didn’t speak English was made before we could even open our mouths.

This is a sad reality, but it wouldn’t really be worth talking about if it was unique. From my family, to my friends, to almost every first-generation Canadian that I have spoken to, we all have a similar story or know someone who does. This is a symptom of a much deeper issue rooted in both a lack of tolerance in the Canadian education system, and a deeply flawed racially unjust society. Our cultures are being erased in the name of assimilating into a country that so proudly claims to be “multicultural.” And this is not to say ESL as a whole should be abolished, but there needs to be some sort of reform and reevaluation. I’m sure the program has been great to the students that needed it, but there needs to be a net to catch those of us that slipped through the cracks as a byproduct of stereotyping.

The “white voice” I put on for a phone interview, my obsession with making sure I don’t have an accent, the way I’ve learned never to speak Arabic in public, these side effects pale in comparison to slowly losing my language. These things solidified in my mind from a young age that I can be Canadian, or Arab, but I can’t be both. I can be ethnic enough to keep the veil of inclusivity alive, but not too ethnic as to threaten the foundation of white beams that this system was built on. So no, it’s not ESL as a program that is the problem, but the intentions behind it.

Last month, Variety reported that Hangover director Todd Phillips was in talks with Joaquin Phoenix to star in the standalone Joker origin film—a compelling choice to play the Batman villain who could probably give the character a depth we haven't seen since Heath Ledger. But following Variety's announcement, another actor unexpectedly threw his hat in the ring for the role—someone whose personal style and slavish devotion to the art would give us a wholly new and terrifying and possibly even more compelling version of the Joker: Tommy Wiseau.

The, uh, singular star of The Room tweeted to Phillips to "DM me" about the role and then later confirmed his desire to the world. It doesn't seem like Phillips ever actually slid into Wiseau's DMs to set up that audition, but Wiseau has never been easily dissuaded.

On Monday, Nerdist debuted Wiseau's "audition tape" for the role, AV Club reports, and just a few seconds of watching him yell "WHY SO SERIOUS?" in full Joker costume will haunt your dreams forever.

He's tired, he's wasted, and he wants to destroy Gotham. Wiseau's eyes, normally hidden behind his ubiquitous sunglasses, are on full display here, burning out of the screen and into your soul from inside a full face of makeup. And that laugh! That laugh! A dead, guttural cackling that sounds more like a diaphragm spasm than a response to humor! It is more than the human heart can bear.

The Room co-star and Disaster Artist author Greg Sestero makes a little cameo in the video as Batman—oh hai, Batman—though Sestero mostly just stands there as Wiseau screams lines from The Dark Knight at him.

Sure, the three-minute video is mostly a joke (one that Wiseau seems in on, this time) and a solid joke, at that. But somehow, the thing manages to still be scary as hell. If Wiseau's not going to land the stand-alone Joker gig, maybe he could at least find his way into Suicide Squad 2? At the very least, he'd make a better Joker than Jared Leto.

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If you’re one of the millions of moviegoers who saw Black Panther, you probably remember at least one scene where T'Challa does a wicked flip and delivers a skull-cracking kick to a bad guy’s face. You know, typical superhero stuff.

But what makes these acrobatic fight scenes possible? I used to think it was just fancy wire work, a camera trick, or some kind of special effect. Then I found out about martial arts tricking, or just “tricking” for short.

Tricking is what you get when martial arts, gymnastics, and breakdancing come together in a gorgeous, explosive display of kicks, flips, and twists. A cousin of capoeira and freerunning, tricking is not intended for real-life combat—who’s going to throw a backflip in the middle of a street fight, honestly?—but it does bring our favorite cinematic superheroes to life.

In fact, the guy in the Black Panther suit is often not Chadwick Boseman but Daniel Graham, a world-class tricker and stunt double. In 2012, he won the Red Bull-sponsored HKPK World Tricking Championships in Las Vegas, meaning he’s certifiably worthy of the suit. Watching him trick is like observing the human body’s equivalent of fireworks.

The roots of tricking can be traced to the mid-90s with the birth of Xtreme Martial Arts (XMA), a type of performative martial arts that combined kicking techniques with flips. Before long, the exclusive practice of these new moves, or “tricks,” broke away from traditional forms of self-defense to become an independent sport and art form. Thanks to an explosion of online videos and tutorials, tricking grew into an underground, worldwide phenomenon.

I got into tricking by way of XMA. And when I found out that two elite trickers worked as fight choreographers for Black Panther, I asked them to help me finally tell the world about how tricking turns real-life human beings into the kicking, flipping superheroes we see on the silver screen.

Matt Emig, 30

Emig has been tricking for 20 years and doing stunts for five years. For Black Panther , he was on the Fight Team, choreographing fights and training the actors and stuntmen. He was also the stunt double for Martin Freeman.

Left: Black Panther fight choreographer Matt Emig soars with a "doubleleg." Right: Emig throws a trick called a "raiz."

VICE: So how did you first get into tricking?
Emig: I was competing [in XMA,] and tricking was just kind of developing. They started to come out with instructional videos, and the night shows at competitions would have special demos where people would showcase these moves. I just fell in love with it.

How did you make the transition into doing stunts?
Because I was competing internationally, I had a lot of friends from all over. A few friends came out to LA and started doing stunts, and I wanted to give it a shot, so I came out. A few years later, I'm in Black Panther.

How has tricking prepared you for a career doing stunts?
Hollywood is always looking for something new and something fresh, and I feel like tricking is one of those things. The superhero genre is in right now—it's the new Western. So if you're at a superhero movie, what do you want to see? Some cool acrobatic, flipping, kicking movements. Then you have Danny Graham, who’s one of the best trickers in the world, playing Black Panther—it just makes sense.

The cast and crew of Black Panther (including Micah Karns, center, and Matt Emig, hooded and kneeling) come together after a successful day of shooting. Photo courtesy Matt Emig.

What was a scene in Black Panther that utilized tricking?
At the end, there's a scene where Danny throws one guy, and then he runs up, kicks off this big dude’s chest, spins around, does a cheat 900, and kicks a guy in the head. He [was wearing] the Panther suit with the helmet on, so vision and breathing were a bit more challenging, but that was all real. So props to Danny for having the accuracy to 900 someone with a controlled kick to the head, and also to the stuntman that took the hit.

What is something unique that tricking brings to the table when it comes to making these superhero movies?
Tricking is flipping, kicking, and twisting all in one, and I feel like that describes most superheroes. They don't just kick somebody in the head—they'll jump up, spin around two times, and kick them in the head. I think it's cool that you could be a tricker, or a martial artist, and train to do these moves and techniques. Then you're almost like a superhero yourself.

Micah Karns, 24

Karns has been tricking for over seven years and doing stunts for five-and-a-half years. For Black Panther , he joined Emig on the Fight Team, choreographing fights and training the actors and stuntmen.

Fight choreographer Micah Karns prepares actors and stuntmen for the waterfall fight scenes. Photo courtesy Micah Karns.

VICE: How did you first get into tricking?
Karns: I started at the martial arts school I went to. It was a very traditional school for Shuri-ryū karate, and on the weekends, we had an extreme performance class. That involved tricking, and then after watching YouTube videos, it just blasted off from there.

And how did you get into the action film industry?
A lot of my teachers from my karate studio all moved to LA to pursue stunts. School was never really my thing, and I felt like my best option was to follow my teachers, so I moved out to California when I was 18.

Most of the martial artists that get into stunts try to do fights, but tricking really sets some of the guys apart. Sometimes the fighters will need wires, whereas trickers can do it without the wires and then still continue on with the choreography.

Do you think that these superhero movies and TV shows would be possible without tricking?
No, tricking definitely adds to the superheroes, especially the ones that are meant to be nimble, like Spider-Man or Black Panther.

I got to trick a little bit in Daredevil—I think I ended up throwing a sideswipe. And then I did motion capture for Pacific Rim Uprising. A lot of the robot moves had tricking in them.

Another day on the set of Black Panther, with Stunt Coordinator Andy Gill (left), Karns (center), and even Panther himself. Photo courtesy Micah Karns.

Can you remember a scene from Black Panther where Graham threw a trick?
Yeah, there's one part when Black Panther is fighting a bunch of armed guys in the jungle. He ended up throwing a trick called a b-twist side kick, which is a butterfly twist and then a side kick afterwards. He blasts this dude in the chest, and he goes flying.

On the day [of the shoot], we brought in local stunt guys from Atlanta, and we placed them in the right spots. It was just them leaving their chests open and letting Danny destroy them. A lot of the characters were very grounded—only Black Panther and Killmonger were acrobatic. It helped that Danny was the double for Black Panther, because we just gave him the choreography and let him do his thing. He added the tricks in, and it was fucking awesome.

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I grew up in Indonesia, alternating between Jakarta, the capital, and Bali, an Indonesian island right smack dab in the middle of what travel guides refer to as the "Banana Pancake Trail." Sure, there's more than one side to the Island of the Gods, but when you call the island home, backpackers are never too far away.

So what's it like to be from a place where (mostly white) backpackers come to "find themselves" or "experience a simpler culture." It's really fucking annoying. This seems to be the standard timeline for a lot of backpackers—graduate high school or university and then take some time off (a "Gap Year" or two) to really immerse yourself in some local Southeast Asian cultures. Except when the typical traveler says "immerse yourself," they mean sip smoothies at some Canggu cafe before flying off to Bangkok for an all-night rager on Kao San followed by, you guessed it, banana pancakes the next morning.

But here's the rub: I love to travel too. Yet when I look online, most of what I see are websites devoted to packaging my own country—and the wider region—for a cashed-up Western audience. We've got sites proposing "frugal" travel budgets in excess of what most Indonesians earn in a month. Others that explain how to deal with "reverse culture shock"—this notion that spending a month or two in Southeast Asia changes you in such profound ways that it's hard to adjust to the dullness of life back home. Maybe it's just hard to return to your regular life after spending so much time doing pretty much nothing on the road. (Drinking Bintang on the beach or looking at temples isn't really keeping busy, sorry.)

Look, I get it. You're fresh out of university, bored by the fact that you've spent your entire life in one place, and you're relatively rich (compared to everyone else in the world). Why wouldn't you want to travel? But don't pretend like it's some eye-opening thing. One blog says that backpacking teaches you to be more open-minded, because you meet new and different people. I bet you there are some different perspectives you're missing out on back home too.

OK, but tourism brings a lot of money to otherwise poor places, the backpacking enthusiasts out there argue. Well, showering some Third World country with a currency that has an uneven exchange rate doesn't improve lives; it only forces globalization on people who aren't ready for it yet.

And do you think that Westerners are the only ones out there with money? Take a day and follow an upper class Jakartan on their Bali vacation, and I assure you that they are probably spending more money than your $35 USD-a-day budget allows.

That's not to mention all places like Bali have sacrificed to pull in as much of that sweet, sweet foreign currency as possible. Backpackers love to lament the loss of realness (AKA poorness) that happens when a place dramatically develops. But who do you think is driving that development? And how are the rest of us supposed to feel when our home gets turned into a vacationer's wonderland full of food that costs way too much and shit clubs that make locals pay a cover while mobs of lobster-skinned schoolies in Bintang singlets get to walk right in?

Meanwhile, backpacker culture is all about trying to squeeze those greenbacks as hard as humanly possible. So this means that less money enters the local economy, while all the shops still feel a need to cater to Western creature comforts or a distorted sense of what Southeast Asia is all about. It's a race to the bottom where cheap, tasteless food wins because that's where the money is.

Canggu doesn't need another bar selling smoothie bowls. We don't need more beach clubs that charge covers to chill on a stretch of sand that used to be free. Guest houses and cafes must grow faster than rice in Bali's climate because every time I return home the island sprouted another guest house (or 50).

I know, it's easy to trash all the people you see spending their days drinking beach beers and enjoying their lives. But it's also hard to feel OK with the fact that your home is turning into an Instagram version of itself. It's hard to see your own culture watered down for international mass consumption. I want my fucking sambal to stay spicy.

We all have a responsibility to actually care about the cultures of the places we visit. A selfie isn't a cultural awakening. Instead take the time to learn what we're actually about. Ask questions. Listen. Don't complain.

Or move. If you really want to be a "digital nomad" or a "global citizen" or any of that other insane Millennial speak then pick a country and move there. Go through the pains of applying for a visa, of immigration queues, and learning a new language. Live outside the expat bubble, but don't try to "go native" or whatever other shitty thing people call it. Be yourself, but meet people halfway. Understand what it's like to actually be from here. Then, next time you're in Bali, take a look around and tell me I'm wrong.

This article originally appeared on VICE ID.

Let’s face it, we’ve all been a con man/woman at some point in our lives, it just depends on how we interpreted it. The job interview? Bullshitted. The first date? Broadway. When you take in the mind-blowing idea that “con” is really just short for “confidence,” you begin to realize that you’ve been conning folks your entire damn life.

Sneaky Pete, an Amazon show that debuted in 2015, pretty much bases its entire appeal around this familiar idea. You have the con man in question, Marius (played by Giovanni Ribisi), who got himself out of prison only to find himself hunted by gangsters—nothing surprising there. The long con however, which is the most original aspect to the show, comes through his choice of escape; Marius actually takes on the identity his former cellmate, Pete, reunites with Pete’s estranged family, and somehow uses up an entire season attempting make that whole farce work on a “con a day keeps the bad men away” sort of shtick. It made for some good watching, especially when Bryan Cranston was factored in as both its co-creator, main villain, and part inspiration for the title of the show (apparently his childhood nickname...I can only wonder why). Then there’s the great performance from Ribisi, who continues his role as Marius (aka Sneaky Pete himself) moving into season 2.

In the new season, which debuted on Thursday, old enemies have been dealt with, and a new set problems have entered the picture as Marius tries his best to put his scam as Pete to bed. As a show that almost entirely maintains its traction through the “con,” I reached out to Ribisi himself and Canadian-born showrunner Graham Yost ( Justified, The Americans), about where things are heading, how they maintain their own con, and their personal forays into con artistry.

VICE: This show is still a fun watch. Unlike other shows, you’re continually dealing with new deceptions. Something that revolves around that subject has got to bring a lot of artistic freedom.
Giovanni Ribisi: You know, I think that’s one of the fun aspects of the show for me. My character is as desperate as a character can be while coming from desperate situations. It’s ridiculous the kind of situations he can find himself in. I mean sure, there’s a ton of drama there, but also so much humour that’s born from that. Of all the roles I’ve done, it’s really what continues to compel me to do the show. Then you add in the group of people we’re working with, which includes the legendary Margo Martindale, which is pretty much what TV is predicated on. You’re not getting these seasons up front. Sure you get an idea of its shape, but you won’t know what that next episode holds, it’s about trust and that dynamic and familiarity with the cast.

Graham Yost: For me, I mean going back to Justified, one of the things we tried to do in early seasons is include a showdown at the end of almost every episode. In Sneaky Pete, we wanted to follow that same trend with Marius running a con in every single ep. It can be a small con, something as simple as getting a wallet from someone that’s at work, or something grander. Those are so fun to watch, but hard as hell to write because trying to come up with something new in every episode is always a challenge. We spend a fair amount of time in the writers’ room just trying to come up with crazier things for Marius to do.

Speaking of the writers’ room. In one of the early episodes, there’s this con involving a stolen key card, and there’s this element to the scene where you got to make me, as the viewer, believe what I’m seeing. Tell me more about how you make sure that it works.
Yost: You know, frankly, you can just Google “how to get a key card from a hotel clerk,” you know? (laughs) People come up with all kinds of scenarios. Someone has done this, done that. The trick of course was to try to give it a little bit of life in the con. You obviously have a scenario in season 2, where Giovanni Ribisi’s character is in a scene trying to gain access to a hotel room. You got two back-up partners in the crime, one that looks like a visitor, attempting to gain access to let Giovanni in, and you got Gina (Jasmine Carmichael), who needs to create a distraction with a phone call. The trick of the episode comes in what she’s going to say. I’d think, well, Julia doesn’t have a lot of time to prepare, so she just an anger-filled story to play on the phone that causes a disturbance.

Ribisi: (Laughs) Ah ha! It’s so interesting. The whole nature of conning as it relates to the victim and the perpetrator, it’s just an incredible subject. There’s a great book called The Confidence Game that focuses not only on con artists, but the propensity for people to be cons. And how that’s a huge factor. That’s one of the sparks about why a show like this is so interesting to me. Because it’s in all of us. The con game is something that’s been storied for thousands of years. There’s a whole damn Wikipedia page on the specific types of cons, the names of them, and the nature of the game. It’s really astounding, because it’s evolved in so many ways that connects to sociology and how technology has aided in its evolution.

From left to right, Bryan Cranston, Graham Yost and Giovanni Ribisi at the Sneaky Pete premiere | Image courtesy of Amazon.

Assuming you want this one to head into far more seasons beyond just a second, how do you maintain the likeability of a con man while increasing the limit he has to pass to do that?
Yosh: Hmm, by never forgetting his motivation. He wanted to save his brother initially from a collector, so he had to con to gather the funds necessary. We have to always show that he has a heart. And also, when he got his money from his various cons, he never ran away. He actually gave it to others to help them out of a jam. So we see a little bit more that he wants to be a better man then he’s been in his life, and that of course will likely carry into future seasons. But to be honest, we like it when Marius does something, and as a viewer, you’re just not sure if he’s doing it for his own personal gain, or if he’s doing it because he wants to help someone else. You always have to strike a balance between the two. But let’s also be honest, a lot of our ability to display these complexities come from Giovanni Ribisi’s ability to let us care for this character, when when the deeds are diabolical.

Ribisi: The fact that my character isn’t even aware of the lack of humanity in much of what he does along with the notion of what it means to be a criminal will always be compelling to me. As an actor, you really have to focus on the humanity within a script when you’re doing this. On an individual end, you can’t simply write them off as someone with a silver tongue.

Graham, you’ve been integral in Justified , which lasted six seasons. You also have The Americans, which is ongoing. What have you learned about how to maintain the momentum of a series?
Yosh: Honestly, to never lose sight of what the show actually is. This show always has to remain a show about a con artist, that’s important. You also never can lose sight of the fact that the audience has to be surprised. You can’t start repeating tricks, because they’ll grow tired and boring. There were some seasons in Justified that were better than others, but going into it, you never thought that, you’d think that ever season would stand on its own. It’s only in retrospect where you realize that.

So here’s the obvious set of questions: have you been conned, and what’s the most con-like thing you’ve ever done?
Yosh: Honestly? Becoming a writer in Hollywood has been the most con-like thing that I’ve done (laughs). I say that only half joking, because the reality is, all of this, film and TV entertainment is a con. We’re conning the audience into suspending their disbelief, and saying that they’re going to get emotionally involved in characters that don’t exist. To that degree, you have to display a certain confidence, and you just have to go for it while believing that it’s all pretty much a big magic trick. Unlike magicians though, if you know what you’re doing, and figured out the trick, you’re screwed. It has to be a kind of magic trick to yourself as well. You can’t entirely know what you’re doing because otherwise, it’s just going to get cold, empty, and dead. That’s me getting high falutin about the job that I do. (laughs) I’ll keep the conned part to myself.

Ribisi: As for me, I won’t go into detail, but of course, I’ve definitely been conned. How about you?

Not that I know of, but hey, if they were good at their jobs, I probably wouldn’t find out.
Ribisi: (Laughs) I should’ve just said that, but I completely agree.

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In yet another example of Grand Theft Auto–grade road rage played out in real life, a Florida man slammed into several cars on Sunday, igniting a ridiculous mob scene of Miami denizens hell-bent on stopping him from speeding away.

The aftermath of the wreck was captured by cellphone footage and features several everyday heroes. The two drivers who attempt to block the fleeing vehicle are undoubted Good Samaritans. I personally like the guy who yells "NO TE MUEVAS!"—or "don't move" in Spanish—and then tries to rip the SUV's door handle off. And then, obviously, there's the random justice-seeker who appears to have no involvement in the accident, but jumps out of his van—where he apparently has a sledgehammer at the ready—and proceeds to methodically swing at the SUV.

Behold:

The driver who allegedly caused the crash, 25-year-old Maxwell Lagutenko, is suspected of being high on narcotics when he hopped a median, started driving into oncoming traffic, and ultimately slammed into three different vehicles, according to Local 10 News. After he was spotted by a police officer while driving recklessly in a car that was basically falling apart, a fire crew apprehended him and he was arrested. He's now being charged with fleeing and eluding police, leaving the scene of an accident involving property damage, and reckless driving.

But for the chaos Lagutenko allegedly caused, he has also gifted us what is quite possibly the most South Florida video of all time. Everyone who tried to stop him did so with everything and anything they had, and the fact that no one on the street seemed afraid of getting run over or T-boned by a driver who may or may not have been high at the time makes it clear—you should never, ever fuck with the people of Miami.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Grudges aren’t inherently a bad thing. In fact, in the short-run, they can be a positive emotion. When you are indignant in the moment, you’re telling yourself, It’s not OK to be treated this way. However, if the resentment festers, it can transform into unhealthy anger, which can take a physiological and mental toll. Feelings of revenge spike cortisol levels, a stress hormone. In this elevated state, blood pressure and heart rates rise while levels of oxytocin, the love and bonding hormone, are depleted. Studies show holding onto anger erodes one’s health while granting forgiveness enhances it.

If you’ve nursed a long-term grudge, you’ll understand why they’re so seductive; they comfort us (I’m hurting), give a sense of purpose (My suffering matters), and reinforce a victim mentality (I’ve been wronged!). Powerful emotions like jealousy, anger, resentment, and sadness are usually tangled with the hostile feelings, which can make it harder to just get over it. That’s why so many people hold on to grudges for months, years, and even lifetimes.

While it’s not easy to let go of a grudge and forgive, it is worth giving yourself the gift of letting those negative feelings go. We asked psychologists, professors, and even a divorce coach to get their best advice for releasing persistent feelings of ill will. Here’s what they said. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Evict the Person from Your Head

The one who hurt you may be living inside of you in a psychological sense; you may think about the person, and have dreams about the person, and that can make you miserable. If you choose to forgive and are ready to do that, then you set yourself free from the inner preoccupation with the person. Why let them live one more day inside of you, and all the while doing so rent-free? Long-held grudges that bring us down mean that the one who hurt us wins twice: first with the original offense and now with a challenging inner misery. Don't let the person win twice! - Robert Enright, professor and founder of the International Forgiveness Institute

Live in the Present

Create a pro/con list for maintaining the grudge, identifying how the grudge is helping and harming you. When you find yourself engaging in thoughts related to the grudge, acknowledge the thoughts, but recognize that these are just thoughts, not your reality or the position from which you need to operate. Distract yourself with something else. Bring your attention to the present, as grudges exist in the past. Remind yourself that going down the grudge rabbit hole isn't a productive use of your time. Focus on your values regarding how you want to spend your time and mental energy. Understand that letting go could be a process, and don't beat yourself up for coming back to the grudge at times. It's served a purpose, but it can also be detrimental. When you find yourself "grudging," acknowledge your feelings with compassion and bring your attention back to yourself––your experiences, your present, and what you hope to shape for your future. - Stacy Rosenfeld, psychologist and director of Gatewell Therapy Center

A Little Empathy Goes a Long Way

It’s helpful to try to see things from the other person’s perspective in order to get a better understanding of their motivation or actions. Attempt to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and come up with as many alternate possible explanations of what transpired as you can. Your goal is not to excuse their behavior, but rather, to help you rationalize where they could have been coming from. Of all the other alternate possible explanations you came up with, which one empowers you the most? Hint: When you choose the explanation that is most empowering to you, it will help you let go of the grudge and the negative energy drain associated with it. - Cheryl Dillon, divorce coach and co-founder of Equitable Mediation Services

Find the Right Audience

If you are holding a grudge because you feel unheard, misunderstood, or not believed, reach out for help to become heard. Here’s the condition: Seek to be heard by people who care about you and can still remain objective. It is not helpful to seek to be heard by those who merely validate or reinforce the narrative you’re already telling yourself. Family and friends, as much as they care for you, are naturally biased towards you. So if you don’t have friends that can listen well, show care and concern, validate your experience, while also speaking truth, consider reaching out to a therapist or counselor. You deserve freedom and peace. Elevate above this grudge and pursue paths that bring you more liberty and fulfillment. - Melody Li, licensed psychotherapist and relationship specialist

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

A gay conversion therapist has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two of his male patients, according to Ontario’s medical regulator.

As first reported by the Toronto Star, the decision by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario came earlier this month. In the course of the investigation, two patients testified that Dr Melvyn Iscove used mutual masturbation as part of his therapy, conducted oral sex on them, and had anal sex with one in his Toronto office. The scandal has left many wondering why gay conversion therapy hasn’t been banned in Canada.

The men, who are referred to as Patient A and Patient B because of a publication ban, were both longtime patients of the psychoanalyst. While gay conversion therapy has been widely discredited it is still practiced both in Canada and the United States, which has led some of those subjected to it to suicide. In their decision, the medical regulator states that Iscove was a devotee of the teachings of Dr Edmund Bergler. Bergler was a 1950s psychoanalyst who focused on homosexuality that the panel describes as “theories [that] treat homosexuality as a condition dating to infancy, which is amenable to therapy.”

Peter Gajdics, who suffered through six years of conversion therapy and has written a memoir about his experience said that he was shocked by how far the physical boundary violation went, and how recently the acts occurred, but he told VICE he wasn’t surprised that this type of therapy is still happening.

"I would say that there is more conversion therapy occurring in Canada than one would think because what masquerades as conversion therapy is often not what people think it is,” said Gajdics. “I think what people tend to think of conversion therapy is when they think of these gay camps in the deep south of America, the Bible belt, where people actually go somewhere that claims to change a person sexual orientation."

"I think that there is probably a lot more of this type of thing happening, but it's in the shadows, it's not discussed, it's not even seen," he added.

One of the men who testified against Iscove saw him for more than 18 years, according to the medical regulator’s decision. The patient came to the doctor because he was suffering from “depression and anxiety associated with fears that he was gay.” The panel wrote that the patient testified that Iscove repeatedly asked him to describe homosexual fantasies and allegedly told the man not to tell anyone because others “wouldn’t understand it.” At one point, years into the therapy, the patient testified that Iscove hugged him and asked "what are you thinking you want to do?" and subsequently told him "you may touch me if you like” before getting the patient to touch his penis through his pants.

“The sexual activity subsequently progressed to Dr. Iscove removing his penis from his trousers, then Patient A doing the same,” reads the decision. “This progressed on later occasions to mutual masturbation and oral sex. Patient A estimated that such activity occurred on between 10 and 20 occasions with oral sex occurring on one-third of the episodes.”

The second patient that came forward regarding Iscove’s conduct started seeing him when he was a teenager and continued to do so for over 20 years. At this point in Patient B’s life, he had only heterosexual relationships and was not questioning his sexuality. However, the panel writes, Iscove would raise the possibility of him being homosexual at every meeting and ask the patient if he ever fantasized about him. In 2007, years into their therapy, the patient says Iscove turned sexual.

Echoing Patient A, Patient B testified that Iscove’s interaction progressed to “mutual oral sex” on both parties. Eventually the patient asked Iscove to “penetrate him anally, which Dr Iscove did.”

The committee found Iscove guilty of engaging in the sexual abuse of two patients and acting “disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional.” Iscove—whose license has been suspended as a result of the decision—has denied the accusations.

While Iscove’s sexual abuse of his patients is assuredly against Canadian law, his practice of gay conversion therapy is not. America is way ahead of Canada when it comes to banning the practice. Several states and major cities have outright banned the therapy and others have imposed sanctions on doctors who practice it. However, the US still has a lot of work to do as it is still legal in 41 states—a study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law estimates that 57,000 LGBT teens will undergo the discredited therapy in the United States in the next year alone.

In Canada, Manitoba has banned doctors from billing the practice to the provinces insurance fund, however, as Gajdics explains, no doctor actually bills for “gay conversion therapy”—his own therapist billed him for “depression” work. Ontario has banned the practice for those under 18, but for adults and everyone else across the country it is still legal. Positive steps are being made in Vancouver, which may become the first city to outlaw the practice as there is a motion sitting in city hall which would do so.

"There is a major contrast between Canada and the States right now. The States are just spearheading these laws state by state, city by city,” said Gajdics. “It's just like wildfire and I'm so happy, but in Canada there is just so much silence around this—it's very sad and it's very distressing.”

Gajdics suffered a mental breakdown during his therapy and said that the ramifications of going through the ordeal left scars that won't fade.

"What gay conversion therapy does... is it is a shame-based approach to sexuality, it's the opposite of learning to accept oneself,” Gajdics told VICE. “So it takes internalized homophobia and turns it on a person and tells them they really need to be straight. It compounds the shame, it also exasperates an emotional and mental dissonance because while your sexuality is not changing you believe it is because that's the whole lie of conversion therapy."

"Ultimately this type of dissonance results in more depression, in my case it resulted in me being shell-shocked by an incomprehension of what was going on. It's torture, it's mental torture."

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In March of 2017, a terror attack in Westminster left 49 people injured and six dead or dying. While victims were still being driven away in ambulances, English Defence League (EDL) founder Tommy Robinson rushed to the scene with a camera crew to pace around outside the police cordon and rant about Muslims. Not long after he'd started, a younger man took over.

Pinching his thumb and forefinger together, the man raises his pinky and tells the camera: "If you import a culture, you get a culture." Barking at unimpressed spectators, he finishes: "The blood. Is on. Your. Fucking. Hands," with all the sassy-camp cadence of a RuPaul’s Drag Race queen.

That man was Caolan Robertson, a video producer with 12,000 YouTube subscribers, 41,000 Facebook followers and 35,000 Twitter followers. Robertson, who is gay, says that while "all religions are pretty bad… Islam is particularly worse". Like fellow gay right-wing figure Milo Yiannopoulos – who became a darling of the alt-right on an anti-political correctness agenda – he has taken arch-campness to a twisted place.

That two public figures on the hard-right are openly gay might surprise some people, given that poster boys of this political persuasion are usually family-oriented and Christian-leaning, like Tommy Robinson and Britain First, or dullard conspiracy theorists, like Paul Joseph Watson. Also, right-wingers – from small-C conservatives up to neo-Nazis – historically haven't been that keen on gays.

However, gay right-wingers aren't actually as uncommon as you might think.

The recent case of neo-Nazi Ethan Stables, for example, who was convicted of preparing a terrorist act after plotting to attack a Pride event in Barrow, sharply counters this idea of heteronormative masculinity, as his defence involved an assertion of his own bisexuality. Elsewhere, European hard-right politicians Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen have played to an LGB – but not T – crowd, while Germany's far-right Alternative for Deutschland party promoted lesbian Alice Weidel to its leadership.

But how do people like Yiannopoulos – a gay man who harasses trans students on campuses – fit into the UK's radical right?

WATCH:

Historically, brief radical right acceptance of white gay men plays against a backdrop of institutionalised homophobia. The Nazis' momentary permissiveness of the gay Storm Battalion co-founder Ernst Rohm is a blip compared to the 50,000 homosexuals imprisoned and 15,000 homosexuals killed during the Holocaust. In 1999, neo-Nazi nail-bomber David Copeland attacked gay people, Bengali Muslims and black people with equal measures of hatred. Nicky Crane may have been a violent neo-Nazi secretly enjoying gay dalliances, but when he came out in 1992 he cast his political views aside, declaring them incompatible with his sexuality.

Then came 9/11, and a shifting – at least in the radical right's eyes – of the hierarchy of minorities. Here was an opportunity to knit together different factions of the right against a common enemy: Islam.

Just as the Taliban’s treatment of women was seized upon by the Bush administration and its supporters to justify the war on terror, its treatment of queer people was used to cast all Muslims as anti-gay. In 2009, a Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies report seemingly backed up the radical right's assertions: while 58 percent of the British general public thought homosexual acts were "morally acceptable", zero percent of British Muslims agreed.

Even the liberal press focused on this statistic: "Patriotic, respectful, homophobic", read The Independent’s summation. "Muslims in Britain have zero tolerance of homosexuality, says poll," said The Guardian. Right-wing outlets, still bothered about gays in the Anglican church and the impending doom of same-sex marriage, didn’t quite know where to pitch up.

The day of the shooting at Orlando's Pulse gay club in 2016, which killed 49 people, Yiannopoulos wrote an article for Breitbart titled "The Left Chose Islam Over Gays. Now 100 People Are Dead Or Maimed". In it, he describes the actions of an extremist as representing all of Islam, using the poll to back up his claims: "This isn't about 'radical' Islam. This isn't a tiny fringe," he writes. "In Britain, a 2009 Gallup survey found that not one Muslim believed that homosexual acts were acceptable. Not one!"

Days later, Yiannopoulos addressed a small crowd in a YouTube livestream, calling for a Muslim ban on that basis. "This is not radical Islam… this is Muslims in the West," he said, ignoring the fact that the same poll found that 19 percent of German Muslims and 35 percent of French Muslims thought homosexual acts were acceptable, implying countries with a longer legacy of Muslim immigration have more LGB-tolerant Muslims.

With that, the clash of civilisations narrative was set.

Weeks later, Donald Trump – whose campaign manager at the time was Stephen Bannon, then-CEO of Breitbart – became the first ever Republican nominee for the US presidency to mention LGBT people, using them as leverage to call for a Muslim immigration ban.

As Matthew Feldman – co-director of the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies, and Professor of the History of Modern Ideas at Teeside University – puts it: "The thinking is: 'If this is another stick to beat Muslims with, we'll take it. We’ll be silent on the LGBT question, we'll just talk about their rights in the abstract.'"

Anne-Marie Waters (Photo by James Poulter)

Trump’s views on LGBT people have since wavered, but other British groups are unafraid to exploit professed support for LGBT rights to attack Islam.

In 2016, a Stockton-on-Tees Pride march was organised by a group with no previous affiliations to the LGBT community, but many links to the EDL and Pegida UK, also founded by Tommy Robinson. The march was "appropriating tragedies to promote further bigotry", warned anti-Islamophobia project Tell MAMA.

The next year, Gays Against Sharia (GAS) – set up by Tommy English, known as Tommy Cook, founder of the EDL LGBT division – carried the baton. Though Tommy Robinson hijacked one of GAS's marches, rebranding it Unite Against Hate, in September of 2017 GAS held its own parade in Bristol. Footage shows English holding a rainbow flag reading "UNITED TOGETHER, TODAY AND FOREVER. HELP US STOP THE GROWTH OF AN EVIL, HATE-FILLED IDEOLOGY". Pictured helping carry this banner is Anne-Marie Waters, the lesbian who ran for candidacy of UKIP on an anti-Islam ticket.

The demonstrators had re-framed Islam as the real and sole oppressors of LGBT people, and the far-right as minorities' protectors – a narrative that's as transparent as it is cynical.

As for the Gallup analysis, Dalia Mogahed – Director of Research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding – tells VICE it has been misinterpreted: "Saying homosexual acts are morally wrong is not evidence that Muslims will hurt the LGBTQ community."

"Muslims have been part of the UK for literally hundreds of years, and unlike the Christian right do not advocate against the LGBTQ community," added Mogahed. "In a democratic society, freedom of thought and belief are central principles, including beliefs that we may not agree with. We erode our own values when we start policing thought."

Mogahed also pointed out the paradox of Yiannopoulos complaining about Muslim bigotry against LGBT people while advocating for the Muslim ban.

Luckily, Yiannopoulos isn't the threat he once was, having lost the radical right's affections, Breitbart’s employ and Robert Mercer's funding after footage surfaced of him defending pederasty. Mind you, he's still at it: his new website, Milo Inc, both damns gays and uses them as a shield to deflect accusations of Islamophobia. Two headlines read: "All The Studies Show, Gay Parents Are Not Good For Kids", and "GOOGLE Aids Indonesia’s Muslim Government In Anti-Gay Crackdown". There is, after all, a limit to how much homosexuality radical right LGBT people can appear to condone.

Caolan Robertson is more overt in his disdain for gay culture. In a video for far-right Canadian YouTube channel The Rebel Media, he attends London Pride 2017, mocks interviewees and calls the event "the most degenerate festival I've ever seen". He also mentions a 2016 ICM poll with questionable methodology which suggests that 52 percent of British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal, quoting when the stat before asking left-wing journalist and campaigner Owen Jones, "Do you think that’s something that’s a threat to gays in our country?"

Jones replies, succinctly: "Far-right groups… try to cynically appropriate gay rights for Islamophobia."

In an another video – this time an interview with radical right vlogger, Millennial Woes – Robertson cites an unknown report alleging that "60 percent of gays in the UK admit to having over 500 partners", adding, "[Gays] have literally shit all over all of the people who fought for their rights to be able to exist by behaving like this." The only record which correlates to this is a 1978 sociological study regularly shared on Christian websites.

Robertson later left Rebel Media acrimoniously, and now works behind the camera on documentaries with fellow Rebel alumni, alt-right Canadian vlogger Lauren Southern.

Failed UKIP leader Anne-Marie Waters' beliefs about LGBT rights and Islam can be summed up by one of her tweets: "I'm a gay woman who values my freedom, believe me, Islam is out to get me." However, her new party, For Britain, makes no mention of LGBT people in its manifesto. Perhaps this is because the radical-right has little space for lesbians, who, as Patrik Hermansson of Hope Not Hate – who spent a year undercover in the alt-right – explains, "aren't even discussed" due to its boys' club chauvinism.

Hermansson understands how gay men come to be part of and celebrated by the radical right: "There's this glorifying of the male body and an idea that men are the best in every possible way. It makes sense, then, that when men are close together, in those groups, homosexuality doesn’t have to be so strange." He also cites the manosphere – made up of single men who feel "left out and oppressed by what they perceive as feminism" – as a common entry point to the radical right. Feldman agrees: "A close male bonding can go from homosociality to homoerotic to LGBT."

There's an argument to be had about the point at which fetishistic enjoyment of fascist iconography can tip into full-blown appreciation of the Nazi ideal of the Ubermensch – a strong, muscular and healthy Aryan man. Think Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Tom of Finland's predilection for uniformed antagonists and the gay skins culture. As Hermansson points out: "It's like the bullied turning into bullies, but it only happens to white men because they’ve got that possibility."

More pressing, though, is supposedly pro-LGBT groups leveraging a minority status to provide a get-out-of-bigotry-free-card in a cynical and manipulative attempt to gain the hard-right ethical kudos and more members. Not only can their arguments – propped up by sloppy and wilfully misinterpreted polling – be convincing, but these people also attempt to cast the left as the real oppressors of gay people. It was a Conservative government which introduced same-sex marriage to the UK, yes, but LGBT rights are more than marriage.

As that long fight showed, sexual orientation doesn't always imply a political orientation, and it's incumbent on everyone across ideological and political spectrums to continue the conversation about how the religious and socially conservative consider and treat LGBT people.

The radical right’s rebranding as well-dressed, slick and intellectual operators has worked to give the movement an undue credibility, but the gay-tolerant rendition of Islamophobia is transparently exploitative. It's only a matter of time before they get found out.

@sophwilkinson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's good practice to ignore the glut of national holidays because they are just transparent marketing stunts. But today is National Napping Day, so I'll make an exception, because sleep is great, and a third of Americans don't get enough of it.

If you're one of the unfortunate sleep-deprived Americans, do not fear! Here are eight foolproof spots to secretly nap at work, because there is no better feeling than covertly getting paid to sleep.

1. Your car

I live in New York City and don't have a driver's license, so this isn't particularly doable for me. But I understand many people don't live in major metropolitan areas, and thus have access to probably the most private office nap spot. This is ideal, and if your boss walks by, you can always play dead. Have a driver's license but not a car? Do not fear! You can rent a portable napping pod (known as a "Car2Go") in many cities across the country for a mere $15 per hour.

2. The bathroom stall

Taking long bathroom breaks to secretly nap has its advantages: Your superiors are less likely to scold you for spending too long in the loo, as opposed to, say, your car (see above), because you can always claim "diarrhea" or "constipation."

3. Under your desk

George Constanza perfected this move, and it obviously works best if you have your own office, but here I am, peacefully resting beneath my office blanket, in our open office. In order to pull this off, you'll need to have chill co-workers to provide cover for you. For example, whenever I'm napping beneath my desk and my boss walks by, my desk mate Alex shouts, "Look up! There's a bat on the ceiling! It's going to attack!" Works every time.

4. Outside

In the summer, this is a relatively easy task, all you need is access to a grassy area, but it can be done in the winter—all you need is a big warm coat. Many years ago, when I was a wee child in preschool, I abhorred playtime outside, especially in the frost of winter. During those bitterly cold recesses, I would curl up in my down parka and sleep underneath a bench.

5. At your desk in sunglasses

If your boss can't see your eyes, they won't know whether they're opened or closed. That's just science. So if you're wearing sunglasses to work—if anyone asks you have a stye—you can sleep anywhere, everywhere, all places, always, forever.

6. Behind a plant

All organic beings are the same, when you really think about it. You'll never get caught napping behind the office plant, but only if you become one with nature first.

7. The copy room

Everything is digital nowadays, so the once-poppin' copy room can become a place of quiet respite, the ultimate office nap destination.

8. Honestly, just go home

Humans are very self-involved creatures, so it's safe to assume that others are generally paying less attention to you than you think they are. So ask yourself, if you leave two hours early, would your boss even notice? Probably not! They have their own shit to deal with, so just go home.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Weeks of batshit craziness amongst Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives—which started with sexual misconduct allegations against former leader Patrick Brown—have fittingly ended with Doug Ford being elected as Brown’s replacement.

As head of the province’s official opposition, Ford is now in the running to become Ontario’s new premier. Considering the Liberals have been in power for 15 years, and have undoubtedly become a source of resentment for many Ontarians, Ford probably has a pretty decent shot at taking down Premier Kathleen Wynne in the June election.

Ford, a former Toronto city councillor and failed mayoral candidate, is well-known for being the mouthpiece of his brother Rob, who served as Canada’s most infamous mayor. Rob Ford was endlessly embroiled in scandals, whether it was his substance abuse problems, his affiliation with criminals, or his alleged bullying of players on the high school football team he once coached.

When it comes to appealing to social conservatives and embracing populism, Doug Ford is just as brash and anti-politically correct as his late brother. Here are a few areas in which Ford would be a nightmare for people with progressive ideals:

Sex ed-curriculum

Ford said he would repeal Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum, which was updated in 2015 and has been a source of contention for parents who take issue with their kids learning about concepts like same-sex couples, gender identity, and the potential consequences of sexting.

Despite the hysteria, the curriculum does not teach kids to engage in anal sex or watch porn. But lots of parents still protested outside of Wynne’s office when it was unveiled.

Ford said as premier he would unroll sex-ed curriculum with the consultation of parents. While on the campaign trail, he said, “Sex-ed curriculum should be about facts, not teaching Liberal ideology.”

Abortion

While Ford said Monday the abortion issue is “not on the top of my priority list” he has already stated that he takes issue with the fact that parents aren’t required to give consent for minors to have an abortion.

"I think we've got to consult parents, and that's what we have to do,” he told CBC, noting that “kids can't even get their tonsils out without the approval of their parents.”

Ford also said he wouldn’t shut down members of the party from proposing legislation that appealed to their personal beliefs.

Under Ontario law, if a child has the mental capacity to consent to treatment, as determined by doctors, the parents’ permission is not needed.

While it would be unlikely that Ford would be able to limit access to abortion, some, including losing PC leadership candidate Christine Elliott have suggested his remarks are more about attracting votes.

“I think right now what Doug is doing is trying to get more votes," she told CBC.

Homophobia

During his time as mayor, Rob Ford was known for regularly snubbing Toronto’s Pride Parade, a position his brother Doug defended. When Rob Ford opted not to stand and clap in council at the announcement that Toronto’s hosting of World Pride in 2014 had been a success, Doug Ford told reporters that openly cheering for it would have been hypocritical.

“If you aren’t going to go to the gay pride parade, like two thirds of the council didn’t, I think it’s a little bit of hypocrisy if you decide to stand up,” he told the Toronto Star. He also tried to use the fact that Rob Ford had a gay campaign worker on his mayoral re-election campaign as proof that the former mayor wasn’t homophobic. In reference to Rob Ford’s decision to vote down a motion to help gay homeless youth find housing, Doug said his brother was “spendaphobic not a homophobic.”

Ford also victim-blamed gay protesters who showed up at his family’s annual Ford Fest barbecue in 2014 and were subsequently called gay slurs including “faggot.”

“The guy came in screaming and shouting. He was calling people homophobic and other things I don’t want to get into,” Doug Ford said at the time. “I apologize to him for what happened but you can’t go into any event, a sporting event even, taunting people...numerous people said he was looking for trouble.”

Youth with disabilities

In 2014, Ford, then a councillor for Etobicoke, backed his constituents who complained about the opening of a home for children with autism in their neighbourhood.

According to media reports from the time, Ford told staff of Griffin Centre that the facility “ruined the community.” He said the issues is that children with “violent behaviour” would be able to leave the home without supervision.

“My heart goes out to kids with autism. But no one told me they’d be leaving the house. If it comes down to it, I’ll buy the house myself and resell it,” he said. He also said to anyone who was critical of that point of view, “I’d be more than happy to take their address and we’ll put the house right next door to them and see how they like it.”

The comments were widely panned as offensive and ignorant. In reality, people with autism—a developmental disorder—are more likely to be victims of violence or hate crimes than to perpetrate it.

Minimum wage

Under Wynne, Ontario increased its minimum wage to $14 this January, which will go up again to $15 at the beginning of next year.

But Ford has described the hike as a government “tax grab.”

“The only people that are benefitting off this pay hike is the government that are making 30 percent more money,” he said during a leadership debate.

“My heart breaks for people making $12, $13 an hour. I support them 100 percent. I would give them a zero tax, put more money back into their pocket. It makes the companies more competitive.”

He didn’t specify how the government would be able to afford outright cutting income taxes for minimum wage workers. The Liberals have already offered small businesses tax breaks and incentives to help curb losses incurred by the wage hike.

With all that said, Ford's alleged experience selling weed could be useful come legalization.

With files from Vanmala Subramaniam

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

“A small back door opened into the lovely woods at the back of the house. Quickly Eepersip made her way out into the open; and everything looked twice as lovely as before. How light it was, with all the world a window, instead of those silly little peep-holes fringed about! How much more glowing everything was! Oh, nothing in a house could compare with the world of light that Eepersip lived in!”

At the age of four, Barbara Newhall Follett pestered her father Wilson to “tell her a story” about his typewriter. By five, Barbara was typing letters and poetry on the Corona without assistance. By six, she completed her first 4,500-word short story. By eight, she had started writing her first full-length novel. At 12, The House Without Windows, and Eepersip’s Life There, would be published to widespread critical acclaim.

At age 25, Follett—once famed as a child genius poised to become the next great American novelist—walked out of her apartment with a notebook in hand and $30 in her pocket. She was never heard from again.

Follett was born March 4, 1914 in Hanover, New Hampshire, to parents Helen—a writer—and father Wilson, a scholar who taught at Dartmouth College and Brown University before taking an editorial position with the Yale University Press.

In a household where typewriters took the place of crucifixes and books the place of formal curriculum, Follett thrived in being schooled at home and socialized amongst adults. Her literary talents blossomed bright and early—according to her mother’s written accounts, Follett’s “love for books” began when she was a year old and became a “passion” by three and a half. Typewritten correspondence became part of her curriculum by age five and, today, letters she wrote to friends and family—mostly adults many years her senior—offer insight into Follett’s deep love of the natural world, talent for diction, and disinterest in same-aged playmates. Follett’s letters and early poetry evolved to include long swarths of prose and, at just six years old, Follett completed the short story The Life of the Spinning-Wheel, the Rocking Horse, and the Rabbit.

Follett's main inspiration was the natural world around her. A turning point in her young career came with her first visit to Lake Sunapee when she was eight—the same year, Barbara began writing the story of Eepersip, a young girl who runs away from her family to live in the wild. She gave the manuscript to her mother as a gift on her ninth birthday. Later that year, Barbara’s completed manuscript—along with the rest of the family’s possessions—were lost in a house fire. Lucky to have survived the blaze and yet unable to shake Eepersip, Barbara returned to the story in 1924. The House Without Windows, and Eepersip’s Life There was published by Alfred A. Knopf—at that time, her father’s employer—as Follett’s debut novel on January 21, 1927. In her own words:

“It is about a little girl named Eepersip who lived on top of a mountain, Mount Varcrobis, and was so lonely that she went away to live wild. She talked to the animals, and led a sweet lovely life with them—just the kind of life that I should like to lead.”

The book received widespread acclaim, with a critic in the The Saturday Review calling her writing “unbearably beautiful” and another in the New York Times calling it a “remarkable little book.” Barbara paid little attention to the praise, but did respond to a review in which a book reviewer pondered what price Barbara might pay later for her “big days” at the typewriter. Barbara’s written response read:

“You write positively as if all children were alike, as if all children desired the same surroundings, as if they all liked the same things. Children are as different from each other as grown-up people; they are even more insistent in their variety of tastes; and a great deal more hurt when things do not go as they like. [...] The book is an expression of joy—no more—and to a careful person it should be an expression of my home-life as well.”

Later that year, Barbara—supervised by a family friend named George Bryan—would embark on a 10-day excursion aboard the Frederick H. schooner to Nova Scotia; The Voyage of the Norman D., published upon her return in 1928, is a partial memoir inspired by the trip to sea. With two critical darlings under her belt by the age of 14, Barbara was considered a child prodigy and poised to be one of the next great American writers—but rough waters were ahead, as Barbara soon learned that her father was leaving the family for his employer’s young secretary, Margaret Whipple. Heartbroken, Barbara wrote to her her father:

“Such things do not reconcile themselves. For instance, if you now finally and determinedly drop all that, leave it behind, kick it out of the way, then how am I to believe that they actually and truly meant all to you that they seemed to at the time?”

Betrayed by the father she’d once idolized, Follett returned to the sea—this time, convincing her mother to sail with her to West Indies. The pair left in September 1928 and sailed for six months, but it would prove to be a trying time—both mother and daughter struggled to sell work and weren’t receiving money from Wilson, who was fired from his editing position after his affair came to light. Additionally, there was tension between mother and daughter; Helen wrote to friends that Barbara had become “difficult” and had “gone to some kind of pieces, emotional, and physical” in the wake of losing the father she “worshipped.” According to letters, the conflict came to a head in Tahiti, when Barbara had what Helen called a “moral break down” and “turned against” her mother; perhaps related to an unchaperoned trip taken with Captain Andrew Burt, during which Barbara wrote she “picked up a new and glorious acquaintance—the devil.”

In 1929, mother and daughter returned to the mainland; agreeing time apart was necessary. The younger Follett stayed with friends in Altadena, where she was placed in psychiatric care and enrolled in junior college. But she subsequently fled to San Francisco—eventually making news after she was captured by police and refused to return to a guardian. She was quoted in a newspaper:

“I came away because I felt I had to have my freedom. I felt utterly suppressed, almost frantic, under the plans that had been made for me. I did not want to enter college nor live the standardized existence. I have never been to school in my life. Perhaps I might like it—I do not know. But this I know: I do not want to like it.”

Barbara would return to the East Coast in 1930, taking work as a typist, penning book synopses for Fox, and beginning a third novel, Lost Island, while living in New York. But she would find her way back to the lush landscapes of the Northeast and, while in Vermont over the summer of 1931, met an outdoorsman named Nickerson Rogers, who she would eventually marry. In the following years, the couple sailed to Europe, married in Boston, and began taking interpretive dance classes.

But come 1939, things would take a turn for the worse—during a trip to the west coast, Follett received a letter from her husband in which he expressed unhappiness in the marriage and a desire to separate. In a letter from this time, Barbara noted that things were more dire than she had initially thought, as she’d discovered that there was another woman. As with all things Follett loved in her life, she was determined not to lose Rogers and committed herself to what she expected to be “long, patient process” of reconciliation. From her letters, it appears that the couple attempted to make it work—but soon, things would appear irreconcilable. According to the last surviving letter written by Barbara:

“In my last letter I told you things were going well, and I thought they were. They continued to go well for a time—at least I thought so, and I was happy, and decided that the worst part of the ordeal was over. But that was too easy. No such luck! I don’t know what to say now. On the surface things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong—just as wrong as they can be. I am trying—we are both trying. I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one; but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!”

Barbara left her apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts with $30 in her pocket and a notebook in hand on the evening of December 7, 1939.

She was never heard from again.

Suspicions surrounded her husband, who waited two weeks to report her disappearance to police and four months to request a missing persons bulletin, claiming he was waiting for her to return. When the bulletin was released, Follett was listed under her married name—thus, the connection to the former child prodigy was not made until many years later. In fact, Follett's own mother did not discover her daughter was missing until the mid-1940s; letters she subsequently sent to former acquaintances, including Captain Andrew Burt, yielded no leads. The case of the missing writer went cold—and with no evidence of foul play the mystery endures: was Barbara murdered? Did she escape to another location, reinvent herself, and live another life without ever telling her family or friends? Or, perhaps, was the draw of Eepersip’s House Without Windows—the natural world, free from cheating husbands and fathers—more than she could resist?

I spoke to Barbara Newhall Follett’s half-nephew Stefan Cooke via email. He revealed that his mother—Barbara’s half-sister Jane—thought she might have made her way from Brookline to the White Mountains, and frozen to death by choice. He has another theory: “I think Barbara chucked everything to start a new life under a new identity,” he wrote. “She'd run away before from untenable circumstances,” he continued, I just don't think Barbara could have been depressed enough at 25 to commit suicide.”

Barbara’s 104th birthday would have been (or maybe is) this week. Her physical letters and papers are archived in a collection at Columbia University, while Cooke—the closest family member to Barbara still alive—has made her work publicly available on Farksolia.org and in anthology published in 2015, Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters.

Though we may never know what became of her, through her work, Barbara Newhall Follett lives on.

Nile Cappello is the writer of The Prodigal Daughter, a screenplay based on the life and disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden

When the neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance Movement in September 2017 tried to organise a march through Gothenburg, a city on the west coast of Sweden, Italian photographer Matteo Congregalli was on hand to document the event. But amongst the large crowd of counter-protesters, one specific group stood out to him – Vikings.

The Vikings attending this counter-protest were there representing the network Vikingar Mot Rasism (Vikings Against Racism), whose members are out to show that you can cherish ancient national traditions without being a racist dickhead. After the march, Congregalli got in touch with some of the Vikings, who agreed to speak with him and let him document modern Viking culture – specifically in Skåne, Sweden's southernmost province, but also in Norway. Like many people would, Congregalli assumed that being a modern Viking would just entail some play-fighting in reenactments, but he quickly found out that it was a way of life.

Kristin, a Norwegian Viking warrior, adjusts her helmet before a practice battle during a winter session in February 2018.

From his conversations with the group, Congregalli also discovered that living like a Viking has become increasingly popular in Sweden since the country joined the EU in 1994. "I felt like [Sweden joining EU] meant that we lost part of our Swedish identity," Ola, a member of the Viking group Halsingarna, told the photographer. "Joining a Viking group has given me and many others a way to preserve our historic identity."

"When I started documenting Viking culture I quickly realised that it's a rapidly growing subculture," Matteo Congregalli told me. "And just like with any subculture, today's Vikings are trying to find a sense of purpose. Some move to Viking villages during the spring and summer, while others just sort of change into Vikings when they get home from work. But most of them celebrate traditions from the Viking era all year round in their own ways – from the Midwinter festival to organising Viking weddings."

Scroll down to see more of Matteo Congregalli's photos of modern Vikings.

Carl Mikael Bengtsson with his two dogs in Sweden. Carl is a historian and a gothi – a heathen priest. October, 2017

Ragnar and Kiin are married. Here they’re standing outside the Viking village of Foteviken in Skåne. December, 2017

Kristin Hage in Norway. February, 2018

Ingelin Skei in Tistedal, Norway. February, 2018

Nora Front in Norway. February, 2018

Cecilie Bredesen Libakken in Norway. February, 2018

Dag Lekander is part of the Halsingarna Viking group. November, 2017

Saga Hegelund is a member of the Halsingarna Viking group. November, 2017

Waldemar Hällström from the Halsingarna group. November, 2017

Practicing a battle scene in Norway. February, 2018

This article originally appeared on VICE SE.