Obama and his teary attorney general at Holder's resignation announcement Thursday. Photo by White House photographer Pete Souza

US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that he is stepping down from his position at the Department of Justice, signaling an end to a turbulent six-year run as the nation’s top law enforcement official. A close friend and confidant of President Obama, Holder has been around since the beginning of the administration, making him one of the longest-serving attorneys general in US history. He’s also been one of the most influential, leaving behind a mixed record on the country’s most divisive legal questions.

That Holder has managed to last this long is something of a mystery. Since taking office, he’s been a near constant headache for the White House—a polarizing and politically tone-deaf dud at the center of almost every controversy the president faced during his first term. Republicans hate Holder viscerally and with a passion that Democrats can’t understand, and have been demanding his resignation for years. (He’s the only cabinet member to ever have been held in contempt of Congress.) Holder himself has been plotting his escape for at least two years, although the administration said Thursday that he would stay on until the Senate confirms his successor, a process that could take months.

Despite his missteps, though, it’s hard to imagine another attorney general having the kind of impact Holder has had during his six years in office. His legacy is a reflection of the hopes and disappointments of Obama’s presidency. As the nation’s first black attorney general, he has spoken about race in ways that Obama couldn't or wouldn’t and taken on civil rights issues that have typically been the purview of liberal activists. But he’s also helped the administration run roughshod over civil liberties, and has been legitimately criticized for failing to prosecute banks involved in the 2009 economic meltdown.

Race
Unlike his boss, Holder is not at all shy about race. In February 2009, barely a month into his job as attorney general, Holder blindsided the White House with a Black History Month speech excoriating Americans for being squeamish about racial issues. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” he told an audience of employees at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The comment, however obvious or true it may have been, set off a political shitstorm, permanently branding Holder as a political liability.

But it also set the stage for what would become the driving cause of Holder’s time in office. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Holder’s legacy on civil rights. He has revitalized the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which he's called the “crown jewel” of the department, and which had been gutted during the George W. Bush administration. He made enforcing the Voting Rights Act a top priority, and vowed to respond aggressively after the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in that law last year. Since then, Holder has gone on offense against states that move to restrict voter rights, suing Texas and North Carolina over new legislation that the DOJ claims disproportionately hurt minorities and the elderly.

Holder has also emerged as a powerful advocate for protecting minorities against institutional racism and abuses of power by the criminal justice system. His DOJ has investigated about 20 police departments accused of civil rights violations and cracked down on discrimination and use of excessive force by law enforcement officers. And in what turned out to be his swan song, Holder was dispatched to Ferguson, Missouri, last month to reassure the restive city that the DOJ would conduct a full investigation into the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a white policeman.

The War on Drugs
It’s hard to talk about racial injustice without talking about the war on drugs, and in that area, Holder’s record has been more mixed. Under his leadership, the DOJ continued to implement harsh, and ultimately ineffective, drug policies, including a massive crackdown on legal medical marijuana dispensaries and their patients.

Recently, though, Holder has taken a softer approach, backing changes in national sentencing guidelines to lower prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, and urging Congress to pass more sweeping reforms to mandatory minimum sentencing. In an interview with Yahoo! News’s Katie Couric released Thursday, he signaled that he might even be open to rescheduling marijuana as a less dangerous drug.

Wall Street
One of the most maddening failures of Holder’s tenure has been his unwillingness to go after those responsible for the 2008–2009 housing crisis and subsequent economic meltdown. Despite intense pressure from the left and sporadic promises from Obama, Holder has failed to press criminal charges against any financial executives involved in the crisis. In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last year, the attorney general said that prosecuting institutions involved in the meltdown would damage the financial system, a position his critics say amounts to making the banks “too big to jail.” He’s since walked back the comments, but still hasn’t put any Wall Street execs in handcuffs. Instead, the DOJ has been reaching settlements with banks that result in huge penalty payments, but don’t require institutions to admit any wrongdoing. Often, the agreements even allow banks to skirt civil charges, effectively leaving no trace of whatever abuses they were accused of committing.

The War on Terror
Holder has also faced intense criticism for his record on civil liberties, and particularly for his role in rubber stamping the Obama administration’s secretive counterterrorism strategies. As attorney general, he has defended the legality of drone strikes—including those that target US citizens—without judicial review, and tried for years to keep the memos detailing those justifications secret. He’s also aggressively cracked down on national security leaks, ordering surveillance of more than 20 journalists and prosecuting whistleblowers suspected of providing information to the media.

Gay Marriage
While Obama will go down in history as the first president to “evolve” on gay marriage, the credit should really go to Holder. As attorney general, he led the administration’s gradual embrace of same-sex marriage, first by refusing to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act in court, and more recently by using his powers to give gay married couples more legal rights.  

Fast and Furious:
Republicans in Congress have always reserved a special hatred for Holder, but the relationship really hit rock bottom over Fast and Furious, a botched gun-smuggling operation that involved agents with the DOJ’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms letting straw purchasers buy firearms in Arizona and then tracking the guns back across the border to Mexico in an effort to identify cartel arms trafficking networks. It was an undeniably stupid idea, made stupider by the fact that the DOJ wasn’t entirely truthful about it when Congress asked about the operation in 2011. The battle has devolved from there, with House Republicans voting in 2012 to hold Holder in contempt of Congress over the scandal. Unbelievably, the case is still making its way through the courts.

***

At this point, there has been little indication of who Obama might nominate to take over from Holder, and administration officials have suggested that the announcement may not happen for the next few weeks. But whoever is chosen—and whoever withstands what's likely to be a contentious confirmation battle—it's unlikely that anyone the president picks will be able to follow up with the kind of impact and controversy that Holder has generated these last six years. 

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

Click here for last week's episode.

Photos of the Holy Land Experience by the author

On a sunny afternoon in September, I sat with 12 tourists inside a plastic-looking cave at the Holy Land Experience, a 16-acre biblical theme park in Orlando, Florida, watching a man dressed as Jesus reenact the Last Supper with His 12 disciples.

“This bread is my flesh,” the man dressed as Jesus said. “This is my blood… poured out for you.”

I bit into my individually packaged sample of Jesus’ flesh, and then washed down my wafer with grape-flavored “blood.” The sugary shot’s terrible aftertaste stayed with me as I wandered around the park, which is owned by the Trinity Broadcasting Network and boasts attractions like the fourth-largest collection of Bible artifacts in the world along with dozens of replicas of biblical settings. I was particularly disturbed by the park’s replica of the whipping post, which played sound effects of the trials of Christ on a loop.

But I wasn’t here to sightsee. I had come to learn more about a man who plays Jesus for a living at the park—Michael Job, a 40-year-old evangelical from Brooklyn. 

Job has worked at Orlando’s most infamous homage to God since 2004. (He mostly performs as Jesus, he told me, but occasionally he takes a turn playing “the soldier dude.”) Growing up in a Catholic household in Brooklyn, he studied music, and in his early 20s, he says, he found relative success as an actor in TV shows and plays. When we spoke on the phone, Job told me he had acted in order to escape the dark thoughts that controlled his life.

“Outside, I looked like a nice guy, maybe a nice shy guy. I never really talked too much,” Job said. “On the inside, I was depressed. I hated myself. I had suicidal tendencies.”

Pretending to be someone else on stage temporarily fixed his problems, but when the performances ended, he felt miserable. He tried church as a solution, but after almost every service, he would hop on the subway to go clubbing.

“I was in church and said it with my lips, but I wasn’t living that with my heart,” Job said.

That changed when Job became a born-again Christian in the middle of Manhattan in 2003, when he was 28. He got saved at Times Square Church, climbing out of his depression and into the love of the Lord.

“Man, it was like blinders came off of my eyes that day. I started crying and everything,” Job said. “For 28 years, I was in the driver’s seat. I’d take Jesus out of the back trunk. I’d have church or prayer, but I was the one driving. I had to surrender the control of my life to him and say, ‘Jesus, be the Lord, be the focus.’ If your life is like a car, you’re going to put Jesus at the driver’s seat.”

Job let Jesus drive him to Orlando, where he worked as Gaston (the villain in Beauty and the Beast) at Disney’s MGM Studios. 

Though his parents were Christian, they were not evangelical, and they were shocked by his transformation.

“When you grow up and you have religion, you just do it on a Sunday,” Job said. “And if you do it more than that, you’re called radical. They said I was overboard, they thought I was crazy, out of my mind, brainwashed.”

In 2004, Job decided to merge his professional and personal life and work as Jesus Christ Himself at the Holy Land Experience before TBN purchased the theme park.

“I never even went in the park other than to audition before I started working, so I had no idea what I was getting into,” he said.

Jew-turned-Baptist evangelist Marvin Rosenthal opened the park in 2001. Rosenthal promoted the park as a museum, urging asceticism and sobriety, though the park also drew protesters who claimed the project’s ultimate goal was to convince Jews to accept Christ as the Messiah.

 “There was no glitz or glamor—it was all more of the authentic,” Job said about the park’s early incarnation. “You couldn’t have anything 20th-century on you. You couldn't have a watch, you couldn’t have a cell phone.”

These policies changed in 2007, when the park was bought by TBN, the televangelist juggernaut that boasts it broadcasts to 92 percent of US households and airs on every inhabited continent. Ticket prices surged from less than $20 to $50 per person, and the park undeniably got tackier. When I visited the park a cardboard Jesus sat on a motorcycle near the park’s entrance, and rhinestones covered the Virgin Mary in the Nativity exhibit. Like at other amusement parks across the country, obese families ate turkey legs and took selfies at the Baptismal Pool.

Many of park’s performers are happy with TBN’s changes. One actress, Whitney Lynn Rivera, stood with me in the Dead Sea Qumran Caves and said that the  network helped her promote her music career. While working at the park over the last two and a half years, she’s recorded songs like “Holy Holy” and “Goliath.”

“I sold 400 albums in 30 days,” she said. “I was like, ‘That’s so God.’”

Rivera went through a process similar to a TV audition to score her job. After submitting a few headshots and a resume, she auditioned in front of production managers, including TBN CEO Jan Crouch herself.

To the network's loyal followers, Jan Crouch and her signature poof of pink hair are as iconic and worthy of respect as, say, Barbara Walters. Viewers donate millions of dollars annually to support TBN (they gave $93 million in 2010), which is classified as a nonprofit. She founded it in 1973 with her now deceased husband Paul, a televangelist who was dogged by a series of scandals in his later years. In 2000, Paul was sued for plagiarism by author Sylvia Fleener, who said he ripped off her material for his novel The Omega Code (the suit was settled out of court). He was also forced to deny allegations of a homosexual encounter after former TBN employee Enoch Lonnie Ford told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that Crouch paid him a $425,000 settlement to keep him quiet about the tryst. And in 2012, the couple’s granddaughter, Brittany Koper, accused her grandparents of misappropriating millions to fund their lavish lifestyles (TBN in turn accused Koper and her husband of stealing $1.3 million).

When I asked Job about all that, he said, “I don’t know a whole lot about fraud. Personally, I believe God is our provision, and I believe He supplies for our needs. It is good to give to God, and if there are evangelists on TV who are just wanting money, are just money-hungry, I don’t really agree with that.”

Job loves TBN’s improvements to the park, especially the Church of All Nations, a bejeweled 2,000-seat auditorium where often bloody plays recount Jesus’s life and teachings. According to Job, before the Church of All Nations, he performed outdoors and four to five people would pass out in the middle of each performance.  

“It’s a very nice theater that Miss Jan had a vision for,” Job said. “[Before the theater] you would have the EMT, in the middle of [a play], going in and carrying out this person because they’ve passed out because they’re dehydrated. And then, he would go back in and get the next person who passes out. One really, really good benefit [of TBN’s management] is the air-conditioned theater.”

Job mostly loves TBN because the company welcomes the presence of the Holy Spirit. During our phone conversation, Job asked me, “Do you have any pain in your body?” I told him I didn’t, but that I have occasional aches in my knees. He immediately started appealing to the Lord for a patella panacea: “Lord God, I ask all arthritis be cast out in the name of Jesus. Her new cartilage, her new tendons, her new ligaments, new meniscus, all things be new in the name of Jesus!”

My legs have yet to improve, but Job insists, “We see healings. I can send you some videos from my phone if you want. I see people get healed every day—the blind see, the deaf hear, those who can’t walk, walk.” Although I never received those videos, Job assured me he performs up to eight faith healings a day.

He also performs up to five crucifixion reenactments a week. At 4 PM, Tuesday through Saturday, Job or another Jesus impersonator writhes in pain as Roman soldiers whip him on the cross, splattering viscous, beet-red stage blood toward the audience of the Passion of the Christ Live Drama. The 75-minute play is the most realistic event at the Holy Land Experience, and Job’s performance feels horrifically believable.

Some Holy Land staff members never want to play Jesus, though. As he ushered tourists near the baptismal pool, an actor dressed in first-century garb told me he has his sights set on Judas. It’s more of an art, he explained.

“It’s easy to be Jesus,” he said. “You can suck and everyone still loves you.”

Photos of pages courtesy of The Tenth

When you flip through The Tenth—a “zine” that has a heft and aesthetic vision on par with Vogue’s September issue—you receive an education. Or perhaps I should say you get schooled on a version of gay black manhood developed on its own terms and written in its own words, by gay black men, for gay black men.

The publication takes its name from an idea popularized in the early 20th century by W.E.B. Du Bois, the co-founder of the NAACP, who believed that an elite group of black people—the “talented tenth”—would raise up their fellows through their ability, success, and leadership. Creative director Khary Septh founded the publication with Andre Y. Jones and Kyle R. Banks—all of who are into aspects of modern culture that Du Bois could not have imagined in his wildest dreams—to draw attention to gay movements like the ballroom scene. (In voguing, you go for tens—a perfect score from the judges.)

The Tenth is about recognizing queer black talent in all its manifestations. As Septh prepared to embark on a 45-day road trip to capture the content for the magazine’s upcoming Americana-themed issue, I sat down with him to discuss the magazine’s origins and the impressive response it’s gotten.

VICE: So how did The Tenth get started?
Kyle Septh: About two years ago, Kyle, Andre, and I were feeling like we wanted to create images of beautiful black gay boys. So we did a series called Boys in the Studios, which we launched here in Brooklyn. Then we had this light bulb moment where we were like, “This feels like more than just a one-time photo series.”

We liked the idea of assembling around this collaborative work we were already doing, this kind of convenient community. We wanted a project that allowed us to reconnect to this idea of community. I think all black working professionals often feel the price of building commercial success, and it’s generally isolation, loneliness, detachment, a lot of pressure, and a lot of work. We wanted to do something that would allow us to be free, and recapture our youth and our artistic intent.

How old are you?
I'm 37, Kyle’s 37 as well, and Andre's 39. The gay midlife crisis happens at 30, right? You become the old bitch at the bar at like 32.

There are three ages of gay: old troll, young twink, and 32.
I should put that on my fucking back—exactly.  [Working in fashion], it's important for me to be aware of what's happening, but also to understand how to mature and become sophisticated. It was clear that that wasn't going to happen in parties and nightclubs, but I still needed that energy. But because we're engaging in a different space that's not sexualized, it's not shady—it's about actually getting to know one another. This bohemian arts scene can be just as cliché as the drag scene in Brooklyn, or the bourgeois-working-corporate-brunch scene that's happening up in Harlem. Our point is to mix it up and have a space where we can connect and share ideas.

What kind of reception has the first issue received?
We originally printed 400 copies, and we were concerned we wouldn't be able to get through them, but it blew up immediately. The old establishment books—traditional media outlets like Ebony and Jet—were super interested in what we were doing. To have them open up their pages to talk about the project to their audiences was amazing. We didn't know we’d get so much support outside of our community. Suddenly, we were getting emails from Tokyo and Berlin, and a lot of straight women allies, which was obvious but a little bit of a light bulb to us, like, These are our sisters, our moms, our best friends. Not in that old-school, accessory type of way—which we really can't stand—but in a way that women are a part of our lives.

Do you worry about being accused of being insular? That often seems to be the response when black people organize amongst themselves.
As figures who are misrepresented a lot of the time and stereotyped in the media, we don't believe we need to promote an idea of diversity. That flows naturally and organically, like how you might be at a party and there’ll be a straight girl and a gay girl in the room together, but the point isn't that you're making diversity a priority.

It’s important that diversity is represented, but I don't believe we need to go after that as one of our principal goals. We're going to make this magazine reflect our world, and our world is segregated, and we need to have that as part of the conversation.

Because, in truth, our entire lives are uncomfortable. America is segregated, even in urban centers like New York. This is a larger critique that needs to happen. We have, in publishing, created a space where we can exist in our own community. Ultimately, the long-term goal may be that these kinds of publications are not necessary, though I'm not sure that's the case. Assimilation is cool, but it has its downsides. Because for us, gay assimilation is moving towards whiteness, not celebrating as excellent anything that's happening in blackness.

Being black and being gay creates an interesting other space, because we feel like “others” in both of those larger communities, so we’re saying let's build our own institutions, lets support each other, let's create our own rules, our own sense of order. I think every society needs those things.

What will the next issue look like?
The theme is Americana. I'm really excited about this road trip.  A big part of this zine is creating a challenge. It doesn't make sense to be safe on this project, to just engage contemporary artists or the people who are easy to access like the Instagram stars. For us, the challenge is to connect as many dots as possible with the limited resources we have across the country, so that that network starts to build. We’re gonna do a dozen locations in 45 days, and have the issue hit the stands on December 10.

Learn more about The Tenth here.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter. 

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Here's what's going on right now: A man killed in Chile while handling homemade bomb, Myanmar releases more than 100 child soldiers, Israeli police restrict Palestinian access to Al Aqsa mosque, and Ferguson police chief issues apology to Michael Brown's family.

Photo via Polaris Music Prize media.
If you hadn’t heard, Nunavut–based throat singer Tanya Tagaq’s most recent album, Animism, just won Canadian music’s coveted Polaris Prize. Since her win, the interweb has been aflutter with opposing reactions. The Vancouver Sun celebrated her amazing performance at the Polaris gala, our sister site Noisey questioned if this is actually a win for independent music, and the AV Club ran a confusingly racist headline: “Drake and Arcade Fire lost the Polaris Music Prize to a seal-eating throat singer.”

Tagaq magnetized the press by using her acceptance speech to single out PETA and their stance on seal hunting—literally finishing her speech with “Fuck PETA!” The animal rights group struck back saying, "Tanya should stop posing her baby with a dead seal and read more."  To which they later added, "We take no issue with the Inuit subsistence seal hunt." But as any Inuit can tell you, this argument is flawed at best—because any amount of disruption to the sealing industry is detrimental to those who still hunt today. In Nunavut, seals provide a sustainable and nutritious food source for Inuit, and as such they’re a vital part of a healthy culture. Just as they have been for generations.

But Tanya Tagaq is celebrating her win by celebrating her culture, as she’s always done. Through her music she’s raised the profile of Inuit culture, even though her solo style of throat singing raises the eyebrows of those who are used to a more traditional approach (when Inuit women throat sing, there are traditionally two of them, facing each other, holding arms, and imitating the sounds of nature and animals).

Whether it’s the reactions she elicits from her performance, her advocacy work, or the accolades she’s received, Tanya Tagaq brings awareness to issues and an art form that would most likely go unnoticed or ignored—so for that, the Inuit love her. Whether you’re confused by her art, or perhaps just don’t see the appeal, you can’t help but be shocked, confused, and enthralled by her raw energizing performance style and interpretation of her culture.

I recently called Tanya to talk about her Polaris win and the subsequent media reaction. Here’s how that went.

VICE: Tanya, congratulations! How does it feel to receive this award after many years of hard work?
Tanya Tagaq: I can’t believe it! It doesn’t feel real yet. It’s like something that happened to someone else. I’ve been working at this a long time now. I quit my day job in 2001—so it’s been a long, long road of hard work. It’s something I stuck to. It’s something I stuck to it even though it there was a lot of opposition from traditionalists in Nunavut, also there’s the people not knowing what to do with what I was doing, in the South [anything south of Nunavut], or around the world. So now, it’s finally like, “OK, everybody is happy and moving forward.”

You’re a huge advocate for traditional inuit sealing, your “Fuck PETA” at the Polaris has been getting a lot of attention in the media, but what drives you to take on this battle—especially in the face of ignorant and uneducated comments?
I don’t engage with anyone who’s not willing to have a sane and clean conversation. I’m happy to converse and talk and debate with people. But the second people are being abusive, I don’t even bother to acknowledge them. When I posted the sealfie trying to convince people what was right and wrong, I learned the hard way, and the reason I’m saying these things is so that a few intelligent, educated people will understand what’s going on at the indigenous level, and what’s happening with the seal hunt, and that’s where my aim is. Not to convert people, but to help the sane, awesome people understand. If there are a bunch of nasty psychos out there who tell me to kill myself, then that’s really them talking about how they feel every day, because I would never say that to anyone. Like, how sad of a life, what you do is you get up in the morning and abuse people on Twitter all day and think you’re a hero.

PETA has claimed that they don’t oppose traditional inuit sealing. But as a fellow Nunavummiut, you and I both know that any attack on the sealing industry is an attack on our traditions of Inuit. What do you have to say about their statement?
They’re trying to separate us from the east coast hunt, but that’s bullshit, because the EU ban prevents us from freeing ourselves economically and freeing ourselves from the federal government. As individuals reaping the benefits of our own natural sustainable resource, they don’t understand, they’re trying to ignore the fact that the seal ban caused economic downfall, which has led to a much lower quality of life—like lack of housing, poverty… they’re taking food out of peoples mouths. [They’re] trying to act all righteous about it. It’s not cool and I’m sick of people getting away with it. I had that scroll of 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women—and that’s just in Canada over the last 30 years—and you’re freaking out over some seals. It’s terrifying to the bone that people would care more about that, and I don’t even know how to deal with it.

I think that if they’re going to disrespect indigenous practices so much, they’re going to have to expect some backlash. If I’m going to open my big giant yap, then I expect backlash too. The simplest thing PETA could’ve done was say “Yeah, fuck you too, Tanya” and have been done with it.

What is the connection between your art and traditional Inuit practices?
Well, the thing is, what I’m doing is not traditional, and I’ve gotten a lot of flak for that as well because it’s different. You can ask anyone that I went to elementary school with—I’ve always been different. I sing about my feelings, and how do I feel? I feel like an Inuk person right now. I don’t feel like I’m an Inuk person from 50 years ago. You know, I don’t feel like an Inuk person from a 100 years ago, and it is important to respect tradition and to keep it alive, but it’s also important to have the books open to the cultures and especially in the wake of post-colonialism where we’re suffering the repercussions of Christianity thrust upon us, and suffering the repercussions of amalgamating our culture with someone else’s.

It’s very important that we keep our culture alive and well today, and that means accepting what it is to be Inuk today, and you know what, a lot of me today is hurting. A lot. I don’t want to see people being abused and I’m sick of it.  I’m mad, I’m yelling about that, I’m yelling about being sexually abused, I’m yelling about all the pain that people are having to go though, I’m yelling about all of this stuff. I think when it comes to who I am, I also feel like I’m yelling about the land, the experience of the Nuna [land] and the peace on it. The peace—the most deepest, perfect, amazing peace I’ve ever felt in my whole entire life and the whole root of who I am.

Anything else you want to add?
People should understand that behind the seal controversy, Inuit people are coming from a peaceful, awesome place. People might not get that. People that are against the seal hunt are coming from a very, very aggressive, and super abusive, judge-y place. But when we’re out on the land, it’s total peace. And we respect the animals. We respect that they gave their lives to us. We respect the process of the land. We respect everything, and it’s not up to anyone else to tell us how to live—because that’s pretty colonialist. It’s up to us. We should be able to make out own decisions. People should make sure their own back yards are clean before they come up to Nunavut and tell us how to live, and telling us to eat tofu.

The land has its peace. It is peace. It’s dangerous, but it’s peaceful out there, and it’s never like we’re just evil hunters going out. It doesn’t feel that way at all. It’s not like. “YAY! We’re going to go kill everything.” For hunters, it’s a totally different vibe. I don’t think a lot of people understand that living in harmony with nature doesn’t have that violence associated with it when they picture people clubbing baby seals over the head. That’s really important for people to know that I’m coming from a good place where I’m trying to inform, not just the anti-seal movement, but I’m trying to inform the rest of people who eat meat to respect what they’re eating when they go to a restaurant when they order a chicken sandwich. Respecting culture a little more too, respecting “the other culture,” the non-mainstream, not well known, not white.

It’s important to take everybody’s opinion if we’re going to move forward as a human race. It’s not OK that I had a scroll of missing and murdered women and people are losing their minds over seal. It’s not OK.


@missnunavut

A crowd of students who have boycotted classes in Hong Kong. All photos by Jeff Cheng

Things are kicking off in Hong Kong. All week, students have been boycotting classes to campaign for democracy, and in an education-obsessed city where good grades and mortarboards are the definition of a successful youth, that's a big deal.

They’re pissed because they’ve been promised universal suffrage ever since the city was handed over from the UK to China in 1997, and more recently by current Hong Kong chief executive CY Leung. Last month, Beijing dropped the bombshell that while everyone would be able to vote in the next 2017 elections, there would only be two or three chief executive candidates up for election and they would all need a national committee’s stamp of approval, basically guaranteeing that the next leader of Hong Kong would be strongly linked to the mainland.

“I wasn’t surprised at all, but I was disappointed when I heard [about Beijing’s decision to restrict election rights],” said 24-year-old Alex Chow, the secretary general of Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) and one of the protests' leaders. “As usual they’re quite conservative.”

Alex Chow speaking to a crowd of students

HKFS has drawn some impressive crowds this week. On Monday, around 13,000 students sweated it out at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to hear Chow ask, “How can a few people decide Hong Kong’s future? Why not the 7 million people of Hong Kong?”

Support swelled again for the impromptu marches that hit the streets on Wednesday afternoon, and again on Thursday night when 4,000 Hong Kongers paraded through town to set up camp outside the chief executive’s house—the highest number to get involved in a civil disobedience act since the '97 handover. Abuse got personal as the crowd hoisted up a giant cardboard cutout of CY Leung’s grinning face (with fangs added) and chanted, “CY Leung, resign!” “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping, shut up!”

Protesters marching to CY Leung's house

Throughout the week, these demonstrations had been peaceful. Besides performing relative routine crowd control, the police had a pretty easy job. The Hong Kong students also showed a great deal of restraint in not getting out of control and provoking the authorities to crack down on them.

“We need to show we are responsible, we’re not just a bunch of troublemaking kids,” said Jonathon Lam, a Hong Kong physics student involved in the protests.

A protester holds up a sign demanding universal suffrage

After a week of boycotts and still no word from their government, though, frustrations were mounting. On Friday night, a handful of students scaled the gates to Civic Square, a previously public area that the government closed in July. About 150 others followed, forcing their ways past the police or scaling the nine-foot-high metal gates to "reclaim" the square. The cops surrounded them, then 3,000 students surrounded the police, then hundreds of riot police surrounded the students. It stayed like that for a long time. People pissed on the road; water and candy bars were passed around.

Protesters hold umbrellas in an effort to protect themselves from pepper spray

Throngs of people pushed and police whipped out signs reading, “Stop charging or we use force.” Huge canisters of pepper spray were aimed at students’ faces, and the cops used shields to force the students back. There were moments of total chaos, even as students threw their hands in the air to indicate their peaceful intentions. A few were injured in the commotion, and others collapsed from heat stroke or hunger.

Protesters clash with cops

By Saturday morning everyone was flagging and supplies were running low. This afternoon the remaining students were arrested or forcibly removed. Chow was among those arrested.  

HKFS plans to return to the area for sit-ins tonight in order to demand the release of arrested protesters and for Leung to break his silence on universal suffrage. Some see these protests as a prelude for Occupy Central, a pro-democracy movement expected to kick off next week.

Organizers have explicitly announced they will protest in peace. But given last night’s events and the Chinese government’s track record, it's not clear whether the police will use violence to break up future demonstrations.

“All we want is the chance for universal suffrage,” muttered a teary 16 year-old girl rubbing pepper spray from her eyes. “Everything else is bullshit. Why do we get treated like thugs just for asking?”

So what next, another Tiananmen? It would be terrible PR for China if something on that scale were to happen, which makes it unlikely. But with the Hong Kong police recently acquiring 4,000 inert grenades and CY Leung continuing to toe the party line for Beijing, it appears that the situation here will get worse before it gets better.

John Fleming is all about the war on drugs.. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

On Friday, at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, United States Congressman and noted anti-pot advocate John Fleming of Louisiana decried the nationwide trend toward the decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, in the process spewing out a bunch of discredited myths that could have come straight out of decades-old war on drugs propaganda films.

According to Fleming, if you smoke marijuana, you will get addicted and/or die. And even if you don’t smoke marijuana, you might end up dead at the hands of a stoner, because pot is the source of "broken families, broken lives, and broken bodies” across America.

And that’s not even the craziest thing he said.

In addition to rehashing dozens of disproven statistics and claims about the harms of smoking pot, Fleming also informed his conservative, pro–small government audience that marijuana prohibition doesn’t actually put people arrested for using the drug in jail.

“What a myth, folks!” he remarked, adding that “a number of experts” have told him personally that “this myth derives from the fact that when marijuana users are arrested for more serious crimes, marijuana possession may be an added charge.”

According to Fleming, a former “Louisiana Family Practice Physician of the Year,” the 600,000+ people arrested annually for weed possession must’ve been shoplifting, raping, or committing some other awful crime. This makes perfect sense to him because “spouse abuse, child abuse, motor vehicle accidents, suicides, mental illness, and failed marriages” are just a few of the “social ills” he linked to “our good friend marijuana,” in addition to permanent brain damage, addiction, schizophrenia, and at least one murder.

Since in Fleming's world pot can kill you or worse, naturally marijuana policy reform would actually cost more money than it saves.

“Now my libertarian friends argue taxpayers and society in general should not make or enforce laws that dictate to them how they should behave or what they should do with their lives when it comes to drugs,” he said. “My answer is it is the same taxpayers who will be required to take care of you and your family once drugs have lead to your broken families, broken lives, and broken bodies. If you truly want a smaller government, then you will oppose the legalization of marijuana."

Otherwise, we should be ready for an “an increasing entitlement state.”

Holy shit, you might think. What kind of pot are the kids smoking these days? Well, according to Fleming, the kind that is three times more potent than the stuff old heads might’ve toked in the 60s (a myth) and “contains tar” four times more potent than tobacco. No wonder “one in six” teen smokers are addicted to pot (actually, they’re not).

All of this is, of course, as bogus as it is old news: Study after study has debunked the idea that teen marijuana users are doomed to cancer or addiction, and found instead that marijuana is pretty harmless, though it could have some negative impact on brain development. Even new propagandistic threats about marijuana legalization—like an alleged increase in fatalities caused by marijuana DUIs after recreational weed was legalized in Colorado—can be quickly proven to be bullshit. And we know that in some medical situations, weed can even be pretty helpful.

Fleming, however, believes that allowing even medical access to marijuana will only make the growing "marijuana addiction" crisis worse.

“Somehow, without any real science,” he said, the fact that marijuana could reduce nausea among cancer patients “morphed into the idea that marijuana is actually a safe natural treatment for many illnesses and is otherwise harmless and nonaddictive.”

The Marijuana Policy Project’s Karen O’Keefe pointed to dozens of studies—full of real science—that detail the potential medical benefits of marijuana, and contested Fleming’s suggestion that legalizing medicinal or recreational access will wreak havoc on society as we know it.

"Nineteen states—including Mississippi, Nebraska, and North Carolina—have legalized or decriminalized marijuana," O'Keefe told me. "Taking a more humane approach to marijuana users hasn’t caused the sky to fall in any of these states, despite Congressman Fleming’s doom-and-gloom perspective."

To that, Fleming might respond that in some towns in California and Colorado, “there are more pot dispensaries than Starbucks coffee shops.” Can you even imagine such a hellscape?

Thankfully, outside of a few drug-war dinosaurs, no one is likely to believe the congressman's hyperbole and fearmongering.

"His positions and pronouncements are both out of touch with available science as well as public opinion,” NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano told me. “If prohibition worked, then we wouldn’t be having this public discussion today and the majority of Americans wouldn’t be voicing their support for regulatory alternatives.”

Or, as O'Keefe put it, "Thankfully, the public increasingly realizes that there is nothing moral about criminalizing their neighbors for making their own decisions to use a substance that is safer than alcohol."

Follow Kristen Gwynne on Twitter.

Three years into Syria's bloody civil war, rebel-held areas of Aleppo are still subjected to constant bombardment from the government's air force in an aerial campaign that seems directed more at the last remaining civilians than rebel fighters on the front line.

In the concluding segment of Ghosts of Aleppo, VICE News asks what, if anything, Western intervention will actually mean for Syria.

Photo courtesy of ICP

“This is just some sappy-ass, lonely attempt from my big fucking sappy friend Violent J, trying to score some of that Kreayshawn lady,” Shaggy 2 Dope says at the start of Insane Clown Posse’s new music video for “The Kreayshawn Song.” “Violent J, go ahead and kick your sappy-ass shit.”

The video then cuts to Violent J in a white suit backed by three blond Marilyn Monroe lookalike background singers and a band of guys dressed as (what else?) scary clowns.

“Crazy, Kreay Kreay,” Violent J raps. “Kreayshawn / it’s on / I won’t front / straight the fuck up / can I hit that… blunt?” 

To the majority of Americans, this video probably seems ridiculous (though you can’t deny it’s catchy as hell), but it’s time to start taking ICP seriously. Since Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J began recording on their Psychopathic Records label, they’ve made their style of hip-hop into a genre all its own and built their cult following into something approaching an actual religion. Before ICP, no artists wore clown makeup while throwing Faygo and rapping about family. Today, 18 likeminded artists belong to the Psychopathic roster, and tens of thousand of ecstatic fans make an annual pilgrimage to the Gathering of the Juggalos.

DJ Paul and Da Mafia 6ix (formerly Three Six Mafia) have recognized the group’s brilliance since their first collaboration over a decade ago, and this fall, Da Mafix 6ix and ICP united to become a supergroup called the Killjoy Club. In early September Psycopathic released the group’s first album, Reindeer Games, and this week the crew embarked on a tour across America. I know a little something about ICP and juggalos, so I called Violent J to talk about the new album, songcraft, and the similarities between his group and John Cougar Mellencamp. 

VICE: What’s your approach to writing and producing a song?
Violent J: We have a number of producers who we use. Mike E. Clarke is ICP’s main producer. When we do a Joker Card album, which is our heart and soul, we put everything we have into it—we have different producers who we use. We did most of the Killjoy Club record with Seven’s beat because at the time Seven was freed up—he wasn’t working with Tech N9ne—so he was sending over crazy beats. Once we get the [beats], Shaggy and me lay down our idea of what the song’s gonna be about and the concept, and then we come up with a hook, like a scratch hook to use until we get together with them.

How did this process change when you collaborated with Da Mafia 6ix on Reindeer Games?
[Da Mafia 6ix] flew to Detroit and we went to my studio—which is out in the woods, we call it Rusty’s Boom Room—and we spent three days together recording on each other’s songs. They jumped all over our songs, and then we did the hooks up the way we wanted them, and then we jumped all over their tracks. They did the same thing.

We did it real professionally, man. I remember when I picked them up from the airport, I was playing the songs, and they were digging ‘em and telling me which ones they liked and which ones they weren’t really feeling, and everybody just kinda jumped.

How did you end up working with them in the first place?
We’ve known them for years. The coolest thing about them was way back in [the late 90s] they were the first established group to ever reach out to us and ask us to be on a song—pretty much they’re still the only group that’s ever reached out and asked us to be on a song. We get tons of offers from groups who are much smaller than us, but never somebody who was actually out there nationwide like that.

Why did you decide to form a supergroup together?
It was always an idea we had—we were always like, We need to do a whole album together. Always talking that shit. Then I started talking to DJ Paul: “Why don’t we really do it? The way we do will be like this: We’ll make half the record using our tracks in the way we make records with our producers, and you guys make the other half.” And when we did it, it’s really cool. When you listen to the album you hear like the ICP side of production, and then on the next song you hear Da Mafia 6ix side of production.

You’ve got a lot of artists on your label at this point. Do you essentially work two jobs: one as artist and the other as businessmen?
It’s an obsession. It’s our entire lives. I sometimes feel like real big successful bands, like U2, say, “Well, we decided to take two years off,” and they get together and record another album. I can’t even picture taking two weeks off. We have to survive out here in this bitch. We have to keep making noise, we have to keep putting shit out on the internet—we have to stay relevant, or we’ll go away. We work every fucking day, except the weekends; the weekends we go home and spend with our families. We’re like a factory: We’re loading boxes, we’re up here working every day, and we’re unloading trucks—we’re up here every day, and our whole staff is up here every day working.

ICP has been popular for a long, long time at this point. How have you maintained that?
For those who like our music, I think we have been providing good shit. This may be a conceited answer, but I think our product is good, for those who like it—which is an acquired taste no doubt. We have been able to switch up our flavor just enough to keep it interesting and keep coming with the goods. I believe we have a talent for what we do. Now if you’re not into what we do, most people don’t even see it as a talent at all—they see us as a joke. We work very, very, very fucking hard to keep coming up with the flavor—and it’s not just ICP. We have a crew up here who brainstorms with us and comes up with ideas.

Through ICP and Psychopathic Records, you’ve pretty much created a new genre of music. What makes a good artist in that genre?
I’d say what makes a good [Psychopathic Records] group work is character. Like a superhero, [they’ve] got to have a good backstory, a good character—something people can get into besides the music. I think Juggalos want a little more than just the music. For example, Anybody Killa is like a native warrior. He’s Native American and the paint that he wears on his face is war paint, and he has his whole backstory. He has an album called Mudface and his own little story, like a character out of a comic book or a horror movie. You gotta make it interesting. Record labels have been doing that forever.

Yeah. It’s like the old Hollywood studio system.
John Cougar Mellencamp wasn’t really named all that shit, you know what I’m saying? They threw the “Cougar” in there.

Are you down with the clown? Then download The Killjoy Club’s new album and check out ICP’s tour with Da Mafia 6ix.

Follow Mitchell on Twitter

A local girl takes a photo with a body displayed inside one of the rock graves. All photos by Marc Ressang.

Everyone covered their noses when the family lifted the cover to the casket. A foreign stench hit my nostrils, making me quiver. So that’s what a corpse smells like, I thought to myself.

I’d previously traveled to the Indonesian regency of Tana Toraja on the island of Sulawesi on two separate occasions, observing the extravagant funeral ceremonies that the area is renowned for: raucous village block parties that can last for days and that families spend years saving up for. The Torajans don’t consider physical death the end of the line. Instead, death is considered only part of the gradual process toward “Puya,” or the Land of Souls.

Though the Torajans are considered predominantly Christian, they hold on to a large part of their ancestors' animist belief system—especially when it comes to death and dying. It was only at the end of my second trip to Tana Toraja that I heard of a less popularized and much more unusual Torajan death ritual, “tomb sweeping,” taken to a morbid extreme. Depending on the village, every one to five years, families reunite to exhume the bodies of their deceased relatives, clean up the inside of their coffins, and, if the mummified bodies are in solid enough condition, give their ancestors a fresh change of clothes.  

A body is taken out of a rotten coffin and wrapped in a new shroud with new clothing and gifts for the afterlife.

People were proud to explain that they had returned home from all corners of Indonesia to dig up their parents’ bodies. At the ritual, family members and guests moved around curiously, snapping photos of the mummified remains, and taking the occasional corpse-selfie, all while trying to suppress their natural gross-out reactions.

The journey from the closest airport to the ritual grounds entailed a bumpy overnight bus from Makassar, the remote capital of South West Sulawesi, up to Rantepao, the capital of Tana Toraja. After another hour’s drive northbound into the mountains, I arrived at the burial site of Lo’ko’mata village: a single, monolithic roadside boulder containing at least 30 graves carved deep into the rock face, some of them over 50 feet off the ground.

The first few days of the ceremony were spent building ladders made out of bamboo from the nearby forest. Afterward, families painstakingly took the bodies from their graves to clean the coffins from the inside out. Sometimes they discarded the rotted coffins entirely, replacing them with a simple cloth wrap around the shriveled body.

Relatives and local villagers huddle around the bodies to make sure they get their photos.

A mummified body is taken out of her coffin, displayed and cleaned up.

A body and coffin are inspected before being cleaned up.

Feeling uneasy as an outsider photographing such an intimate ritual, I was disarmed by how low-key the locals were about the whole process. People casually handed out cigarettes and coffee to anyone attending—I found myself holding both, as two local brothers called me over to photograph them unwrapping their parents’ corpses.

At dawn on the last day of the ritual, the graves were sealed shut and the bamboo scaffolding removed. The locals held a Christian service near the burial site and slaughtered some pigs and water buffalos for lunch. Then, to mark the end of the ritual, the crowd was entertained by a game of Sisemba, a traditional form of kick-fighting.

Bodies from a single family are paraded across town, before being cleaned.

The rock gravesite of Lo’ko’mata. 

Villagers take down a coffin from one of the rock graves.

Follow Marc Ressang on Twitter.

Photos by Colton Kugler

High school students in suburban Denver are taking to the streets and staging protests in response to a couple major changes coming to their school district. The first is the adoption of a pay-grade system that will tie teacher salaries to performance reviews. The second proposal hasn't yet been approved by the board, but it's far more controversial: It would modify the AP US History curriculum to, in essence, teach a more a right-wing vision of America’s past.

"Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” reads the history proposal, presented by newly elected conservative board member Julie Williams. “Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage."

Ironically, the proposal itself has inspired a great deal of civil disorder. While this has evolved into a student-lead protest last week, the momentum began building a week earlier, when 50 district teachers held a “sickout" that forced the closure of two district schools. Then, last Monday, 100 students from Evergreen High School students staged a walkout, which inspired students from other schools to follow suit the next day. By midweek, around 700 students filled the sidewalks outside Jefferson County's Chatfield High School.

“We’re not going to listen to empty promises and be influenced as easily as they think teenagers are,” said Scott Romano, a junior at Chatfield High School who helped organize Wednesday’s protest through Facebook. Romano told me he’s concerned about how these changes will affect future academic prospects for Jefferson County students.

“We don’t want national colleges to look at Jefferson County, Colorado, and say, ‘Oh, you passed the AP exam in Jefferson County? Well that doesn’t mean the same thing as passing the AP exam in other districts,'" he added.

He's got a point. As Tony Robinson, chair of the University of Colorado at Denver’s political science department, put it, the new curriculum is destructive and will lead to “historical illiteracy" for students.

“They’ll be ignorant to the facts, but they’ll also be ignorant to civic consciousness,” Robinson told me. “There are a good deal of studies that show this kind of ‘patriotism education’ is associated with xenophobia, jingoism, and authoritarian personalities. And when those youth actually confront the reality of their country’s history, there’s a shocking moment of disillusionment and radicalization.”

These protests in Jefferson County coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement protests of 1964 (almost to the day). Back then, certain journalists insisted that there must be some adults behind the impressive and organized force of the movement (leading protester Jack Weinberg to coin the phrase, “We don’t trust anyone over 30”). Similarly, the student protesters have been met with condescension from both local media—who often frame the story as kids merely skipping school—and members of the school board.

Board chairman Ken Witt believes that it’s the teachers—who are naturally upset with the potential pitfalls contained in the coming salary overhaul—who are behind the student walkouts. While he concedes the kids are sincere, he insists they’re misinformed, citing a conversation he witnessed on one school website where students believed that the budget had been cut by $40 million and that US slavery was being excised from history texts.

“Those are both patently untrue,” he told me. “We actually increased the budget, have given teachers significant raises, and there’s been no discussion of eliminating slavery from the curriculum. When I’ve talked to these students, it’s clear they’re being strongly incited to these actions [by the teachers]. I’m glad they’re engaged, but I’m extremely disappointed that they’re being manipulated and misinformed. And I’m disappointed that they’re out of their classrooms, when they could be doing this outside of class time."

Romano doesn’t buy it, and claimed that its the board that's being manipulated by outsiders. “We are doing this completely on our own terms,” he said. “The board is being used as pawns by the radical Tea Party that is using them to force their ideals down our throat.”

Following the initial uproar on Tuesday, the board member responsible for the history proposal, Julie Williams, released a statement asserting that she “must not have explained [herself] clearly.” She went on to criticize current AP US History textbooks, claiming they “have an emphasis on race, gender, class, ethnicity, grievance and America-bashing while simultaneously omitting the most basic structural and philosophical elements considered essential to the understanding of American History for generations.”

But according to Chatfield High senior Ashlyn Maher, there was no misunderstanding. “In that statement she just doubled down on everything she’d already said,” she told me.

Williams was empowered along with three other conservative members of the school board in last November’s off-year election. Their campaigns were backed by Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers political advocacy group—hence Romano’s accusations of Tea Party influence.  

Last April, the director of the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, Dustin Zvonek, wrote an op-ed in the Colorado Observer to make a pitch for school districts to “develop a merit pay system which links better documented performance to higher pay for teachers.” He anticipated some backlash toward that proposal, writing that “controversy is almost inevitable when you attempt to alter the culture of a major institution.” But he warned that “board members perhaps run a bigger risk, in terms of turning off parents, by seeming to be passive, risk-averse or intimidated by the shrill voices of a tiny, anti-reform minority.”

So conservatives were ready for some pushback. And there are political wunderkinds like Maher and Romano in every high school—the Lisa Simpson characters who are much savvier than adults give them credit for. But it’s unlikely anyone anticipated the student protests against the new history regime would be as large, enthusiastic, and sustained as they have been.

“They better be ready for a fight, because I know the students are willing to give it—and the teachers are too,” Maher told me. “The school board can definitely discipline the teachers, so that’s when it’s critical for the students to step in. This is a game-changer, because now students are watching what the school board is doing. So if they try to pull this stuff again, they’ll get even more pushback.”

The protests even inspired a bit of Stephen Colbert–style satire with the hashtag #JeffCoSchoolBoardHistory, where both students and outsiders have been parodying what the new curriculum may look like with tweets like, “1720s, South Carolina: Caring white business owners ensured their employees exercised daily,” and “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a technical bill to conform the law with current practices.”

Protests swelled on Thursday, with 1,000 students from Columbine and Dakota Ridge marching down the sidewalk. They held signs reading “Don’t Make History Be A Mystery,” and “We Are Rebels For All The Right Reasons,” directly referencing the section of the AP US History proposal looking to remove materials that “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”

As the demonstrations went on, Jefferson County Superintendent Dan McMinimee met with Chatfield High School students in an assembly in the school’s auditorium. He's new to the position, having taken over after the previous superintendent, Cindy Stevenson, abruptly announced her resignation not long after last November’s election of the three new conservative board members, saying, “I can't lead and manage because I am not respected by this board. I can't make decisions. This board does not respect me."

On Thursday morning, Romano and Maher actually gave the introduction to the superintendent and received enthusiastic cheers from their fellow students, who’d rallied around the duo’s efforts during protests the day before. They were clearly delighted that the forum was taking place, but also spoke on behalf of McMinimee, clarifying that he “will not be able to answer all of your questions. As the Jefferson County school board is his boss, and he’s not able to speak on behalf of the board, and won’t discuss what they intend to do.”

Maher then reiterated what McMinimee had been saying all week: The AP US History and teachers salary proposals are only that—proposals. They were tabled during the meeting last Thursday, and will be addressed again in a meeting on October 2. 

The school’s assistant principal had pleaded with the students earlier in the morning to be on their best behavior during the assembly. The only uproar emanated from an unknown adult who interrupted McMinimee’s comment about how Colorado school boards differed from those in the state of Texas, shouting, “We’re not Texas! Don’t talk about Texas!” That earned a large round of applause from the students. (Some of the fervor stems from the fact that the Jefferson County AP US History proposal is nearly identical to one that passed in Texas in 2010.)

Following the assembly, walkouts continued at Lakewood High School and Jefferson County Open School.

MoveOn.org has been gathering signatures for a petition fighting the proposal to change AP US History, and has accumulated about 30,000 names. But just as the three school board members' support from the Koch brothers has fueled activism against them, protestors' support from the famously liberal MoveOn.org will only lead to more polarization and conflict, as Colorado conservatives look to shut down what they see as the liberal infiltration of their children’s education.

Then again, both sides couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of democracy in action for their students than the debates, protests, and civic accountability they’ve engaged in over the last week. It’s definitely been an education, for everybody.

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

A homeless man in San Francisco. Photo via Flickr user Evan Blaser

The statistics on poverty in America make for sobering reading. The US Census Bureau’s annual report on income shows that one in five American children live in poverty, that Americans are earning less than they did in 2007 and that the median income for black households was about $23,000 less than that of white households. Last year, a report from the National Poverty Center revealed that the number of households in the US living on less than $2 a day per person increased from 636,000 in 1996 to 1.65 million in 2011.

One effect of this kind of poverty is the prevalence of neglected tropical diseases in the US, particularly in the South and along the Gulf Coast, and especially among black and Hispanic communities. Up to 1 million citizens carry the parasite that causes Chagas disease, a chronic infection that leads to deadly heart or gut damage in 40 percent of cases.

There are a number of diseases similar to Chagas that illustrate how impoverished Americans are neglected by society at large. Someone who understands this is Dr. Peter Hotez of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. He's been working on neglected tropical diseases for his whole life, so I caught up with him to talk about them.

VICE: So the tropical diseases you work on are classed as "neglected"—do you feel that the work you’re doing is also neglected?
Dr. Peter Hotez: There are a group of these diseases. Our original list that we published in 2005 had 13 or 14 “neglected tropical diseases," and now the World Health Organization has expanded the list to 17, and it’s a good list. I like to call them the most important diseases you’ve never heard of. They’re actually the most common afflictions of poor people. The problem is they’re only occurring among poor people, so there’s no real attention being paid. One of the things that was so powerful for HIV/AIDS was that you had a very strong advocacy group that began in the US, North America, and Europe, and you don’t have that for these diseases because they’re only occurring among the extremely poor.

One of my studies has shown that some of the highest numbers of neglected tropical diseases are occurring among the poor who live in wealthier countries, including the United States. These are not only the afflictions of Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Dr. Peter Hotez

What kind of diseases are popping up in America now that hadn’t before?
Well, it’s not that they hadn’t before, it’s just that nobody was looking, which is also interesting. One of them is called Chagas disease; it’s a parasitic infection of the heart that’s transmitted by kissing bugs, and this is widespread in Texas.

So you think these diseases are ignored specifically because they affect poor people?
That’s right. If these were diseases that were striking the middle class or wealthy people in North America or England, or elsewhere in Europe, we would never tolerate it. But because they’re only occurring among the poorest of the poor they go unseen.

With that in mind, how do you approach working on them?
I guess your question is, "How do you get people to care about these diseases?"

Yeah—how do you get people to care about them, but also how do you get people to care about it without it becoming a situation in which you're putting yourself forward as some kind of savior figure?
Well, one of the things I say is that these diseases not only occur in the setting of poverty; we now also have strong evidence to show that they have caused poverty. Diseases like Schistosomiasis, which is a parasitic worm infection, hookworm, and another one called Toxocariasis—which occurs among the poor in the US—actually reduce intelligence. They reduce IQ among kids, and there are studies to show that when chronic infections occur in childhood [they can] reduce future wage earning by 40 percent. The others make people too sick to go to work.

This is the stealth reason why the bottom billion cannot escape poverty—because they’re too sick. In many cases, we have interventions that are so inexpensive that we could quite easily lift the bottom billion out of poverty through these interventions. In fact, we call the vaccines that we make in our research laboratories "anti-poverty vaccines" because they’re going to have an impact not only on improving health, but also on economic development.

Are these vaccines being supported? I suppose the worry is that you tell politicians or big companies that lots of people trapped in poverty have this particular disease, which helps keep them in poverty, and you hear a lot of concerned noises, but then nothing actually happens. As someone working on these diseases, do you feel supported or do you feel occasionally like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall?
I would say both. We have good days and bad days, and we’ve done a reasonably good job of getting donor support from the EU; they’re supporting our hookworm vaccine. The Carlos Slim Health Institute has been supporting our Chagas and Leishmaniasis vaccines. We’ve had support from the Gates Foundation, the US government, and the National Institutes of Health, and another big one is the Michelson Medical Research Foundation. That’s enabled us to develop the vaccines through early stage clinical testing. The challenge is going to be the later stages of clinical testing and leading to licensure—how that’s going to be financed. So we don’t have all the elements of the business model worked out, but we’ve made enormous progress so far in getting these vaccines into clinical testing.

The life cycle of Schistosomiasis (Click to enlarge)

You say that a lot of the solutions for these diseases are really quite simple; is it the case that, with a number of these diseases, you have vaccinations and you have pills, but the issue is about distributing them, about education, about having them find the right people?
Yeah, so this problem is sometimes referred to as global access—how do you ensure global access? And we think we have good strategies in terms of good medicines that we give for de-worming and Schistosomiasis treatment. They seem to be getting to the people who need them. In fact, the US Agency for International Development just celebrated its one-billionth treatment, so people seem to be getting them because they’re fairly simple to use. And that’s how we partly designed the package when we wrote these papers in 2005 and 2006. We thought it would be fairly straightforward and easy, especially when the medicines are being donated and they don't have to be given by a healthcare provider.

How does distribution of these medicines in the US compare with the rest of the world?
The irony is, we’re having a tougher time getting people to accept how widespread neglected tropical diseases are in the US. People don't want to admit that we have poor people in this country, but we have 1.65 million American families living on less than $2 a day. So we’ve been working with Congress to get some legislation enacted. Congressman Chris Smith in New Jersey recently submitted legislation to Congress called the End Neglected Tropical Diseases Act, which addresses the problem not only of NTDs like female genital Schistosomiasis across Africa, but also NTDs here in the US.

So then the presence of NTDs in the US becomes evidence for something that America doesn’t really want to talk about, which is the existence of widespread poverty across the country?
That’s right, and it’s really flared up again now with this immigrant debate—you know, the 50,000 Central American children now being detained at the border of Mexico. One of their rationales for deporting the kids is that they’re going to introduce all these diseases, but in fact the diseases are here and they’ve been here for a very long time. 

It always fascinates me, the number of American kids who want to go off and “save Africa,” but don’t understand that there’s an enormous amount of poverty on their doorstep.
I think the impressive part is the extreme poverty we’re seeing. You know, we now have nearly 20 million Americans living at one half of the US poverty level, and so we’re approaching a level of poverty in this country—mostly in the American south, and then the Gulf Coast—that's reaching the level of poverty of many middle-income countries. It’s poverty that is the overwhelming determinate. We call them “tropical diseases” and sometimes it’s a bit of a misnomer. These are diseases of extreme poverty. I mean, climate is a component, but poverty is the overriding determinant.

Have you seen an upswing in poverty during your time as a doctor?
Well, an upswing in the way that, before, nobody looked, and now we’re looking. So we came to Texas three years ago to create this National School of Tropical Medicine, which is modeled after similar schools in London and Liverpool. The difference is that we’re working in a disease endemic country, which is the southern part of the US and Houston, so that has been very powerful—the idea that we’re making interventions not only for people in Africa, but also for neglected diseases among the poor here at home. The drug companies have been good at donating the medicines, but then it’s another matter to convince their shareholders to invest in research and development to make new interventions that eventually they’d have to give away. So we feel we have to do that in a nonprofit sector.

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