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All the Beautiful, Expensive, and Corny Art I Saw at Art Basel This Year

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All photos by Nick Gazin

Every December a bunch of art fairs infest Miami, and every year I show up try to understand what's going on. The main fair of Miami Art Week is Art Basel, which began life in Switzerland in 1970. In 2002 Art Basel Miami Beach was created, and its popularity birthed about 20 satellite art fairs of varying sizes, other unrelated shows, concerts, and about a million branded-content things and marketing-driven events. Art Basel exists because it's a fun way for the art world to have a reunion in a warm place, but mainly it was created to evade paying taxes on expensive art pieces. Art Basel is great; Art Basel is terrible. In some ways, it's a little microcosm of the best and worst aspects of the art world. I go every year to try to learn what I can, relaying my photos and information back to you, the VICE reader, while escaping my seasonal affective disorder. I hope reading this will make you feel like you were right there with me.

I covered Basel for VICE in 2012 and 2014. This year Basel kinda sucked. It's always a little corny, but it rained the whole week straight this year and a lot of cool people elected to stay home. Multiple friends made anti-Basel memes and then the police shot a schizophrenic man and a lady stabbed another lady. At some point I caught a real bad flu, and now that I'm thinking about it, I really wish I'd stayed home this year. Anyway, here's how the week went.

Wednesday

It was raining in New York when I left it last Wednesday evening and it was raining in Miami when I arrived. The weather was so bad in New York that the flight was delayed, and I missed the Jeremy Scott party for the third time in a row. Will I ever get to meet Jeremy Scott? My host returned from the rained-out party with the Misshapes and some Jeremy Scott high heels with beach ball nozzles on the back.

Leigh Lazark, Greg Mishka (who runs Mishka), our host, and I all got high and watched the Fat Boys' movie Disorderlies on VHS. It was a real star-studded movie-watching affair.

Thursday

One of the trademarks of Wynwood is the worst food service imaginable. I went to Panther Coffee in Wynwood, where I witnessed a staff member drop a thing and then her coworker yelled at the customers, "You're making her nervous!" Later the same girl drank a shot of espresso from the measuring glass and didn't wash it before pouring my drink. I think we all got sick from this place.

Outside we ran into Cope2, an old graffiti artist from the Bronx. My pal Greg Rivera posted a photo of him on Instagram and everyone started posting that he was an informant, racist, a pedophile, and a homophobe. I don't know anything about that.

Then it rained a lot so we stayed indoors, got high, and watched Tapeheads until I had to go out and DJ. Thursday was a bust for art-looking.

This is David from Flowers of Evil with Dee Dee Dum Dum from the Dum Dum Girls. Dee Dee and the Crocodiles played as a supergroup at Gramps, the only good bar I've been to in Miami. I DJ'ed between the bands and after. It rained almost the whole show, but it was still good.

Friday


How Australia Ignores Female HIV Patients

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Image via Wikipedia


In Australia, HIV is still often seen as a disease that only affects gay men. As a result, women diagnosed with the virus can struggle with a lack of awareness and understanding around their risks, management, and experience. Of course, any person living with HIV can be subject to stigma and anxiety. But for women these feelings are compounded by public perceptions of the disease, child-bearing responsibilities, and a lack of information about how treatment affects women's bodies over time.

Much of this is due to the lack of visibility around women with HIV in Australia. While the Australian Federation of Aids Organisations (AFAO) consider national infection rates to be stable, 27,150 people live with the condition—10 percent of whom are women. With a small population impacted, women are not identified as a priority population in the Department of Health's Seventh National HIV Strategy.

According to advocacy groups such as Positive Women, not having women on the government agenda fails to recognize that women's experiences of the disease are unique. It can also exacerbate the lack of awareness and understanding on the topic. "There's no perceived risk," Autumn Pierce from Positive Women explained to VICE. "Women often contract HIV from a trusted long-term partner. We're advocating for a more complete picture of the experience of women living with HIV in Australia so that organizations such as ours are able to provide really tailored, effective support."

Carol El-Hayek, an epidemiologist at the Burnet Institute, agrees. Speaking to VICE she said, "Everything is focussed on gay men because they make up the numbers. Even though the number of women is quite stable, the potential risk is still there." General Practitioners will test men who identify as gay or bisexual on an annual basis, but a woman is only tested if identified as high-risk or presenting the symptoms of late-stage HIV.

Women also face a complex set of double standards in relation to their sexual behavior. Autumn explains that this is reinforced by the misconception that HIV-positive women are "sleeping around." It can take only one sexual encounter or sexual partner for someone to become infected. The stigma worsens still when an HIV-positive woman decides to give birth. "Not only are they seen as harboring this disease but now as infectors of this disease and passing it onto children, which is really not the case in Australia," notes Pierce. The transmission rate from an HIV positive mother to her unborn child is actually very low, currently at 1.7 percent.

For more on HIV treatment, watch our documentary 'Stopping HIV? The Truvada Revolution'

May*, 34, was diagnosed with HIV in 2007. She migrated from an African country with considerably higher incidences of HIV. Ironically, she tested positive in Australia, where she feels she let her guard down when it came to STDs. As is the case for many women with the disease, giving birth to her two children has been a huge and stressful challenge. "Nothing is ever 100 percent. With the 1.7 percent chance, it's always bearing down on you," she said. "After giving birth you want to celebrate the child, but you have this anxiety—you only get the all-clear when the child is six months old." Because of the stress involved with being pregnant as an HIV positive woman, May does not plan on having any more children.

Despite this tension, May has accepted that HIV is now a part of her life and is ready to disclose her condition to people other than close family members and medical professionals. But her husband is still coming to terms with living with an HIV-positive partner and struggles to talk about it. Additionally, he feels that by her speaking about her condition, he'll be implicated in it.

As May and other women like her get older, the issues they face also evolve. Menopause is an emerging issue in the experience of women living with HIV. "There's a lot of unknowns around how drugs over time have affected their bone density, their heart etc, which would bring a lot of anxiety," Carol adds.

The reality is not all women infected with HIV will have similar experiences of contracting, living with, or treating the disease. But any visibility or additional focus from government agencies around their lives will help deconstruct the stigma they face. But without attention and recognition, social policy and public attitudes are sadly slow to change.

*Name changed to protect privacy of the individual.

Follow Chelsea on Twitter

The Hallucinatory Terror of Unica Zürn

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Unica Zürn

It's difficult to begin any discussion of German Surrealist Unica Zürn's work without first acknowledging the ongoing personal terror that was her life. Hers was a life spent under unending torment, beginning with acts of sexual abuse inflicted by her brother and ending a short 54-years later when she jumped out of her apartment window, an act that she would foreshadow directly in her writing years before. Her ongoing state of clinical depression and trauma can be felt in the space and language of her writing, which she seemed to wield in mortal fury, pressing back all of the horror and anxiety into a mode of work that is full of fury, almost physical, destructive, and as beautiful as it is severe.

Zürn was born and raised in Berlin-Grunewald in 1916. She was employed as a secretary during World War II by the Universum-Film-AG, a film corporation consolidated by the Nazis and used for the creation of propaganda films. Unaware at the time of the true nature of Nazi enterprises, Zürn was horrified when she later learned the full scope of what she had been involved with. It was a shock that would haunt her for the rest of her life, imbuing her work with a continuous sense of self-deprecation and loathing, ongoing schizophrenia-inspired visions of death and hell. Her personal life following the war continued just as darkly: she would marry and have two children, only to eventually be divorced, and lose custody of the children due to her escalating mental trauma. Later, after remarrying the surrealist painter Hans Bellmer, she would undergo multiple unprofessional abortion procedures, resulting in lasting physical and emotional complications. The final ten years of her life were spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals, suffering ongoing depression and bouts of hallucination, during which she received treatment from the same psychiatrist as Antonin Artaud. She would attempt suicide multiple times before her death in 1970.

And yet despite her ongoing mental issues, Zürn's vision as an artist could not have been more pronounced, definitive, a product of great will under duress. Zürn wrote and drew prolifically throughout the second half of her life. Among her surviving body of work (she was known to destroy some of her own pieces in fits of rage) are poems, drawings, paintings, prose, and perhaps her favorite form of exploration, anagrams. Like other surrealists, Zürn loved the idea of automatic writing, finding meaning or even just visualizing shapes of sound from games of wordplay. As a result, her writing often slips into fugue-state passages which intermingle with the more personal themes she became concerned with—childbirth, sexual awakening and damage, death. In the end, she became an important part of the surrealist movement alongside her friends Max Ernst and Man Ray, and for me remains one of the more vital of those, given her penchant not just for sublime associations of the uncanny, but for the natural madness of it, the unwillingness to separate the brutality of life from its bizarreness.

The most recent translation of Zürn's work into English is a slim novella released this summer, The Trumpets of Jericho. Like much of Zürn's prose, it bears direct resemblance to her actual life—in this case obviously labored with Zürn's complicated history of motherhood—and yet its clear, if intentionally macabre, perspective is but a gateway to a world of feverish serial nightmare. The narrator, a woman for some reason stranded alone in a tower haunted by ravens and ghosts, is pregnant to the point of sickness, unable to feel anything but loathing for the "bastard, whom I hate with all my strength." The narrator's description of her desire to end the life of the child inside her before it begins, or at the very least to force it out of her prematurely, is harrowing and full of certain pain, but so evocatively written that you can't help but be drawn through.

"He who has sucked all the strength from my flesh and bones day after day for nine months," Zürn writes, "he will die slower than a snail can move, limpingly covering a thousand-mile trail. And I will ceremonially pack his tattered, bloody remains in seven different packages and send them to my last seven lovers. Maybe he is equally the son of all seven? Since these men could only sire a single son." One can see in the sonorous playing of Zürn's phrasings how even these blackest ideations of her imagination are played out.

Unfortunately for the child, even after the narrator induces birth by pulling it out of her womb by hand, the world that he is born into is no less treacherous. The mother wants to bury the baby alive, but is "too tired to climb down the 88 steps" to leave her tower, and anyway there's almost nowhere left that she could carry on the act, seeing as "our Earth is mucked with corpses." All that is left, then, is to be subject to the mother, and her unending series of plague-like visions, strings of horrid daydreams, as she lies around "motionless in my own filth." Simple acts like getting up and cleaning the blood off their bodies become monstrosities of the narrator's imagination, incurring flashing descriptions of the death dreams that she feels and awful voices that she hears. Each sentence that occurs to her triggers further awful tableaus of imagination, like dreaming while awake, under which both she and the child seem to disappear as the book continues piling on one fugue-plagued scene after another.

We then, as readers, become dragged on into the hell itself. Gorgeous, if sickly, descriptions bearing imagery and ideas such as finding Satan stuffed and put on display in a museum, unseen figures drowning in ashes, laws against praying, murder of animals, altogether bleed into a monologue that is as dazzling in expanse as it is unnerving in effect. Philosophical snippets become amputated in gibberish, prophecies of death and anguish lopped off in mid-vision and veered over into cubist-like images that offer nothing but their own beauty, then are gone. Zürn controls the helm like a hellish little conductor of black symphonics, from which even the act of creation is no release. "Are you thoroughly bored by my story?" she interrupts herself. "I promise you, I'm as bored as you are while I'm writing this. If you scratch your head right now, you might catch the Moloch under your fingernail."

Perhaps that's part of the point here: there is no release. As wild and transgressive as Zürn gets, clearly speaking from a place unchained by necessary logic or certainly anything like hope, it is solely the masterful mechanics of her writing, the dervishes of images that could be found absolutely nowhere else, that keep us going. Zürn denies nothing from admission, no black whim not invoked and splayed out, then just as quickly again abandoned, left behind; which in a culture as precious as ours has become, and surely in spite of itself, could hardly feel more alive.

Buy Trumpets of Jericho here.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

VICE Meets: Taking Drawing Lessons from Artist and Journalist Molly Crabapple

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Molly Crabapple is a relentlessly prolific artist, writer, and activist. Her murals adorn the walls of famous night clubs in New York and London, and her writing has been published in Vanity Fair, Paris Review, VICE, and New York Times.

Through illustration and words, Crabapple has documented some of the most pivotal political moments of the last decade—from the 2008 recession to Occupy Wall Street to life inside Guantanamo Bay to the Syrian Civil War. Most recently, she published a memoir, Drawing Blood, that tells the story of her eclectic life and work.

VICE wanted to get a better idea of how Crabapple has built her career and seamlessly blend her art with journalism, so host Dory Carr-Harris accepted her offer of drawing lessons at her live-in studio in Manhattan's Financial District and headed over to chat.

Virtual Reality Slaughterhouses Could Be the Future of Animal Rights Activism

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Photo by the author

It was early Thursday afternoon on the campus of Valley College in Van Nuys, California, when two employees of the animal rights organization Last Chance for Animals set up a table in the quad. Students of all ages were lounging around and walking to class, and LCA's campaigns director, Nina Jackel, was ready to spread the word of their cause, rocking a grey t-shirt that declared "There's no excuse for animal abuse." Jackel gave passersby a cheery greeting: "We're encouraging people to have a cruelty free holiday this year!"

She and her cohort had brought along a plastic, virtual reality headset, which contained a video showing a 360-degree scene of two industrial farm facilities—chickens and pigs held in miserable-looking cages and pens, doomed for slaughter. With the upcoming holiday season, Jackel and LCA's social media coordinator Karen Smith had come to raise awareness about the cruelty of factory farms.

"Most holiday celebrations are actually centered around death and cruelty," Jackel said. "You have a turkey in the middle of your table, a ham in the middle of your table. So while you're celebrating peace and love and joy and all these wonderful things, you're celebrating around death and torture. It's something that people really don't think about, but it's actually extremely twisted."

Animal rights organizations have been advocating for years against factory farms, but this year the LCA has come up with a high-tech new strategy of its own. Using hidden-camera footage collected on GoPro cameras, the group has put together a two-minute virtual-reality video experience designed to raise awareness about what the group considers the most barbaric practices of our meat eating society. When I strapped on the head-seat at Valley College and looked around, I was brought face-to-face with a giant pig among thousands of others inside a vast compound of Mid Western pork producer Christensen Farms. The hog was marinating in its own filth in a metal cage that looked so small the animal couldn't even turn around.

This isn't the first animal rights group to get in on virtual reality technology. Last year, PETA unveiled a VR simulator called I, Chicken. PETA representatives invited people at various college campuses to strap on wireless goggles and take on the life of a chicken.

Watch: Drone Footage Reveals Massive, Toxic Manure 'Lagoons' at Factory Farms

Last Chance for Animals, which was founded in 1984 and is based in West Hollywood, got into the virtual-reality game with its website Factory Farm 360. The site shows 360-degree footage of the insides of major enterprises like Christensen Farms, which supplies pork products for huge clients like Walmart. Jackel says their use of VR is meant to help people better empathize with what animals raised for slaughter are going through.

"It actually puts you in the animal's place, and then when you look around you see what the animal sees," Jackel said. "As bad as that is, there are a lot of things you don't see—like the smell of the ammonia, or the disease, the bacteria that's all over the place. As bad as it is here, it's actually ten times worse for these chickens in real life."


Still from Factory Farm 360 footage

Slaughterhouse and factory farm videos produced by animal rights groups can be extremely disturbing, and the videos on Factory Farm 360 are no different. One video from a Christensen Farms facility, collected by undercover investigators, shows clips of piglets being killed in a carbon dioxide chamber, and caged hogs suffering from suppurating pressure sores. It's videos like these that compelled Smith to go vegan in the first place, she said.

But in the two-minute video I saw at Valley College, the factory farms footage was juxtaposed with a vision of a meat-free situation: a clip from a California sanctuary called the Gentle Barn, where rescued pigs, goats, and chickens were cleaned up and roaming free in a quaint red barnyard.

"The virtual reality footage is not as painful to watch," Smith said. "It's raising awareness more than showing the cruelty, you know what I mean?"

Video footage from Christensen Farms, via Last Chance for Animals's YouTube

The question, of course, is whether anybody will actually feel more for these animals by getting a virtual-reality glimpse of their living situations. For a high-tech approach, the setup at Valley College was actually pretty low-budget: a Samsung smartphone hooked up to a virtual reality headset they bought on Amazon. The sound was barely audible and the hustle and bustle of the college campus also made it hard to feel fully immersed in the industrial meat machine.

Jackel said that she and Smith had a lot of success when they recently visited California State University, Northridge. For the hour I spent with them at Valley College, the scene wasn't quite as happening. But a handful of people tried the headset on, a couple fellow animal rights championed voiced their support, and a little crowd formed when a tall kid with a mop of brown hair excitedly walked up to try it on.

"This is cool!" he said, gazing up and down and around with wonder. His friends gathered around as he narrated the experience. "That's fucked up... Oh, what the hell? I don't know, that one that's outside looks OK."

Alas, the overall point of the video seemed lost on him. When the activists tried to ask him about animal cruelty, he just wandered off.

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

Did the Conservative Party’s Next Leader Use COP21 as a Coming Out Party?

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Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall. Photo via Facebook.

When newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he'd be bringing along a massive delegation of provincial premiers, opposing party leaders, and other politicians from across Canada to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, it was seen as sign of the Liberal Party's new brand of inclusive politics. Yet, one voice in among the Canadian ranks stood out in stark contrast to the rest.

While many provincial leaders and Trudeau himself committed to greater climate change controls, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall rallied against implementing measures such as carbon taxes. Instead, Wall stood alone as the sole voice of dissent in the Canadian delegation, urging other delegates to consider the fragile state of western Canada's energy sector before rushing into such commitments. Wall was unapologetic about his stance, telling reporters that he isn't worried "about what the other kids in class think of me."

"His first objective was to send the message to the Canadian government and other provincial premiers that we have problems in the energy sector and that we don't want to compound those," Joseph Garcea, a professor of political studies at the University of Saskatchewan, told VICE. "He said that he is not opposed to dealing with environmental matters, but argued that we have to do it in a way that doesn't adversely affect the Saskatchewan economy."

Erica Lee is a Saskatoon-based aboriginal and environmental activist who travelled to the COP21 conference as part of the Canadian youth delegation and made headlines by posing for a selfie while sticking her tongue out at Wall during the talks. Lee was troubled by how she saw Wall conducting himself during the conference. "It's disappointing that he was one of Saskatchewan's only representatives, and he spent his whole time at the climate conference making deals with extractive industry and corporations, inviting them into our lands. It was apparent that even the rest of the Canadian delegates viewed Brad Wall as out of touch," she said.

The inclusion of oil and gas companies into the COP21 conference has been somewhat controversial. Some argued that the biggest man-made causes of climate change have no place at the conference, while others contend that extractive industries are an undeniable part of the world economy and will play an important role in controlling climate change.

"As young people, our strength is in breaking through the political games that so many officials want to play—we are here to fight for justice and our futures. A lot of politicians seem detached from that reality," said Lee, "When we called out the government on sending representatives from mining and corporate sectors to an international climate forum, the response was that it wasn't 'practical' to exclude corporations, no matter how unethical their practices. What would be truly practical is to be able to eat food, drink water, and breathe air without being poisoned."

Wall's call for a measured response to climate change was in line with his Saskatchewan Party's previous positions on environmental issues and the energy industry. Wall firmly established himself as a proponent of the Keystone XL pipeline. When that project ultimately failed to come to fruition, Wall took to Facebook to publically shame President Obama for his choice and went as far as to say that the decision may damage Canada-US relations. Now, Wall has thrown his support behind the proposed Energy East pipeline that would link Alberta and Quebec. Meanwhile, the Saskatchewan Party was also recently implicated in a scandal involving a $1.5 billion carbon capture facility in southern Saskatchewan. The project was flaunted as a major environmental initiative by Wall and his party, however documents leaked to the opposition NDP revealed that the facility was only operated at 45 percent capacity for the year it has been open.

Minister Herb Cox and Brad Wall (right) in the Saskatchewan wilderness. Photo via Facebook.

While Wall has never tried to hide the fact that he is an ally of the energy industry, his statements at the Paris conference, as well as his criticisms of Trudeau's refugee intake plan, seem to indicate that he has ambitions beyond the premiership of Saskatchewan. Wall has so far denied that he has any interest in running for federal office, but that hasn't stopped people from speculating about where he could fit into the federal Conservative Party as their next leader. "Apart from the people who are within the Conservative Party caucus, he's the only major potential candidate the media talks about," said Garcea.

When Wall was first elected premier in 2007, he did so by a landslide. An important part of the Saskatchewan Party's sweep into power was Wall's leadership. Under his predecessor Erwin Hermanson, the party was firmly established in the political right. In order to appeal to a wider range of voters, Wall moved his party's ideology to the center. It's a strategy that could have merit for a Conservative Party in desperate need of a new image in the wake of a devastating election loss this October. "I think it's fair to say that in conservative circles, there's a feeling that there's the right amount of progressivism and conservatism in Mr. Wall that makes him an attractive candidate," said Garcea.

Wall has enjoyed immense popularity in Saskatchewan for years. In the 2011 provincial election, Wall won reelection and secured the third largest majority government in Saskatchewan history, winning 49 of 57 seats in the provincial legislature. Furthermore, Wall has led the quarterly Angus Reid poll which rates the popularity of Canadian premiers for all of 2015. According to the latest poll released on December 10, Wall holds a 60 percent approval rating and is the only Canadian premier to maintain a majority of support.

However, if Wall does choose to run for the Conservative Party, the road will not be without obstacles. For one, provincial premiers have a historically terrible record when it comes to doing so. Furthermore, Wall doesn't speak French, which will immensely damage his prospects in Quebec and is practically a non-starter in Canadian politics. And with the Conservative Party having had several western Canadian leaders in a row, its leadership could decide that it's time for a leader from the East. With Nova Scotian Peter McKay leading in the most recent polls, that could be the direction the party is heading in.

Regardless of these issues, Garcea believes that Wall will remain an intriguing figure in the Conservative Party leadership debate.

"The truth of the matter is that he's well positioned to either become an influential figure or a leader in the Conservative Party. He's highly respected and he performs well. He has both a high and positive profile in Saskatchewan and across the country," said Garcea.

Why Donald Trump Is a Big Winner And Why We Are All Losers

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Even this beagle knows he's a winner. Photo via Facebook.

Donald J. Trump is winning. Because he's a winner. He's only ever known how to win.

He started a business: it won.

He wrote a book: it won.

He started a reality show: it won.

He's running for president: he's winning.

Mexicans: losers.

Rosie O'Donnell: fat.

Refugees: stupid.

Muslims: terrorists.

A huge number of Americans are staring at their hands in disbelief. Canadian cousins in Winnipeg are sending Snapchats of themselves to American relatives asking wtf is going on down there. The American League of Racist Uncles have just finished a successful Thanksgiving campaign and are gearing up to tell uncomfortable millennial nieces that Trump will Make America Great Again™ from the opposite side of a dry Christmas goose.

This isn't just about a nomination race to determine who will lose to Hillary Clinton. This is a fight for the very political soul of the West.

Trump will either be slayed or will slay us. We've got to be winners.

Donald June Trump is not an aberration. He's not an outlier. Not a disease, a disruption, or even a surprise. He is the product and extension of 14 years of suspicion, xenophobia, political incompetence, jingoism, stupidity, ugliness, celebrity worship, retail politics, class divide, and The Apprentice.

Donald Joanne Trump is like the flu your body develops when it's riddled with so many golf-ball-sized tumours that it looks like the grass at a driving range.

So don't avert your eyes. Don't swerve. Stare directly into the political abomination of Donald Jonathan Trump* and appreciate the mortality of our democracy.

*We recommend that for the pregnant, weak of heart, or incontinent stare instead at Ted Cruz in moderation.

The ethos that created Donald Jefferson Trump also buoyed bullish former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. It boosted the National Front in France. It incubated the UK Independence Party. It propped up the Aryan thumb that is Geert Wilders. It is the raison d'etre for the Greek paramilitary boys' club of Golden Dawn.

They all belong to a political fraternity that believes common sense can solve any problem.

Extremism isn't the end goal, it's merely the output. Voters and supporters of these maniacs aren't themselves extremists—they're frustrated idiots.

My garbage is overflowing? Damn refugees.

Crime is up in my neighbourhood? Minorities at it again.

We lost a war? Political correctness makes us weak.

This political brand of earnastiness—a word I just made up because making up words is fun—is the core belief that there is nothing with this place that can't be fixed with some good ol' fashioned get-er-done-ness, conveyed through monosyllabic bumper stickers.

Make America great again.

Drill baby drill.

Respect for taxpayers.

The silent majority.

None is too many.

Subways, subways, subways.

This isn't new. The moronic chest-thumping and high-pitched insistence that Muslim/Mexican/Serbian/Italian/Jewish/Irish immigrants are the threat to our country has been around for about as long as there's been columnists like me to sit back and very smugly explain why it's wrong.

But what's new is the feeling that the crazed frustrated, the earnastiness, is winning.

Sure, Dick Nixon was a piece of cake. And Ronald Reagan was a racist. The George Bushes couldn't stop invading the Middle East.

But there's something scarier about this new wave of racism, xenophobia, stupidity. Maybe it's because this hard-on for hatred is re-hashing fights that we thought we've already won.

Whereas most social struggles—women's liberation, the gay movement, the fight for black civil liberties—went in one direction, with stops along the way, it now feels like we're sliding back. It's as though we've just climbed up a mountain, only to feel a tugging on our leg as Donald Trump races down the hill on a snowmobile, and he's tied a rope from it to our foot.

Hate crimes are on the rise. Politicians—even here in friendly ol' Canada—are openly musing about banning Muslim garb in all sorts of places. Refugees are not war-weary engineers with three kids and two degrees, no, they're trojan horses, hired by the Islamic State to sneak into the West.

And you know what? There's no real way to fix it.

To quote a man defending our felled prime mInister, Stephen Harper—who wasn't, himself, prone to earnastiness, but dabbled in it when the mood struck—"I don't care if has sex with a sheep as long as you work for the people."

The lesson from that is: one, still don't have sex with sheep please, because, gross; and, two, populism can Trump, and even help sell, the most disgusting of hate crimes.

Sheep-fucker guy belongs to the least-scary camp of the far-right. He wants good government, low taxes, workable public services, and everything else is gravy. He's like this seemingly-wonderful retired hairdresser who told Toronto Life: "I love the Fords because they say what they do and they do what they say."

They're going to shrug and blame The Lamestream Media™ when asked about Trump's plan to ban Muslims.

They're the earnest part. The nasty part is the problem.

Fueled by rampant inequality and profound distrust in both the media and the government, a new class of political malcontents is rising up to demand that the government fix their shit lives. For the first time in a century, the lower middle class feels that it is slipping backwards, and it intends to grab tightly onto the social fabric as it falls. And they're not going to tattoo a swastika on their back in the process. Instead, they're going to put on a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat and lecture you on "the Koran."

Those losers just want to win. They're convinced that the current winners—the Congresspeople, the Members of Parliament, the absurdly well-paid Chiefs of Newspaper Bureaus and Political Correspondents for Online-Only Media Outlets—want the country to lose, so they can keep winning.

That win/lose duality of the far-right needs to suffocate any third data point.

Mexicans are coming to America and working? Losers. Bad. Even if they're contributing to a competitive economic climate that is likely to create jobs? Losers. They're losers.

China may become the world's largest economy? We're getting killed. We've got to crush them. Even if it's a logical extension of a command economy with an artificially deflated currency? They're killing us. We've got to crush them. We've got to win.

The Islamic State is gaining ground? I will destroy them. Right now, we're weak. We've got to be strong. I will be strong. Even though a ground war would likely spark more regional conflict? We're weak. We need to be winners.

Trump supporters, just like Rob Ford voters or people who still insist on watching Two and a Half Men, revel in simplicity. They hold onto the firm philosophical belief that Occam's Razor is not just a problem-solving principle but a way of doing business.

The easy solution is to counteract the populism with populism. To throw a Bernie Sanders at every Donald Trump and hope everything works out. To hug Justin Trudeau so hard that his eyes bulge out of his perfect head.

But that's wrong. Whatever qualities Sanders or Trudeau may have as candidates, they're still just singular antibodies in a sick system.

Another alternative is to placate the broad political middle with the least offensive hand-shaking fleshbag the party establishment can find in order to suck in so much filthy money they can to drown out the anguished cries of agreement to Trump's most guttural war chants. Looking at you, Jeb! and Hil! Up here, we call it the John Tory Response.

But that's even worse. It's a response that necessitates leaning into a corrupt system awash with tainted money in order to silence a broad chorus of disaffected rubes.

So, where does that leave us?

It leaves us with the task of fixing politics altogether. In Canada: finding a way to bring in a more diverse cross-section of politics that gives channels to the disgruntled that doesn't involve watching Ezra Levant rant about his refugees-as-terrorists vitriol. In America: getting money out of politics and taking a sledgehammer to the two-party system. In Europe: re-imaging racial integration and reforming immigration procedures to ratchet-down tensions while still managing a Eurozone and helping the wave of migrants heading from the Middle East to the southern and eastern borders.

But those options are difficult and fraught with problems.

It might just be easier to win.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Portrait of a Canadian Sex Convention

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Caroline S. All photos by Luis Mora, assisted by Mark Byk, Manny Trinh and Melanie Johns. Producer: Jessica Tjeng (Zinc Production)

For the past 16 years, The Everything To Do With Sex Show has taken over a packed convention centre in Toronto. Over the weekend, "North America's largest consumer romance show" brings with it hundreds of booths featuring everything from swingers clubs to adult film stars, cam girls, and sex toy distributors with bins full of discount dildos and novelty penis pasta. There are burlesque performers, latex fetish wear fashion shows, and blowjob workshops, as well as a bar where people can buy watered-down caesars as they watch a gimp in a Mexican wrestling mask get his nipples zapped with a cattle prod.

Events like these are usually photographed in a paparazzi, in-your-face style. But I wanted to do the opposite and connect with the people who are participating on both sides: the fans and the people working there.

Instead of digitally snapping away without asking permission, I documented the show using traditional portraiture. I wanted the portraits to seem intimate without being intrusive or explicit, compared to most of the photos you would see from such a sexually charged atmosphere.

The project shows the diversity of people who are interested in "sex" and "romance" across age, gender, and race.

See more of Luis' work here and follow him on Instagram.


Someone in Alberta is Murdering Cows and Carving Them Up

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Don't fuck with us. Photo via Flickr user Sunny Ripert

Cows in Alberta are being gunned down for their meat.

Cops in southeast Alberta are on the lookout for some weirdoes/BBQ fanatics that shot and killed two cows this week and then skinned and butchered them.

The cow killer (or killers) made off with premium cuts of meat, leaving the carcasses to rot in a field, according to Consort RCMP. The remains were apparently then eaten by other animals. Gross.

Acting Corp. Jim Countryman told VICE cattle are one of the primary sources of livelihood in the area.

"With the downfall of the oil industry and things slowing down there, crimes like this do tend to creep up."

He more or less said police have no clue why this is happening, though beef prices could be a factor.

"I don't know if there's a black market they can tap into themselves. I have no idea what the motive of this is," he said.

This isn't the first time cows have been targeted for their assets.

Six cows, whose beef was valued at $20,000, were slaughtered in BC over a period of several months this year. Their remains were once again left behind after select cuts of meat were taken.

Cow rustling is on the rise in parts of Canada, in part due to soaring beef prices. Over the past two years, sirloin has gone up 44 per cent in value to $24 a kilo.

If it turns out the crimes aren't hanger-motivated, however, this shit is just creepy as hell.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Awful Misogynists Keep Threatening to Kill Alberta Premier Rachel Notley

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Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. Photo via Facebook.

TRIGGER WARNING: This story contains descriptions of threats of physical violence.

The threats against NDP Alberta Premier Rachel Notley come in many shapes and sizes.

Some come at the end of a long and rambling political diatribe about commies and dictators with the suggestion of hanging her in a public square. Some simply call her a cunt and suggest that the best course of action would be to put a bullet in her head and leave it at that. Others are chillingly specific, such as one that reads: "I would assassinate Notley using a zip tie around her neck so I could watch the look on her face as she struggles to breathe."

The comments seem to appear anywhere and everywhere, although there are some usual suspects: the comment section of the anti-Notley stories published by Toronto-based pundit Ezra Levant; on the wall of Albertan Separatist pages; on Reddit; hidden deep in the ableg hashtag on Twitter; and so on. But they even exist in seemingly innocuous places—just yesterday, a single CTV Lethbridge story featured at least four threats against Notley.

And it's not just Alberta's premier. During the final deliberation for the controversial Bill 6 yesterday, Energy Minister Marg McCuaig-Boyd broke down while addressing the legislature. She said that "a climate has been created where people are afraid to speak," referencing the extreme outrage that arose from the bill and the vitriol that followed.

"I myself was somewhat concerned to go home last week."

All in all, it seems that right now Albertans have a serious problem when it comes to not threatening to kill our current premier and her staff. With the aforementioned Bill 6 yesterday came a new tidal wave of angry rhetoric. One comment suggested that driving a pitchfork through Notley's neck and burning down the legislature may be a solution to the problem. Another that "maybe we need to just go back to the wild west and shoot her already."

The threats hit such a critical mass that Albertan opposition leader Brian Jean had to take to Facebook to denounce the right wingers who use violent and misogynistic language against the premier—which comes off a tad disingenuous when you realize that Jean, to an extent, was fanning the flames of the Bill 6 outrage. Standing up to the trolls took leadership though and for his trouble, Jean was slammed in the comment section of his own post.

This problem isn't just a flash in the pan sort of thing either. Back in October, the RCMP had to look into more death threats being laid against Notley. Albertans Against the NDP, and a Facebook page that harboured this type of violent language was briefly taken down. The threats seemed sadly familiar, "We can take over the government we just need the wild to back us, or a lone gunman," one read. "Not condoning that. Just saying bad things happen to bad leaders."

Furthermore, this isn't solely a partisan problem either. In 2014 then Progressive Conservative Premier Alison Redford was emailed the message "Fuck this Nazi failed process Redford you and your daughter will fucking pay" and the man who sent it was investigated by the RCMP. Early this year a death threat, albeit from an angry conservative, helped seal Airdrie MLA Rob Anderson's decision to quit politics.

It's important to remember that, as Edmonton Journal columnist Paula Simons put it, "Threatening to kill a particular public figure isn't a hate crime. It's a crime crime." Threatening to give harm to a public figure even on social media is a crime. Earlier this year, during the first major swarm of dickhead threats, Insp. Gibson Glavin told CBC: "If there is a reasonable likelihood that the person receiving that threat should take it seriously, then that is a type of thing that could be considered to fall in the criminal realm."

The saddest part of all of this is that it seems like this type of language and threats are considered par for the course in Albertan politics. Back in October when the RCMP was looking into The Albertans Against the NDP threats, Premier Notley's press secretary stated that "this kind of social media or correspondence activity is not unusual in any way" and that this was "normal."

I was born and raised in rural Alberta. I understand the frustration that came with the new NDP government. I don't agree with it, but I get it. There have been a lot of fast changes and if you pair that with a slumping economy, things can seem too much. But in no way is that any excuse to threaten to kill another human being.

A main complaint I routinely hear from other Albertans is that the rest of the country thinks we're ingrates, that we're hicks. I tell you what, I'm going to offer a little bit of advice right now.

Maybe if we don't want to be considered redneck by the rest of the Canadian population we should have political discourse in which threatening to drive a pitchfork through the premier's neck isn't considered "normal."

Seems reasonable, right?

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Another Powerful New York Politician Just Got Convicted for Corruption

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Federal court in Manhattan. Photo via Flickr user Jeffrey Zeldman

For the second time in a matter of weeks, a former top player in New York State government got convicted on Friday, the latest head to roll over what by most accounts is a cesspool of political corruption in the Empire State.

Former State Senate Majority leader Dean Skelos and his son Adam were found guilty by a jury of all eight counts—their crimes included bribery, extortion, and conspiracy—as the New York Times reports. At issues were allegations that Skelos used his position to solicit three businesses for cash and lucrative employment opportunities—including a "no-show job"—for his son.

The conviction follows that of Sheldon Silver, the former Speaker of the State Assembly, who was found guilty on November 30, and is another notch on the belt of US Attorney Preet Bharara, perhaps the most powerful prosecutor in America at the moment. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the ouster of two of the "three men in a room"—the top legislative leaders and the governor who decide how to run New York—will have any impact on their former colleagues in the state capital of Albany.

The Republican Behind the Federal Ban on Gun Violence Research Explains His Big Regrets

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This story originally appeared on The Trace.

The controversy over a two-decade-old prohibition on gun violence research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) resurfaced on Thursday when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced that Democrats will insist on the removal of the rider as part of the $1.1 trillion omnibus bill required to fund the government. Failure to pass the package will trigger a government shutdown, and Pelosi's move may complicate negotiations for Republican leaders, who have consistently deflected efforts to allow the CDC to resume funding studies of the subject. In June of this year, during the last such push on Capitol Hill, then-Speaker of the House John Boehner flatly stated, "I'm sorry, but a gun is not a disease."

The effective ban can be traced back to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which famously barred the CDC from involvement in any research that could be interpreted as advocating tougher gun laws. Jay Dickey, a Republican Congressman from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, slipped the rider into a spending bill as a junior member of the House Appropriations Committee. Congress slashed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget after the amendment went into effect — the exact amount that the organization had dedicated to studying gun violence the year before. The swift one-two punch has come to define the organization's current research climate, in which studies on guns and public health are virtually non-existent.

Read: The CDC Just Released a 'Gun Violence' Study That Doesn't Study Guns

Opponents of the research ban argue that it hugely complicates the task of reducing gun deaths and injuries. "In terms of resources and the burden to the U.S. public, there are order and orders of magnitude between gun violence and various infectious diseases," Dr. Charles Branas, a gun violence researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, tells The Trace. "So why aren't we investing in this, and why aren't we making this a very important topic of study?"

Democrats and public health experts aren't the only ones calling for an end to the ban. In recent years, Dickey himself has actively spoken out against his own amendment. One day before the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Dickey published a sober letter to Congress. "Research could have been continued on gun violence without infringing on the rights of gun owners," he writes. "Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution."

In a conversation with The Trace, Dickey discussed how his reading of the Second Amendment motivated his legislation, the importance of science in addressing the gun problem, and his growing regrets over the research funding freeze.

Watch 'Click, Print, Gun,' the inside story of the 3-D gun movement:

The Trace: Your amendment established the CDC ban on gun violence research. You've since had a change of heart. Why?
Jay Dickey: I just regret it. I don't know if it was a change of heart, I just regret that we didn't maintain the commitment to funding science and research. In fact, I don't think I ever intended it to be a prohibition against spending money like that. It just shouldn't be spent for political purposes.

If you didn't intend it to prohibit federal gun violence research, what did you hope the result would be?
That the politicalization of the research stop. Because we were spending money, not for health purposes, but for political agenda purposes. But I would have added to the amendment, if I had the control. I was just a junior member of the committee, and I didn't know what wording went into the amendment before it passed. I would have added to it and made it a requirement that there be scientific research. That it should continue until a solution is reached. And at no time is the solution to even get close to infringing on the rights of gun owners.

How did gun rights come to be major priority for you?
The more I read about the Second Amendment and the more I read about why it was there, I just finally figured it was important. Then when I saw the opposition on the other side, it just kind of took it to another level.

On the research issue, the side that wanted to stop gun control felt like they were fighting for the Second Amendment. That was a constitutional amendment, and that connected them with the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That's a pretty strong motivation.

Read on VICE News: San Bernardino Residents: The City Had Pretty Awful Gun Violence Before Today

What do you think would have happened if the CDC's research had continued?
We could have been spending a little bit of money for a long period of time and we would have a solution. The highway industry, it solved their problem with the use of science and didn't eliminate the car. If someone asked me, "What do you think the solution would be to eliminate head-on collisions?," I never would have thought that a little guardrail would be enough force to stop a car. But science won out. There's no telling what science will do. If a consistent, continual effort is made, we'll find a solution.

Do you have any idea of what that solution might be?
That's what I can't figure out. I don't think I can predict it right now. But we can't get to a solution by doing nothing. We need to do something.

You recently sent a letter to Congress, calling for renewed federal funding for research on gun violence. Given the intensity of the debate around guns, do you think you would have sent the letter if you were facing re-election?
No. People are used to the NRA on one side and the gun control people on the other. And they're accustomed to speaking in those terms. They're unaccustomed to doing things in a joint fashion. And so, when you delve into that environment, you get these knee-jerk reactions. And you have to overcome the knee-jerk.

Do you think that'll ever happen, where the two sides will find a way to compromise and collaborate?
Well, Mark Rosenberg and I have it. He was the was head of the CDC department that was supposed to be spending the money at the time. We were the point men for each side when the issue came up in Congress. I mean, I was told to watch out for him. And I think he was told to watch out for me. So we were on opposite sides. But later I got to know him, and we found a middle ground.

And how did you guys reach that understanding?
He showed up in the office to say hello once. We started talking and then we got to our families and we started connecting. And I don't think I've convinced him, and I don't think he's convinced me, but we are miles further along than we were.

Have you gotten any feedback from other Republicans about your letter?
Zero. I didn't expect anything. I just did that because my conscience wasn't doing well. I had to do something, even if no one else did.

How much blame do you think sitting Congress members hold for the state of gun research in the U.S.?
I can't attribute any guilt to them right now. I'm just saying, something could have been done. And I could have done it. I could have put the language in the amendment that did more to encourage the science. But when you have those kinds of fights, there's kind of an anticlimax. It was a big battle to get the amendment passed, and after it was over, I kind of just said, "I don't want to hear about that for a while." And so I stopped.


Follow The Trace on Twitter.

A School Is Asking Kids to Sing This Walmart-Themed Christmas Song

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Image provided by "Erin"

The above is from a set of lyrics recently given to Blythe Elementary School students in Huntersville, North Carolina, right outside of Charlotte. They are, obviously, about how great Walmart is.

According to a mother who asked to be called Erin, whose son attends Blythe Elementary, the school gave the lyrics to her ten year-old fourth-grader. "My student said he was told it was the glee club," she told me over the phone. Her son was under the impression that "he'd be taken out of school to do this performance at Walmart." Apparently, students were given these lyrics and told they had the opportunity to try out for the right to sing this, and a few other Christmas songs, near the entrance of the local Walmart. (Erin's son, she says, didn't make the cut.)

A couple days ago, Erin posted the lyrics on reddit because she found them funny, she told me, inadvertently sparking a miniature shitstorm in the Charlotte area. "There's a huge uproar" over this, she said. "I it for the lols, I didn't realize the community would go berserk." Erin's image of the lyrics now has over a million views.

Erin told me that as a result of the Walmart debacle, parents have been threatening to pull their kids from school, and the Charlotte-Mecklenberg School system's Facebook page has gone into damage control mode, mollifying upset parents and randos alike who were voicing their anger.

After speaking with Erin, I tried to find out who told a bunch of elementary school kids they needed to sing some goofy songs about Walmart being sweet.

I contacted Walmart corporate, who responded with a statement reading:

The Huntersville Walmart is an active member of the community, and this includes having a positive relationship with Wythe Elementary School. We have supported them through our school of the month program, as well as provided them with materials and refreshments through various school events. The Blythe elementary school chorus will be performing at our store as they have in years past. This will include a special song performed as a way to thank the store for their support.

After that, I called Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools, who emailed me the following statement:

The Blythe Elementary Chorus Club is an extracurricular activity for students. Club members composed the song to sing to Walmart staff in the lobby of the Huntersville store across the street from the school. The song was the students' way of thanking the store for its generosity in contributing school supplies, teacher incentives, and other supports for the neighborhood elementary school. This is the third year of the community partnership effort between Blythe Elementary and the store. The song is not intended to be performed on the school campus.

Previously, in a reddit comment from an account claiming to be from Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools, responding to Erin's initial post, a CMS spokesperson wrote, "We must say... we also find this extraordinarily inappropriate."

Follow Drew on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: No, the Sinaloa Cartel Doesn't Have Beef with ISIS

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Photo courtesy of VICE News

Read: How a Mobster's Son Got Everyone to Repeat His Line About the Mafia Declaring War on ISIS

Earlier this week, El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped from prison in a tunnel this summer, allegedly declared war on the Islamic State. The threat was reported in a since-deleted post on cartelblog.com, which claimed that El Chapo had sent an email to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi calling ISIS soldiers "lowly pussies" and threatening to "destroy" them, after the Islamic State reportedly intercepted and destroyed some of the cartel's shipments to the Middle East.

The problem is, there's no evidence ISIS actually intercepted any of the Cartel's drug shipments, and the email had apparently been leaked by an unnamed Mexican blogger, which made it hard to figure out if any of it was true. And on Friday, it became clear that the whole thing was a hoax. According to a report in the New York Daily News, the story originated as a satirical post on a website called Thug Life Videos almost two weeks ago, and went viral when Cartelblog.com picked it up. Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for a slew of reports to surface with accounts of the email.

In an interview with the Daily News, Steve Charnock—the writer behind the original Thug Life Videos post—said the whole thing was intended to be a joke. The original post had been tagged "satire," but Charnock said it snowballed because it coincided with events in the news.

"We just thought it would be funny," Charnock told the paper, "but I guess we made some of the quotes just a little too real."

Follow Michael Cuby on Twitter.

Comics: Ghost Girl Has a Realization in This Week's Comic from Ines Estrada


German Activist Are Trolling Anti-Immigrant Groups

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The migrant crisis has hit Germany hard. The country has responded to the influx of asylum seekers with relatively generous, if inconsistent, policies to deal with a projected 1.5 million people expected to enter its borders this year. Early on in the migrant crisis, Germany arguably treated migrants the best out of any European Union member on both an administrative and local level. German citizens were noted for throwing welcome parties, as well as holding "free hugs" signs to foreigners entering the country. But right-wing politicians and other countries in the EU are putting a lot of pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to turn away asylum seekers.

Grassroots efforts have also rallied on both the pro- and anti-refugee fronts in Germany. Some citizens established websites that function as "Airbnb for refugees" and threw charity fundraising parties, while the right wing criticized Merkel's liberal immigration policies at demonstrations around the country. Thirty one police officers were injured during a riot that erupted at a anti-refugee rally in Heidenau only one day after Merkel announced the suspension of migrant fingerprinting protocols that force-register asylum seekers and restrict their movement across Europe. In October, the PEGIDA movement ("Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West"), which started in 2014, drew thousands to rallies in Chemnitz and Dresden, where protestors held up nooses marked for Merkel. German-Turkish author Akif Pirinçci was also there and told the crowd it's a shame that concentration camps are inactive. And the recent attacks in Paris have only added to these types of xenophobic and Islamophobic expression in Europe.

Things were different at the end of World War II. Neo-Nazism was pushed underground when Germany passed "denazification" laws. These laws were aimed at preventing the rise of another Nazi movement and they prohibited Nazis from publicly displaying their beliefs by banning the swastika and sieg heil salute. The measures also prohibit Volksverhetzung, or speech that encourages hatred or potentially violent action against certain people. But in recent years, the right-wing movement has made its anti-refugee feelings more prominent and visible due to the rise of PEGIDA and a swelling number of anti-immigrant posts on social media, which some believe violate the de-nazification laws.

These hateful displays, both online and IRL, have inspired refugee advocates to clap back at detractors and adopt clever methods to discourage right-wing hate speech. For the past few years, there have been several efforts to turn the actions of right-wing extremists into charity for left-wing causes. In 2014, the Center for Democratic Culture in Germany (ZDK Deutschland) started Rechts Gegen Rechts, or Nazis Against Nazis, "the most involuntary charity in Germany." The campaign transformed an annual, decades-old neo-Nazi rally in Wunsiedel into a surprise walkathon to raise funds for EXIT Deutschland, an organization that helps neo-Nazis defect from the right-wing scene and provides support to refugees. Some of those former neo-Nazis now work for EXIT Deutschland and its campaigns, including Nazis Against Nazis, which has raised money by asking locals to donate 10 euro for every meter marched by neo-Nazis.

Screenshot via Rechts Gegen Rechts Youtube clip

"Our main goals are to receive money for EXIT Germany and to stop neo-Nazis," ZDK's Fabian Wichmann explained over the phone to VICE. "We haven't stopped neo-Nazis, but we are raising money for EXIT Germany, so one of two goals has been reached."

In 2015, Nazis Against Nazis expanded its efforts to two more German towns, Bad Nenndorf and Remagen, where Wichmann claims attendance at annual right-wing rallies fell by nearly half. "Last year more than 200 people came to Remagen to demonstrate," he said. "This year we started Nazis Against Nazis there and only 100 or 120 people came. I don't know if Nazis Against Nazis is the reason the group shrank, but we see that the neo-Nazis see our actions, discuss them, and think about how to handle it. I think they have no idea how to combat our actions. Maybe it's a long shot, but perhaps some demonstrators don't come to demonstrations because of us. I hope so."

The refugee situation and general spikes in Islamophobia have inspired another wave of extremist trolling from leftist factions on social media. These campagns often have more to do with combatting those who oppose the immigrants rather than fighting for the immigrants themselves. Though activist groups allover Europe are concerned with challenging Islamophobia on the internet, the digital front is considered an essential battle to German leftists who believe hate speech has the power to turn into action.

"Sometimes we send hate comments to the police because they are violent or dangerous or threatening somebody," Whichmann explained. "But that's not our main goal. Our main goal is to ban the hate."

As Nazis Against Nazis has traveled to new cities, ZDK also continued to spread its trolling project from extremist marches to the digital realm of the xenophobia-filled internet with a branch called Hass Hilft ("Hate Helps"), which applies the same model to hateful Facebook posts. The enterprise launched with support from corporate sponsors, including major German media providers like Sky TV Deutschland and radio station BigFM, who donate one euro for every xenophobic, racist, or otherwise intolerant comment the Hass Hilft page is tagged in. Thus, "the haters and the trolls are making a donation against their own cause," explains the website, which now accepts money from civilians as well. This campaign is basically just online trolling.

"It's more powerful if you have partners," said Wichmann. "Donations are one thing; the other thing is to have the signal to send a voice that says, 'There's hate on the internet, and we have to do something against it.' If you have some partners like Sky or Big FM on the homepage, more people will stop and think about it."

The German government has also added weight to the cause by pressuring Facebook to do the work Hass Hilft has taken upon itself. In September, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas called upon Facebook to monitor and automatically censor offensive comments in the German network, specifically those with xenophobic messages, to comply with the country's strict free speech laws. A few weeks later, microphones picked up snippets of a conversation between Merkel and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which the Chancellor asked if the social network was "working on" the task, and Zuckerberg assured her they were on the case.

It's interesting that the German government is anointing an American tech corporation to regulate the speech of its citizens. Whether an algorithm can detect the nuances between hate speech and sarcasm on Facebook is still up for debate, especially considering Facebook is already getting criticized in Germany for being more likely to remove a photo featuring both nipples and hate speech for its nudity than its bigotry.

So far Facebook has helped the anti-extremist cause by teaming up with a nonprofit organization called FSM, the Voluntary Self-Monitoring of Multimedia Service Providers, to crack down on hate speech posts that violate Germany's speech laws. On November 12, police in Berlin and Brandenburg raided the homes of ten people suspected of publishing offensive and provocatively hateful images and posts, which included swastikas and comments decrying asylum seekers, and confiscated computers and smartphones for evidence. The perpetrators face fines or jail time for using right-wing propaganda to influence others to hate refugees, and their sentences hinge on Germany's crucial, legal difference between voicing a negative opinion and doing so in a way that will persuade others to feel the same.

Many Americans would balk at the idea of facing arrest for expressing one's opinion on social media however unpopular it may be. And they might also question the strategy of silencing refugees' detractors rather than supporting the refugees themselves in more direct ways. But to many in Germany, online acts of hate and violence are considered just as dangerous as neo-Nazi marches on the city streets. Anti-refugee memes may be less influential than political actions that forcibly remove migrants from Germany, but as more refugees continue to enter the country, and as more xenophobia swells, leftist activists will continue to oppose the far right on every front they can.

Comics: Lola Has a Bad Weekend in Today's Comic from Nina Van Denbempt

Photos Showing the Reality of Prison Inmate Rehabilitation

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All images courtesy of Nick Vedros and the Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art

The Lansing Correctional Facility, a state prison operated by the Kansas Department of Corrections, was not where photographer Nick Vedros thought he'd shoot the images for one of his first big museum exhibitions. The 62-year-old has been a prolific photojournalist and commercial photographer for nearly four decades, but prior to his work for Faces of Change , an exhibition open through February 7 at the Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art in Kansas City, he had never stepped inside a prison.

The solo exhibition features 22 portraits of inmates engaged in Reach Out from Within (ROFW), a rehabilitation project created by the organization Courage to Change, which aims to reduce recidivism rates through weekly meetings where inmates are encouraged to interact with one another and address their personal problems in a group therapy-like setting. The goal of ROFW is to encourage inmates to break the cycle of violence, drugs, and crime that has overwhelmed so many that belong to this country's convict class outside of prison walls.

Vedros's photo project aims to document images of the men and women who are actively changing their lives by following the program, as well as humanize both the initiative and the inmates it seeks to help. Faces of Change is an unflinching glimpse into the eyes and souls of those trying to exit the world of mass incarceration and never return. VICE talked with Vedros by phone to learn about how the exhibition came to be, what it was like shooting inside a prison, and why he decided to include the raw interiors of the prison in his photos.

'Daryan' by Nick Vedro

VICE: How did you end up going into a prison and taking portraits of inmates?
Nick Vedros: I first heard about Reaching Out from Within at a party and met SuEllen Fried, this amazing 83-year-old powerhouse behind the program who's never been accused of being low-energy. Over a glass of wine, she began telling me about the rehabilitation initiative and started quoting statistics, such as that the national recidivism rate hovers above 50 percent and some years it's in the 60s. But her program, which was founded 33 years ago, has a recidivism rate of 8 percent when inmates attended 50 to 60 ROFW classes.

I was stunned that it had dropped from a national average of 50 percent to 8 percent and I thought, My God, that's doing a world of good . I asked SuEllen if anybody had taken relevant photographs, had anyone on the inside photographed these inmates? Has anybody put a face on these inmates? I said I know there are words written about this program, but are there any photographs to go along with the words? And she said no.

What was your thought process from there? Just go in and photograph prisoners?
I asked if SuEllen could get me into the prisons, and she said yes and arranged for me to go to one of the Reach Out from Within meetings. And the very first visit behind those walls was an eye-opener for me. I didn't know what to think when I arrived, but then these guys in the meeting were intelligent, articulate, welcoming, very warm and friendly—not at all what I figured it would be like on the inside.

After that initial meeting, I went home and thought about how I could photograph the experience. I wanted to do a portrait series and at first I thought it would be good to have a white background because I wanted it to be as far from a mugshot as possible. I didn't want to make it dark and gloomy because that wasn't the feeling that I got from these guys. Eventually it evolved to a cinderblock background because that was more real and honest. Most of the inside walls are cinderblock. The format that I picked was a square because they live in a box in the prison. So I went with the square format for the final image.

I wanted to tell the story in a positive light. We had the inmates give us three of their favorite quotes because they start every meeting with a quote. You have to say your name. I would say, "Nick Vedros, I'm a photographer," and I would give my quote. Mine was: "Heal the past, live the present, and dream the future." The quotes from each inmate became part of the photographs. This way the viewer would be able to look into the eyes of the inmate and see their positive quote. That helped us tell the story.

'Linda' by Nick Vedros

How did you get approval from the warden at the prison to undertake the project?
I went with SuEllen and I had to pitch the idea to the warden and make sure he was on board. I first created a test portrait of what my concept would look like and presented that to Warden Pryor at Lansing, who understood the project from the get-go. What made it easy for me was that this program has done so much good behind the walls that the warden is in favor of if. He thinks it keeps the prisoners nonviolent and encourages them to be kinder to one another, so he gave me excellent access throughout the facility. I wanted to have access to the entire prison because I'm curious about what the inmate sees everyday.

Why did you include the photos of the cell walls, barbed wire, and other parts of the prison on top of the inmate portraits?
I felt it was necessary to capture the environment that the prisoners were in because most people don't know what the inside of a prison looks like. They've seen movies but to see a real prison is different. I wanted to shoot inside the walls of both the women's prison in Topeka and the men's in Lansing to contextualize the portraits so we could see where these people existed. I even asked for a plate of prison food and they brought me a very typical meal inmates get in the cafeteria. I photographed that plate of food to show how awful the food actually is. According to what I heard, they feed each inmate on $5.61 a day. For three meals, thats about $1.87 per meal. You can imagine what the food is like.

I felt lucky to be able to do this project and put a face on it. I felt like I'd been given access and was able to see something that very few people had ever been given access to. I did feel like it was important to show the walls and the barbed-wire and the confinement. That way people could see the environment inmates are trying to leave.

'Lunch Plate at Lansing Correctional' by Nick Vedros

How did you pick what images to use in the exhibition?
I photographed 51 inmates total, about 15 female inmates at Topeka Correctional Facility. From that 51 I had to pair it down to 22 final portraits. It was very difficult. A lot of times you are looking for who simply photographed the best—whose face worked best in front of the camera, if they connected with me, how honest their poses looked. I also wanted to have a pretty good cross-section of age and ethnicity—older, younger, black, white, Hispanic, and American Indian prisoners.

Can you tell me about the exhibition, now that it's open at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art?
My wildest dream was to get this project into a venue like the Kemper. That was shooting for the sky. We weren't sure we would get in. We needed a gallery or a museum that would give us the credibility to make people pay attention to it. And we fortunately landed our first choice because they viewed my photographs not only as an artistic project, but as a socially-relevant project. The Kemper has been wonderful to work with and they provided terrific input on how to hang the show.

I haven't made gallery showings the main part of my career. Its not really the thing that I do the most, and I needed a lot of help putting the show together and doing it right. The museum was a great support system, and my longtime friend and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Dan White acted as curator for the exhibit.

What images from Faces of Change in particular have made a lasting impact on you?
The image with the guy who has his back turned to the camera is one of my favorite images. That was shot on the casting day. A photographer doesn't just press the button and shoot like an idiot. You need to think and reflect and look at your work on your computer monitor to see if what you are doing is working. So that you can bring out the real them. I had that experience on the casting day. Another one I really liked is Darien, the guy with the glasses looking into the frame. He became kind of the face of the program. I really like that one and his thick glasses.

Faces of Change is on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art through February 7. For more information, visit the museum website here and Nick Vedro's site here.

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Taking on the Sandy Hook Truthers: What Kind of Person Calls a Mass Shooting a Hoax?

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Noah Pozner's sister at his grave in Newtown, Connecticut. Photos courtesy of Lenny Pozner

This article originally appeared in The Trace.

A year and a half after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Lenny Pozner called to set up a meeting with Wolfgang Halbig. The 68-year-old security consultant was the de facto leader of a community of conspiracy theorists, known as hoaxers, who claimed that the shooting had been staged by the government. To the hoaxers, the 26 victims — one of whom was Pozner's six-year-old son, Noah — were fictional characters.

It was May 28, 2014, and Pozner, an IT consultant, was in Florida on business. He hoped to sit down with Halbig at a coffee shop near his home in Orlando, Florida. He wanted to talk to him face-to-face about Noah, who was his only son and never far from his mind. On December 14, 2012, the day of the shooting, Pozner had been the one to drop Noah off at school. As they drove, they listened to "Gangnam Style," Noah's favorite song. When they arrived, Pozner said, "Have a fun day," and watched as his child headed inside, fiddling with his backpack and brown jacket.

Ever since his son's death, Pozner had been dealing with the hoaxers. It was his habit to regularly post photos of Noah, a happy boy with soft blue eyes and a wide smile,on his Google Plus page. He would put up pictures of Noah hugging his twin sister, or playing on the beach, or showing off the tooth he lost less than two weeks before he was murdered. The hoaxers would see these images and offer comments: "Where's Noah going to die next?" read one.Another commenter, seemingly believing that Pozner had been recruited to help perpetuate the myth of the shooting, asked, "How much do you get paid?"

Pozner was one of the rare Sandy Hook parents who confronted those who questioned his child's murder. In response to their comments, he posted online his son's birth and death certificates. He shared the medical examiner's report and one of Noah's report cards. The hoaxers said the records were counterfeits.

Pozner remained undaunted. He thought that perhaps if he could show Halbig the documents in person, he and the rest of the hoaxers might at last relent. "I wanted to be as transparent as possible," Pozner says. "I thought keeping the documents private would only feed the conspiracy."

When Pozner did not receive a reply from Halbig, he contacted Kelley Watt, one of the more aggressive hoaxers who showed up on his Google Plus page. Watt wrote back on Halbig's behalf. "Wolfgang does not wish to speak with you," her note said, "unless you exhume Noah's body and prove to the world you lost your son."

Giving up on a meeting with Halbig, Pozner looked to engage in some sort of dialogue with the people who, around this time, made him their chief target. (One video montage that started making the rounds showed images of Noah set to a soundtrack of pornographic sounds.) In June 2014, Pozner accepted an invitation to join a private Facebook group called Sandy Hook Hoax. He told its members that he was willing to answer their questions. "I think I lasted all of eight minutes," he recalls. One participant said, "Man, I'm gonna have to coach you up if you wanna go on TV and make money Lenny." Another typical attacker proclaimed,"Fuck your fake family, you piece of shit."

Pozner eventually realized that, for Halbig and his brethren, this was a game without end. His efforts to combat them became a mission. "I'm going to have to protect Noah's honor for the rest of my life," he says.

Lenny Pozner in an undated photo with his son, Noah.

Every modern atrocity or disaster has its attendant conspiracy theories. Their shared thesis is that governments, needing a way to keep the populace in fear, orchestrate mock calamities, using the tools of the state to cover their tracks. Within 24 hours of the recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, videos claiming the event was "staged" surfaced on Youtube and received thousands of clicks.

It was the same in 2007, after a senior at Virginia Tech killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. The record death toll fed rumors that "black ops" must have been behind the incident. Five years later, in the wake of an attack on a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, Alex Jones, who runs the popular conspiracy site InfoWars, implied that the gunman was in cahoots with the government, pointing listeners to his graduate student work at a "government-funded neuroscience program," not mentioning the fact, that, like most grad programs, it also receives plenty of private funding as well. In one of the darker ironies America has recently produced, the sheriff investigating the October mass shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College was found to have shared mass shooting conspiracy theories on Facebook.

Yet even amid this terrible canon, the conspiracy theories that sprang up after Sandy Hook have been exceptional. Less than a month after the shooting, a video called "The Sandy Hook Shooting — Fully Exposed" had received 10 million views on Youtube. Driving some of these hoaxers, in part, was a panic over new firearms restrictions. An infamous conspiracy theorist named James Fetzer called the Newtown attack a "FEMA drill to promote gun control." The National Rifle Association laid the groundwork for such sentiments. In February 2012, Wayne Lapierre, the group's executive vice president, described then-first-term President Obama's hidden agenda: "Get re-elected and, with no more elections to worry about...erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and excise it from the U.S. Constitution."

Read: What We Know About Mass Shootings in America in 2015

In the wake of the massacre, Halbig started the website sandyhookjustice.com. He touted his credentials as a former security director for schools in Seminole County, Florida, and claimed he worked on the official investigation into the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. He said his knowledge of security protocols and procedures provided him with a singular ability to analyze what happened that day in Newtown, and highlight what he believed to be the government's many lies. Other hoaxers rallied around Halbig's alleged resume, and donated tens of thousands of dollars to his Gofundme account. On his show, Alex Jones championed him as a "leading expert" on Sandy Hook.

To press their case, hoaxers designated themselves experts on the physiology of grieving. The parents didn't appear sad enough in interviews, they argued; therefore, they could not possibly have lost children.

Halbig became known for asking a set of 16 questions that he argued proved the event was staged, carried out by "crisis actors," whom the government pays to pose as victims during emergency preparedness drills. Halbig claimed the authorities could not provide him with answers that, in fact, were available to the public in the Connecticut State Police report on the shooting. For instance, he wanted to know why paramedics and EMTs weren't allowed to enter the school (they were), and why helicopters weren't used to transport victims to the hospital (with the exception of four wounded individuals, who were taken by ambulance, the rest were dead). Supplied with those facts, he and the hoaxers insisted they had to be fiction, given their source. The whole point, after all, is that the government can never be trusted.

Frustrated by their inability to rattle government officials, Hoaxers began attacking the families of victims, accusing them of being "treasonous" government operatives. To press their case, they designated themselves authorities on the physiology of grieving. The parents didn't appear sad enough in interviews, they argued; therefore, they could not possibly have lost children. "They aren't behaving the way human beings would act," conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner said on his radio show. Hoaxers also latched onto time-stamping errors on certain victims' memorial pages, which, due to a common Google bug, made it seem like they were set up the before the massacre. The hoaxers found a photo of a little girl taken after the shooting. Mistaking its subject for her dead sister, they held it up as proof that the victim was still alive.

The conspiracy movement's personal attacks show no sign of abating. Early this November, a 32-year-old man was arrested for accosting the sisters of Vicki Soto, a slain teacher, at a Newtown charity event; he wanted to ask them whether a family photo of theirs had been photoshopped.

For the hoaxers, no private moment has been sacred. At one point, they vigorously picked over the details of Noah's funeral. Prior to the ceremony, the family opened Noah's casket for a private viewing, which was reported in the news. It's not an unusual custom for Jewish families, but hoaxers alleged it was against the laws of the religion, which somehow helped substantiate their claim that Noah wasn't real.

It was around this time that Pozner began to fight back. Halbig's sandyhookjustice.com had by then drawn a benificent counterbalance, blogs like sandyhookfacts.com, devoted to debunking every crackpot claim put forward by the hoaxers, whom they referred to as "conspiratards." Pozner began to work with the blogs' authors, who had no connection to Newtown or its residents, beyond a shared disgust with Halbig's campaign. "This became my catharsis, my path to healing," Pozner says. "It was how I was getting the pain out of me."

"I know that the more garbage that is out there, the more it ages over time, the more the myth becomes accepted as a disgusting historical fact that tries to dismiss the existence of my child," says Pozner. "I mean, damn it, his life had value. He existed. He was real. How dare they."

Pozner also began filing police reports against his harassers. The reports would never go anywhere, but Pozner didn't care. He put the documents online. "So the hoaxers could see what I was doing," he says. Often, it was enough to cause people to take down the offensive content in question.

During the summer of 2014, two months after Pozner had suggested they meet in Florida, he filed a complaint against Halbig with the Florida Attorney General. "I wanted the AG to know he was a fraud," Pozner says. The complaint read, "Mister Halbig is soliciting donation from people to fund his uncovering the Hoax at Sandy Hook... As a parent of a child that was murdered on 12-14-12 in Sandy Hook Elementary school, I feel his scam is just plain wrong."

After Halbig learned of the complaint, he tried calling Pozner several times, leaving messages on his voicemail. He sounded alarmed, and said it was "urgent" that they speak. Halbig denies reaching out, but Pozner saved the voicemails and phone records from that period. I asked Halbig about the discrepancy. "That's very strange," he told me. "Never called him in my life."

On December 16, 2014, shortly after the two-year anniversary of Newtown, Taliban gunmen opened fire at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 141 people. Soon after, a poster of Noah inexplicably appeared at a vigil there. "I assume it was it done out of solidarity," Pozner says.

Halbig and the Hoaxers made much of this development. They began to sarcastically refer to Noah as the boy who was "killed twice." Halbig splashed the pictures all over sandyhookjustice.com. Then, in early 2015, he escalated his attacks, posting the Attorney General complaint on his website. The complaint contained all of Pozner's contact information.

"So I sued him in September," Pozner says.

The injunction required Halbig to remove the complaint from the Internet. Instead, Halbig took down his entire website. Pozner was pleased with the result, until a month later, when Halbig launched a new website, where he resumed what he calls his "investigation." Last week, Halbig used the site to recirculate photos of Noah that had previously appeared online.

"He does it to mess with me," Pozner says. "It's a taunt." He alerted Godaddy, which hosts the site, that Halbig was violating its terms of service. The photos have since been removed.

On VICE News: Gods, Guns, and the Mass Shooting in Tyrone, Missouri

To further his cause, Pozner has created an organization, called the HONR Network, whose goal is to "bring awareness to Hoaxer activity" and "prosecute those who wittingly and publicly defame, harass, and emotionally abuse the victims of high profile tragedies." Since there is no criminal law that protects families like Pozner's from the darker impulses of the Internet, he and his volunteers — folks he met virtually, when he began debunking — perform a slow and painful task. Whenever a video or a screed appears online attacking the victims of a horrible event, they alert venues like YouTube that their rules have been broken. The victories have been small. Though they've removed hundreds of links from the Internet, there are countless more like them.

"I know that the more garbage that is out there, the more it ages over time, the more the myth becomes accepted as a disgusting historical fact that tries to dismiss the existence of my child," says Pozner. "I mean, damn it, his life had value. He existed. He was real. How dare they."

In November, the HONR Network released an ebook on Halbig, called "The Hoax of a Lifetime." The volume runs more than 100 pages, and digs deeply into his past. One of the things the group reports is that it could find no evidence that Halbig ever worked on an official investigation related to Columbine. But that is not the most interesting revelation. It seems Halbig's tenure as director of security of Seminole County schools was rather unremarkable, save for one particular incident: in 1997, a student stole his gun. He expressed embarrassment to the Orlando Sentinel. "I mean, gosh, I'm the director of security," he said.

Halbig, for his part, insists he's just an investigator with good intentions.

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist," he assured me. "I don't even know what a hoaxer is."


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