The White Nationalists in the Trump Administration Aren't There by Accident

One of the Trump administration's main projects has been to keep as many non-white people out of the country as possible. It has banned travel from several African and Middle Eastern countries, drastically reduced the number of Muslim and Syrian refugees being let into the country, emboldened ICE to go after all undocumented immigrants rather than just those accused of committing serious crimes, pushed for cuts to legal immigration, and is considering making it impossible for any immigrants who received public benefits—including Affordable Care Act subsidies—to become citizens. Under Donald Trump, the US has separated migrant children from their parents and is now denying passports to some Americans who were born near the border with Mexico.

In all these cases, the administration has pointed to a national security or economic justification: Trump says the travel ban targeted countries the Obama administration deemed security risks, that instead of helping refugees the US should help native-born Americans, and that immigrants bring crime. If you buy into this view, the fact that all these moves have led to the prosecuting, deporting, and banning of non-white people is just a side effect of putting America first. But it's increasingly obvious that for some in charge of making and selling these policies, those justifications are just a fig leaf for an aggressive attempt to make America white again.

This week, The Atlantic uncovered emails from Department of Homeland official Ian M. Smith showing that he was friendly with white nationalists in DC. Smith subsequently resigned, but the Washington Post reported that as an immigration policy analyst he had worked on some of the administration's most high-profile and controversial initiatives, including refugees and penalizing immigrants who used public assistance. This follows the resignation of a Trump speechwriter who attended a conference with white nationalist and news that Trump's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, had the publisher of a white nationalist website as a guest at his birthday party. Last month, the chairperson of the Republican Party of Spokane, Washington, resigned after inviting a white nationalist to speak at a gathering. Pro-Confederacy candidate Corey Stewart won a GOP Senate primary in Virginia.

The right's rhetoric on race has moved far beyond dog whistles. Trump himself has called African countries "shitholes" and asked why the US couldn't bring in more immigrants from countries like Norway. He defended the racists who marched in Charlottesville. More recently, he tweeted about white South African farmers' land being seized, an obscure issue that the alt-right has rallied around and that was highlighted by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Fellow Fox News host Laura Ingraham went on a rant earlier this month about how "demographic change" is "destroying the America we know and love."

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Racist is such a powerful word that the press routinely tiptoes around it—"White anxiety finds a home at Fox News" was a euphemistic headline atop an August CNN piece about Carlson and Ingraham. The argument against deploying the word is that it seems to peer into a person's heart. Can we definitively say that another person's words were motivated by raw prejudice and not economic anxiety, or whatever? The charge of racism is always met by blanket denials, no matter how contradictory those denials seem. After former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke praised Ingraham, the host said that her monologue “had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather a shared goal of keeping America safe and her citizens safe and prosperous.”

Avoiding the R-word is often a form of political correctness, a way for people who disagree strongly on issues like immigration to have a conversation without descending into mutual recrimination and name-calling. It's often unproductive to accuse people of racism—if a voter is genuinely worried that immigrants will take his job, people who favor more immigration have more to gain by trying to convince him he's mistaken than by calling him out as a deplorable. And as a rule of thumb we should assume the opposition is acting in good faith, that the other side is not concealing some awful ulterior motive. Surely many people who support Trump's policies are not outright racists.

But it's not a coincidence that a significant chunk of anti-immigrant sentiment is undeniably racist, or that administration officials continually find themselves rubbing elbows with white nationalists, or that Trump is simultaneously pushing policies that target immigrants and saying things that you wouldn't hesitate to call racist if you heard them at a bar. Trump's aides would no doubt bristle at the suggestion that they are white nationalists. I'm sure the vast majority are not on email chains that contain jokes about dinner parties being "judenfrei," as Smith was. But it's impossible to deny that they aren't allied with white nationalists on a very basic level.

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'Adventure Time' Ends on Monday and Everyone Is Sad

Finn the human and Jake the relentlessly chill magic dog have been fighting monsters and figuring out their emotional biz for eight years now, but on Monday the televised portion of their adventures come to an end. Adventure Time’s 40-minute behemoth of a finale airs on September 3. It’s named “Come Along with Me,” after the show’s melancholy credits theme song, a fitting title for the episode that brings their story—and Princess Bubblegum’s, and Marceline the Vampire Queen’s, and Ice King’s, and Lady Rainicorn’s, and many more—to an end.

At its peak, Adventure Time reached an audience of over 3 million viewers per episode, and it attracted the kind of devotion most shows would kill for. The dozens of artists who collaborated to create it clearly made it their passion project: When Cartoon Network announced the end of the show, creator Pendleton Ward, showrunner Adam Muto, a slew of writers, storyboarders, and alumni like Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar all said publicly how grateful they were for the show. At this year’s San Diego Comic Con, Jake voice actor John DiMaggio recounted crying after the show’s final recording session.

One of the things that made Adventure Time so special was how it attracted some of the most recognizable voices in the world. From the first season, celebrities like George Takei and Andy Milonakis were eager to make their mark on Finn and Jake’s surreal home of Ooo. Takei was one of the first A-listers in the cast, voicing Ricardio the Heart Guy, a villain so bizarre and memorable he’s threatened the Candy Kingdom twice. “I’m heartbroken that Adventure Time is ending,” Takei told VICE in an email.

Milonakis was also part of Ward’s vision from the beginning. “Pen tweeted me, ‘Hey I have a cartoon that just got picked up from Cartoon Network, you wanna be in it?’” Milonokis said. “I watched it and was blown away with how different it was... I was instantly obsessed and a fan.” Milonokis voiced the lovably annoying Never-Ending Pie-Throwing Robot, who raps and would do anything for his creator, Finn.

“There was such a brilliant mix of weirdness/geekery/adventure, and also the colors and drawing/animation style lit up my brain like a pinball machine... It really sucked you in. I was constantly surprised with how weird the show was... I'm constantly disappointed with how generic and obvious most mainstream media is, it's nice to see a show with some balls,” Milonokis said. “It's rare to work on things you're a fan of, I'm definitely sad it's ending, but I'm just hoping it will pop back up in the near future, maybe in movie form.”

Keith David, known for roles in They Live and Armageddon, and whose voice you may recognize as the President of the United States in Rick and Morty, voiced Fire Princess’s controlling father, Flame King. He too is mourning the loss of the show. “I definitely loved being a part of this show,” he said in an email. “It’s sad that it’s coming to an end, and there have been many people that have come up to me to talk about Adventure time… It’s the end of an era but, should there be an opportunity for the show to come back, I will be ready, willing and able.”

When the news of the show's conclusion was announced, Ward wrote in an official statement, “Adventure Time was a passion project for the people on the crew who poured their heart into the art and stories. We tried to put into every episode something genuine and telling from our lives and make a show that was personal to us and that had jokes, too! I’m really happy that it connected with an audience for so long. It’s a special thing, I think.” As the show’s creator, his feelings on the his most famous creation's end are probably very complicated. But based on his most recent tweet, it looks like he may be the only one who isn't sad.

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Native New Yorkers Reflect on the Death of the 'Village Voice'

On Friday, the owner of the Village Voice told his staff that the iconic New York City alt-weekly, which shuttered its print edition after 62 years last August, will no longer publish new stories on its website. "Today is kind of a sucky day," owner Peter Barbey said in a private phone call to staff, according to Gothamist. "In recent years, the Voice has been subject to the increasingly harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media," Barbey added in a statement.

To New Yorkers like myself, the news felt like learning a chronically ill friend had died. The Voice was an integral part of the landscape of the city—Manhattan was crowded with those gnarled, graffiti-covered plastic boxes full of free copies of the city's rowdier, weirder alternative to the Daily News, New York Post, and New York Times. As an East Village native, I began reading the paper early on, mostly because my parents adored it so much. In a sense, the paper died when it went out of print, but as long as the website was running, something called the Village Voice existed. Now it doesn't.

As a tween and beyond, I remember excitedly picking up a copy each Wednesday, the distinct smell and texture of a freshly printed copy that had yet to be leafed through. I'd quizzically examine the pornographic classifieds in the back of the paper, heed the movie reviews and local theater listings, devour the Tom Tomorrow comic strips. "The print pages of The Village Voice... was where many New Yorkers learned to be New Yorkers," the Times wrote last year after the print edition ended.

It's a sad day for media, and a sad day for New York. I asked six writers who are from New York to reflect on the death of the Village Voice:

Evan Narcisse (from Borough Park, Brooklyn, and Hempstead, Long Island):

I went to New York University in the early 1990s and stacks of the Village Voice were everywhere. College was an exercise in defying the wishes of my Haitian immigrant mom. NYU was supposed to be the first step on my road to becoming a lawyer, someone with a “good job” that she could brag about. But my first constitutional law course disabused me of any notion that I wanted to do that. After I took “Minorities in the Media” for credit requirements, Professor David Dent (a VICE contributor) told me I should consider journalism as a career. He told me I talent, but I wondered if I actually could do it.

The Village Voice, goddamn them, made me think I could. The alt-weekly was one of the first places I saw black cultural traditions talked about with both familial love and critical rigor. The conversations I’d have with other black students and some of my journalism professors often swung between two poles: How They Talk About Us and How We Talk about Ourselves. A grown-up version of that same energy was in the articles by Nelson George, Thulani Davis, Lisa Jones and Greg Tate. The Voice was a place where I realized we could push back against the lazy zombie narratives foisted on black folks by non-blacks. A place where we could celebrate, reclaim, and deconstruct the black contributions that helped make New York the greatest city in the world. We’re still having conversations on that Them/Us continuum today, in ways that feel more fraught and explosive than ever. The Village Voice was a place that showed me that, if you want people to give a damn about black creativity, sometimes you gotta blow shit up, both literally and figuratively.

Evan Narcisse is a journalist, critic, and the writer of Rise of the Black Panther for Marvel Comics.

Jaya Saxena (from the East Village and the Upper East Side):

My dad never bought the New York Times or the Post or the Daily News. Instead, every morning when he'd pick up Entenmann's cakes and coffee at the deli downstairs, he'd come back up with the Village Voice and the New York Press, rivals at the time. Those papers were where I first learned about my city, whether it was politics or weird local news or shows I'd beg my parents to let me go to. We even cut out the weekly comic strips and use them to plaster our bathroom walls. The Press died years ago, but something about the Voice seemed eternal, even with the recent years of change and strife. Maybe it's just because I'd walk by their building off Astor Place all the time growing up. They felt permanent. I got to write for them for the first time last year, and while it felt cool, it's hitting me now how amazing it was that I got to contribute to a place that educated me so much. I don't know if I'll ever know my city as well as they did.

Jaya Saxena is the co-author of Basic Witches, and contributes to GQ and the Establishment.

John Surico (from the Queens/Nassau County border):

As a kid growing up in the city-suburban borderlands of New York, the Voice was everything to me. It was this remarkable window into the fucked up world that the city was—and still very much is—down to its goddamn core, from the crooked politics that gave us Donald Trump, to the totally offbeat film, music, and culture that could really only live here, here in New York City. And I loved it so much for being just that. So getting to work and write there as a college student, and even after, was a batshit dream come true. I had relatively no clips to my name, but my peers there let me have goo-goo-eyed fun in a city that was relatively new to me at the time—an opportunity not many 20-year-olds get, and one that I am greatly indebted to years later. And I had a ball.

But in its waning days, the Voice was never not in turmoil. You'd pass hallways hung with stories by legends like Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins, or Michael Musto, to attend staff meetings where you'd learn that your colleagues and friends were being laid off because of a bunch of Barbarians at the Gates–like corporate raiders who said so. They ripped this institution apart, and will forever be guilty for that. But so it goes, I guess, in New York: Dreams come here to live, and all too often die. We obsess over finding The Next Best Thing here a lot. But nothing will replace the Voice. And nothing ever should.

John Surico is a journalist who writes often for VICE, as well as the New York Times and others. He worked at the Voice from 2011 to 2013.

Rebecca Fishbein (from the Upper West Side):

To my parents, the New York Times was the local gold standard in journalism, but to me, it was the Village Voice. The Voice was sharp, cool, smart, and mean, which was what you aspired to be as a rebellious-but-not-too-rebellious teen in Manhattan. I fangirled every time I walked by the Voice office in Cooper Square, dreaming of the day I too got to curse in print. I'm still bummed I didn't write anything for them, and more bummed for everyone else who never will.

Rebecca Fishbein is a freelance writer who's contributed to VICE as well as Jezebel, the Cut, Gothamist, and others.

Rupa Bhattacharya (from the New York suburbs):

I'm not sure I remember a part of my childhood in which I didn't read the Village Voice cover to cover, usually brought to school by some other kid and discarded in the corner of the student lounge for me to find. Every page, too, including (and especially) the once-incredibly dense and then eventually waning back pages, which advertised everything I could possibly dream would be part of my world as an adult and also several things that had never occurred to me that human bodies could do. The Village Voice made me realize what existed outside the boundaries of my rule-bound, achievement-driven home life, and I could not be more grateful.

Rupa Bhattacharya is the editor-in-chief of MUNCHIES.

Harry Siegel (from Flatbush, Brooklyn):

Growing up here, the Village Voice was the secret map to the city I KNEW was there but had only seen glimpses of. The thing you picked up to find a job and ended up reading about corruption and art and all the other things that matter. Someone was always lamenting about how it wasn’t it was, kinda like New York City.

As a grown-up, I got to edit its main competitor at the time, New York Press, and then to work briefly at the Voice. By the time I got to both those places, they truly weren’t what they were. It’s a grand feeling though to have been part of these un-pedigreed, angry, whip-smart outlets full of journalists, too often men but also many brilliant women, who were cocksure about their obsessions—and to have been some small part of some 17-year-old’s semi-golden age. To have been around a ton of brilliant, driven, and tormented journalists—many of em who could have been making more money somewhere else and some of em who couldn’t possibly have functioned anywhere else—who were going to keep doing this until the alt-weekly business model completely collapsed.

Instead of lamenting what was and ain’t no more, we need to respect the people who were reporting and writing stories and capturing scenes that matter than and continue doing that work now.

"p.s. Fuck Peter Barbey."

Harry Siegel is a senior editor at the Daily Beast.

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Trump's Secret Anti-Weed Committee

The Trump administration's stance on weed has often been confusing. Trump himself said he would leave legalization up to the states—a typical GOP move. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been aggressive in his anti-weed rhetoric, allowing federal prosecutors to go after marijuana growers and sellers.

Enter the Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, a previously unknown body that has apparently been charged with pushing an anti-marijuana line. Through the committee, the Trump administration has seemingly guided various agencies and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to help stack up data and evidence on the "threat" of marijuana.

Why did the Trump administration create this committee at a time when decriminalizing marijuana is popular across party lines? We spoke to VICE editor Harry Cheadle about the move.

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'Same Old,' Today's Comic by Sung Hyun Kim

Here's the 'Office' and 'Jack Ryan' Mashup You Didn't Know You Needed

There's a certain close relationship that springs up between two people who hate each other with a fiery passion. The best heroes and villain pairs throughout history have all shared some kind of strange rapport: Batman and the Joker understood each other better than anyone else could, Captain Hook was basically Peter Pan's surrogate father, only the Ninja Turtles truly knew the pain and sadness of Bebop and Rocksteady. But nowhere is the bond between two opponents stronger than in the single greatest on-screen rivalry of the 21st century—Jim Halpert and Dwight Schrute.

For nine glorious seasons of The Office, Jim and Dwight pranked and sabotaged each other across their desks at Dunder-Mifflin, but in between the faxes from the future and Jell-O calculators, a secret friendship grew. They confided in each other. They watched each other's backs. They, uh, played volleyball together one time. Now, finally, the brilliant minds at Funny or Die have found a way to bring Jim and Dwight back together again one final time—by editing Dwight into John Krasinski's very serious new show, Jack Ryan. And the results are truly glorious.

In the two-and-a-half-minute mash-up video, titled Tom Clancy's Jim Ryan, Krasinski's paper slinger is pulled out of his mild-mannered Pennsylvanian life and dropped in the middle of a battle of wits when a new terrorist arises that only he can stop: Dwight K. Schrute.

"There's something different about his agenda," Krasinski says in the clip, over a collage of Jack Ryan battle scenes intercut with Dwight dicking around at Dunder-Mifflin. "Whatever he's planning, he's ready now," he continues, as Dwight bursts from inside a snowman and pummels Jim with snowballs in that infamous scene from "Classy Christmas."

The entire mash-up video is impeccably edited and seamlessly recasts Dwight as a high-level terrorist bent on mayhem, which honestly isn't that far from his original Office character. Ultimately, though, the clip just serves as a reminder of how excellent Jim and Dwight were together.

The Office reboot is still just a glimmer in the eyes of Krasinski and a few hopeful NBC execs, but after seeing this, maybe the thing we really need now is to get the cast back together for a full-length Michael Scarn feature. Or maybe a Rainn Wilson cameo in the next season of Jack Ryan, at least?

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Now People Are Getting Neo-Nazi Robocalls About Mollie Tibbetts's Death

The tragic death of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts has become an ugly right-wing talking point for politicians eager to point to the college student's suspected killer, a Mexican named Cristhian Rivera, as a reason to bolster anti-immigration policies in the country. But now it appears that a neo-Nazi has taken it one step further by targeting Iowans with racist robocalls about her death.

A reader of the local Iowa Starting Line newspaper sent in a recording of the message he received on Tuesday at around 8 PM. In it, a man who speaks in the same cadence as the host of neo-Nazi podcast The Road to Power, says that Tibbetts would call for genocide if she were still alive and that her family, who have begged politicians and white supremacists not to use their relative's death as racist propaganda, are wrong. At one point, it even uses a female voice actor to impersonate Tibbetts's voice. Here's the transcript of the recorded call, per the Starting Line, below:

“The body of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was found in a corn field after she was stabbed to death by an invader from Mexico. A biological hybrid of white and savage Aztec ancestors, who also killed with knives during their mass human sacrifices on top of pyramids they didn’t build.

Some relatives of Mollie Tibbetts are implying that despite having been murdered by a non-white, savage intruder, she would still support the invasion of America by a brown horde currently at a staggering 58 million. But you know in your heart they are wrong.

If after her life has now been brutally stolen from her, she could be brought back to life for just one moment and asked, ‘What do you think now?’ Mollie Tibbetts would say, ‘Kill them all.’

We don’t have to kill them all, but we do have to deport them all. The Aztec hybrids, known as Mestizos, are low-IQ, bottom-feeding savages, and is why the countries they infest are crime-ridden failures. That’s now America’s fate too unless we re-found America as whites-only and get rid of them now! Every last one!

This message paid for by The Road To Power dot com.”

The Road to Power podcast is also allegedly behind robocalls for two racist California politicians. One promoted failed neo-Nazi candidate Patrick Little for the Senate in May, and another supported Holocaust-denying congressional candidate John Fitzgerald in July. According to the Daily Beast, Idaho's Sandpoint Reader traced the podcast back to a local resident named Scott Rhodes. He's been accused of distributing anti-Semitic propaganda in Sandpoint, and has made racist videos online.

Tibbets went missing during a jog on July 18. About a month later, authorities say that Rivera, who they believe is in the country illegally, led them to the body after questioning. He has since been charged with first degree murder. Despite calls from Tibbetts's family not to politicize her death, two US senators from Iowa and the state's governor have blamed the country's immigration laws for allowing Rivera into the country. Politicians, including the president, ran with that message to continue to push the Trump administration's hardline stance on the issue.

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Would You Rather: James Corden Edition

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Question: Is James Corden an insufferable prick? I don't think he is, but also, I think he is. Do you understand? It's possible I am being unclear. I do not think, by any valuable metric. If you were to test him for prickishness in lab conditions, James Corden's prick score would come out as anything other than "neutral" or "slightly below a prick." But I—personally—think he is a prick.

I am not alone in thinking James Corden is a prick: Everyone within 500 yards of you right now thinks it, too. Again, this might not be universally true, but it isn't universally untrue. Go up to everyone and ask them: Hey, do you like James Corden (do not ask your mom: your mom likes him just fine because he has neat hair and is polite and "tries hard"). Watch the answers roll in. There are three answers, ranging in severity from heaven to hell:

— “I liked Gavin & Stacey, does that count?” (No.)
— “I don’t hate-hate him. I think he’s a prick, but… I don’t hate-hate him”
— “No. I think he’s fully a prick.”

It is weird, isn’t it. And the Corden Conundrum is more urgent now than ever because James Corden is everywhere. He is the voiceover to every voice and he is in those infernal Confused.com advertisements and he was in Ocean’s Eight, for some reason, and his Carpool Karaoke late-night American thing is now the go-to for artists promoting an album, so if you want to see an in any way fun or inventive TV interview with your fave then you have to endure them in a James Corden video, him doing the exact same tut-and-look-over move at the start of every video. "The traffic’s awful," James Corden says, in his little polo shirt, "thank you so much for helping me out," and pause, reveal, and the crowd goes wild. Ariana Grande did one, and Rod Stewart, and Bruno Mars. Madonna did one, and Adele too. Adele! Lovely Adele. But also: Corden! Horrible, insufferable, Corden.

Listen: In an attempt to put a beat on the exact pulse of my disdain for Corden, I have invented a fun game, which is called "Would You Rather: James Corden Edition." The aim of the game is this: I will set out a series of difficult "Would You Rather?" questions. You answer them, internally or out loud (play with a friend!), to the best of your ability. At the end, we will sit, cross-legged and arm-in-arm together, and ask ourselves—what is James Corden? And I’m hoping very much that our collective answer will be: an insufferable prick. But maybe there is another answer. Let us play.

Would You Rather? James Corden Edition

– Would you rather give James Corden £1,000 [$1,300], or have James Corden give you £1,000? Think before you answer this because you know he would be awful about it.

– Would you rather have a dog—a cute little thing, a miniature dachshund or something. I will buy it for you, as well as paying kennel fees and paying for all the food a dog needs, I will also be helping you rent a place where the dog can stay and someone to come over and dogsit a few hours a day so you can go to work—but, once a week, James Corden comes over to visit your dog, and James Corden makes such a thing over your dog. He's taking selfies with it, he goes on a little walk, and when people stop him with the dog he talks to people as if it’s his dog. He is just making so much of a fuss over the dog that he essentially dog-hogs you, and when he leaves the dog sort of pines at a door for him and the whirlwind of glamor he brings, and you start to suspect the dog secretly loves James Corden much more than it loves you, but then for the other six days of the week—until Corden’s next haunting—the dog belongs to you. It’s either that or no dog. What are you saying to me right now?

– Would you rather do your weekly shopping at a supermarket accompanied by James Corden, or watch your mom orgasm exactly once? (In this scenario, James Corden is extremely acting up, in the supermarket—he keeps picking things up "as a joke" and putting them in your cart, he keeps holding small cans of beans up to his eyes as if they were glasses, there is a whole 30 minutes where you try to leave the vegetable aisle but he keeps picking up a zucchini and two tomatoes and hooting them in front of his crotch, whereas for example your mom is modestly under a blanket —she can either be serviced by another human or use whatever methods necessary to get off—and gets the job done relatively quickly; it’s just you have to look her dead in the eyes at the exact moment of climax. That’s not so bad, is it? When you think about James Corden’s voice coming wailing over a supermarket intercom system, desperately calling you by name. James Corden has spilled an entire tub of yogurt and now he’s all embarrassed and red. James Corden in the clothes section jokily trying on an oversized dress. Now: your mom, coming. Which is it? Which is it? Which is it? You know which one it is. Which is it?)?

– Would you rather take one single punch to the face by a leading boxer? Anthony Joshua would pull the punch because he’s too nice, so let’s say Tyson Fury is going to do it, all raged up after a big roast, and he’s not allowed a glove either, so he’s really going to fuck you up—or watch a super-cut of every moment in Carpool Karaoke where Corden’s face reacts to a song. His eyes widen white and his teeth show through his lips in a smile like a scream, and he turns to the artist in the seat next to him waiting for a little catch of recognition in their eyes, and then he turns and inhales just half a breath, about to sing, and then—

(The punch would shatter your nose to irretrievable pieces but the super-cut would last for hours and hours and hours)

– There is also a hand gesture James Corden does when he sings, which looks like he is trying to shake dice deliberately to the beat of the song playing, which is always accompanied with some puppyishly excited head bobbing and moving, and again the wide-eyed facial expression. Would you rather have to do that whole routine—the arm and the bobbing and the "Wow! This song, huh! Turn it up, Adele!" and the tapping the steering wheel—every time you see someone naked ever again in your life, or: never see anyone naked again ever in your life? Porn counts for this too, by the way, so don’t think you’re getting out of it by just watching porn. You have to do the bobbing thing even if you’re alone in bed, one leg under the duvet, sickeningly illuminated by the cold-blue light of your laptop screen

– The situation is this: You are allowed access to James Corden’s cell phone for 24 full hours, to do with it what you will. Think of the famous numbers in there. You could text with all the stars. You could arrange to go to lunch with, I don’t know, Bono or something. You could call his bank and get them to arrange a substantial financial payment to you. Order a limousine. You have 24 hours with the phone made of riches and sex and fame! But in exchange, you have 24 hours to tell an anecdote to James Corden without him jumping over and interrupting your punchline, and if you don’t manage it, then I’ll, I don’t know, take one of your kidneys out. How confident are you feeling? Can you live with one kidney? But also, I’ve never taken a kidney out before. Every time he interrupts you he leans over and touches your forearm very lightly. How confident are you feeling?

– I’ll kill one of your three closest friends if you don’t become best friends with James Corden for a year, and that doesn’t sound so bad but it would be. He keeps doing really irritating things, like you go to lunch together, and he gets two extra plates of mozzarella sticks and a whole thing of wine but gets you to split the bill in half, even though it’s really close to your payday. Or, he keeps referring to famous people by their first name—"me and Tom"—like you know them too. You have to spend one day a week with him, to maintain the friendship, or he starts sending you really long text messages about whether you really like him. He has a significant birthday and expects you to fly to Dubai to celebrate it with him and David Beckham. Once a month he calls you after midnight and asks to come to your house. Tell me: Which of your friends am I killing?

– Would you rather spend ten days in the Bahamas—full luxury, first class, everything bought and paid for—but you have to go there with James Corden, or would you rather stay at home and interrogate just exactly why you feel such poisonous hatred to what is, in the grand scheme of things, a very innocuous man?

– You have to spend one month in prison or you have to watch James Corden practicing his laugh in the mirror for an hour, these are the only choices I will allow to you.

– Either you have to pore over James Corden’s financial reports and figure out how long it takes him to earn your annual salary (in 2017, it was estimated he made $4 million, which estimates to just over $10,000 a day, so he almost certainly brings in what you do in a year in well under a week) and from there, calculate how much the world appreciates his brand of sweet sincerity much more than it does your brand of sticky cynicism, or… actually, no, there is no "rather" to this one, it’s bummed me out too much—

– James Corden has promised to go to space and die alone there if you can sit in a room and listen as he delivers a somber and noble to-camera piece for a show scheduled in the hours after a terrorist attack, one that various viral headlines will say was "right in the feels" and "Moving AF," and that Corden is "terror bae." Nobody else is allowed in the room but you and him. The monologue is ten minutes long and he has a whole rehearsed bit where he says "excuse me" and wipes a single tear away with his thumb. Is James Corden dying in space or not.

– Would you rather kill your mom, your dad, or would you rather confront the fact that in this video of James Corden and Patrick Stewart, James Corden is absolutely the one who comes out best in this?

– They’ve invented time travel but it is ultra-exclusive and prohibitively expensive. The world only has the requisite power and resources to send you and four other people on trips back in time. You are granted one trip back to the period of your choosing, return journey, but first, you must go back in time and sit next to James Corden during every single class he ever took in secondary school. Consider how often James Corden said "si–ir!" in a semi-faltering (but still v. sycophantic) voice when he was a teen. James Corden, in a blazer, showing off in drama class. James Corden is genuinely friends with one of the teachers. James Corden sobbing because he only got a B on an English test. Do you understand? Imagine James Corden now, but worse, and you have to sit next to that for eight years, while he quietly practices his singing and draws Late, Late Show logos in the back of his notebook. You could go anywhere: the Old West, Victorian London, Ancient Egypt. You could see glorious temples and terrible wars. But first: You have to watch James Corden lord it over some girl because he got made a hall monitor and she didn’t.

– Everyone alive can recall five of the most crippling, flinch-inducing, embarrassing memories in their life. This is just a fact. So many social interactions have been experienced from your position—the first person, horrendous and unfathomable, and to other people, they are more-or-less normal. But to you, thinking about them is like being shot in the head with a psychic bullet: You, with your eyes closed against the light, reliving that time you mispronounced your own name to a girl you liked, or called the teacher "mom", or had your shorts yanked down on a boat trip.

Here are your choices:

You have to go back and relive every single one of those embarrassing moments—the flinching, the agony, the unbearableness of it—or, instead:

You can sit down in a room and quietly admit to yourself that, if you met him, you would probably be extremely charmed by James Corden, and probably leave the situation thinking he was alright.

The time you got drunk at your parent’s big wedding anniversary. When you vomited down the front of your pants in that Uber Pool. The time you offered your hand out to shake to what turned out to be the stump of a one-armed man. James Corden, holding your shoulders from behind, letting out a high-pitched laugh.

The only possible explainer for James Corden’s continued fame is that he is an electric bolt of charisma that just does not, cannot, quite translate to the screen, so that his abundant real-life charm somehow comes through as either mediocre non-committal neutrality (most people, normal people, can stand Corden, at least a little) or sometimes outwardly hatable, and it is you that is wrong about this, not him. All of your favorite celebrities consider them his friend. He has got to the top of the kill-or-be-killed entertainment industry, somehow. He has 10 million followers on Twitter—10 million—and you can barely break 200 since you locked your account after that United fan called you "Dipshitinho." He is, somehow, doing something, and the fact that you cannot identify that means that, and logic dictates this, you are the one willfully misinterpreting him, and not the other way around.

Would you rather realize James Corden is more popular than you will ever be in your lifetime, or change your life around the full 180 it would take for this to no longer be true?

Would you rather live a lifetime hating James Corden for who he is, or live in his body for a day, enjoying everything he has made for himself?

Would you rather punch James Corden in the face 100 times, or sing in a car with Elton John?

Or would you like to admit now that maybe, even though you still think he is the world’s most insufferable prick (and I still do, sorry), that maybe the problem lies with you, and not him?

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I Was a Jealous Partner Until I Went on a Swingers Vacation

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What Kindness Means to Death Row Inmates Like Me

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Trump Is Screwing Over the People Who Got Him Elected

Donald Trump won the presidency because, for all his lies, he told a certain kind of truth. "The Republican nominee is selling an apocalyptic vision—the US as an impoverished hellscape beset by bloodthirsty urban anarchists, a terrorist fifth column, and the machinations of globalist elites," is how CNN's Jeremy King put it in October 2016. The hellscape was particularly acute when it came to the economy. “Many Pennsylvania towns once thriving and humming are now in a state of despair,” Trump said during a June 2016 speech in Elkhart, Indiana. The narrative he painted didn't match up with cold hard statistics, but it nonetheless felt true to voters in the Midwest who didn't think the recovery Barack Obama presided over had touched their lives. Those voters, in no small part, carried Trump to his narrow victory.

Now that Trump is president, his narrative has flipped and he's signing a song about how great the American economy is doing. But the version of the truth he told during the campaign continues to be as true as it ever was. People have been left behind. And Trump is making it worse.

Elkhart, the town where Trump gave that speech, was primed to be receptive to his message. As the Economist reported at the time, unemployment had been at 20 percent during the worst of the recession, and though stimulus money helped it to bounce back remarkably, locals didn't give Obama credit for the turnaround. Though jobs had come back, median income was lower in 2016 than it was in either 2008 or 1999—a statistic that paints a broader portrait of decline that goes beyond the most recent recession and rebound.

The New Yorker reported during the campaign that for all the talk of the "Rust Belt," the Midwest as a whole was doing well when you looked at the numbers: low unemployment, low economic instability. But some once-proud manufacturing towns had been decimated by the decline of unions and free trade deals that accelerated globalization, and they welcomed a candidate who seemed to be speaking for them. With a presidential election decided by a mere 80,000 votes it's impossible to list all the factors that led to Trump's victory, but his doom and gloom rhetoric on the economy undeniably helped sway the swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. (Many of these voters, a study found, supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.)

---

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Trump kept up the fire and brimstone in his inaugural address about "American carnage," but seems to have discovered during his presidency that it's possible to describe the economy in rosy terms. "Our Economy is setting records on virtually every front - Probably the best our country has ever done," he tweeted last week; the week before, he announced, "The Economy is stronger and better than ever before. Importantly, there remains tremendous potential - it will only get better with time!"

That sounds an awful lot like Hillary Clinton. At the Democratic National Convention, the nominee praised the Obama administration's record the same way Trump is praising himself. "Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office," she said. "Twenty million more Americans with health insurance. And an auto industry that just had its best year ever. Now, that's real progress, but none of us can be satisfied with the status quo. Not by a long shot."

Politicians always play up problems when they're running for office and play them down once they get elected. But Trump's about-face on the economy is striking because all that trauma he diagnosed in 2016 is still there. An astonishing 40 percent of US families had trouble paying for food, shelter, or medical care in 2017, according to a survey out this week. Though the unemployment rate continues to fall, that's being driven by gains in counties that voted for Clinton, with "Trump country" still suffering more than its share of job losses. And while the economy has continued to grow, the Trump economy has largely seen the same winners and losers that the Obama economy did—if anything, Trump has tilted the playing field even more against the people who gave him his presidency.

Trump loves to talk about the stock market, but the vast majority of stocks are owned by the wealthy, and stock prices don't equal broadly shared prosperity; a jump in Amazon stock happened at the same time the e-commerce giant was being attacked for underpaying workers. The upper class also disproportionately benefited from Trump's tax cut, while the working class is getting no such preferential treatment—on Thursday, Trump announced plans to cancel a pay raise for civilian federal workers.

Meanwhile, Trump's much-hyped infrastructure plan, which was supposed to revitalize all those crumbling cities has itself turned to dust. His grandiose promises on healthcare were similarly bullshit. (Instead, his administration has quietly worked to make it harder for people to get Medicaid.) And even his protectionist actions on trade—the one area where the president has arguably backed up his populist campaign rhetoric—seem poised to hurt the people he claimed he would help.

Elkhart, the site of that Trump speech, still supports Trump even though his recently enacted tariffs on steel and aluminum could hurt the town's RV industry, the Daily Beast reported recently. But some residents could turn on Trump if his trade wars lead to layoffs. "He has been given a fair amount of political rope," the Beast wrote. "But the rope isn’t endless."

Just as Obama inherited an economy on the brink of collapse, Trump has inherited a massive income inequality problem. The difference is, Obama did take action to save struggling industries. The effectiveness of his stimulus will be debated forever, but what is inarguable is that inequality in America is getting worse andTrump is pushing policies that will likely exacerbate it.

In 2016, Trump's pessimism on the economy rang true because it lined up with many people's lived experiences. For years, their families's fortunes had been declining, and here was a politician who finally seemed to get it. The question in 2020 is: Will those voters still trust Trump after years of hearing him say that the economy is doing great? Or will they look around and wonder if, like so many outsiders before him, Trump went to DC and just turned into another politician?

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I Biked the Most Dangerous Road in the World

The DREAMer Hoping to Make It as a Professional Hollywood Photographer

On HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY, VICELAND follows a handful of young aspiring actors, models, DJs, rappers, influencers, and even meme creators in Los Angeles who are trying to make it big. But few have as much motivation as Angel Pacheco, a DREAMer who hopes his gritty party photography could be a launchpad for a professional career—and a shot at staying in the country.

On the season finale, we met up with Angel, who runs a popular Instagram account that captures the local drug- and sex-fueled party scene. He gives us a glimpse into his life, where he simultaneously juggles his budding career, helps his parents pay rent, and waits for his pending DACA renewal.

Find out how to tune in and watch Angel's episode and the rest of VICELAND's HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY here.

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Inside Canada’s First-Ever Flat Earth Conference

An NYPD 'Bee Cop' Explains How to Calm Down Thousands of Swarming Bees

For those of you who aren't glued to your computers all day, more than 40,000 bees swarmed a hot dog stand in Times Square on Tuesday afternoon, and thanks to a livestream on Reuters TV, people around the world watched breathlessly awaiting their fate. Passersby were rapt by the moving mosaic of insects until the New York Police Department cordoned off a part of West 43rd Street lest anyone be stung while trying to snap a pic. Then one man—nay, hero—eventually approached the quivering mass. Dressed in full beekeeping suit and armed with something called a "bee-vac," NYPD officer Mike Lauriano successfully captured the displaced hive.

Usually the responsibility of protecting public areas from bee swarms is delegated to animal control departments, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, in New York and a few other cities, that job falls on the cops. Starting in 1995, a lone officer named Tony Planakis, a.k.a. Tony Bees, would don protective gear and corral them around the city. But since 2014, the job has fallen to just two city cops, Lauriano and Officer Darren Mays.

New Yorkers, who pride themselves on having seen it all, were undeniably curious about this previously little-known unit of their city's police force. Mays, who joined the force in 2001 and works the midnight shift at a precinct in Queens, caught up with VICE between fielding the public's newfound questions on Twitter. Although he's never gotten a call about bee-related crime, Mays was able to discuss the tricks of the trade and what it is he does all day.

VICE: How did you originally get into beekeeping?
Officer Darren Mays: Basically, I got into it back in 2008. I had a friend who started taking beekeeping classes. I found it kind of comical, so I called him immediately and laughed at him about it. But he said, "Just wait until you taste the honey I produce." He shared his honey with me, and it was the sweetest thing in the world. Then my wife bought me a kit that Christmas, and said, "Just give it a shot."

And how did you join this bee-specific task force? Is it a competitive thing?
What happened was there was always a beekeeper in the department. He retired, and they needed a replacement. So one guy that I used to work with overheard the operations coordinator for the department saying that, so he interjected that he worked with a guy who raised honeybees and would be a good replacement. That lieutenant said, "Have him call me tomorrow," and I ended up [helping] him to fill that void. Everyone else they knew of were exterminators.

How often do you get called away from your regular beat work to jobs related to bees? And what's the typical call?
Last year, we would get an average of maybe two calls a week. It's a seasonal thing that lasts anywhere from Mother's Day to mid or late July. The swarm the other day was an unusual, very late swarm. We've gotten some that were like 15,000 bees, which is a good, average size of a swarm. The biggest I've had to deal with was 35,000 bees up on Dyckman Street up in the Upper East Side back in 2012 or 2013 maybe.

How do you approach 35,000 bees? Is there anything you do before vacuuming them up?
You just got to monitor them and you got to gently work them slow and methodically. And this is an old thing I learned from the old-timers—you wanna speak to them. Ninety percent of the bees in the hive are females, so you just want to say to them something like, "Good afternoon, ladies. I'm just here to see if you're doing good. I hope you all work with me today." And letting them get the scent of you as well. They will attack you if you're being overly aggressive.

Why do they swarm specific areas? Was the umbrella appealing because it was brightly colored, or was it completely random? Is it just wherever the queen lands, they go?
Some people seem to think it's the color of it, but there's no rhyme or reason. If you Google pictures of swarms, you can see they may land on a bicycle that's parked on the street or onto a car. One thing we'll never understand as humans is why they swarm where they swarm. It's definitely wherever the queen lands. She picks a spot, and that's where they all land temporarily. Then scout bees go out and look for a permanent location. Once they establish the permanent location and all agree to go, that's when they'll take off and go again.

Where do the bees go after they get sucked into the bee-vac? Do they become property of the city?
Officer Lauriano took it to an apiary he owns in Long Island. If no one at the scene wants them or claims them at that moment, he has to take sole responsibility to take them in as his own.

Wait, what? Has anyone ever tried to claim a giant swarm of bees?
Not since I've been doing it, not since he's been doing it. No one ever says, "Those are my bees."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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This Tattoo Artist Brought Traditional Japanese-Style Tattooing to Texas

Chris Trevino may be as Texas as they come, but his career as a tattoo artist brought him all the way to Japan to after being inspired by Horiyoshi III, the ambassador of traditional Japanese tattooing. Trevino, known as one of the most obsessive artists in the industry, spent years in the country intensely channelling his mentor's work. When he returned to the States, he combined the traditional Japanese technique with the bright, bold colors and graphics of Texas traditional tattoos to champion his own unique style.

TATTOO AGE airs Wednesdays at 10:30 PM on VICELAND. Find out how to tune in here.

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'Twitter at Night and Nostalgia,' Today's Comic by Alex Krokus

This Addictive New Game Is Like Minecraft, But with GIFs

GIPHY, the company whose endless repository of GIFs cured you of saying “Hey” on Tinder and “happy birthday” on work Slack, spends a lot of time just making cool shit. They do GIF art shows, screensavers, photo booths, and much more. Their latest experiment is a virtual reality video game where you use GIFs to build infinitely customizable worlds. It’s kind of like Minecraft but with over a billion different kinds of blocks to choose from. I got to try it earlier this week, and it’s addictive as hell.

The game is called GIPHY World. It’s like Tilt Brush for the very online. Players can choose one of three surreal locales as a canvas: an idyllic island, a minimalist chess board, or forested campsite. Then, just add GIFs. From iconic Friends moments to reaction GIFs and really out-there art loops, the search bar is the limit. The whole landscape can be transformed into a bustling metropolis, a winding corn maze, or a scorched earth apocalypse. My creative aspirations tended toward the latter.

Designer Ralph Bishop told me the idea for an app that lets people draw with GIFs came from two of GIPHY’s previous VR experiments, the Museum of GIF Art and Sticker Time. “It just didn’t exist,” he said, and he needed it to. GIPHY let him team up with engineering lead Laura Juo-Hsin Chen's New York-based developer Planeta to build the game. As a GIF company, it's in GIPHY's interest to shepherd the format through the shifting technological landscape. “If we can bring the GIF along though new tech and keep it relevant—and bring artists along for the ride—then that’s a cool place to be,” Bishop said.

He and GIPHY producer Jason Clarke taught me how to stamp, spray, draw, and sculpt with GIFs. They taught me how to shrink and grow my body to make bigger and smaller GIFs, and how to smash my creations into oblivion with a digital hammer. In essence, they taught me how to be a god in this tropical paradise. I could create infinite friends to party with, draw fantastic structures into existence, and light it all on fire when I was done. There’s a camera feature for taking selfies with your masterpiece, which is a feature every VR experience should include. This feature alone could cement GIPHY World’s legacy, even if it weren’t so trippy and fun to play. Here's a video of me fucking around in the app.

As I explored the different tools and snapped GIF selfies with the incredibly intuitive assistant bot, I found myself wishing I could graft my face onto the squishy, smiling avatar. Bishop said they’re planning to develop new features for GIPHY World after the launch, one of which might be the ability to graft GIFs directly onto the digital body. Another possibility is a smartphone version of the app that will allow people to explore their creations sans-headset.

When the demo was over, I reluctantly took off the headset and wiped my cursed creations from the computer’s memory. It's supremely addictive! The game is out on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive today.

Download GIPHY World on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Steam.

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