Walking toward the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday afternoon, I could hear the speaker’s voice long before I picked him out among the crowd gathered by the Reflecting Pool. His voice crackled through the loudspeaker and rolled across the water as he led his audience in the refrain:
“MUSIC IS NOT A CRIME! F-CK THE FBI!”
“F-CK THAT SH-T! F-CK THAT SH-T!”
As I got a little closer I saw the outfits: face paint, hair dye, military gear, circus shoes. A man wearing a rubber killer-clown mask pedaled his bike serenely by.
There’s never been a Washington protest like the Juggalo March.
The Juggalos, who describe themselves as “the last subculture in music,” are the absurdly devoted fans of the Insane Clown Posse, a horror-core rap duo from Detroit. Since the early 1990s, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope have painted their faces, rapped about gruesome violence, venereal disease, and their occult vision of the afterlife, and hosted annual “Gatherings,” which are no-holds-barred music festivals fueled by a staggering river of drugs and alcohol.
ICP bills themselves as “the most hated band on earth,” and this self-conception forms the backbone of Juggalo culture. The fans identify as misfits and outcasts, scorned by the uninitiated but bound together by their shared, judgement-free love for self-destructive behavior.
Juggalo pilgrims gather from across the country to revel in their common oddity. They cover their bodies in tattoos of Hatchetman, the ICP logo. They swear allegiance to Faygo, the cheap Detroit soda that has become their trademark, much to the company’s dismay. (ICP drenches their audiences in the stuff at concerts.) Their rallying cries are “whoop whoop” and “family.”
And since 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has classified the Juggalos as a “loosely affiliated hybrid gang,” a label they share with the Bloods and MS-13. The FBI made the move after some criminal gangs began to adopt imagery and tactics from ICP music, which is as horrifying as it sounds: There is nightmare clown makeup, meat cleaver attacks, and sundry other psychopathies.
The Juggalos see the FBI’s designation as an outrage. Those gangs are a few bad apples, they argue. Or even appropriators of Juggalo culture: the fans point to Juggalo gang attacks on non-gang Juggalos to illustrate their point.
Many maintain that the gang classification has led to discrimination and harassment in their personal lives. Which is what spurred some 1,500 of them to forsake the pastoral tableau of the Gatherings and come to Washington.
“Our legal team has heard testimonies and reports from Juggalos all over the nation who have lost custody of their children, been fired from jobs, denied access into the armed forces, and the most common consequence—being officially labeled as a gang member by law enforcement agencies,” reads the manifesto on the official Juggalo March website. “A simple traffic stop for a broken tail light can—and has—resulted in an otherwise law-abiding, hard-working, taxpaying citizen being put on a local or state list of gang members simply for displaying their Juggalo pride.”
“We paint our faces, put our middle fingers in the sky, and scream, I don’t give a f-ck!” said Scott Donihoo, who runs fan forum FaygoLuvers.net (“Because FaygoLuvers.com was already taken!”). “But in all honesty, we do give a f-ck. We give so much of a f-ck that many people traveled thousands of miles across the country to stand here in solidarity for being labeled as something we’re not: a gang.”
If the Juggalos at the march had a single message, it’s this: Sure, they’ve got a fondness for music that can be gory and obscene, but they’re also regular people—fast food workers and teachers, cops and military men. Some are actually clowns. A Juggalo in a clerical collar tells me he’s a Navy vet, a former NSA analyst, a father of seven, and that he’s been a fan of the Insane Clown Posse since 1999.
“What we’re gathering here for is the unfair classification of an entire culture being called a gang based on the actions of so few individuals, and based on the fact that they had so little intel to go on,” he says. “We’re fighting to prevent the subjugation of our culture, and fighting for freedom of speech. It’s our ability to believe what we want, listen to whatever music we choose to, and at the same time gather peacefully.”
But although the March was a bona-fide political rally, it was also a Juggalo gathering, which gave it the bizarre flavor of a drug-addled family reunion. Reconnected friends reminisced over the acid flashbacks of Gatherings past. Ten-year-old girls in Juggalo paint sat on their dads’ shoulders throwing out the “Juggalo Love” hand sign. Scruffy bearded shirtless guys wandered around with drawstring trash bags: “Garbage! Put your garbage here!” And hand-painted signs ranged from the laconic (“WTF FBI”), to the pithy (“JUDGE ME NOT BY THE COLOR OF MY FACEPAINT”), to the absurdist (“MOST OF YOU CAN’T EVEN JUGGLE!”)
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None of these marchers were expecting the strangest turn of the protest: the Juggalos are suddenly hip. After decades of being viewed as the nadir of bad taste, the march’s message of protesting oppression has landed the group sympathetic profiles in the Washington Post and Time magazine.
“You can feel it in your gut: We’re the good guys!” Violent J roared from the stage. “We’re actually in the right this time! If there’s a holy creator, and you know we think there is, you know he’s patting us on our head right now!” Not yet ready to fully embrace this new role, Violent then made a joke about child rape.
The bulk of the positive Juggalo coverage sprang from the hope that the march would become an anti-Trump demonstration, with reporters salivating over the prospect of a clash between the Juggalos and a pro-Trump rally which took place concurrently elsewhere on the Mall.
And political types certainly tried to egg on the Juggalos. The Democratic Socialists of America were on hand to pass out snacks, “FAYGO NOT FASCISM” signs, and brochures suggesting marchers “Try Socialism.” A few-dozen Michiganders representing “Great Lakes Antifa” turned up with a banner reading “WHOOP WHOOP F-CK TRUMP”; one scrawny bespectacled guy carried a baseball bat and a sign proclaiming that “NAZI LIVES DON’T MATTER.”
But people hoping to find untapped left-wing rage among the Juggalos wound up disappointed. Outside of the gang issue, it turns out that the Insane Clown Posse couldn’t care less about politics.
“Anybody I know, anybody I’ve been around since I was born, no matter who’s the president or governor or mayor, it’s never made a difference in their lives,” Violent told Spin last month. “I could say ‘F-ck Trump,’ but I don’ t know sh-t about him. I just know he’s some f-cking billionaire.”
This unusual ambivalence means Juggalos actually boast an ideological diversity that puts most subcultures to shame. There are fascist Juggalos and communist Juggalos; Trump Juggalos and Hillary Juggalos and Alex Jones Juggalos. One guy at the rally wore a Trump mask and carried a sign picturing a clown-hatted Jeff Sessions; another was emblazoned with “MAGA” slogans, the A’s replaced with anarchy symbols. American and Chinese flags flew over the rally, both modified to feature the Hatchetman. At one point, the Juggalo March actually joined the Trump rally in a chant of “USA!” The Juggalo message is clear: ICP’s not for everyone, but anyone down with the clown is welcome in their ranks. It’s a surreal but weirdly inspiring thing to see. If Americans can come together around something as bizarre and seemingly inconsequential as the Insane Clown Posse, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us yet.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Scott Donihoo as Mitchell Sutherland.
