QANon and the Joker Cards

A few years back I had the surreal opportunity to cover the 2016 Republican Convention and the Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse’s annual festival of arts and culture in the same insanely eventful week. I wrote 7 Days in Ohio about the experience. 

The following year, in early 2017, I wrote an article for Cracked about the surprising commonalities between Insane Clown Posse’s fanbase of die-hard Juggalos and Trump cultists. 

I was struck, in both instances, by how closely Trump’s appeal to his base mirrored that of Insane Clown Posse’s appeal to Juggalos. The most hated man in American politics and the self-styled “world’s most hated group” both cultivated surprisingly lucrative and successful images as consummate outsiders who didn’t just accept being despised by educated elites: they embraced it. They fucking thrived on it. 

QAnon cultists, those deluded souls who believe that Donald Trump is secretly fighting a heroic battle against an evil, all-powerful cadre of Satanic child molesters and murderers embrace being mocked by cultural elites even more than plain old Trump super-fans because they think that the most powerful figures in Democratic politics and entertainment are figures of almost inconceivable evil who eat babies after sexually defiling them in demonic rituals. 

At its core, QAnon is fundamentally about morality in its starkest terms: good versus evil. Heroes versus villains. A heroic chief executive doggedly fighting a furtive, all-or-nothing war against ultimate evil while being crucified and vilified by a brainwashed press against, literally, the forces of Satan.

In that respect, QAnon resembles a core element of Insane Clown Posse’s Dark Carnival theology/mythology, the Joker Cards. The Joker Cards were a series of seven albums Insane Clown Posse releases between 1992’s Carnival of Carnage and 2004’s The Wraith: Hell’s Pit that collectively expressed Insane Clown Posse’s core philosophy, which is, and I am paraphrasing here, that you should be a good person and go to heaven, or Shangri-La, instead of being a bad person and going to Hell’s Pit. 

As with QAnon, the morality of the Joker Cards is not subtle, ambiguous or nuanced. It’s obsessed with the prevalence and pervasiveness of evil. 

QAnon and the Joker Cards both have irresistible interactive elements. They’re essentially both elaborate games, a real-life “Choose Your Own Adventure” of sorts, in which acolytes are called upon to interpret a series of clues from either “Q”, an anonymous higher-up in the government with secret knowledge of Trump’s war against cannibalistic Satanists like Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton, or Insane Clown Posse in their Joker Card albums. 

QAnon and the Joker Cards both afford acolytes an opportunity to be part of something much bigger than themselves: an out and out war against the forces of evil in which they can, and should, play an active part.   

And both QAnon and the Joker Cards posit people considered by many to amoral and unethical—Donald Trump and a much-hated duo whose fans have been officially classified as a violent gang by the FBI—as secret paragons of virtue intent on crushing an evil conspiracy of almost inconceivably evil child sex traffickers and paving the path to salvation and paradise for their followers, respectively. 

The big difference is that there is no downside to ICP encouraging their fans, through the Joker Cards, to be good people and refrain from committing horrible crimes like rape, child abuse and domestic violence. 

QAnon, in sharp contrast, strongly feel that the best way to fight evil in 2020 is to blindly support the presidency and policies of Donald Trump on the basis that in his second term he’ll FINALLY have the power and authority to do all of the heroic things he was supposed to do in his first term but never quite got around to. In actuality, backing Trump is the best way to support evil. 

As I have argued extensively, Insane Clown Posse, despite its reputation, is a force for good in the universe. Trump is a force for bad so even though there are an almost uncanny number of similarities between QAnon and the Joker Cards their ultimate messages are ultimately not just markedly different but completely antithetical. 

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