#like i do not think any law enforcement agency cares given that weed will be fully legal in july

[failfemme]

i don’t trust ppl who deal on lex just bc it’s terrible opsec

[marymosley]

The New Censors: The Call For Banning Political Lies Threatens Free Speech

Below is my column on the call by Democratic members for censorship of political ads by Facebook. The overwhelming support for the call by members like Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez shows the erosion in our values of free speech. Democrats and the media were once the defenders of free speech and critics of censorship. They are now demanding that corporations police political ads and remove ads viewed as false or misleading. It is a standard that many of these members would quickly denounce if applied to some of their own past comments.

Here is the column:

For people fearful of the power of companies like Facebook and Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg is right out of central casting. A Silicon Valley billionaire with an androidish demeanor, he comes across as more machine than man in responding to politicians on Capitol Hill who, at times, appear on the verge of hysterics over the supposed “lies” of their opponents.

With the House Financial Services Committee hearing this past week, Democrats and the media condemned Zuckerberg and his refusal to put a stop to false political ads. As unpopular as it may be, however, Zuckerberg is right that what members are demanding from Facebook is censorship and, if allowed, it would create a dangerous regulation of free speech. Indeed, the scariest thing to come out of the hearing, besides the relative silence of civil liberties and free speech groups, is that Zuckerberg may be one of the last barriers to a system of political censorship in America.

Watching the cable news coverage of the hearing, you sensed the rising revulsion on some networks over his refusal to promise to review and regulate political ads for alleged lies. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York made regulating political speech sound noble and obvious by demanding, “So you will not take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that is just a pretty simple yes or no.” The answer, if you believe in free speech, is a simple no. Media hosts and writers expressed disbelief that Zuckerburg would allow lies to pervade the 2020 election, and Ocasio Cortez was heralded for “schooling” and “dismantling” him.

I have written for years about the erosion of free speech in Western democracies, particularly in Britain, France, and Germany. Governments now regulate political speech and prosecute those deemed to engage in hate speech or false speech. In the United States, calls for greater speech regulation are growing on college campuses all across the country and in media outlets, both once the bastions of free speech.

On college campuses, conservative or controversial speakers are routinely prevented from participating in discussions. A controversy at the Harvard Crimson newspaper is illustrative of this trend. The student newspaper was completing a story on immigration issues and protests. The reporter did what any responsible journalist would do and asked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for a response. That request triggered a furious counterprotest. It was not the content of the comment that sparked it, but the mere solicitation of comment from the agency.

University of Pennsylvania students recently prevented a discussion with former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan. Georgetown University students prevented others from discussing immigration policy with Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan. No action was taken by the college against the students. Northwestern University students stopped a class from discussing policy with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement representative after the class heard from an undocumented person. Student April Navarro rejected the right of the professor to have a “nice conversation” about the agency. Again, no action was taken by the college against the students.

The House hearing with Zuckerberg revealed what House Democrats want to create, which is a system where companies can block political ads deemed false. Of course, reasonable minds can disagree on what is false in politics. But history shows that once this power is given to regulate speech, the appetite for censorship then becomes insatiable.

An insight can be found in the work of the British Advertising Standards Authority. Established to weed out gender and racial stereotypes and other social ills in advertising, the authority has set about its task with humorless zeal and recently banned commercials for Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Volkswagen. The first showed men so lost in enjoying the cream cheese that they leave their babies on a conveyor belt.

The fact that it was a joke did not matter since, as Ella Smillie of the agency explained, “The use of humor or banter is unlikely to mitigate against the potential for harm.” The commercial was spiked for implicating that women are better at child care. The Volkswagen commercial was taken down for having images of male astronauts and hikers along with a brief shot of a woman with a baby. Clearly, Volkswagen was saying that women cannot be astronauts or hikers.

Americans have long resisted such boards or authorities. Yet Democrats are using Russian internet trolling operations and presidential tweets to make another play for speech regulation. Would Ocasio Cortez feel the same way about Facebook banning an ad featuring her false assertion that the “vast majority” of Americans do not make a “living wage”? Or her false assertion that Walmart and Amazon do not pay minimum wages? Or how about her false assertion that most of “Medicare for All” could be paid for by simply recouping $21 trillion lost due to “Pentagon errors”?

Then there is Representative Adam Schiff using a House hearing to give a false account of the transcript of the call between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart. The Washington Post itself found repeated misrepresentations in his speech. While assuring the public that this was the “essence” of the transcript, he proceeded to falsely speak in the voice of Trump as he read, “I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you though. I am going to say this only seven times, so you better listen good. I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent. Understand? Lots of it, on this and on that.” It clearly was false, designed to enrage.

But where does Facebook stop? Trump offers troubling descriptions of undocumented persons, while Hillary Clinton has hinted at Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii being a “Russian asset.” Then there are contested descriptions of climate change on both sides. One can imagine constant demands from groups to take down ads as factually misleading, a more sophisticated version of the shout downs on college campus.

There is an alternative to the kind of political commissar demanded by Ocasio Cortez and others. It is free speech. Zuckerberg correctly stated that plenty of third parties currently review and contest false political statements. He would leave political speech to politics. Facebook already engages in too much content regulation of sites and postings. Yet that is still not enough for many House members, who want to decide when and how individuals and groups can speak out in the political arena.

The truly insidious aspect of this effort by those on the left is that they are dressing up censorship as the protection of democracy to try to convince citizens to give up core free speech protections. In the silence that would follow, few would be able to object. After all, the censors could merely treat censorship objections as simply more “lies” to take down.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

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[gossipnetwork-blog]

What the California Fires Mean for the Weed Industry

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What the California Fires Mean for the Weed Industry

Ashley Oldham, one of only a few dozen legal pot growers in Northern California’s Mendocino County, was sound asleep in the early hours of October 9th when she woke to the sound of her neighbor banging on her door. He’d driven through flames and jumped her fence to tell her that she needed to get out, that a fire was headed straight for her home and cannabis farm.

Oldham, the owner of Frost Flower Farms, jumped out of bed. She grabbed her daughter, dogs, computer, a filing cabinet, some clean laundry and the stash of cash that she kept in her office – other stashes with more money weren’t easily accessible, so she left them behind. Then, she got out. About 15 minutes later, the flames consumed her house and burned it to the ground.

Oldham stayed the night at her best friend’s house in Ukiah, a 20-minute drive away. In the coming days, high winds and dry conditions contributed to Northern California fires that burnt at least 240,000 acres and blanketed multiple counties in smoke. So far, the fires have killed at least 42 people (with 50 others still missing), displaced 100,000 and caused more than $1 billion of insured losses.

California’s thriving cannabis industry wasn’t spared by the destruction. Assessing the early damage, Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, says that 30 to 40 percent of the state’s marijuana growers could have been affected in some way, whether by fires or the resulting smoke and toxic particles in the air.

In the morning, after a long and terrifying night, Oldham drove back to her neighborhood. She needed to see if her plants were still alive. If they were, she needed to water them. Cannabis like hers, grown with a combination of lamps and natural light, can dry out in as little as a day, she says.

Oldham, like other growers in Mendocino County, has invested thousands – in her case, she says, $80,000 so far – to meet the requirements to become a legal, registered marijuana grower in anticipation of full recreational legalization in the state, which is set to go into effect on January 1st, 2018. It’s the reason why this year, of all years, was perhaps the worst for a fire like this, according to Chiah Rodriques, the CEO of Mendocino Generations, a collective of organic cannabis farmers in the county. There are 40 farms in the collective, all of which are either legal or are in the process of becoming legal.

“So many of these people have literally spent their last dollar trying to get permitted,” Rodriques says. And what’s worse, she notes, once growers are legal they’re subject to a flat fee local tax. Those with 5,000 to 10,000-square-feet of canopy, for instance, are required to pay at least $5,000 per-growing-cycle, whether they make any money or not.

Smoke from a wildfire rises over the hills near in Kenwood, California, on October 10th. Jim Wilson/Redux

“Other industries don’t have a flat rate tax like that,” she says. And, in a case of especially bad timing, some farmers who likely lost everything received their bill for that tax this week, although the Mendocino County Tax Collector’s Office said on Friday that the Board of Supervisors may consider waiving the fee for those who lost their farms. Yet still, it’s one of those things that can make legality seem like more trouble than it’s worth.

“Every time we turn around it’s ‘Go this way, pay this fee, talk to this agency,'” Rodriques says. “We’re really getting the shaft here and [it’s too bad because] we’ve really been putting ourselves on the line.'”

On her way to her property on Monday, Oldham was stopped by a blockade. Her rural neighborhood was an evacuation zone and no one was being let in. So, Oldham parked her car and hiked three and a half miles to her property with a friend. On the way, she says, they saw multiple small fires, some of them in her neighbor’s yards. Every time she saw one, Oldham would grab the nearest hose and extinguish the flames. She wasn’t supposed to be behind the lines, but she needed to get to her crop, she says.

When she reached her property, Oldham found her greenhouse and the majority of her plants still standing amidst the rubble. Some of the plants were singed, and two of her other buildings, which housed processing and other equipment, were gone. But she still had something. She watered the plants and left.

On the second day, Oldham hiked in again, this time with three friends. Again, they put the out fires they found, hoping to save neighbor’s homes. Again, they watered the plants.

On day three, Oldham learned that the sheriff’s office was letting dozens of vintners in to water their grapes. As a legal grower who is registered with the county and pays taxes, Oldham had nothing to hide. She approached a sheriff’s deputy and asked to be let in.

“I said, ‘Hey, I need to get in. I pay my taxes. I passed every agency test. I’m 100 percent legal.’ They basically laughed in my face,” she says.

Over the next few days, Oldham tried repeatedly to return to her property. She says that each time, she was denied entry and told that her name wasn’t on “the list,” despite having permission from the County Agriculture Department and a public statement from the Sheriff that legal growers would be given the same access as those with vineyards in the area.

Greg Van Patten Captain, who served as the operations chief for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office during the emergency, says that there were probably “hiccups” in the communication between the local agriculture department, the farm bureau and his office. He also says that some farmers whose names were on the list may have been turned away because their properties were in “active fire zones,” not just evacuated zones, because it was considered too dangerous to let them in.

“If the information was given [was to let them in] I could care less about what they do or who they are,” Van Patten says.

But discrimination is something that legal cannabis operations are familiar with. Santa Rosa-based CannaCraft, Inc., a legal company which saw at least $1 million-worth of cannabis and several of its structures destroyed in the fires, as well as 20 percent of its employees evacuated, experienced another kind of disaster when it was raided in 2016 because of alleged code violations. Law enforcement, including officers from the Santa Rosa Police Department and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, took $8 million worth of equipment and cash that they have still not returned, according to spokeswoman Kial Long. The Santa Rosa Police Department says that it was not able to confirm or deny that it still had CannaCraft property in its possession, because the city is still in a state of emergency and officers who would normally be in the office were all out assisting people who had lost their homes in the fire.

But one silver lining of the fires, according to Long, came in the dark days after the blazes started, when much of Santa Rosa looked like a smoking wasteland. CannaCraft employees went into an evacuated area to see how bad the damage to one of their structures was. While there, a sheriff’s deputy stopped by. The CannaCraft employees were originally concerned that the deputy would wrongly suspect that they were an illegal operation. But instead, he advised them that they should protect their surviving plants from looters. For Long, it was a hopeful sign that cannabis was gaining recognition as a legitimate industry, and that their business is being seen as a part of the community, not something that’s undermining it. To that end, CannaCraft also offered up part of their office to growers who lost their facilities and as a temporary regional headquarters to 200 members of the Red Cross, who set up their office in CannaCraft’s building.

CannaCraft didn’t have insurance on their plants. Courtesy of CannaCraft

“We have so little help outside of the industry that we’re really used to helping one another,” Long says.

Like Oldham’s operation, CannaCraft didn’t have insurance on the marijuana plants, because it’s either too difficult to get or prohibitively expensive.

Erich Pearson, the CEO of SPARC SF, San Francisco’s largest licensed dispensary, is experiencing uninsured losses, too. In 2016, SPARC moved some of its greenhouses to Glen Ellen in Eastern Sonoma County, directly in the path of one of the fires. “We were basically ground zero for the ‘Nuns Fire'” Pearson says, referring to one of the many fires that sprung up in the area starting on October 9th. As for why he didn’t buy insurance, Pearson says, he didn’t think it was worth it at the time. “Insurance for a crop loss seems like you’re flushing your money down the toilet until it happens,” he says. “You have so many other expenses. Everyone’s going through these regulatory processes now. Who would have ever thought that we’d have a massive forest fire sweep through the property?”

And yet, all of the cannabis growers say they went into this business knowing it was risky and uncertain. Staying in the shadows and operating illegally has as many risks as trying to become legal. “It depends what kind of risks you want,” says Oldham.

Pearson agrees. “This is a pretty risk-inherent industry,” he says. “And you go in understanding those risks, whether you lose crop to law enforcement who’s taking it or whether it’s crop loss.”

Rodriques says she wishes public agencies would be more helpful. “This is about livelihoods,” she says. “We paid a lot of fees to the government and they don’t have our backs.”

Part of the issue, Oldham says, comes from the misconception that all cannabis growers are making boatloads of money, or that they’re all the same, whether they’re legal or illegal.

“I feel like we are treated unfairly in general,” she says. “There’s a major lack of respect for cannabis growers and our local bureaucracy is having a hard time differentiating between black market cultivators and those who are legal. And they have this major misconception about how much money we have – like we all have millions of dollars buried in the forest. That’s not true.”

At a cannabis business conference in Oakland last Friday, some people say that the fires could keep the price of weed from tanking this year. With so many new growers and larger operations, that has been a concern. But Pearson says he doubts the fires will affect the cost. His estimation is that the fires only destroyed about 5 percent of this year’s crop.

But the total number of those affected is still unclear, according to Josh Drayton, the spokesman for the California Cannabis Industry Association. In the days following the fire, he says, cell service was spotty, and the association couldn’t reach members. As it stands now, some people are just beginning to return home and assess the real damage.

“We will know much more in the next few days,” he says.

Oldham, for one, says she intends to return and rebuild, although she doesn’t know where she’ll start. Technically, her grower’s permit depends on there being a house on her land and a fence around it – two of the things that burned down. She also feels the need to be close to her crop, to tend and protect it, but she doesn’t know if it would be dangerous to stay in a trailer on her property, since the some of the ash from her burned home could be unhealthy to expose herself and her children to.

“I’m not going to sit here in my burnt-down house and cry about it,” she says. “The only thing I can do is keep my chin up and put one foot in front of the other. This will be like starting over. But I think, with the support of my community, I can pull it off. The legal community is totally different than the black market community… people are way more into supporting and helping each other (and) there is a major sense of solidarity.”

Pearson, who survived the fire with much of his total SPARC operations unscathed, is similarly optimistic. But not everyone is feeling as resilient.

According to Rodriques, the fires have almost certainly finished off some very good farmers who were just getting started. “It’s depressing,” she says. “It’s just incomprehensible for someone to go back to their farm, the only thing they have left, and find crispy cannabis…It’s like being raided. In fact, it’s worse.”

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[gossipnetwork-blog]

March of the Juggalos: Inside the Faygo-Soaked D.C. Protest

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March of the Juggalos: Inside the Faygo-Soaked D.C. Protest

Without Insane Clown Posse and their fan base, the Juggalos, Moon Brown would probably be dead. So a 16-hour bus ride from Detroit wasn’t going to stop Brown from seeing ICP for the first time at Saturday’s Juggalo March on Washington. Brown, 25, wearing a brown felt hat, black pants held up by a Grateful Dead belt and shirtless with a black leather vest, came to D.C. on Friday with a few bucks in his pocket, and he slept the night before the march behind the Lincoln Memorial. Carrying an aqua knapsack that he’s had since his days hitchhiking across America, he wanted to be only a few steps away from the stage for the event, excited about the prospect of seeing so many others who are like him.

Brown is skin and bones, with his black, white and red face paint that he had applied a day before beginning to wear off. With a wild brown beard, locks of long, wispy hair and a green half-crescent moon tattooed on the middle of his forehead, Brown, whose name is a pseudonym, has never been big on going to ICP shows or attending a Gathering of the Juggalos, the subculture’s annual music festival. But he credits the horrorcore rap duo of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, and Juggalos in general, for a support system that eluded him – and had him contemplating taking his own life a decade earlier.

“ICP built a family for those who didn’t have one,” Brown says. “Maybe they didn’t realize what they were doing, but they did something great, and I have the appreciation and love for that.” He adds: “If they’re going to call us out to be at the March, then I owe them.”

This feels different than your regular ICP show or Gathering. Sure, about 1,500 people are passing around liters of Faygo, smoking cigarettes like they’re going out of style, and yelling their fraternal call – “Whoop! Whoop!” – at anyone who passes by. Men walk around in Jason and lucha libre wrestling masks, women are in schoolgirl outfits and toddlers are in face-paint and ICP T-shirts. It attracts all ages, from the older man in the wheelchair to the little girl with curly brown hair holding a face-painted doll’s head on a stick. But Gatherings don’t happen at the National Mall, and they certainly don’t have the political feeling this one does. You see signs of the day: “Juggalo Lives Matter.” “Don’t Shoot/I’m Just a Music Fan With a Really Big Family.” “FBI: Foolish Bunch of Inbreds.” “The FBI Listens to Nickelback.”

Since 2011, the Juggalos have been branded by the FBI’s National Gang Threat Assessment as “a loosely-organized hybrid gang” in four states – Arizona, California, Pennsylvania and Utah. The report, which was collected from data submitted by state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide, recognized that subsets exhibited “gang-like behavior and engage in criminal activity and violence” in at least 21 states. In 2014, ICP, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the FBI. Though the initial suit was dismissed for lacking “legal standing,” an appeals court reinstated the case in 2015, on the basis that the gang designation has brought significant harm to Juggalos. (Oral arguments on the appeal are set to begin October 11th.) “You might not give a fuck about ICP, but how are you not going to give a fuck about the situation that’s going on?” Shaggy says.

Whether you sip the Faygo or remember ridiculing the kid in high school who wanted to wear a Hatchetman shirt, one thing about this case has united people: The move to designate ICP’s fan base as a gang is unprecedented. Never before has the U.S. government targeted a fan base of an artist or music genre, and labeled anyone associated with it, as part of an organized gang. Though the Juggalos were not specifically named in the FBI’s 2013 or 2015 National Gang Reports, the gang label is the stain they can’t remove. That’s why they’re marching.

“You now have people examining the issue and understanding how wrong it was,” says Steve Miller, author of Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made, on the gang classification. “That was the problem before – you didn’t have people seriously taking a look at this as a true First Amendment legal issue.”

Antifa members join Juggalos in their march. Rosie Cohe

Off in the distance is the Mother of All Rallies, a relatively small demonstration in support of President Donald Trump. Despite the online clamoring for the face-painted Juggalos to confront and pummel the crowd, the gathering’s focus is civil, focused and disciplined. Antifa make their presence known in case there is a problem with the pro-Trumpers, but they remain off to the side, not impeding on the Juggalos or the event. Most Juggalos tell me that this day isn’t about the red hat-wearing assholes over there. It’s about them. It’s about their rights. It’s about the future of an American subculture that, in their eyes, has been unfairly labeled by the federal government and affected their lives for the worse.

One by one, Juggalos of all kinds – military veterans, registered nurses, fast-food cooks, government employees – step up to tell their stories to this family of misfits and outcasts. Despite never receiving a negative work review, Jessica Bonometti says she was fired from her job as a Virginia probation officer last year for showing appreciation on Facebook for ICP. Because she saw an ICP show, Crystal Guerrero says she lost a custody battle for her two children in New Mexico, now only seeing them six hours a week. Ashley Vasquez recalls instances in which she was almost kicked out of the military for her tattoos and wearing clothes supporting ICP’s music.

“That’s the biggest misconception about people outside looking in, thinking that Juggalos are just a piece of shit, inbred, uneducated fuckheads, you know what I’m saying?” Shaggy tells me. “It’s the furthest from the truth.”

Talk to some Juggalos on this steamy September day at the nation’s capital and they’ll rattle off about every insult thrown at them for the last 20 years. Losers. Freaks. White trash. Rednecks. Meth addicts. Mistakes. Criminals. They’ve grown numb to the barbs, largely ignoring the constant ridicule that’s followed the marginalized fan-base. But one hurts more than any other: Gang member.

“What happened to us never happened to any band in the history of rock and roll that I know of,” J tells Rolling Stone. “Nothing like it.”

He adds: “You wanna call us something, call us a family, because a lot of us don’t have a family and all we’ve got is each other. This shit is real for us, man.”

ICP’s Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J visited Rolling Stone to discuss the march.

Like almost every Juggalo I spoke to about their life growing up, Brown’s childhood was pretty shitty. Living in the Florida panhandle, his drug-abusive parents caused Brown to run away from group homes and bounce around the foster care system in Pensacola until he was around nine. On the steps at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, Brown refers back to the time he had to pull a needle out of his mom’s arm, and how his dad sold crack and forced him to smoke weed when he was four. Time and time again, foster parents would take him in, only to make it clear they really didn’t want him and that they only took him to not separate him from his sister. The last pair of parents, he says, constantly punished him, forcing him to run away again when he was 12.

It was around this time that he found an MP3 player on a school bus. When he popped in headphones and hit play, he listened to a few songs from ICP. He was hooked. But even with his newfound love couldn’t shield him from what was happening at home. He says that shortly after his foster family dropped him off with his biological parents, he was left to fend for himself. Between the ages of 14 and 18, Brown was homeless, living on the streets. “Homeless at 14 is not a good way to be in Pensacola,” he tells me. During that time, he says he was taken in by a few different families of Juggalos in the area for stretches. When he was 15, Brown was told by a friend what he already knew deep down: He was a Juggalo.

“Meeting the Juggalos and hanging out with them, I saw how people had each other’s backs, just this blunt, honest attitude,” Brown tells me. “It was real. That gave me something to lean toward.”

Brown remembers the first ass-kicking he got for being a Juggalo. When he heard the “Whoop! Whoop!” call at a party, he instinctively responded with one of his own. But these 20-somethings he was partying with were instead talking trash about Juggalo culture. Quick to fight, Brown, then 15 or 16, says he was repeatedly kicked in the stomach, with the anti-Juggalo group furiously stomping on his head. By the time they were done with him, Brown left with a bloody nose, a ripped shirt and a reminder of how people simply enjoy picking on Juggalos.

A juggalo getting their face paint done on site. Rosie Cohe

“People don’t get us,” he tells me.

Brown’s journey to Washington hasn’t been without its setbacks. When he was 17, he says he was given nine months in a low-risk juvenile program for improper display of a firearm at school when he unknowingly had a gun in his backpack. And trouble would find him again. Not long after the firearm incident, Brown and a buddy would walk up and down Michigan Avenue in Montclair, what Brown calls the ghetto of Pensacola, in hope of selling drugs to the area’s residential junkies. When he was apprehended for resisting arrest after tripping a cop around 2011, police found a custom knife he found in a gutter in his waistband.

The possession of a concealed weapon charge got him 14 months in jail. When he was getting booked, he says police saw his tattoos and asked him if he was a Juggalo. He says he confirmed he was, and saw the official at the jail mark down that he was a gang member. Brown says he didn’t care about the label at the time and that he hasn’t let it impact him since then, but one thought has stayed on his mind: What the fuck?

Sitting inside a studio at the Rolling Stone office days before the Juggalo March, J and Shaggy say they knew a while ago they had to do something.

Initially, they joked that the FBI’s gang classification of their fan base was yet another reason why they proudly own the title of “most hated band in the world.” But the group’s outlook would take a sharp turn from glee to despair. When they’d hit the road for meet-and-greets and in-store signings across the country, they found that the FBI’s gang label had real-life consequences for Juggalos: Longer terms in jail for offenders. Parents losing kids in custody battles. People getting fired from their jobs. Potential recruits not being able to get into the military. And on and on.

Even with the increased attention on their cause, the duo say that it’s hard to do those meetups with fans nowadays, as the stories they keep hearing from loyal Juggalos affected by the gang label are heartbreaking. Yes, there are probably a few fans who are gang members, but, they argue, why isn’t that same flimsy standard of blanketing an entire group applied to people in gangs who like other artists?

“There’s fucking Bonnie Raitt fans that are in gangs,” J says.

While they downplay the effect the gang label has had on them and keep the focus on their fans, it has impacted their ability to earn, specifically from the venues that are skeptical of booking them because of the Juggalo designation.

“The more that spreads, the harder this shit is getting, and fuck, man, where does it end?” J says.

When reached by Rolling Stone for comment, the FBI reiterated to that the 2011 report was “compromised of information shared with the National Gang Intelligence Center and the FBI from law enforcement agencies around the country.”

“The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. We investigate activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement. “The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based on an individual’s exercise of their First Amendment rights.”

The duo knows that getting the FBI to rescind the label, or at least acknowledge the matter, is a pipe dream. Shaggy says he knows already that’ll never happen. That’s why ICP became the latest in a decorated history of political demonstrations in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

“Whether [the FBI] want to admit it or not,” Shaggy says, “they fucked up.”

By 3 p.m., the chanting, laughter and clouds of cigarette smoke have made this a full-blown party. This might not be a Gathering of the Juggalos, but it’s a celebration of the culture and the people who make it possible. There’s Richard and Stephanie Miller, a couple from New Castle, Delaware, that’s helped organize a Juggalo carpool system, coordinating rides for people from as far as California and Washington State. There’s Amanda Donihoo, whose husband, Scott, otherwise known as Scottie D., president of Faygoluvers.net, gives an impassioned speech of his life for the Juggalos that mentions how him and his wife, an IT professional and a registered nurse in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, respectively, reflect how the group is pigeonholed and criminalized because of the actions of a few.

“We are some of the most straight-laced people ever,” says Amanda Donihoo, 35. “But since we don’t always wear the attire you expect or perceive a Juggalo would wear, people don’t understand.”

Juggalo marchers in face paint holding a sign saying “Juggalo’s are a family not a gang. Those who think otherwise [middle finger]”. Rosie Cohe

ICP has no plans to make this an annual event, so the Juggalos are making the most out of the day.

Hannah Baxter drove seven hours from New York state to be at the March. Baxter, 27, has been to roughly 50 ICP shows and two Gatherings, but it’s hard for the former group-home kid to describe what she’s feeling while looking at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

“This is the first time we’re actually banding together as a family to show everybody that we’re not as bad as they think we are,” she says. “Just ’cause we like people that rap about something a little crazy, we’re normal people, too.”

By the time ICP take the stage around 5 p.m., the Juggalos are hanging on their every word. While they speak on stage, two Juggalettes yell at a guy with a camera wearing a backwards “Make America Great Again” hat, telling him he’d get his ass beat by a family of a thousand clowns if he didn’t leave now. He says, “Fuck you, bitch,” and flees. Aside from that, this moment is festive and positive.

“This is our day! This is our year! Are you ready?” J asks the jubilant Juggalos. “The Juggalo family and the Wicked Clowns will never die. Let’s march, motherfuckers!”

ICP is at the beginning of the procession, looking almost overwhelmed by the love of the unlikeliest of families. It’s from this love that they push forward to lift the Juggalos’ gang label.

“It’s scary because this ain’t a movie,” J tells me. “This ain’t something anybody’s been through. And you don’t know how this is going to end.”

Brown’s March starts, and ends, with him walking through the crowd, carrying his third clear trash bag of the day. In an effort to help turn around the perception some may hold toward Juggalos, Brown, who works with prototype car parts for Chevy and Ford back in Michigan, packed some garbage bags and vowed to clean up the trash left behind on the Mall. It’s his way of giving back to a subculture that’s given him so much. At the back end of the March around the outside of the Washington Monument, there isn’t a piece of trash that Brown doesn’t pick up. He’s in D.C. for the next few days before heading back to Michigan, unsure of what’s next or where he’ll spend the night. For now, he’s bottling up the energy and the positive feelings of the day the Juggalos took Washington, a day he met more extended members of his family.

“That was epic,” he tells me, flashing his biggest smile of the day. He then darts to every piece of trash in his path, saying to anyone who will listen at the tail of the March: “Throw your garbage away! Give me your trash!”

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