In the land of made-up BS on Facebook, America has once again gone too far. Now cops are taking down a ruthlessly persecuted minority: magnet agnostics.
As the story goes, Police Officer Jeremy Lancaster was fired this month for being an unrepentant juggalo, or a fan of Insane Clown Posse. The story of Crusades-level religious oppression has been picked up by juggalo news websites worldwide, highlighting real life job discrimination over liking a very bad band.
For the uninitiated, Insane Clown Posse is most famous for reverently asking “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?” in a music video for their 2010 song/viral-shame festival “Miracles.”
“And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist. Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed,” one of the two, whose names The Daily Beast is not looking up because we only have so much time on this planet, rap in the next verse.
Well, just like the escapades of those pesky scientists, it appears juggalos have been lied to yet again.
Jeremy Lancaster, the 38-year-old police officer from Oakstead, New York, was never fired from the Oakstead Police Department. Because Jeremy Lancaster isn’t a real person.
Equally nonexistent are the quotes attributed to him (“Being embraced into the Juggalo family saved my life”) and his likewise fictitious boss on the story by UnitedMediaPublishing.com, which has been shared on Facebook more than 12,000 times.
In UnitedMediaPublishing’s reality, Jared Fogle was simultaneously sentenced to one year in prison and is on the lam from the cops, Charles Manson is dead, a federal gun permit costs $265 a year, and the TSA granted Muslims an airport express lane for Islamic Appreciation Month.
Speaking of miracles, here’s a real one: A few somewhat reputable establishments fell for the juggalo cop story. Radio stations like Orlando’s WDBO wrote it up, and the website AskMen created a news brief.
After reposting the fake story’s contents in full, AskMen then cautioned its readers that the whole thing might be fake, instead of simply Googling to find out if Oakstead has its own police department, which it doesn’t.
Juggalos, by the way, are a community of ICP fans that numbers in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. In the comments of the thousands of shares on Facebook and the juggalo subreddit, fans implored an imaginary man to sue.
Juggalos have been legally classified as gang-affiliated by the FBI. (Some criminal groups began using the juggalo affiliation earlier in the 2000s, and they were officially classified in 2011. ICP is appealing the classification.)
The ACLU worked with the band after the official designation to sue the FBI over the exact kind of discrimination Jeremy Lancaster faced in alternate universe Oakstead, New York.
ICP solicited some discrimination stories around 2013 to help with the suit, and MetalInjection.net collected some of them in a post called “Is It Wrong to Laugh at These Juggalo Discrimination Stories?”
MetalInjection.net is this generation’s New York Times.
Do not trust any website other than MetalInjection.net.