What’s your greatest fear? Home invasion? Spider bites? Running out of bog roll? Or does the thing that keeps you awake at night wear a hyper-coloured wig, oodles of face paint and ludicrously large footwear?

Picture this: it’s late 2016 and the campaign to find the 45th US President is in full swing. These are some of the most divisive times in the country’s modern history. People don’t just dislike Donald Trump. They friggin’ revile him and everything he stands for. As for his supporters, they’re no more than a “basket of deplorables.”

And what about Hillary Clinton? People can’t see any appeal in appointing another establishment candidate and creating a Clinton-family dynasty. Fat lot of good the Bushes did for us, they say.

More salacious news stories appear as the days roll by. The language in the attack ads gets nastier and nastier. Politics is no longer something that’s just talked about on cable news and written about in the Washington Post. It’s come to define every individual. Everyone’s picked a side and adopted the attitude that if you’re not with me, you’re against me.

Of course, we’re still experiencing this division four years later, but there was a rare moment of unity in the midst of the 2016 election campaign (which, of course, Trump ultimately won).

To put it simply: people across the USA united over their shared hatred of clowns. There had been a number of clown sightings across the US since August 2016. It sparked many showings of community resistance, including the students of Penn State University rioting in solidarity.

A shirtless male student addressed the gathering of anti-clown zealots at Penn State. “No matter where you come from, no matter your colour, your religion, no matter who you’re voting for, we can all agree on one thing – fuck that clown!”

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Is there anything scarier than a clown?

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