A new wave of activists is trading placards for painted faces and megaphones for mime, using the ancient art of clowning as a vehicle for political resistance. At the forefront of this movement is Taylor Horne, a Brooklyn-based drag performer who takes to the streets as Tillie the Clown — a character that has become one of the most unmistakable presences in contemporary American activism.
On 15 July, Horne woke at 5am to begin a two-hour transformation into their alter ego, applying makeup and donning a black top hat, gloves, and a face painted white and red. Ten hours later, they were given the floor at a New York City council meeting to deliver a three-minute address on Romanch’s Law, a piece of legislation that would phase out — and ultimately ban — the city’s horse carriage industry. What followed was a masterclass in the power of the unexpected.
A Tradition of Subversion
The notion of the clown as a political figure is hardly new. Throughout medieval and Renaissance-era Europe, court jesters enjoyed a singular licence: they could mock monarchs and the social elite under the protective guise of humour. In the courts of China and Japan, jesters occupied positions of considerable influence, advising rulers on matters of state. You Zhan famously warned Qin Er Shi against lacquering the Great Wall, a decision that would have drained the working class. Sorori, meanwhile, used food and laughter to teach Toyotomi Hideyoshi how to detect manipulation. In the late 19th-century United States, entertainer Dan Rice blended Shakespearean parody with sharp critiques of politicians, including Abraham Lincoln, from the stage.
Modern-day practitioners have adapted this inheritance to suit contemporary struggles. When white supremacists gathered in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2007, clowns turned up in response — red noses, stilts and unicycles in tow — hurling bags of flour at one another while chanting the counter-slogan “white flour”, a deliberate riff on “white power”. In 2012, activists in Charlotte, North Carolina, repeated the tactic at a white supremacist rally, this time brandishing the slogan “wife power”. In 2017, when neo-Nazis descended on Whitefish, Montana, to harass the town’s Jewish community, clowns appeared with matzo ball soup, sharing it with passersby as an act of quiet defiance. Organisations such as the Boredom Patrol and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army have since channelled clowning into civil disobedience, protesting border patrols along the US-Mexico frontier and rallying for climate action respectively.
Tillie Takes the Floor
Horne’s path to activism was neither linear nor predictable. For years, they worked in fashion and advertising before the Covid-19 lockdown forced a period of reflection. One day, experimenting with makeup in front of a mirror and taking self-portraits to explore gender expression, Horne stumbled upon the character that would become Tillie the Clown. What began as a digital side project quickly gathered momentum. Within three years, Tillie had evolved from an escapist online personality into a full-time occupation, with an Instagram following exceeding 35,000.
Through the character, Horne addresses a range of issues: the white supremacy and xenophobia embedded within US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, the fascism lurking beneath certain beauty trends, and queerness as an act of rebellion — all delivered with the exaggerated visual language of clown drag. When a video Horne produced about the carriage horse industry gained traction earlier this year, two animal rights organisations, Peta and NYClass, privately reached out with an invitation to speak at the council meeting. Horne accepted without hesitation.
The reaction from carriage horse proponents was immediate and predictable. As Horne entered the meeting room, dressed head to toe in costume, opponents pointed and laughed. Undeterred, Horne delivered their speech with composure: “We pride ourselves on being a world-class destination … yet we are clinging to the exploitation of horse-drawn carriages. A giant prey animal is not built to thrive in New York’s overstimulating concrete environment.” The laughter, Horne later realised, had been precisely the trap. “They fell right into my trap,” they said. “They decided to critique the messenger and not the message.”
“Clowns are the only ones in the court that have the privilege to speak truth to power, to speak to the king without consequence,” Horne said. “So I embody that as an activist, as a character.” Embodying Tillie, Horne added, “is so profoundly disruptive because my experience as this character and as a human being completely defies the binary and the patriarchy. You’re going to laugh at me? I’m in on the joke.”
Healing Through the Giggle
For others in the movement, clowning serves a more intimate purpose: the mending of intergenerational trauma. Kendra Ferguson, a Japanese American whose family was interned during the Second World War, discovered clown activism after burning out from years of work in a group home. A career in mental health had taught her to access her feelings, but it was clown school, attended in 2023, that offered a new framework. “I found psychology as a way to access my feelings and connect with myself,” Ferguson said. She recognised that her grandmother, having been interned, had survived by behaving as non-threateningly as possible — a survival mechanism Ferguson had unconsciously adopted herself. Clowning allowed her to set that pattern aside.
Ferguson’s first taste of clown activism was entirely unplanned. In August 2025, she attended an anti-ICE gathering where agents were pepper spraying protestors. With exhausted demonstrators and no costumes or props to hand, Ferguson and a friend turned to improvisation. “We just started playing,” she recalled, “to help alleviate tension and bring humanity back into the situation.” Beginning that autumn, the two appeared weekly outside an immigration court in San Francisco, juggling, crafting balloon animals and walking on stilts while distributing leaflets about ICE abductions and mutual aid organisations. When the months-long demonstration concluded in January, Ferguson transitioned to school patrol, tossing juggling balls and playing with children in the morning as a way to keep watch over potential ICE raids.
“Clowning is a space container where we are constantly facing extreme rage, grief or failure through the lens of delight,” Ferguson said. “Humans can process all of it by watching the clown and we feel cathartic because of that.”
The movement is not without its tensions. Clown activism has, on occasion, led to heated confrontations between opposing groups. Yet its adherents remain convinced that delight offers something discipline alone cannot: a means of disarming hostility while refusing to yield ground.
The Pendulum Swings
For Horne, Ferguson and their peers, the appeal of clowning lies in its dual function — a shield and a spotlight. It weakens the authority of those who rely on intimidation while drawing public attention to causes that might otherwise be drowned out by noise. In a political climate defined by polarising legislation and state-sanctioned violence, the clown offers communities a way to reclaim agency, one laugh at a time.
As Tillie the Clown put it: “People are firing back on all cylinders, being like: ‘I don’t want to be smaller. I don’t want to fall in line.’ The pendulum is just swinging.”
Why it Matters
The emergence of clown activism into mainstream protest discourse signals a broader shift in how movements organise, communicate and resist. In an era when traditional demonstrations frequently struggle to cut through media saturation, the theatricality of clowning offers an alternative language — one built on spectacle, humour and emotional resonance. Its roots stretch back centuries, yet its present-day practitioners are addressing distinctly modern anxieties: immigration enforcement, authoritarian populism, environmental catastrophe. Whether one finds it amusing or alarming, the phenomenon demands attention, because it challenges fundamental assumptions about what protest looks like and who is permitted to lead it. The clowns are not merely entertaining; they are reshaping the playbook.
