QAA Podcast - The Painting Passion of Jon McNaughton feat Joshua Citarella (Premium E285) Sample

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

An exploration of the most famous right wing crank painter in the game: artist Jon McNaughton. From tea-party-era images of Obama burning the constitution to MAGA-era images of Trump as Atlas, the progression of his career has mirrored a deeper shift in the Republican base and its obsessions. Our guest is artist, writer, and host of the Doomscroll podcast Joshua Citarella. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/qaa Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Keep mehame If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 285, the painting passion of John McNaughton. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View. The purpose of art is to reflect the identity and beliefs of the audience back to them, giving them a sense of comfort and validation. Art should make you nod and go, yeah, that's me all right. Or, yeah, I do hate or love that thing or person.

Or even, yeah, those are my political beliefs expressed in a clear and direct way by someone who agrees with me. Now, obviously, the best art is made by AI because it allows the audience to write a prompt for exactly what they want to see, read, or hear, and the machine squirts out an art piece made just for them. Paintings are probably some of the worst art out there because it's difficult for the artist to know if the audience, When viewing the painting, will be angry, horny, happy, or bored, which are the four emotions. Obviously, paintings got better after we invented the internet, because they could be photographed and posted to social media, generating engagement. Engagement helps the artist understand what people want, giving these lost creators

and starving artists an opportunity to change their output to better please the consumer. But in the before times, when AI was just a glint in some evil nerd's eye, A man was born who'd become a harbinger of things to come. His paintings look like they could be AI, but are probably best understood as a data set for AI to train on, granting John McNaughton, its creator, eventual immortality. Now, if you're an American that uses the Internet, you've probably come across the work of John McNaughton at some point,

perhaps unknowingly. So before we jump in, I'd like to introduce our guest this week, Joshua Citarela. He's an artist, writer, and the host of the Doom Scroll podcast, which I recommend you go check out on YouTube. Josh, welcome on the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here, long time, first time. I'm happy to throw the full prestige and pedigree, my institutional experience from the art world to say that John McNaughton is the sharp tip of the spear for the avant-garde. Many people are saying it, and you're about to find out why. John McNaughton was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1967. When he was 16, his family moved to Utah. There in the city of Provo,

McNaughton attended Brigham Young University, where he studied art. After graduating, he worked in finance for eight years, making money that would allow him to pursue his creative passion. A Mormon, John stuck to painting landscapes and religious scenes until 2008, when the candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama infuriated him so much that it profoundly changed the trajectory of his art. Now, there's very little doubt that McNaughton's political awakening accompanied the rise of the Tea Party movement, which started around 2007.

From that point on, John McNaughton created mostly what he calls political paintings, essentially oil-painted propaganda memes with zero subtlety, all depicting the gripes and grumbles of the post-W. Bush conservative mind. His style, which has basically remained unchanged for the last 17 years, is a sort of crude realism with a touch of impressionism. It's defined by representational competency and a total lack of imagination and experimentation. His painting style in my mind

harkens back to one that could be used to illustrate a children's Bible in the 70s. Back before we were doing Pixar bullshit, you know, back when we respected and paid the people who illustrated our books. So in this vintage 2012 clip of Sean Hannity on Fox, McNaughton is brought on to discuss the supposed liberal outrage over his paintings.

Even though his paintings and many of his other works have come under intense scrutiny and controversy, the artist is defending his images, say he will not back away from his beliefs. Joining me now with more is the artist himself. John McDonougham is with us, John. Welcome aboard. Thanks, Sean. It's good to be here. All right. Are you surprised that some of the reaction you've gotten in some of your paintings? I'm not surprised. I've done these kind of paintings before, and the country is very divided.

And whenever I do a painting like this, the left comes down on me pretty hard. Yeah, and I'm used to that. And you did another one. Apparently this other one, I first saw it on the Drudge Report, is, what, six feet long? And this is of all our founders. And explain, and you have a picture of President Obama in front, and they're like, basically, look, all our other presidents. Explain what that's about.

Well, the title of that painting is the forgotten man. And you have this man sitting on the bench that represents every American. future generations, those who may not have the same opportunities. And all these presidents are gathering around, you know, wondering if what's going to happen to this forgotten man. But as you look closely, you see President Obama and he's actually standing on the Constitution. You know, and that was the first painting I did that had President Obama in it. And I was inspired to do that after they actually passed the Obamacare back in 2010.

kind of what triggered this whole thing he's like he's like if you look closely uh you can see andrew jackson trying to catch a dump uh from baroque obama as he stands behind him it does look somewhat like that even though he's he's he's going like why would you do this to to to the constitution but it also looks like he's just holding out his hands to catch a turn that is i didn't even notice that but yes of course that's the that's the first thing that comes to my it's like a Roarshock test. Like, that's the first thing I see, of course. Although this guy, I've never seen him before.

He really does look like kind of like a market analyst kind of guy. Yeah, he has like a kind of, it's hard, it's hard to describe like a smirking little goblin face when he describes like how angry the left is. Like something in him has been awakened. He's figured out a way to get some inner psychosexual thing scratched through his art. Finally, after, you know, just painting beautiful paintings, he's like, damn. They're all really angry at me. And my favorite part is that there's the three bad presidents all the way on the right. So you got like FDR, Bill Clinton, and Theodore Roosevelt.

And they're all clapping. And then you've got the kind of like, not so great president, George W. Bush. And he's kind of looking off confused. Like he's looking to the good presidents to be like, how should I feel about this? Him stepping on the Constitution. And there's money strewn all over the ground. the poor guy who John McNaughton has come under fire for depicting as a systematically light-haired, blue-eyed kind of Aryan.

Hard to miss that one, yeah. Yeah, he's down on his luck on the bench. I mean, what I really love about that clip is just the way they kind of like carefully explicate the elements of the painting. And they're saying things like, you see how Barack Obama is spinning in the face of a bald eagle. That's actually symbolic. Yes. This is a systematic thing for him is he doesn't just do insanely unsubtle art.

He also explains every unsubtle detail of it. And he thinks if he hides enough unsubtle, insane, like, you know, on the nose metaphors, that that makes it complex. If there's just a bunch of them. It's like, where's Waldo? Like, there's just so much detail. But all of the details are this simple. Like, Obama step on Constitution, that is bad. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.

For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Plan with Julian the Nanny, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian live 10 episodes of the spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad plus 20 episodes of trickle down with me Travis view it's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting Travis for once I agree with

you and I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA well that's not an opinion it's a fact you're so right Jake we love and appreciate all of our listeners yes we do and Travis is actually crying right now I think out of gratitude maybe that's not true the part about me crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.