Is Josh Duggar secretly an N.W.A. superfan?
Josh Duggar is not having a very good year. In May, the eldest of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting admitted to molesting five underage girls, four of whom were his sisters, as a teenager. The 27-year-old married father of four was also linked to a paid Ashley Madison profile when hackers leaked personal information of the infidelity dating site’s millions of customers last week.
Duggar’s Ashley Madison account was associated with the email address [email protected]. The handle “joesmithsonnwa” was also used for a now-deleted OKCupid profile, Gawker reports, which many have speculated belongs to the ex-lobbyist.
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Let’s break that username down. The thought process behind “Joe Smithson” is fairly transparent: you start with a barely-even-trying Joe Smith, realize you might as well be calling yourself John Doe, and tack on a -son in the hopes of sounding slightly less unbelievably generic. That seems in character for a man who—as Gawker notes—may have chosen his profile picture from the top Google Images search results for “random guy.”
But “nwa”? Maybe we have Straight Outta Compton on the brain, but it’s hard to read that three-letter acronym as anything other than Niggaz With Attitude, the seminal West Coast hip-hop group comprised of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, DJ Yella, and MC Ren. Is it possible that the evangelical Christian—whose favorite song, according to the Duggar family website, is the traditional hymn “How Great Thou Art“—could be the world’s least likely fan of gangsta rap?
As much as we’d love to believe it, probably not. We scoured the internet for other possible meanings:
- Neighborhood Watch Association
- Northwest Airlines
- Naval Weapons Analysis
- National Wrestling Alliance
- National Weather Association
- National Watermelon Association
- National Waffle Association
- Nwa, the Igbo word for “child”
Finally, we landed on something plausible: Northwest Arkansas. Duggar was raised in Tontitown, a small town close to the Natural State’s borders with Oklahoma and Missouri. The fast-growing metropolitan area is frequently identified by locals as NWA, an acronym that appears in the names of organizations as diverse as the First National Bank of NWA and CrossFit NWA.
At least we’ll have the mental image of Josh Duggar rapping along to “Fuck Tha Police” to remember this by.
Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion’s Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.