Premium Episode 71: Pro-Trump Cartoonist Ben Garrison (Sample)
He loves to draw Hillary's butt. He's a libertarian who just happens to draw trump like he's a biblical figure with a young athlete's body. He got retweeted by Kylie Jenner because he's anti-vaxx. His images were tweaked by neo-nazis to create surprisingly effective memes. Which have in turn been retweeted by Ron Paul. He got invited and then disinvited from the White House social media summit. It involves Mike Cernovich. Alex Jones keeps inviting him on. It's just... a mess. And a fun episode.
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SOURCES:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Garrison
https://grrrgraphics.com/about
http://www.lifeandnews.com/articles/the-rogue-cartoonist-ben-garrison-on-what-its-like-to-be-a-political-cartoonist-during-the-presidential-election/
https://www.adl.org/blog/anti-semitism-used-in-attack-against-national-security-adviser-h-r-mcmaster
https://www.mic.com/articles/143471/the-internet-is-freaking-out-about-this-antifeminist-political-cartoon#.7pKFzt73n
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/ron-paul-racist-caricature-tweet-republican-pattern.html
https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/11/28/a-return-to-normalization-rightbloggers-help-numb-the-nation-to-trump/
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnwmyy/kylie-jenner-anti-vaxx-conspiracy-theory-tweet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11/05/anonymouss-operation-kkk-leak-targets-the-elusive-online-world-of-white-nationalism/
https://www.wired.com/story/ben-garrison-alt-right-cartoonist/
https://www.jta.org/2019/07/10/united-states/cartoonist-disinvited-from-white-house-defends-image-widely-labeled-as-anti-semitic
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/395176-ron-paul-tweets-racist-cartoon-faces-backlash
https://www.salon.com/test/2016/05/18/no_limits_to_alex_jones_hatred_and_insanity_the_right_wing_conspiracy_psycho_thinks_michelle_obama_killed_joan_rivers/
Welcome, listener, to the 71st premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Ben Garrison episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis Fugue.
Not everyone knows who Ben Garrison is, but if you've hung out on the internet, chances are you've experienced his work in some form or other.
His colorful, dense political cartoons are so inherently ridiculous that you can get about 3,000 retweets by just posting the latest one and saying something like, Ben Garrison's drawing style is artless in a way that's difficult to describe.
I think he has like a congenital fear of negative space.
He also cannot help but label every single part of his drawings with words.
Often because they're so overloaded with disparate political points that he's forced to basically explain the cartoon to his audience as if it were some other medium that isn't visual.
There's nothing subtle about them.
It's like, you get the point with trying to be communicated.
It reminds me of, like, maps that I used to draw in, like, kindergarten and preschool.
I would draw secret passageways and stuff, and all the trap doors would be labeled,
and I would be labeled, like this is me at the bottom of the trap door.
All of this stuff, they really do.
I've got a red scholastic journal that's filled with very similarly labeled things
where you just wanna fit as much onto the page as possible.
At the same age, Ben was just filling pages with guns.
Yeah, guns and the blood of animals that he had captured in his backyard.
You could argue Ben is, like, not bad at drawing.
I'm just saying it's completely artless.
Yeah, it's, uh, yeah.
It's so thickly outlined, like, in a kind of, like, Adobe Illustrator way, and it's saturated with digital colorization, and so it's kind of no surprise that in the age of smartphone scrolling, right-wingers have ended up consuming a lot of his cartoons.
Yeah, you know what?
so clearly like you can read them on a smartphone and the outline of every
character has a nice black line so he kind of learned the visual language of
boomers peering down through their reading glasses at their phones yeah you
know what it's not so much like a cartoon as it is like kind of like
hieroglyphics if that makes any sense Yeah, for sure.
It's cultural.
For sure.
So today we're going to explore Ben's career and political commentary, but we're also going to take a look at celebrity Kylie Jenner and politician Ron Paul, both of whom had brief flings with Garrison and were obviously publicly shamed as a result.
Finally, of course, we will examine the absolute bane of Ben Garrison's existence as a cartoonist.
How easy it is for neo-Nazis to slightly modify his images to create effective propaganda.
And half the time, the Nazis don't even bother removing his signature.
Ben Garrison is like the guy who keeps accidentally walking into a big wooden cutout of Hitler and placing his face in the hole.
Whoops!
I looked anti-Semitic again!
But if you really want to know what kind of a guy Ben is, then here's a snippet of an almost three minute long video I took.
I obviously cut it down a little bit.
He made it in 2019.
So this is kind of like sums up who he is.
So it's summer.
There's a beautiful sun out and Ben is just surrounded by lush nature.
But he's not happy.
He has decided to use his selfie stick to wander around and complain about a big issue on his mind that he calls uptalk.
And it started with the valley girl speak.
And in the big cities, in the big blue cities and college campuses.
But now even conservatives... I see conservative sites where people are using up-talking and it has to cease.
Now how do we make it cease?
How do we make it cease before it becomes a law?
Because in an Orwellian society, maybe it'll become against the law for you to speak aggressively by using declarative sentences the way they're supposed to be.
Well, we have to, we have to raise awareness of this problem.
So if you see it on a podcast, I know on a video, whatever you in your comment section, please tell the speaker that they're succumbing to the uptalking virus.
Thank you.
This has been Ben Garrison.
I'll talk to you later.
Bye-bye.
What a fucking weirdo.
I mean, he's just giving people instructions on how to be a crank.
That's what it is.
He's a crank.
Yeah, he's just a cranky old libertarian.
He looks like a guy who would bring, like, animal guests onto, like, a late-night talk show, but then, like, you know, scold the host for, you know, improper handling or something.
Like, I don't even know what he's talking about.
Up-talking?
What does that even mean?
So what he means by uptalk is that the second half of the sentence you speak is not declarative.
It kind of contains the tone of a question.
So it's like a less, I guess, manly and assertive way of speaking.
And he's saying that, like, we're all becoming, I guess, pussified by using Uptalk and it started with the Valley Girls.
And this reminds me of Seb Gorka blaming trans rights off on the Teletubbies.
Like, it's just beautiful.
Beautiful, beautiful thing.
Rogue cartoonist Ben the rogue cartoonist Garrison goes rogue.
Beautiful.
Not much is known of Ben's upbringing.
He told a website that interviewed him on kind of friendly terms that he started drawing cartoons in grade school by caricaturing his classmates and teachers.
He seems purposefully vague about his age, although we know he graduated from Angelo State University in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts.
Assuming he was in his early 20s when that happened, Ben is probably in his 60s.
He wanted to be a fine artist, but got a job as a graphic artist for the San Angelo Standard Times instead.
He claims his first editorial cartoon, quote, featured Uncle Sam delivering a draft notice to an 18-year-old while simultaneously blowing out the kids' birthday cake candles and forming a small atomic explosion.
Now that's not a bad cartoon!
So that was his first!
But that's the thing, that's the period he considers to be non-political.
I guess by non-political, because he does refer to that later, he means non-partisan.
Garrison's website claims his work did not veer political until quote,
Ben began drawing cartoons in 2009 to protest the central banker bailout, bloated government, and the slide towards
tyranny.
The page then continues to boast of Ben's wide readership, but the next passage on his about page is entitled,
I see your name on racist cartoons on the internet. Are you some kind of crazed Nazi or white supremacist?
Oh my god!
He has a FAQ, he has a frequently answered question on his own website as an illustrator where that's one of the questions that's frequently asked.
Seems like it's bad to acknowledge that people often confuse me for a Nazi.
It's true, but they are mistaken.
Garrison, absolutely not mad, calmly answers this apparently frequently asked question.
Ben Garrison has been the target of an ongoing smear campaign to ruin his online reputation and his career as a commercial artist.
Internet trolls have defaced his work into racist and anti-semitic propaganda.
Ben Garrison is neither racist nor anti-semitic.
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