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| Not Garrison, but illustrative nonetheless |
His cartoons seem to be somewhat effective with his intended audiences, largely due to Garrison’s penchant for using labels to explain everything in minute detail; he knows his audiences.
Conspiracy theories: pseudoscience & denialism
Garrison’s work is an example of crank magnetism; indeed, for any topic that comes his way, you can be sure he’ll look for the silliest take consistent with his fervent paranoia. A peculiar, recurring theme in his cartoons, by the way, is Don Quixote’s fight with windmills, a sequence Garrison consistently fails to understand, with some unintentionally hilarious results (e.g. here and here).
Though he claims that he is “not anti-science”, Garrison does (falsely) believe that vaccines cause autism – based primarily on the mythical autism epidemic and its perceived correlation with a mythical increase in the numbers of vaccine doses children are given – and that vaccines are a money-making conspiracy managed by Big Pharma, which is “tied in with the globalists” to ensure that “natural cures are suppressed” and to “ ‘control and regulate’ supplements,” which Garrison thinks, based on the marketing materials from big supplement producers that are under no control or oversight, are safe and effective. As Garrison sees it, vaccines are full of toxic ingredients like bribery, Guillian-Barre, mercury, formaldehyde, lobbyists, cancer, aluminum, seizures, autism, and thimerosal – in addition to the usual suspects aluminum, polysorbate 80, “aborted fetal DNA”, and “bacterial & viral DNA”. During Covid, Garrison also promoted various conspiracy theories accusing Bill Gates of trying to use vaccines as a depopulation tool. Meanwhile, his cartoons often depict central anti-vaccine activists like RFK jr., Kent Heckenlively, Del Bigtree, Polly Tommey, Andrew Wakefield (Garrison is a fan of Wakefield), Suzanne Humphries and (for good measure) Milo Yiannopoulos as superheroes. Other standard anti-vaccine PRATTs promoted by Garrison include:
- “vaccine makers” have “immunity from lawsuits” (false, of course); and also, in line with his general paranoia: “Some statists would now love to see another law: One that makes criticism of vaccination abuse a crime”)
- The Hepatitis B vaccine is a laughable scam since babies are not “in danger of being exposed to it” [dangerously false, of course]
- “In fact, most of the diseases
had already largely gone away before a vaccine was invented [they had not].
- News stories about children dying from the flu are malevolent propaganda, since “people die of the flu all the time and always have”, so there is no reason to get the flu shot. Just think about it.
- Measles is “a harmless and nuisance disease”
- “Don’t ask what’s in the vaccines, either. Most doctors don’t even know.”
Garrison has also lamented the alleged suppression of Mike Adams, the “Natural News Health Ranger”, and “his valuable information”.
As for climate change, Garrison is a denier. Contrary to all evidence, Garrison believes (e.g.) that
- “the ice caps at the poles is [sic] growing”
- “the sun is the primary driver of climate”, but “it gets ignored” because “those running the show at the top want us to pay a carbon tax for breathing.”
- A recurring feature of his cartoons is to claim that days with cold weather disproves global warming and proves that Al Gore is a con man.
- Contrary to science, Garrison still thinks “the hockey stick is broken” based on talking points he’s read on denialist websites.
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| Al Gore: fooling the world since 1912 |
Yes, there are chemtrail and anti-GMO conspiracy theories, too, but we can’t be bothered.
Conspiracy theories: Grand unified ones
The Thunberg/Soros conspiracy theory points toward the somewhat nebulous grand unified conspiracy theory that ties the various paranoid strands of denialism and nonsense that constitute Garrison’s mind together. The deep state consists of a group of extremely wealthy bankers that, by the incoherence permitted by grand unified conspiracy theories, want to usher in communism. Soros himself is a puppet of the Rothschild banking family, who is (or is part of) the puppet masters that control world events (that they all happen to be Jewish is just how things are): “The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of corrupt and powerful men and women from the Deep State Swamp. They control the government, the corporate media, too much of the judicial system, and the security agencies. They use their corporate media to lie to us and control narratives. We conservatives realized they were lying to us, so we found the truth on the Internet. Now conservative voices are being censored”. The UN – which is also behind the California wildfires – is controlled by the “Satanic Illuminati.” (Garrison’s toying with anti-semitism is what led Trump to rescind his invitation to attend a “Social Media Summit” in 2019; in response to being uninvited, Garrison promptly sued the ADL for defamation, characterizing, in the court filings, the ADL as “a tool of the Democratic Party and private corporations, such as Google, to target Trump supporters, members of the Republican Party, and conservatives generally”; the suit also insisted that “the Rothschilds controlled Soros and that Soros controlled McMaster”).
Of course, once you’ve committed yourself to a deranged grand unified conspiracy theory, anything goes. So for Garrison, the January 6 2021 Capitol storming was apparently orchestrated not even by Antifa, as many nonsense wingnuts conveniently like to believe, but by the FBI. On January 8, 2021, Garrison was himself banned from Twitter along with several other far-right figures (including Trump himself) for incitement of violence during the January 6 attempted coup; to Garrison, the ban was of course just another example of how the “Soros-funded” globalist left is suppressing free speech.
Conspiracy theories: false flags & current events
As a political cartoonist, your primary role is to weigh in on current events, and Garrison weighs in with his particular blend of insight and analysis: For the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, for instance, Garrison prominently criticized the librul focus on gun control, which is “ignorant and insensitive” and “had nothing to do with it” (so there). But he also raised the possibility that “there were multiple shooters” and asked the pertinent question about the shooter “[d]he convert to Islam recently?”, though he admitted that “[i]t seems unlikely” – Garrison doesn’t like Muslims and sees the threat of Islam everywhere: “Obama (probably a Muslim himself) began forcing [Islam] upon our country and now we increasingly need to change American culture to favor the religion of Muhammad. Muslims will soon outnumber Jews in this country. Will Sharia Law replace the Constitution?” (Garrison thinks ‘yes’, because Islam and sharia law is a “George Soros vision of globalism” … there is nothing billionaire communist Jewish bankers like more than theocratic Islam unless it’s communism).
With regard to mass shootings, however, Garrison has more than toyed with Sandy Hook trutherism – his defense of Alex Jones, for instance, was based in part on commending Jones’s valuable information on “the Deep State, including the corrupt security agencies, the Bohemian Grove, the CFR, the Bilderbergs, fluoride in our water, the lies about 9-11, and yes, even Sandy Hook”, which, according to Garrison, “had many anomalies that should be questioned.” Even more obviously, to Garrison, as to wingnut commentators in general, Cesar Sayoc’s attempted mail-bombings of prominent Democrats and liberal public figures was obviously a false flag operation committed by liberals – there’s a desperate evolution in his takes on that one as the case unfolded, including obviously photoshopped images of Sayoc’s supposed voter registration info to show him as a Democrat and the hilariously desperate notion that Stormy Daniels and Sayoc worked at the same nightclub.
The liberal media machine is a powerful adversary (and ruled exclusively, like all of science and the whole Democratic party, by George Soros’s bottomless pockets) for people like Ben Garrison, however, and it is easy for the sheeple to get confused when media is employing their large stock of crisis actors to stage news events. The 2018 incident when migrants attempting to cross the US–Mexico border from Tijuana – part of “the Soros funded caravan” – were tear-gassed by border patrols, for instance, was entirely staged by the “Fake News Media”. Unfortunately, most people don’t recognize how deep and wide the Fake News Media network extends; Garrison for instance mentions an anecdote of him talking with an elderly woman who claimed to have admired Walter Cronkite, and how he had a “sad duty to inform her” that Cronkite “was a far-left globalist who prided himself as being at the right hand of Satan. He loved the U.N. and collectivist causes. He conducted ceremonies at the Bohemian Grove. […] a perfect spokesman for the Deep State”.
Conspiracy theories: Covid
Garrison believes that the Covid pandemic was a hoax made by the Deep State for the purpose of oppressing the people; it is “the latest crisis and the Deep State and the Fake News media are having a grand old time fanning the flames of fear.”
Exactly who was behind it, varies a bit, however: At one point, Garrison promoted the discredited conspiracy theory that the pathogen was a bioweapon produced by the Chinese to target Christians, since the Chinese are communists and communists are anti-religion (Garrison emphasizes that by randomly and falsely claiming that social-democrat Bernie Sanders promises action against Christians, whom he [Sanders] calls “religious bigots”). His reasoning is mostly that the Chinese communists would do so because communists are evil and lying, and as evidence that communists are evil and lying he cites the alleged fact that “[t]he current Chinese Communists are lying about the release of a bioweapon from one of their labs in Wuhan.” At least the allegation provides some clear insight into how Ben Garrison navigates the world.
Somewhat later, however, Garrison rather went for arguing that the virus was made by Bill Gates; Gates is, in Garrison’s mind, a eugenicist who wants to murder people, including through his promotion of GMO crops and “a handy-dandy microchip” in his vaccines (Garrison is not subtle about his accusations). The evidence is mostly that Gates had earlier warned about the possibility of a pandemic and why else would “a former computer nerd and mogul become so interested in vaccination and disease?” if it weren’t because he was harboring depopulation plans. How Garrison reasons about other people’s motivation tells you little about other people but might tell you something important about Garrison. Unfortunately, however, Gates/Soros/Rothschild have the governments and media (including Fox News) in their pockets, and “the corrupt WHO and CDC”, in turn, “have us controlled like puppets on strings. We obey without question. Citizens are not allowed to question medical ‘authorities’ without fearing censorship or ridicule. When the time comes for a mandatory vaccine, people will already have become conditioned to obey the medical ‘authorities’, and it's all going according to plan.” The illustration is here. Yes, they’re turning us into sheeple. Wake up.
His wife Tina, who since 2018 has occasionally submitted cartoons, too, with a ‘TinaToon’ signature and a style and substance similar to Ben’s, was at least euphoric when Trump defunded the WHO, claiming that the WHO hates America and that China “reaps all the benefits”. Tina is, of cousre, anti-vaccine, too, having produced cartoons with the slamdunk gotcha ‘if vaccines are so necessary, how did humans survive without them for millions of years’ (hint: they didn’t).
In September 2021, Garrison and his wife contracted COVID-19 themselves. Garrison claimed to treat it through self-medicating with nonsense woo like as ivermectin, beet root juice, and zinc, and continued to shout, loudly, that COVID-19 vaccines were “not real vaccines” but “gene therapy”, “free poison” and “foul spike protein-producing jabs which are neither safe nor effective”. He also promised never to visit a hospital since hospitals were killing COVID-19 patients for “extra money for Covid death reports, which is necessary to keep fear ramped up”.
Conspiracy theories: QAnon
But of course. “We are now enduring rampant lies, grift, plunder, pedophilia and satanism at the highest levels of government,” says Garrison, and that’s what the international-Jewish-banker-funded Deep State is ultimately all about. Garrison was an early (and dead serious) promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory: “A while back I drew Hillary kissing the ring of the Devil just before making her convention acceptance speech. It turned out to be a prophetic cartoon.” Garrison does not like Hillary Clinton (“she needs to be investigated, prosecuted and LOCKED UP!” the order of events seems irrelevant to Garrison.) Clinton and her campaign “are evil. They engage in Satanic practices in order to gain dominance. They want power over the populace and they have succeeded. It’s now time to expose these monsters. The Clintons are connected to a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. Both Hillary and Bill made many trips to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Pedophile Island.’No wonder the Clintons have put vast sums of money into banks in the mideast. They have their escape hatches ready.” Unfortunately, many people live in “hermetically sealed echo chambers” and are unable to recognize this dimension to Clinton and her companions, including, in particular, John Podesta, who has also featured in Garrison’s cartoons on numerous occasions and who, according to Garrison, may in fact be the son of Josef Mengele (as suggested by some YouTube video Garrison came across in an entirely non-echo-chamberly fashion). Garrison has also parroted the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” which is not at all suggestive of the sort of sheeplike attitude he otherwise criticizes.
Garrison has also promoted Georgia Guidestones nonsense, conspiracy theories about Satanist Illuminati-led New World Order depopulation measures, and claimed that 5G is a plot to kill people and control their minds (in some order). And yes, there is a QAnon connection between everything here: Garrison is of course anti-abortion, and if Garrison has an opinion on something, you can be sure it is backed up by some delusional conspiracy theory. So, according to Garrison:
“[t]he Illuminati who controls the Deep State loves abortion. The Satanists among them love to torture and kill innocent people and nobody is more innocent than a newborn baby. What’s next, the execution of children because they’re ‘unwanted’ by their parents? Before you laugh at this notion, consider the Illuminati is already trying to carry out the message on their Georgia Guide Stones. Satanists for some reason like to announce in advance what they're going to do to us, and they’re doing it right now. They put fluoride in the drinking water and chemtrails in the air. They force their GMO foods on us as well as their vaccines. Have you noticed how anxious they are for us to get jabbed with flu shots? […] The next killer will be 5G. Not only will it be used to control minds, it will also fry them. The illuminati don't want us on ‘their’ planet. They own it. They think they own us. We are their cattle to be culled. If we accept their premise that life is nothing but disconnected matter without meaning, then it will make it all the easier for them to finish us off.”
Garrison is also a Moon landing denialist, claiming that the Moon landing was faked by NASA and that “the CIA lied about it” because the Van Allen belts.
Diagnosis: As someone aptly characterized him, Ben Garrison is the Jack Chick of the wingnut conspiracy circus. Unfortunately, Garrison seems to enjoy a lot more authority and recognition than Jack Chick ever did. Like his sympathetic audiences, Garrison doesn’t understand the reality he inhabits, doesn’t understand that he doesn’t understand it, and tries to fill the gaps in his understanding and resolve his confusions with anger and paranoia. The usual stuff. We should feel sorry for him, but we don’t.
Hat-tip: Rationalwiki