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Not Garrison, but illustrative nonetheless |
Benjamin
“Ben” Garrison is a wingnut and “politically incorrect” editorial cartoonist, QAnon promoter, anti-vaccine activist, champion of all things
pseudoscience, and in general an all-purpose conspiracy theorist. Like many wingnuts, Garrison is a
self-described libertarian, which, as you’d expect given the context, means an authoritarian
(Trump) paleoconservative fundie whose criticism of tyranny and
oppression is limited to the exclusively
imaginary forces of tyranny and oppression that populates, supported by various
conspiracy theories, his own paranoid mind (and which everyone else ostensibly lies about). Or, as he puts it himself, “as
socialists, the Democrats naturally hate Christianity. It’s predictable. They
want to destroy our culture, our economy, and our freedom including freedom of
religion. Yes, that will be extinguished too. Communists want to be worshipped
and they will permit only their own religion, the worship of the state.”
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].
Clean food & water & modern living standards did the
trick.”
Indeed, the “
polio shot wasn't even
needed”.
- 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 |
The whole
idea of climate change is really a conspiracy engineered by Al Gore (presumably in the 1890s), for “[w]ho benefits from
carbon taxes? Al Gore, of course” – Gore “has a vested interest
to push the global warming/climate change agenda no matter what. Scientists are
bought off. Data are distorted.” (Garrison lives in a very small world.). Indeed,
climate change is being used to perpetuate “worldwide communism”.
Part of the evidence, as Garrison for some hard-to-discern reason sees it, is
that the biggest threat to the planet,
Fukushima,
“is completely ignored”. Greta Thunberg, meanwhile, is a puppet of Soros,
who wants to usher in global socialism because he is a billionaire and that’s what billionaires want.
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