An Interview With Ben Garrison, the Internet's Most Infamous Cartoonist
Art by Alizeh Khalifa
Ben Garrison is the most infamous political cartoonist alive. If you’re even remotely tuned into social media, you’ve likely run into one of Garrison’s cartoons. His humorous, bizarre, and always sensational pieces have gotten millions of likes on Twitter, 4Chan, and Reddit, and have been shared by everyone from Julian Assange to Donald Trump Jr. to Kylie Jenner.
Garrison’s subject matter is the fodder for instant cancellation, dealing in anti-vaccination, Pizzagate, South African ‘white genocide,’ and free speech for conservatives. Yet his foundational beliefs are cut from traditional American libertarianism. “I’m pro-constitution and pro-liberty. I’m anti-war, anti-big government, and especially anti-socialism,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Curiously, Garrison has been most trolled by the alt-right, who feel that his cartoons don’t go far enough, and edit racist tropes of Jews into them while keeping his name on the art. These twisted, repurposed works cost Garrison his career as an exhibiting artist, forcing him to rely on the internet to distribute his cartoons.
Garrison has vehemently denounced the trolls’ offensive hate, but his genuine work has also been called antisemitic—he was invited, then disinvited, to the Trump White House for a cartoon depicting George Soros and the Rothschild family as puppetmasters (which, for the record, Garrison insisted was not antisemitic, but referred to the Rothschilds’ influence in banking, with some rabbis coming to his defense).
While most people on the left consider Garrison a pestilence, his recent anti-Biden cartoons are gaining an unlikely fanbase—progressive Bernouts. They’ve been rejoicing in Garrison’s attacks on Biden and his incisive critiques on the bourgeoisie. “I have no idea how diehard conservative anti-vax anti-climate-change ben garrison produced this astonishingly correct image,” one Tweet read about Garrison’s illustration of the ‘crony capitalist pyramid.’ To pigeonhole Garrison as just a pro-Trump cartoonist is a classic media failure: Garrison’s anti-authoritarianism and disdain for the 1% would be more familiar to a revolutionary pyschedelic enthusiast than a Marco Rubio Republican.
All cartoons by Ben Garrison (Grrr Graphics)
I recently spoke over the phone with the 63-year-old Garrison. As a former Orthodox Jew, I wanted to hear his thoughts from him directly. From his home in Montana, he spoke to me about the 2020 race, why our problems trace back to the Federal Reserve, and how coronavirus has affected his view of Trump. While a bit zany, he’s totally sincere, and his conviction in the face of social ridicule and financial punishment is admirable. Having been ‘cancelled’ in multiple realms, Garrison is one of the few commentators able to ridicule Biden and single out the 1% without suffering further consequences. In other words, a free artist.
Ben, thanks for speaking to us. What’s your take on coronavirus?
It’s a complicated thing. The virus is real and it’s killing people, but it’s also a distraction from the financial meltdown we are seeing. This all goes back to the Federal Reserve taking over our currency. It’s the same thing that Andrew Jackson battled in his Presidency with the Second National Bank. It took him two terms to get rid of them. That was essentially the Federal Reserve—because they had control over our money supply and the currency—and then Woodrow Wilson brought it back. This is the end result.
I’m kind of surprised it took over 100 years for the system to finally start collapsing like we’re seeing. This virus is a giant distraction! Sure, it is real, and if China accidentally leaked such a bioweapon they have to be held accountable, but the powers that be really jumped on the opportunity to bring the population under control.
Most people are trying to make a living, and they don’t want to stop eating meat and driving their car. Well now we have the virus and they’ve stopped driving their cars and we have meat shortages. [The government] is using this virus as leverage to get what they want, and what they want—and I had one liberal friend who laughed in my face when I said this—is eugenics and depopulation. It’s very disturbing that everyone’s falling in line and caving into all this crap and having to wear the mask and having to stay at home. How easily their liberties have been bought off by a lousy $1200!
You were a Trump supporter in 2016. How has coronavirus impacted your view of him?
Well I liked Rand Paul in 2016 until I saw he didn’t generate enough interest, and that’s when I cast my allegiance to Trump.
But [coronavirus] has had a deleterious effect. I’m in a quandary because I really went all-in on Trump and I saw him as a populist president—similar to Andrew Jackson, whom he has a portrait of in the Oval Office. Trump was a guy who expressed interest in auditing the Federal Reserve! I saw him as our last best hope to combat the globalist socialist takeover—that’s why they’re so anxious to get him out of office. But I don’t think he has handled [coronavirus] right.
To hand over his power to this medical tyranny...that was not a good move. This is exactly what they want. They wanted a collapse of the economy and now we have to go along with the plan, a total socialist makeover which will be a new feudalism of sorts. He’s essentially given them a blank check to create a vaccine, which I will not be taking under any circumstances. If they knock on the door wanting to jab me, I’m going to have a pistol in my hand and I’ll go out blazing.
It’s bad enough that I have to pay their useless taxes—if I don’t, they come and take away everything I own. But I’m drawing the line with my body. I’m not going to take any of their foul vaccines. My body, my choice, right?
How will coronavirus affect the 2020 election?
Unfortunately, Trump is in a kerfuffle as he has had Fauci and Birx take over his podium. That’s really discouraging for me. I don’t want to bash him, I want him to come about on his own and realize it. This could be a ruinous event for his presidency, except for that Joe Biden is so completely unelectable. But that’s why I think Democrats put Biden in there—they’re going to have the convention, and he’s going to be so obviously incompetent that they’re going to put Hillary or someone else to replace Biden because he has no chance on the debate stage against Trump.
Your cartoons played a part in the 2016 election. What are you going to focus on for the 2020 election?
Well, the whole thing boils down to our immoral currency system that crushes the middle class. Everybody is getting poorer; the millennials don’t stand a chance. This is no longer a capitalist system—it’s crony capitalism at best—but it’s drifting toward fascism. What do I mean by that? When the government, combined with the Federal Reserve, can pick and choose who gets bailed out with trillions of dollars—where is that money going? It’s not going to the people who really need it, the people who lost their jobs. It’s going towards the 1%.
We saw this with the stock market. It should have collapsed but the Feds stepped in and protected the 1% who own 40% of the stock market. 55% of Americans don’t own any stock at all. They don’t have any benefits over what the Federal Reserve is doing. And of course they don’t because the Reserve isn’t audited and can do whatever they want!
When Ben Bernanke was questioned by, of all people, Bernie Sanders, who asked ‘Where did trillions in taxpayer loans go?’ He said ‘I’m not going to tell you, it’s none of your business!’ That really opened my eyes. The Constitution says Congress is in control of currency. But what happened in 1913 is that Congress gave away their power to a private central bank organization in the Federal Reserve. There’s nowhere in the Constitution it says they can do that! They’re not allowed to delegate congressional powers into private banker hands. Nobody mentions it, but the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, people don’t know their rights. They totally acquiesce: “Yes sir, no sir.” We’ve been trained in school to obey authority, not to develop a mind capable of thinking. You see the same thing with social distancing—it goes from a recommendation to the force of law and now you have police harassing people over it. A lot of these sheriffs are tyrannical-minded anyways, so you’re seeing all these tyrants in full bloom right now.
I complain about it in my cartoons. I complained about the PATRIOT Act. I complained about the government taking and pushing all the time. But they’re never going to stop. Well then, I’m never going to stop either. I’m going to keep drawing the cartoons. Even if it’s a lost cause, I’m going to still do them.
You’ve been the victim of a lot of trolling online. People have repurposed your cartoons in a hateful manner to harm you in real life. Have you been able to overcome that?
Well, I’ve regained my own voice. All these people thought I was [antisemitic] because these doppelgängers of my cartoons were created and I finally dispelled that.
In 2016, I had a friend of President Trump’s call me and start chewing me out: ‘We like your cartoons but you’ve got to lay off the antisemitism!’ And I said ‘I’ve never drawn an antisemitic cartoon in my life.’ And he said he saw a cartoon with a Jew rubbing his hands. I told him that I didn’t draw that, that a troll edited my cartoon. But it taints you; it’s like when they tell a rape victim ‘Well, you must have done something to deserve it.’
All I did was express my free speech and everyone started taking my cartoons and it destroyed my commercial art career and certainly my fine art career. And the [antisemitism] is still sort of the underlying perception of me.
Anyways, last year in 2019, I got invited to the Social Media Summit at the White House. I thought all this stuff had blown over. I’m a legitimate cartoonist; I don’t draw racist or antisemitic cartoons or none of that stuff. Regardless, Jake Tapper—and he’s a failed cartoonist, he really hates my guts—alerted the Anti-Defamation League which contacted the White House and told them I’m blatantly antisemitic. So I was banned from the White House.
The cartoon that got Garrison banned from the White House.
For one day, I was the most evil man on the face of the planet! The headlines were ‘Antisemitic Cartoonist Banned from the White House.” It was a vicious slur. How could I push back?
But I’m not antisemitic. I’m not going after George Soros or the Rothschilds because they may or may not be Jewish. I don’t care about that. I care about what they do. They’re a historically important family.
Do you have any peers you enjoy in the cartoon game? Are political cartoons coming back in vogue?
Well, editorial cartoons are in a transitional stage. There’s a lot of other cartoonists that complain that editorial cartooning is dead. But it’s not dead, they just failed at it. For years, glamour boys had plum jobs making 100k a year at a major metro and now they’re realizing that to survive, they have to get on the internet and do what I’m doing.
Can you imagine me in a newspaper? I would never be able to draw what I’m drawing. I still don’t have a salary or health insurance or a house...I’m walking on a tightrope and that’s how most of us get by now. But the millennials are in the same situation. They don’t have a chance.
I couldn’t have done this without my wife Tina. She was so mad at the trolling, she was like ‘We’re not going to let them [affect us]...We have to go on social media and get our cartoons out there.’ I haven’t been banned or blacklisted yet. So I’ve got to keep drawing the cartoons while I can, because I don’t know when Twitter will pull the plug.
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