MAGA political cartoonist confirms he has COVID, says he's treating it with beet juice and zinc
What does a right-wing cartoonist draw these days? Usually strange images of a buff Donald Trump, and his pretend multi-racial MAGA following. But if you are Ben Garrison, who came to prominence as a darling of the alt-right movement and a self-identified libertarian, you spend time in your Montana home drawing images of Joe Biden wearing a burglar mask and trying to run away with “red” states labeled MI, PA, NV, WI, GA, and AZ falling out of a hole in your “Election Theft” bag. You also attack COVID-19 as being overblown, and vaccines and hospitals as being death sentences for rubes.
Garrison is also reportedly sick with COVID-19. Garrison, who has been banned from Twitter because of his support of the insurrection and the Big Lie, emailed with Gizmodo, explaining how he’s been sick for about two weeks, though it doesn’t seem he has actually been tested for COVID-19. “Yes, it’s definitely Covid and we’ve had all the symptoms. My wife and [I] went out with a couple to a restaurant and the next day all four of us were sick. One of us went to see a doctor and was told she had Covid, and that was the clincher.” Not exactly how that works, but who knows. Maybe these four have been hanging out for a little while and just happened to all show symptoms the day after dinner.
According to Garrison he’s been taking all of the things proven not to work like ivermectin, “various vitamins,” beet juice, and “a lot of Zinc.” He says that he and his wife have had a “rough” time over the past two weeks and Garrison himself has lost his senses of taste and smell. “I would never go to a hospital with Covid. Robert David Steele did it a few weeks ago and they killed him. The hospitals get extra money for Covid death reports, which is necessary to keep fear ramped up.”
Some more of the vaccine science Garrison espouses:
David Steele, a wack-a-doo conspiracy theorist, died in a Florida hospital like so many other right-wing conspiracy pundits who have used their platforms to speak out against vaccinations in general and COVID-19 vaccines, specifically. Garrison isn’t even up-to-date on Steele’s version of conspiracy theory. Before Steele died, he wrote a blog post about the trust he had in the hospital he was at. “I will not take the vaccination, though I did test positive for whatever they’re calling ‘COVID’ today, but the bottom line is that my lungs are not functioning…We will never be the same because now we know that we’ve all been lied to about everything. But, now we also know that we can trust each other. I’m alive today because I had a network that put me into a good hospital in Florida,” wrote Steele shortly before he passed away from COVID-19.
Garrison also promoted a cornucopia of misinformation to Gizmodo in support his untenable positions, including the belief that mRNA vaccines are “gene therapy” and are more dangerous than COVID-19. Oh, yeah, the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, isn’t vaccinated nor is Bill Gates. The conspiracy theory around Bourla is based on the wildly irresponsible reporting of Newsmax wraith Emerald Robinson, who promoted the idea falsely to hundreds of thousands of followers in early August of this year. If she had read the article she was promoting before spewing out her tweet, she would have realized she was claiming the opposite of the truth. The Gates conspiracy theory is even less tenable, as it consists entirely of people looking at images and video of Gates getting his vaccine and saying it’s a pretend pantomime of getting a shot.
Here’s a reminder of the kind of profound(ly racist) satire Garrison provides his fans.