In Ben Garrison, the Alt-Right Found Its Favorite …

But the vicious cycle intensified. The more Garrison fought the defamation, the more the trollsspearheaded by 4chan, 8chan, and an army of extremists commanded by neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, founder of hate site The Daily Stormersmeared his reputation. In their capable hands, the then-unknown Garrison transformed into the most vicious man on the internet, with a long list of nicknames. The most popular of these was Zyklon Ben (after zyklon b, the gas used in Nazi concentration camps), but the web is still littered with threads calling him Ben "One Man Klan" Garrison or Ben "Not White? Shoot On Sight" Garrison and other bits of jingly hate speech. The trolls even got a Fox News affiliate to talk about the fictional Nazi version of Garrison by flooding the comments section during the Baltimore riots. "The meme was more successful than I was," Garrison says. "If you typed my name into Google, you'd only see posts about how I was racist, and a photoshopped picture of me in a Nazi uniform." Which is what that gallery owner saw before she cut ties with Garrison.

Garrison's employment troubles didn't end with just one gallery. According to him, the trolling campaign was so successful he spent the next five years with no income. He became obsessed with stamping out the defamation, but trolls are difficult and expensive to sue, and Garrison worried that his efforts to report those harassing him had gone too far. "I became an SJW myself," he said. "A libertarian against free speech! So I talked to my wife and we decided the best thing to do was to share the real cartoons enough to outspread the fake ones." So he busted out his sketchbook, and Garrison's wife, Tina, became his full-time social media manager.

It worked. Garrison's Twitter account has more than 80,000 followers, many rabidly pro-Trump and eager for Garrison to provide the triumphant portraits of their leader the mainstream media denies them. His cartoons constantly trend on alt-right social media platforms like Gab. Through Patreon, he's even become a modest financial success, though he's quick to point out that the platform doesn't reward his worldview as much as others'. "Pro-tranny cartoons get 15 to 20 grand a month, but conservatives, we dont get that kind of break."

Still, thanks in part to the support of alt-right figureheads like Mike Cernovich, Garrison's income continues to swell. "I commissioned a lot of work at above market rates and promoted him heavily," Cernovich says. "He's a great-hearted person who deserves to succeed. His work is both family-friendly and politically audacious. That's a hard style to pull off." Garrison has a similarly warm relationship with pro-Trump YouTube personality and alleged cult leader Stefan Molyneux, and frequently includes prominent "alt-light" figures like Infowars' Paul Joseph Watson and Yiannopoulos in his cartoons.

For a trolling victim to promote arch-troll Yiannopoulos seems illogical, but Garrison doesn't see it that way. "When Milo got shut down on Twitter, I did a cartoon about it because it's the same thing that happened to me: He lost his voice," Garrison says. That he was using his voice to stir up a racist trolling campaign against actress Leslie Jones doesn't phase Garrison, and he doesn't even see it as real trolling. "He does a little trolling, maybe, but with a twinkle in his eye," he says. "But I'd rather him stick to arguments than that flaming stuff." (That "flaming stuff" he's referring to is being openly homosexual on Real Time with Bill Maher.)

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In Ben Garrison, the Alt-Right Found Its Favorite ...