Garry Trudeau began cartooning as a counter-cultural figure at Yale in the 1960s. As we now know, many of those involved in the counterculture were not advocates of greater human freedom or the advancement of the American people. Their role was to mock and destroy. There was often something malicious beneath the surface of their “high ideals.”
Beginning in 1970, the cartoon strip Doonesbury took this counter-cultural role to over a thousand newspapers daily. And while newspapers are dying fossils, cartoons like Doonesbury live on and on, recycling what passes for liberal humor. Go to any college library, and you’ll find stacks of graphic novels. Yes, cartooning lives.
In the 1960s, one often suspected that these opponents of the Vietnam War, advocates of what Democrat Sen. Tom Eagleton called "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion," were acting less on the principle that America should withdraw from overseas conflicts and more on an active sympathy for totalitarianism. This explains why so many are now interventionist hawks.
They are ever ready to harness the military-industrial complex for ideological colonialism. Why not use bombs to make the world safe for the rainbow flag, trans rights, and the sexual revolution they spearheaded? The film "Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb" was supposed to be a parody of the Right, but today is it not the other way around?
In his March 10 weekly Sunday cartoon, Trudeau let it all hang out. The theme of the cartoon is how to work with the FBI to help hunt down people who trespassed on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020. Self-awareness is not something Leftists are often good at, which is why their humor has all the lightness of a being of a Siberian chain gang.
Today's Doonesbury: "Sedition hunting." https://t.co/ckcANmPASY
— Doonesbury (@DoonesburyComic) March 10, 2024
At the end of the cartoon is a URL to an FBI site hunting down these Americans. In one of the stupidest captions you will ever read, it says, “KIDS! Want to be a sedition hunter like me? Go to [the link] And be sure to ask your civics teacher for CREDIT!”
I don’t think there are many “kids” under 70 reading Doonesbury. And since the strip is old cartoon reruns six days a week with only one new cartoon on Sundays, it barely has a pulse. In the past, Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame criticized Trudeau for his minimal work ethic, while the Saturday Review of Books called his strip when he came back from a year-long break in the 1980s “predictable, mean-spirited”. It seems little has changed over the decades.
What his latest bout of nonsense shows is that much of the counter-cultural cream that rose to the top thanks to the 1960s continues to sour with age. Rather than being principled foes of the FBI and the police state, they were only green with envy.
Related: How to Resist the Left
No, police overreach wasn’t bad. It was just the wrong people engaging in it! These green-eyed monsters just wanted the power in their own hands to harass, entrap, persecute, and jail their political opponents without so much as an ounce of mercy.
In the left’s snitch culture, Garry Trudeau may be a hero. But unless the Left is able to go full Stasi here, I don’t think most Americans will give him extra credit.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member