Earlier this year a Daniel Brannan cartoon caused a bit of a fuss.
Well, Daniel is not one to let the dust settle.
From the Coeur d’Alene Press at the beginning of this month:
Bigoted postcards arrived in Coeur d’Alene mailboxes Thursday, prompting outrage and solidarity from community leaders and candidates.
The postcard, postmarked with Tuesday’s date and location of the U.S. Postal Service sorting center in Spokane, delivers an animated rendering of a Sept. 17 photograph taken at the Coeur d’Alene City Council meeting, where president of the Kootenai County Human Rights Task Force and fellow council candidate Christie Wood posed with Mayor Steve Widmyer and Love Lives Here CDA founder Laura Tenneson.
In the postcard, that photograph was altered through a digital lens to depict Wood, Widmyer and Tenneson as cartoonish clowns. Beneath the altered image, a line of smaller figures depicted a drug addict, a gang member, a member of the trans community, a homeless man, a suicide bomber, a racist depiction of an African-American with the face of a primate, and a woman wearing a burka. The postcard is titled “Clown World” beneath the image in cartoonish balloon lettering.
On the back of the postcard, a diatribe calls the Sept. 17 declaration a “freak show,” labeling it a “Perversity Proclamation.”
None of the local politicians were happy about the cartoon, and the Coeur d’Alene Press referred to the mailing as “Bigoted postcards” that “arrived in Coeur d’Alene mailboxes Thursday, prompting outrage and solidarity from community leaders and candidates.”
The Press’ story, with pro and reader con reaction.
The Idaho Statesman ran an editorial objecting to the “racist cartoon.”
Yesterday the Coeur d’Alene Press printed cartoonist Dan Brannan’s rebuttal:
Allow me to clear a few things up.
Most political cartoons today lean Liberal/Left. Not because there is such a bigger audience for them, but rather because the outlets which publish them are strongholds of the Left. And that monopoly undergirds a normalcy bias whose natives simply cannot imagine people laughing at their views.
As we have seen concerning my recent cartoon (in the CDAPress 11/1/19), any such satirical tweak to their ideological nose is, to them, an utmost taboo. Sacrilege, really.
Some more radical elements in that bubble have even suggested that Conservative cartooning is a crime! Which, in itself, is hilarious.
But it’s also really spooky…
Read the entirety of Brannon’s response.