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Bob Moran – “BoB” – is a multi-award winning British political cartoonist, illustrator and national treasure. In an interview with Scum Media last year, he spoke about the role of a political cartoonist and the moral questions presented by the global response to Covid.

Through his cartoons, he asked people to contemplate the inevitable consequences of how governments around the world were behaving in the name of Covid. In particular, he tried to highlight the horrific impact on children and the future society we were creating for them.

Bob is one of these brave and principled few who have, and continue, to make a stand for the truth. He had a good career as a cartoonist for The Telegraph but his defence of the truth and speaking out about what’s happening during the Covid “pandemic” has cost him that career and his income.

In September 2021 Bob got into a Twitter row with an NHS doctor about wearing masks on public transport to stop the spread of Covid. He was censored by Twitter because he “violated the Twitter rules.” He was also suspended by The Telegraph and later sacked for the incident.  Press Gazette named Bob’s sacking as the second biggest media story of 2021, second only to the launch of GB News.

The cartoon below famously became known as his most censored cartoon on social media titled “Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.”

And his cartoons continue to be censored.

This cartoon has been removed from Instagram. pic.twitter.com/ZGm0jyQBXT

— Bob Moran (@bobscartoons) March 17, 2022

Bob refuses to bow to this unjustified harassment of himself and his beliefs and carries on the fight for truth and justice, so make yourself a cuppa, sit back and listen to what a decent human being has to say about the global insanity we see taking place today.

We have linked a 20-minute excerpt from his December 2021 interview with Scum Media below, you can watch the full 60-minute interview HERE.

Click on the image below to watch the video on Odysee.

Follow Bob:

• Bob Moran on Telegram HERE
• Bob Moran on Twitter HERE
• Bob Moran website HERE

Transcript of the video above

I made it clear early on, and the Editors were aware, that I was against what was happening completely, primarily on moral grounds. And that was something that they were supportive of and said that we’re happy for you to pursue that.

By sort of October, I’d say, 2020. I was doing some really quite harsh comments, things that I was submitting. I thought “they’re never going to accept this,” and they were, which was great. And then for whatever reason, that changed. And I was getting a lot of push back – became more difficult. So that little glimmer of freedom suddenly disappeared and it got harder and harder to say what I felt needed to be said.

The thing that frustrated me the most, I mean, to be fair, The Telegraph has been a lot better than other newspapers. There are journalists there who have tried to put across the other side of the argument, who’ve done some digging. They’ve had some really good comment pieces talking about the harms of lockdown and the fact that it’s morally questionable, but they won’t go far enough. And they do this thing where they’ll try and frame it as a kind of moral conundrum, as if “oh the Government’s in an extremely difficult position.” No, on most of this, there’s nothing difficult about it. It’s clear cut. What they’re doing is completely immoral. There’s no justification for it.

And even by saying, “well, this might be viewed or this might turn out to be the wrong thing, vaccinating children is a moral minefield.” It’s not a moral minefield at all. It’s a moral chasm that you’ve just plunged headlong into, that’s it. And I am so frustrated by the fact that they refuse to be absolute about these things which should be absolute, I think, in a civilised society.

The cartoons I’ve done have shifted quite dramatically in tone and message over the past 18 months.  I have certainly felt the need to escalate what I’m saying and the images I’m creating as this situation has gone on. It’s another thing that’s frustrating me about the media, where they have this reluctance to move to the next stage. They’ll say something is absolutely wrong. It will continue happening for six months and six months later they will just publish the same article saying “this can’t be allowed to continue.” Whereas I felt like they’re upping their game, they are increasing their tyranny and they’re totally unjustifiable measures, so we should do the same. And so, my work ended up becoming – some of it becoming a lot more serious, a lot darker, and some of that has been the most popular. And actually, a lot of that stuff was work I did independently, so not things that were published by the paper.

My most well-known, or possibly the piece that had the most impact, is probably the stand firm piece with the demon standing in front of the mother with her child holding a syringe. And it was the fastest cartoon I’ve ever done. I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t plan it. I just sat down and did it in two or three hours. I think it was just pure emotion, desperation. They just let it pour out onto the page. And what’s interesting about that is it’s very dark and quite extreme, but I was sort of trying to do two things at the same time. I wanted to frighten people about what was happening because I think people should be afraid. But at the same time, the message was an optimistic one. It was a positive one. It was: “Stay strong. You can stand against this and you should. And if you do, it will be okay.” And I think maybe it’s that juxtaposition of “be afraid but be brave and you can get through this.” That maybe makes it work. I don’t know, because I didn’t plan it. So, it’s one of those weird things. I don’t quite know where it came from.

And then the other one that’s probably resonated the most, which is the other end of the scale in terms of tone, is the couple sitting on the hill with the message: “Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.” And I almost didn’t do that one because I thought, this is too obvious. This message is just a given. Everybody knows this. And then I realised we’d reached a point somehow where it was controversial to say that. And the responses, the negative responses to that from the other side, because I put that out, I think, in September 2020, and it was one of the things that made me realise just how serious the problem was for people who were in support of what was going on. So many people saying, “yeah, unless you’re going to kill them unless you’re going to give them a virus that kills them and then obviously you must surrender your right to be with them.” Which is so it’s such an odd argument, because nowhere in that sentiment am I saying “surrender your right not to be with the people you love.” No one has ever suggested that Chris Witty should go around to people’s houses and force them to go and visit their elderly relatives if they don’t want to. That’s not the point. If you agree with the people you love, that actually you’re all scared of the virus and you don’t want to take the risk, don’t see each other, that’s fine. But the point is, it’s up to families to decide, not the government. That frightened me, actually, the number of people who didn’t appear to be able to make that distinction. These things should be fundamental moral truths that we have in a free, civilised society. We’re losing them.

And there are still so many people calling for lockdowns, promoting lockdowns, or even talking about the first lockdown as a necessary evil or a mistake, something that was done in panic, and we couldn’t possibly have known what the consequences would be.

The point about lockdown, this is what it all boils down to, and lots of people on our side don’t acknowledge this enough, is that if you lock people in their homes, if you shut down front line health care, if you introduce a situation where mental health goes through the roof, where you drive people to suicide, where you destroy their businesses, where you put them into extreme poverty, you make them homeless, you implement measures as a government, you take that direct action that does those things. It will kill people. It has killed people. It will go on killing people for the next 10, or 20 years.

Now, the government itself commissioned a report into the effects of the first lockdown, which said around 200,000 people could die over the following 10 years as a result of that first lockdown. It was on the front pages of the newspapers, it was on the front page of The Telegraph. That was later revised up to 500,000 people.

And the way it was reported was to say, “there’s a chance that lockdown could kill more people than the virus.” That was such an irresponsible way to report it. What they should have said was: “Our government is prepared to murder 200,000 people to control the spread of a respiratory virus.” If they had reported it like that, if that had been the headline on BBC News, people would have woken up to what was going on. They would have said, this is wrong. But there’s this idea that it’s to do with a balance of numbers: “Oh well, as long as the virus kills more people, that’s okay.” It’s not about numbers. This doesn’t come down to numbers. Ethically speaking, what lockdown means is that your government is prepared to kill this group of people over here – and it knows that they will die. Okay? They couldn’t possibly have known it was collateral damage or it was an accident. No, they knew because they told us, we’re going to murder these people over here because we think – we don’t even know it’s a hunch – that this other group over here won’t get a respiratory virus. If you have a society that accepts that, at all. If you set that precedent, it’s over morally for you. You cannot have a government that’s able to do that, because, ethically speaking, it’s no different from the government or the police or whoever it is going door to door shooting people in the head and screaming, “Save the NHS.”

How many people who agree with lockdown would have been okay if that’s what they did? Ethically, there’s a massive difference between action and inaction. Not taking action and people dying from a virus is not the same thing as taking direct action to kill people because you think it will save others. The second one is just not acceptable. You can’t do it. You do everything else, even if you think it works, and even if you think we might have to do it, you do everything else possible before you get to that point.

If you’re out in public, if you’re Chris Witty or Patrick Valence or Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock, you must be aware that some of the people around you have had their lives destroyed by the measures you have implemented. People have lost businesses. They’ve lost their homes. Their marriages have been destroyed. People’s children have died. People have lost babies. I think the least these people should expect is some mean words shouted at them, perhaps, but to take to social media or to write a column saying, “this is unacceptable, I’m not having this.” I find that disgusting. I think that is dangerous. These people have to take some responsibility for what they have done.

My biggest fear in many ways is that I don’t want to get to the end of my life and have to look my children in the eye and say, “I just didn’t bother, I just sat that one out because I didn’t think I could do anything.” At least I’ve tried.

I’m quite optimistic about the future. I hope that, now, I’m going to have a lot more freedom than I had before. That’s not really a criticism of The Telegraph. It’s just if you’re not attached to a newspaper, if you’re not attached to a big corporation, you just aren’t constrained in the same way. So, working without as much editorial input is exciting for me. It’s a bit daunting because, obviously, I’ve had 10 years of working in that way. But I’m really excited. And I think what I’m really keen to do is try and cover what’s going on all over the world, not just domestically, because there’s so much going on in other countries that don’t get covered in our media, obviously.

I don’t know whether I’m still a political cartoonist or a newspaper cartoonist. Maybe I’m something different now. Maybe I’ve become something different by accident through what’s happened over the past 20 months. I don’t know if I describe myself in that way anymore, but I’m reluctant to call myself an “artist” that feels far too grand to me, but I’m just going to try and stay true to myself, true to my message, and keep putting things out.

This is one of the big questions, isn’t it? Will they overreach themselves? Will they overplay their hand? Somebody said to me near the beginning that the thing about mass psychosis, which I think is a big part of this, is that the human brain cannot sustain psychotic ideas for more than a certain amount of time. Because it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to hold these nonsensical ideas and to perform this theatre for so long. Eventually, your brain just says, “no,” and it pushes it out, “can’t do it again.” There’s a natural breakdown in it. I’d have thought that would have happened by now. But the worry is, that if this is an agenda, and that’s something else I wanted to talk about, actually, because we know this is wrong because we’ve known it’s wrong for such a long time, naturally, we not only oppose it and say it needs to stop but we start trying to figure out exactly what is going on. And I think it’s entirely healthy and understandable that we explore all lines of inquiry, we’re open to any possibilities and inevitably you come across various theories, conspiracy theories, and things that might be going on behind the received narrative.

But a point I really want to stress is that: you don’t need to have read or believed a single conspiracy anywhere online to be against all of this. On the face of it alone, just on the morality of it, just on the logic, just on the instinct you should feel as a human being, it’s wrong. And there’s this idea on the other side that often gets thrown at this assumption that “you would have been okay with it if you hadn’t watched that video on YouTube and now you suddenly think Bill gates has put the internet in your brain.” It’s not that. All of that is interesting and there’s a place for it. And part of the problem is that we can’t stop this happening unless we understand what it actually is.

So, it’s perfectly reasonable to try and establish what it actually is. Is it incompetence? Is it governments copying each other? Is it a conspiracy? Is it an agenda? But to be against it and to want it to stop and to want to ensure it never happens again. None of that is necessary. Now. If it is an agenda, if this is something they’re pushing, if they’re genuinely trying to change what humanity is forever – will they take it to a certain point and then just give up? If there’s resistance or have they planned for that, how extreme will they become? If it’s a plan, they must have bargained on the fact that people might wake up and fight back. The worrying thing is what are they going to be prepared to do when that happens?

I think, several other people have said this, that if there are people behind all of this they’re evil and evil Is predominantly cowardly. And when evil meets with genuine bravery and people fight back, it tends to just crumble. And so, I think we should all remain hopeful and optimistic that we’re will win.

Featured image courtesy of Bob Moran https://www.bobmoran.co.uk/