It takes courage to speak out against racism, bigotry in all its ugliness, especially if you live in regions dominated by Trump extremism.
Take Greg Kearney. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, a town he describes as “a little dot of blue in a sea of red.” Yet Kearney, a political cartoonist, uses his pen to skewer extremists, an urgent necessity these days. Kearney’s cartoons now appear regularly in People’s World.
The socialist People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper,
and Greg embraces their philosophy:
[Greg] also spoke of the need for all workers to be union members. “We need strong and effective unions…. The woman working in Walmart needs representation by an organization that looks out for her interests because employers are never going to do that.”
“Anyone who does their job is influenced by those who came before them. The Worker had some really great cartoonists. Art Young was a genius,” he said referring to a legendary cartoonist for the Daily Worker, a predecessor of People’s World.
[Greg’s career] started in 1980 when the Star Tribune of Casper, Wyoming, hired him as an editorial cartoonist, a job that lasted 20 years.
Kearney describes himself as a “Franklin Roosevelt New Deal Democrat…a labor Democrat.” He says he tells his neighbors, some of them hardscrabble family farmers, that the Republicans “are not your friends….They do not have your interests at heart.”
People’s World interviewed Kearney by phone recently.
An extensive collection of Greg Kearney’s work can be found at his blog, Drawing Attention.