Pulitzer Prize-winning leftist, antisemitic cartoonist arrested for possessing child pornography

In 2019, Darrin Bell won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. In 2025, Darrin Bell was arrested based on allegations that he possessed 134 child pornography videos as well as AI-generated child porn. Although he is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, many are not surprised, given the tenor of his political cartoons.

Darrin Bell got his start in the leftist hotbed of the San Francisco Bay Area, attending UC Berkeley, where he worked for the practically communist student newspaper, The Daily Californian, before moving on to not-quite-so-communist outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the former Bay Area News Group papers, which included the Oakland Tribune.

Since 2003, Bell has published Candorville through the Washington Post Writers Group, a strip that focuses on inner-city black and Latino characters. He also publishes Rudy Park, another syndicated strip. In short, he’s a truly talented guy whose work appeals to leftist audiences.

Bell’s cartoons often portray conservatives, starting with Trump, as sexual predators or people who are weirdly obsessed with child sexuality. (Incidentally, the little “T” logo in many of the cartoons is meant to be a Trump swastika):

Then there’s Bell’s December 27 Substack cartoon that, in retrospect, is kind of weird. Two men sit on the couch in their basement apartment on a cold winter day. One of them says he feels like he’s a six-year-old again, just like the days when he’d built forts out of couch cushions.

His friend is shocked. “What the—? You a grown man, Dawg.”

At this point, the first character responds, “A real man isn’t afraid to be six years old.”

His friend tells him to take a time-out in the corner, but, in light of the child porn charges, all I could see was “a real man isn’t afraid to be six years old”—or perhaps, to be sexually obsessed with six-year-olds.

Generally speaking, Bell is a bad person, and I say that because he’s also radically anti-Israel, going back long before October 7. To him, the pluralist, free society that gives civil rights to all people regardless of sex, race, color, creed, etc., is the bad guy compared to the Muslims in Judea and Samaria, who abuse and kill women, Jews, Christians, gays, etc., all in the name of their faith. This is ironic, considering that he’s allegedly half-Jewish, but that’s what leftism does to the brain.

So, we have a hard-left, antisemitic, sexually-obsessed child-man. And somehow, that seems to lead inevitably to the charges against Bell:

Sacramento Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Detectives (ICAC) conducted an investigation stemming from a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) related to someone uploading Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM), also referred to as child pornography. The tip was related to 18 files containing CSAM. The investigation continued, and a total of 134 videos of CSAM were located and linked to the same account, owned and controlled by 49-year-old Darrin Bell.

Yesterday morning (January 15), ICAC Detectives served a residential search warrant at Bell's home. Detectives recovered evidence related to the case, as well as computer-generated/Al CSAM. Bell was subsequently arrested and booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail for the possession of CSAM. He is currently in custody being held on $1 million bail and is scheduled to appear in court on January 17.

This case was the first arrest by Sacramento Valley ICAC where possession of computer-generated/Al CSAM was charged against a suspect (the law changed on January 1, 2025, to include Al-generated material as a criminal offense). Bell is a well-known cartoonist, having been featured in several prominent publications. His booking photo is not available for public release, per California law.

It will be interesting to see how this case plays out. Whether or not Bell is a pedophile—something evidence and a jury will determine—there’s one thing we know for certain: He’s not a nice man.

Image: YouTube screen grab.

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