Scott Adams faces 'consequence culture' as U.S. newspapers drop 'Dilbert'

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Feb 28

In the category of career implosions for a major American cultural figure, the downfall of Scott Adams has been especially swift and spectacular.

The East Bay cartoonist's "Dilbert" comic strip, long one of the most popular in the country and appearing in more than 2,000 newspapers at its peak, all but vanished by Monday after he called Black people "a hate group" in an incendiary diatribe on race relations in America last week.

First, hundreds of newspapers — including The Mercury News and East Bay Times, Washington Post, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times and those in USA Today Network — canceled the strip. Then Andrews McMeel Universal, the company that syndicates "Dilbert," said it would no longer work with the cartoonist. Adams told this news organization Monday that the publisher of his books on career and life advice had canceled his upcoming and backlisted works, as well.

True to his vision of himself as a renegade truth teller, Adams said his "cancellation" was "predictable" while claiming his explosive remarks were meant to hold up "the mirror" to what Americans really think. He argued that his critics failed to put his comments on race, uttered during his "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" show last week, into "context" or to recognize that he was using "hyperbole" to make an important point about U.S. culture. In fact, he seemed to revel in the social media "power" he said he's earned from his supporters, which now include Elon Musk, who supported the fallen cartoonist Monday on Twitter.

For all Adams' bravado, the provocateur offered a "no comment" when asked by this newspaper if he wanted to say anything else, although he acknowledged, according to Poynter senior media reporter Tom Jones, that "my reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed."

On his show Monday, Adams scoffed at a viewer who asked, "How does it feel to lose all your money?" Adams' response suggested that his lost income won't seriously impact his wealth. During the "Dilbert" heyday, Adams became a multimillionaire by penning not only the comic strip but marketing related books and merchandise and launching a short-lived Dilbert TV show.

Adams' implosion began last Wednesday when he cited a Rasmussen survey that dealt with the phrase, "It's OK to be White." Proclaiming that 26% of Black respondents said it's "not OK to be White" and 21% said "they weren't sure," Adams said: "That's 47% of Blacks not willing to say it's OK to be White." Adams said the poll demonstrated that Black people were a "hate group" and that there is "no fixing" current racial tensions in America, which is why he insisted White people should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.

Scott Adams, creator of the the comic strip, "Dilbert," is photographed at his home in Pleasanton on Dec. 4, 2017. (Photo: Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people," the 65-year-old author exclaimed.

Adams said he had already moved to an area "with a very low Black population." It's not clear if he was referring to the Tri-Valley town of Pleasanton, 1.6 percent Black in a 2010 study, where he was known to be living in 2020.

In his follow-up YouTube shows, Adams said he's heard from "many" Black and White people who agree with him and blamed the media for "riling up" Black people to hate White people, he said.

Adams has embraced increasingly radical positions in recent years, praising Donald Trump's powers of "persuasion" and predicting that if Biden were elected, Republicans would be "hunted down" and there was a good chance many would be "dead within a year." Still, his latest statements took both many of his fans and critics by surprise.

"I was shocked that he came right out and said what I had long suspected he believed," said Darrin Bell, the first Black artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Bell became a fan of Dilbert in the 1990s when he was at UC Berkeley drawing cartoons for the Daily Californian. "It was misanthropic and jaded in a way most strips were not, at the time, and I found that to be refreshing," Bell said.

Bell noticed that Adams began to say things that were "clearly misogynistic or racist" and would always try to deflect criticism by saying people "didn't understand what he really meant." He also said it was "unbelievably condescending" for Adams to say Black people don't like White people "because we've been directed to by (the media)."

Martin Reynolds, co-executive director for the Oakland-based Maynard Institute, which promotes diversity in America's newsrooms, said Adams' comments initially took him aback but were "not surprising" after four years of President Donald Trump.

While calling it a "sign of progress" that Adams' words had consequences, Reynolds said, "As a society we've moved in a direction where these overt statements have become — I won't say accepted — but it's like the goal post has been moved back to a time when you could say these things."

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