‘Dilbert’ Cartoonist Scott Adams Is Predictably On-Brand With Racist Rant

Scott Adams, creator of the once-popular Dilbert comic strip, built his fanbase by mocking the petty tyranny of self-righteous hypocrites in the target-rich environment of corporate culture. Now the joke is on him. Adams made headlines last week by dropping a video on his “Real Coffee with Scott Adams” channel describing Black Americans as a “hate group” and advising whites like himself to “get the hell away.”

After Adams’s outburst elicited nearly unanimous outrage over its over-the-top racism, and saw newspapers, distributors and agents “severing our relationship” with him, Adams took to Twitter to defend his position.

“Dilbert has been cancelled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with. (My syndication partner canceled me.),” Adams tweeted. Adams’s current line seems to be that anyone who took his remarks at face value has been “poisoned” by the media, and that “no one objected to what I said in context.”

Here is the context for what Adams said. In his video, he was commenting on a recent Rasmussen poll reporting that a majority of Black respondents disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.” Adams opined on his livestreamed YouTube show that “if nearly half of all Blacks are not ok with White people … that’s a hate group. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, 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 … because there is no fixing this.”

Adams apparently expects people to believe that his advice comes not from a place of personal racism, but as a logical reaction to the expressed sentiments in that poll. The problem with trying to hive off the racist content of his video rant by resorting to this rhetorical position is that the context doesn’t actually stop where Adams wants it to stop.

It turns out “it’s ok to be white” isn’t just some innocuous collection of words that no sensible person could object to. Several years ago, in response to rising awareness of issues of structural racism in institutions like law enforcement, aggrieved conservatives took to social media to popularize that phrase, along with other facially unobjectionable sentiments like “all lives matter,” as a way to signal hostility toward racial equity without going so far as to don a white hood and set a cross on fire. The ADL, an organization that knows a bit about the tactics of hate groups and fascists, categorizes it as hate speech and trolling.

Chances are, many respondents to the poll were in on the gag and responded according to their understanding of the question in context. And it was certainly a curious choice on the part of Rasmussen, a data collection outfit closely aligned with right wing causes and promoter of conservative media narratives, to poll on this question in the first place.

Looking at that broader view, only a naïve fool would take anything surrounding that poll in good faith, and only someone who has been living under a rock for the past decade would think that saying what Adams said on that video would elicit anything but a rapid stampede to exits for anyone having anything to do with him or his products.

Adams is many things, but “naive fool living under a rock” is not one of them. Both his style of humor and his career are based on being the smartest guy in the room, the only one with the courage to call bullshit on the corporate doubletalk that is not only stupid, but also illogical according to its own stated aims.

Adams successfully turned this kind of contrarian populism into a brand that extended beyond the comic strip to merchandise, self-help and business books, and a lucrative speaking career. Since then, his work has been critical of the tendency of people to “identify as” different genders or ethnic groups, and he is vocal on Twitter about his views on current political issues that impact people personally and directly.

His defense for these kinds of views is that he is “only asking questions,” following the facts and logic to their inevitable conclusions, even if that leads, regrettably, to some dark places. Freedom, in his conception, demands he be allowed to ask those questions and accept where his logic leads him, without anyone questioning his good faith and motives.

But if Adams is entitled to his opinions, so are his readers and business partners. So now come the consequences. “My publisher for non-Dilbert books has cancelled my upcoming book and the entire backlist,” he tweeted. “Still no disagreement about my point of view. My book agent canceled me as well.”

It is impossible to imagine Adams failed to see this coming. He seems to be betting that reaching whatever mass market is available to him through traditional publishers and the quaint legacy business of running daily comic strips in newspapers is one of diminishing returns, and the really big money is in joining the ranks of the righteously aggrieved victims of the “woke mob.” That audience has shown a remarkable willingness to spend money on behalf of sympathetic martyrs, regardless of what they are peddling, and someone in Adams’s position probably considers it foolish not to join the parade.

By flaming out in the mainstream in such a spectacular burst of naked racism unconcealed by flimsy, bad-faith objections, he probably hopes he will end up right at the front of the line.