I have strong feelings about Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip “Dilbert,” which in an ideal world would be a sentence that nobody has said since roughly 1998.
Adams made headlines just recently because multiple newspapers are dropping his comic strip after his recent racist rant went viral.
On a video Adams posted to YouTube, he talked about a Rasmussen poll that asked people if they agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”
According to the poll, 26 percent of black respondents outright disagreed with the statement.
This shouldn’t be too surprising since “It’s OK to be white” began life on the internet cesspit 4chan as a response to “Black Lives Matter” and has since become a slogan adopted by white supremacists; I would assume that a substantial portion of the 26 percent of people who disagreed with the phrase took issue with its modern usage.
However, that wasn’t Adams’ takeaway. Adams’ takeaway was that black people constitute a hate group and should be avoided at all costs.
“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,” Adams said. “Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this.”
“I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore,” Adams continued in a video that he recorded and posted on YouTube of his own volition. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”
Now, if you’re not terribly familiar with Scott Adams, you’re probably thinking, “man, that’s some pretty full-throttle racism coming from anyone, much less the dude who writes Dilbert.”
However, for folks like me who have been following Adams a long time, it wasn’t much of a surprise.
For reasons I cannot fully explain, I really liked Dilbert when I was a kid in the 1990s. I liked comic strips in general; The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County were my favorites, but Dilbert was somewhere in the top ten. I thought it was a pretty funny strip, and I owned a few Dilbert collections.
Based on my love of Dilbert, I even read a few of Scott Adams’ other books, including “God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment,” which struck me at the time as a fascinating philosophy text but now reads like your friend’s burnout Libertarian older brother just came upstairs to rant at you for two hours after hotboxing the basement.
I used to subscribe to Scott Adams’ newsletter, and I also followed his blog. He was terminally online before a lot of people even considered owning a home computer, and if you emailed him, chances were good he would reply. I speak from experience.
Around the early to mid 2000s, I drifted away from Adams. He began to come across as the smartest guy in the room, boasting of his 180 IQ and MENSA membership and talking about how his training in hypnotism allowed him to manipulate people. He claimed that he had improved his health and made wonderful things happen in his life through “positive affirmation,” and he presented himself as the kind of guy who had all the answers to society’s ills if only all the dummies out there would listen.
At some point around 2016, I started following Adams again, but it was different this time; now I was the guy at the NASCAR race who only showed up to see the wrecks. Adams correctly predicted that Donald Trump would be elected President in 2016 — although he said that he supported Hillary Clinton publicly only because he knew he would be murdered if he didn’t, which is a pretty inflated sense of self-importance coming from the Dilbert guy. When he was proven right about Trump’s victory, he began a journey down a deep rabbit hole of right-wing extremism.
Since then, Adams has pushed debunked COVID cures. He predicted that if Joe Biden were elected, Republicans would be hunted down and killed “within a year.” He also became an unbelievable misogynist and has dabbled in some light Holocaust denialism. If I listed out all the insane reactionary stuff Scott Adams has said in the last few years, this would be a five-part column.
For whatever reason, however, Adams’ racist rant on YouTube was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and now dozens upon dozens of newspapers have finally dropped Dilbert.
I’m darkly fascinated by Adams in the same way I’m fascinated by all famous people who make a pile of money based on a fairly minor talent and then go out of their way to self-destruct.
What’s different with Adams is that I think I understand what happened to him. It’s the exact same thing that’s happened to people all over this country.
I don’t get my news from social media; I use my social media as a hub for my interests. In turn, social media algorithms provide me with more of the stuff that they know I’m interested in. If you were to look at my Facebook feed, you would assume that the three most important topics in human history are pinball and arcade repair, 1970s heavy metal, and Simpsons memes. That’s it, nothing else is worth noting.
If you’re using social media for your hobbies, these algorithms are fairly useful. If you’re using social media as a news source, it will only give you news that’s like the other news you’ve read.
How many people do you know who talk about how all major cities are simultaneously on fire and engaged in an active race war? Or how everyone knows the 2020 election was rigged? Or how everyone knows that COVID is a hoax?
These are people who have unknowingly crafted their own echo chambers, places where their fears and anxieties are amplified and fed right back to them. Their entire worldview becomes skewed to the extreme like a funhouse mirror.
When Scott Adams correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 victory, he had a brief experience with a different kind of fame. He started getting interviewed by folks who shared his extreme beliefs, and he almost seemed to be mulling a transition from newspaper cartoonist to political pundit.
Adams was on the edge already, but his journey into the world of political extremism only seemed to amplify and distort the ideas he’d only flirted with earlier in his career. It couldn’t have been hard for the constantly-online Adams to craft his own echo chamber, one that served to reaffirm the most hateful and racist ideas that his “genius” level intellect could conjure.
From there, it’s a pretty brief journey to recording a video where you tell white America that it should avoid black America at all costs while being oblivious to the fact that spouting racist madness is a solid way to destroy your career.
Just a few days after Adams posted his video and his world imploded, he posted a follow-up video, seeming shocked that his legacy had been ruined by “cancel culture,” the modern term for what we used to call “the consequences of your own actions.”
So long and good riddance, Scott Adams. You either die a Dilbert, or you live long enough to become the Pointy-Haired Boss.
