Way back in the day, I read the funnies, and I suppose I enjoyed Dilbert as much as the next person, especially as I was just getting into corporate culture. But I stopped reading about twenty years ago, and it seems none too soon.
Since Dilbert’s heyday, Scott Adams, the creator of the strip, went over to the dark side in a very hard-right turn. The last handful of years has seen him go all in on MAGA. I tried listening to one of his podcasts regarding a Jesse Watters controversy last year, and I couldn’t sit through all of it. He was simply too far gone for me.
Apparently, I had no idea how far he still had to go, because Wednesday—in the wake of the Highland Park shooting—Adams decided to go all in on murder.
The Independent has the story:
On Wednesday (6 July) Adams posted a tweet which read: “The Highland shooting and every Fentanyl overdose death among the young are teaching us the same lesson, and we refuse to learn it.
“It’s difficult, but I’m qualified to give you this lesson (unfortunately). This won’t be easy to read.”
He continued: “When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son.”
“Those are your only options. … If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”
According to the Mercury News, Adams did finally include a third option, but not one much better: to ship all of these troubled young men off to some isolated place away from society, so that they could do nothing but “hurt each other.”
Insanity.
Adams groups fentanyl use with violence in this scenario. In 2018, Adams lost his adopted son to overdose; the 14-year-old suffered a traumatic brain injury after initially being prescribed opioids for pain management. This does not quite explain why fentanyl addicts should also be relegated to this vicious wasteland Adams has conjured up in his imagination.
At least one Twitter user tagged the FBI in reponse to Adams’s comments.