If you’ve seen Mark Sumner’s report on the latest newspaper to drop Scott Adam’s comic strip Dilbert because of racist rhetoric from Adams, this report from the BBC has a response from Adams.
Many US newspapers including the Washington Post have dropped the long-running Dilbert cartoon strip after its creator made racist comments.
In a video on YouTube, Scott Adams, who is white, said black Americans were part of a "hate group" and that white people should "get the hell away" from them.
Mr Adams, 65, later acknowledged that his career was destroyed.
He said most of his income would be gone by next week.
Income perhaps, but wealth?
This 2017 profile of Adams in Businessweek by Caroline Winter is something that explains a lot now. Among other things, it suggests Adams had profited handsomely from Dilbert over the years, and was always coming from somewhere near the fringe:
How Scott Adams Got Hypnotized by Trump
Come to his Dilbert-shaped home. Bite into a Dilberito. Be persuaded on genocide, mental orgasms, and his fellow Master Wizard, the president of the United States.
There are plenty of clues Adams was always headed for this moment.
...At both the bank and the phone company, Adams has said, his professional advancement was thwarted by diversity hires. “There was no hope for another generic white male to get promoted any time soon,” he wrote in Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert. (Later in the book, he noted that his Dilbert TV show was canceled after “the network made a strategic decision to focus on shows with African-American actors.”)
Inspiration for Dilbert came from his cynical view of corporate life. “About 60 percent of my job at Pacific Bell involved trying to look busy,” he wrote in his most recent book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. “Most of my budget spreadsheets had formula errors, but that didn’t matter because all of the inputs from the various departments were complete lies and bullshit. If anything, my error probably smoothed out some of the bullshit and made it closer to truth.” While working for Pacific Bell, Adams set his alarm for 4 a.m. most days and spent a few hours sketching Dilbert and writing, 15 times in a row, an affirmation: “I, Scott Adams, will become a famous cartoonist.” His breakthrough came when United Media began syndicating Dilbert in 1989.
Starting in the late ’90s, Adams also launched a line of vitamin-infused vegan microwave burritos called Dilberitos, which were discontinued after a few years, and two restaurants, which went belly-up. “For a while, everything I touched turned to gold,” Adams said. “So I tried harder things, until I found my limit. The restaurants were my limit.” He also wrote two religion-themed novellas, published in 2001 and 2004, which, he told me, will be his ultimate legacy—not Dilbert.
It looks like Adams has found another limit.
Adam’s fascination with Trump is spelled out in this profile — and his admiration for Trump’s ability to con people comes across as recognition of a “kindred spirit”. Here’s how he responded to Trump’s performance in the first 2015 Republican debate, where many people at the time thought Trump had shown himself unfit for office.
Scott Adams, the millionaire creator of the office-humor comic strip Dilbert, saw something different. In that moment, he realized that Trump might be a kindred spirit—a fellow “Master Wizard,” Adams’s term for experts in hypnosis and persuasion. Watching the debate alone at home, he grew excited. “I really got out of my chair and said, ‘Whoa, there’s something happening here that’s not like regular politics,’ ” Adams recalled. As he saw it, Trump had deftly defanged Kelly’s accusations by replacing them with a powerful visual: the iconic O’Donnell, “who is very unpopular among his base,” Adams said. “It was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” A week later, he published a blog post titled “Clown Genius.”
Never mind that Trump lost the 2016 election by millions of votes and was only installed in the White House by the Electoral College. Adams was hooked back then and apparently still is.
Read The Whole Thing. It shows that Adams is more than just someone with racist views — he’s actually more than a little creepy, and has has what might be called ‘interesting’ opinions about himself, his talents, and the way the world works.
Charles P. Pierce wrote about a particular kind of American feature that offers an understanding of where someone like Adams is coming from — and where he might have fit once upon a time. Here’s a couple of quotes:
“This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
“We will have to remember where our cranks belong in our national life, so that they can resume their proper roles as lonely guardians of the frontiers of the national imagination, prodding and pushing, getting us to think about things in new ways, but also knowing that their place is of necessity a lonely and humble one. There is nothing wrong with a country that has people who put saddles on their dinosaurs. It’s a wonderful show and we should watch them and applaud. We have no obligation to climb aboard and ride.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
Also from Pierce:
“Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America—Greil Marcus’s old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who’s sold out.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
Adams stopped being an amusing crank some time ago, and is now possibly worse than a charlatan. How long will it be before he becomes a staple on the wingnut welfare grievance circuit, a ‘victim’ of ‘cancel culture’?
And what do we do with all the other cranks who have progressed to charlatanism? We may need cranks, but we probably shouldn’t elect them to public office unless we really want to leave America and move into Idiot America. That’s a line too easily crossed lately.