Cartoonist Scott Adams, famous for the, until-now, long running newspaper strip Dilbert, destroyed his reputation over the past week when he used his daily Youtube show to call America’s Black population a “hate group” and advised white people to segregate themselves. Even with Adams’ history of problematic behavior, having written a book attacking Islam, support for Donald Trump, advocating for killing your son, anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theories, and claims of being a hypnotist, some are wondering how it came to this.
To understand the Fall of the House of Dilbert, you have to go back to the 2016 presidential election. Adams was an early supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign. This marked the moment when his public persona went from semi-apolitical smarter-than-thou Reddit atheist type (a la Dilbert) to open conspiracy theorist and rightwing culture warrior (a la Dogbert's evil combined with the Boss's stupidity.) In 2016 Adams claimed he was switching his support to Hilary Clinton, as he was afraid her supporters would murder him and cover it up, playing into the extreme conspiracy theories about the Clintons killing scores of people for political purposes.
In late 2016 Adams began to play the part of a major climate denier. In December of that year he posted a challenge to Twitter to “Find a scientist -- just one -- who says the climate prediction models are credible.” He ignored, denied or shot down anyone who tried to offer evidence that climate models were reliable and trusted by scientists, and ever since he has consistently pushed false narratives minimizing or outright denying the climate realities humanity faces.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided ample opportunities for further descent in the conspiracy theorizing, and Adams got so far into that he was having Twitter fights with other anti-vaxers over whom was properly telling lies about the life saving medicine.
Over the course of 2022 and into 2023, Adams has jumped on the bandwagon of using Environmental Social and Governance investment scores Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Affirmative Action measures as targets for conspiracies and disinformation. He took special care to promote anti-ESG messages, working elements of earlier conspiracy theories he had succumbed to directly into Dilbert strips.
The final collapse of Scott Adams’ career as a newspaper cartoonist came, coincidentally enough, after a brief bit on his Youtube show on his fellow anti-ESG demagogue Vivek Ramaswamy’s announcement that he's running for president. After claiming that only Vivek could get rid of the “climate religion” and end affirmative action without being called racist, Adams switches to saying that anything bad said about Vladimir Putin is probably just propaganda. Then he ends his career.
Adams brought up a Rasmussen poll which included a question about whether or not people agree with the white supremacist-popularized phrase, “It’s ok to be white.” Given that it's been a racist slogan for more than a decade, many people of color are aware that it’s a threatening, hateful statement, and more than 20% of the Black respondents disagreed with the statement, and another 20+% said they weren’t sure.
Adams used this as a jumping off point to say the he no longer identifies a Black, that he was only identifying as Black because he wanted to be on the “winning team”, which could be enough to unpack alone, but he then went on to say that now, because of this poll, he views Black people as hate group and calls on white people to “get away” from Black people.
He then says he picked the neighborhood when he lived specifically because there weren’t Black people living there. Adams says that there is nothing that can help Black people, and that white people should stop trying to help Black Americans. “It’s over, it’s not worth trying.” “Get away, just get away.”
As of March 1 Adams has begun complaining about ESG investing and DEI trainings being products of “Jewish race grifters” and claiming that the death count of the Holocaust has probably been inflated for political reasons. Still, we'll stop here, because "please stop" is more or less what Adams' editors said at the various newspapers that still ran Dilbert– until now.