Posted by:
anybody
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Date: February 25, 2023 09:31PM
<Gasp!> I liked "Dilbert." This is so sad. I had no idea Scott Adams had gone off into wacko white nationalist / conspiracy theory land.
I guess the message here is that some people can't escape racism -- no matter their education or social connnections.
Steve Benson, please comment.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/25/business/dilbert-comic-strip-racist-tirade/index.htmlNewspapers across the country dropped the “Dilbert” comic strip over the weekend after the creator of the satirical cartoon went on a racist tirade, calling Black Americans a “hate group” and suggesting that White people should “get the hell away” from them.
The USA Today Network, which operates hundreds of newspapers, said it had pulled the plug on the long-running comic strip. The Washington Post and The Plain Dealer also in Cleveland said they would no longer carry the comic.
The move came after Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind “Dilbert,” effectively encouraged segregation in a shocking rant on YouTube. His comments came in response to a poll from the conservative firm Rasmussen Reports that said 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be White.”
The Anti-Defamation League has noted that the phrase emerged on the infamous message board 4chan in 2017 as a trolling campaign and has a “long history” in the white supremacist movement.
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people – according to this poll, not according to me, according to th is poll – that’s a hate group,” Adams said Wednesday on his YouTube show “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “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, just get the f**k away … because there is no fixing this.”
Adams has since said on Twitter that he was only “advising people to avoid hate” and suggested that the cancellation of his cartoon signals that free speech in America is under assault.
Andrews McMeel Syndication, the company that distributes “Dilbert,” did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.
The newspapers that have cut the comic strip have been clear with readers.
“Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, went on a racist rant this week … and we will no longer carry his comic strip in The Plain Dealer,” wrote Chris Quinn, editor of the paper. “This is not a difficult decision.”
“We are not a home for those who espouse racism,” Quinn added. “We certainly do not want to provide them with financial support.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/02/25/scott-adams-dilbert-canceled/“Scott Adams is a disgrace,” Darrin Bell, creator of “Candorville” and the first Black artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, told The Post on Saturday. “His racism is not even unique among cartoonists.” Bell compared Adams’s views to the Jim Crow era and more recent examples of White supremacy, including “millions of angry people trying to redefine the word ‘racism’ itself.”
In fact, Adams did exactly that on his YouTube show Saturday. He offered a long, quasi-Socratic defense of his comments, which he said were taken out of context, and seemed to define racism as essentially any political activity. “Any tax code change is racist,” he said at one point in the show. He denounced racism against “individuals” and racist laws, but said, “You should absolutely be racist whenever it’s to your advantage. Every one of you should be open to making a racist personal career decision.”
In the same show, Adams suggested that he had done irreparable harm to a once-sterling career.
“Most of my income will be gone by next week,” he told about 3,000 live-stream viewers. “My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this, am I right? There’s no way you can come back from this.”