Papers drop ‘Dilbert’ after cartoonist’s rant

Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’ long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said white people should “get the hell away from” them.

The Washington Post, the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the San Antonio Express-News and other publications announced they would stop publishing “Dilbert” after the 65-year-old cartoonist’s rant Wednesday on YouTube. Asked how many newspapers still carried the strip, a workplace satire that Adams created in 1989, he told The Post: “By Monday, around zero.”

The once widely celebrated cartoonist, who has been entertaining extreme-right ideologies and conspiracy theories for several years, was upset Wednesday by a Rasmussen poll that found a thin majority of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people … that’s a hate group,” Adams said on his live-streaming YouTube show. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. 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 … because there is no fixing this.”

Adams also blamed Black people for not “focusing on education” during the show and said, “I’m also really sick of seeing video after video of Black Americans beating up non-Black citizens.” Anger followed. By Thursday, The Post began hearing from readers calling for the strip’s cancellation. On Friday, the USA Today Network announced it “will no longer publish the Dilbert comic due to recent discriminatory comments by its creator.”

The Gannett-owned chain oversees more than 300 newspapers, including the Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Austin American-Statesman and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Editor’s note: The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and sister WEHCO Media, Inc., publications also will stop publishing the strip as soon as possible.

“In light of Scott Adams’s recent statements promoting segregation, The Washington Post has ceased publication of the Dilbert comic strip,” a spokesperson for the newspaper said Saturday, noting it was too late to stop the strip from running in some upcoming print editions, including today’s.

Chris Quinn, the vice president of content for Plain Dealer publisher Advance Ohio, wrote in a letter from the editor Friday that pulling “Dilbert” was “not a difficult decision.”

“We are not a home for those who espouse racism,” Quinn wrote. “We certainly do not want to provide them with financial support.”

“MLive has zero tolerance for racism,” wrote John Hiner, the vice president of content for MLive Media Group, which oversees eight Michigan-based publications. “And we certainly will not spend our money supporting purveyors of it.”

Referring to Adams’ “numerous disparaging remarks about Black Americans,” the Express-News wrote: “These statements are offensive to our core values.”

“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 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.”

On his YouTube show Saturday, Adams defended his comments, which he said were taken out of context.

“Any tax code change is racist,” he said at one point in the show. He denounced what he called 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 livestream viewers. “My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. … There’s no way you can come back from this.”

Set in a dystopian office where the titular character is tormented by his boss and a talking dog, “Dilbert” appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers at its peak, winning Adams the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award in 1998.