Pink slip is justifiable consequence of ‘Dilbert’ creator’s racist rant

Back in 2015, “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams used his comic strip to offer the following advice on gaining social media followers: “Find something you hate and write about it … and don’t hold back.”

Perhaps that was what motivated Adams’ racist tirade last week in which he repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group,” called on white Americans to “get the hell away from Black people” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.”

In the parade of the twisted rage and resentment of MAGA extremists, Adams now waves to us from the newest float in the sad procession.

By Monday morning the fallout from Adams’ rant was coming into focus. Hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Las Vegas Sun, dropped “Dilbert” from their comic pages. Andrews Mcmeel Universal, the company that syndicates “Dilbert,” said it was “severing ties” with the author. And the Penguin Random House imprint Portfolio announced that it wouldn’t publish Adams’ upcoming book.

In response Adams tweeted, “an obvious question for those who canceled me is do they disagree with my point. So far I have not seen it. I only see disagreement with my use of hyperbole.”

Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who was raised in the apartheid era in South Africa, leapt to Adams’ defense, trying to deflect the conversation by completely ignoring Adams’ statements and launching into his own tirade about racism in the media.

Adams and his defenders seem to be missing the point that Adams’ self-described “hyperbole” is explanation enough for the consequences he is facing. He accused all Black people of being members of a hate group and then advocated for a permanent separation of the races. This is both exactly what apartheid was all about in South Africa and the central feature of Jim Crow-era thinking in the United States. No context can justify it.

Adams then added insult to injury by proclaiming that “it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore. … And so I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”

We didn’t think that being a decent human being and helping others when the opportunity arises was particularly onerous or unreasonable. Nor should it require a payoff. It’s simply the right thing to do. Nor, frankly, do we think Black people are counting on Americans to “be helpful” — how patronizing — and instead just expect that we all behave toward one another justly and civilly.

Black Americans have spent centuries fighting for recognition of their most basic human and civil rights. Meanwhile, Adams and Musk, each of whom have wealth, power and a massive communication platform, believe they are somehow owed the right to spread hate without consequence. Perhaps more disturbing is that they’ve found a welcoming home for their white victimhood in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

In the wake of Adams’ statements, MAGA extremists and Republican culture warriors (read: white nationalists) have taken to social media to advocate the absurd position that “canceling” Adams violates his First Amendment rights. For those who weren’t paying attention in high school civics, the First Amendment protects you from government infringement on free speech. It doesn’t apply to private businesses or individual readers of comic strips.

Under the law, Adams has the constitutional right to engage in a hateful, racist and bigoted tirade. His readers and business associates also have the right to condemn him and cut ties with him. The right to speak freely is not the right to speak without consequence.

This should be obvious to someone like Adams, who spent years criticizing C-suite executives and middle-managers alike for failing to understand how their own business processes actually function, yet now appears completely unaware of how his own business relationships function.

Unlike the Black Americans toward whom Adams harbors so much anger, the cartoonist has been given numerous opportunities to learn the consequences of his angry white persecution complex, if not actually grow beyond it.

Over the past year, nearly 100 newspapers cut ties with Adams after he introduced “Dilbert’s” first Black character and began a running commentary on how Black people are given special privileges and opportunities for success in the United States. On a recent episode of his Youtube show, Adams said he was “identifying as Black” because “I like to be on the winning team.”

These statements betray Adams’ lack of knowledge about the past and present ways in which Black people are treated in American society. Even Adams’ most recent tirade was motivated by his response to a phrase from a questionable poll he doesn’t seem to understand or know anything about. The question was whether people agree with the statement that “it’s OK to be white.”

While Adams was hyperventilating about his imagined implications when a minority of Black people refused to agree with the statement in a recent Rasmussen poll, he failed to recognize that Rasmussen had specifically polled about the phrase because it’s a slogan commonly used by violent white supremacist and other hate groups like the KKK to express their perceived victimhood as whites.

We suspect Black distaste for the phrase was not rooted in Black hatred of white people but in Black hatred of violent white supremacy. It was rooted in the now-societally accepted use of hate-speech by the Maga-right and the societally accepted whitewashing of American history by people like Adams.

But Adams, Musk and MAGA Americans couldn’t be bothered to seek out further information or context. They were too busy being angry, too busy arguing for an American apartheid, too busy being resentful and too busy looking for evidence to support the narrative that they are society’s misunderstood victims. Woe are we.

Scott Adams acts like a racist, speaks like a racist and gives comfort to racism, and then like a petulant child tries to hide from the consequences of his racism. But more importantly, he is a symptom of a rightwing belief system that uses racist tropes to justify white victimhood.

Americans have a choice to support that system and align ourselves with angry and ignorant ideologues like Adams and Musk or reject hate in all its forms. We choose the latter. We choose to promote the rights, dignity, equity and equality of all people, not because it’s “woke” or benefits us in some way, but because it’s the right thing to do.