MAGA racist Scott Adams, who draws the “Dilbert” comic strip that satirizes the corporate workplace, is whining this weekend: “Most of my income will be gone by next week. My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed.”
Oh boo hoo. Where’s my violin?
This guy has been running his mouth in detestable fashion for a long time, and he’s finally suffering the consequences. The First Amendment grants him the freedom to say whatever he wants, but those on the receiving end of his rants have the freedom to scrape him off their shoes. That’s what’s happening.
Hundreds of newspapers from coast to coast, from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the Los Angeles Times, have made the decision to dump “Dilbert” because they don’t want to be associated with a twisted dude who disgorges stuff like this:
“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 fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.” So said Adams the other day, opining on his regular video podcast. What can’t be “fixed,” according to Adams, is that Black people are “a hate group.” Therefore, “It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. It’s over.”
Adams has been flirting with self-destruction for decades, trying the patience of the media outlets that pay him. Back in 2006, for instance, he questioned whether the Holocaust death statistics were real (“Is it like every other LRN – large round number – that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition?”); in 2015 he compared newbie candidate Donald Trump to a certain religious icon (“Jesus Christ comes to mind”); in 2020 he warned that if Trump were to lose his re-election bid, there was a “good chance” that Republicans would be hunted and “dead within a year”; in 2020, when a TV network pulled the plug on a short-lived “Dilbert” show, he claimed that “I lost my TV show for being white”; last month, for the umpteenth time, he denounced Covid vaccinations, insisting that un-vaxxed Americans “came out the best” during the worse of the pandemic, and, hey, “Can we all agree that that was the winning path?”
I suspect that some readers are thinking, “OK, this guy is definitely off his rocker, but that doesn’t mean he should be canceled. Don’t we have free speech in this country?”
In response, I’ll keep it simple: Americans are free to speak freely, but free speech is not necessarily free of consequences. Adams has every right to advocate for racial segregation, but responsible media outlets have every right to enforce their own inclusive values and thus distance themselves from someone who advocates for racial segregation.
I’ll make it even simpler: The First Amendment protects the free-speech practitioner from government laws that seek to curb his speech – but it does not shield the practitioner from how other Americans might react to his speech. Especially those Americans who subsidize the practitioner’s livelihood.
That’s precisely what happened in 2018, when hate-speech maestro Alex Jones was thrown off Twitter, Apple, Pinterest, Spotify, LinkedIn, and YouTube. That’s what happened in back 2010, when the A&E cabe network suspended reality TV star Phil Robertson after the Duck Dynasty patriarch told GQ magazine that gay people were “degrading to the human soul” and that Black folks led more joyful lives during the Jim Crow era (“They were godly, they were happy, no one was singing the blues”).
Now Scott Adams is taking the hit, but he doesn’t appear to have been humbled. In his Saturday podcast, he said that his earlier racist remarks had been…wait for it…taken out of context. Then he offered his version of context: “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.”
He has certainly made his own career decision. This is America, where an unhinged person has the unfettered freedom to screw himself.