KC publisher made the right call with ‘Dilbert.’ Scott Adams is no free speech martyr | Opinion

Sunday evening, the senior executives of one of Kansas City’s most prominent publishers released a statement about L’Affaire Dilbert:

“Andrews McMeel Universal is severing our relationship with ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams,” wrote Chairman Hugh Andrews and President/CEO Andy Sareyan. “As a media and communications company, AMU values free speech. … But we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate. Recent comments by Scott Adams regarding race and race relations do not align with our core values as a company.”

Most readers seeing such strong language probably have the same question: “‘Dilbert’? That comic strip from the ‘90s with the terrible art and the same dozen jokes about cubicles, passwords and coffee breaks on endless repeat? Race relations and hate speech? Huh?”

That’s because most of us live in the real world. But over on Twitter, things are a lot different. Everyday Americans, who don’t use the service by a huge majority, aren’t familiar with its culture, where the only currencies are outrage and insult. I’m less a both-sideser every day, but I can confidently say that tweeters of all political and philosophical orientations waste a lot of time disparaging, grandstanding and generally hollering into the void of their own partisan echo chambers. I don’t see any hearts or minds getting changed by all that tiresome noise.

Twitter’s Extremely Online regulars know the cast of its most popular characters and their scandals of the day. The man behind “Dilbert” is one of them, and his antagonistic, childishly macho persona has been a constant there for years. But last week, he said some things on his YouTube channel that are shocking, even by the overblown standards of social media.

While discussing a bogus survey about a well-known white supremacist meme, Adams simply lost it. Black people? “That’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he said. His advice to fellow white people? “Just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. … You just have to escape.” He bragged that he lives in a “neighborhood where I have a very low Black population,” adding that “it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. … It’s no longer a rational impulse.” I’m purposely leaving out his profanity, delivered with the style and sophistication of the grade school playground.

I don’t recommend that you watch the video — but if you do, you’ll see how manic, how untethered to reality Adams seems. It’s almost surreal to realize that this is a 65-year-old adult who owes his fame and fortune to the funny pages. The failure of the TV version notwithstanding (he blamed that on anti-white prejudice, by the way), “Dilbert” was something of a bona fide cultural sensation a quarter-century ago, complete with tie-in plush toys, desk calendars and board games.

Outside his comic, Adams has become an increasingly belligerent Twitter presence over the past several years, spouting depressingly commonplace conspiracy theories and other nonsense about the usual contrarian topics: climate change, COVID-19 vaccines, the U.S. Capitol insurrection, the 2017 Charlottesville hate rally, how unfair they are to Donald Trump — you can probably fill in the rest of the list yourself.

Lee Enterprises already got rid of Adams’ strip in its newspapers last fall. This new racist meltdown prompted The Washington Post, the Gannett chain and The Star’s parent company McClatchy, among others, to 86 the comic over the past few days. His syndicate dropping him was the death knell for “Dilbert” as we know it.

I agree with every word in the note McClatchy published about the decision: “Mr. Adams is free to share his views as he sees fit, but we will not allow our platform to be used by those who espouse hatred and bigotry. Our readers deserve better.”

Exactly right. YouTube, owned by Google, lets Adams espouse white separatist garbage (for now). He maintains his own website, and Elon “the media is racist against whites” Musk isn’t likely to boot him from Twitter.

So, please: Spare us all the boo-hooing about cancel culture, or bizarre explanations that people offended by “get the hell away from Black people” (a verbatim quote) just don’t understand it in context.

It’s a free country. Adams can say whatever he wants about fleeing in terror from his African American neighbors. But I know from my many years of interacting with our readers that the very most conservative among them don’t want to join him, and certainly don’t count themselves among the white supremacists.

The government hasn’t done a thing to silence Adams — and that is the one and only entity that can deprive anyone of First Amendment rights. Getting booted from a major publishing deal is a massive career failure, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with free speech. His ravings will continue, but they won’t likely get as wide a reach as he’s enjoyed for many years. Losing that huge megaphone is his fault, and nobody else’s.

Scott Adams is not a conservative intellect. He’s no free speech hero. He’s just a rich and famous guy who didn’t have the common sense or self-control to keep his mouth shut when he got very angry on YouTube while people were watching.