by Dilbert, the last name unknown, was fired this week from several newspapers that were printing his unsavory workplace comments on their comics pages, where the pasty office drone has spent nearly 34 years of his career.
Umbrella publications USA Today and Advance Local said they were dropping the strip because of creator Scott Adams’ latest incendiary comments, which were made in a live stream Wednesday.
“The best advice I would give white people is to get the hell out of black people,” Adams mouthed.
“Get off the hook. Wherever you have to go, go,” he said.
And on: “There is no solution to this. This cannot be fixed. … All you have to do is escape. So that’s what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population.”
Adams said that pollsters found that “almost half of all Blacks are not okay with white people,” and that this meant that Black people are a “hate group.”
“And I want nothing to do with them,” he said.
Newspaper editors then decided they had nothing to do with the empty Dilbert scene.
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images via Getty Images
Gannett-owned USA Today called Adams’ comments “discriminatory” in a statement posted on social media on Friday. Editors for Advance Local publications including Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, NJ.com and MLive.com wrote letters to their readers explaining why they were choosing to dump “Dilbert,” as well.
“This is not a difficult decision,” wrote Chris Quinn, editor of The Plain Dealer.
John Hiner, editor of MLive.com, which serves the mid-Michigan area, declined to even link to the video of Adams’ latest comments.
“If you’re curious enough to subject yourself to that garbage, I’m sure your search engine or social media will guide you,” Hiner wrote.
Adams has long established himself as a right-wing reactionary, using his Twitter page and other outlets to stand up to Donald Trump as far back as 2015. When protests took to the streets of major cities in against police brutality in 2020, Adams said. said the Black Lives Matter movement has turned into a “domestic terrorist organization that has been setting race relations back for perhaps twenty years.”
“If Biden is elected, there’s a good chance you’ll be dead within the year,” he said write in July 2020, as the Trump administration continued to fail on a comprehensive response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Republicans will be hunted,” he said.
Adams spent part of his Saturday retweeting people who agreed with his stance on Black people and recommended that even those who were making counterclaims did not think it was wrong.
“Imagine what would happen if they disagreed with me. Much worse,” he said without further explanation.
