Master persuader Scott Adams master persuades a bunch of newspapers to drop Dilbert via race comments

When it comes to the now-thriving market of Blowing Up Your Own Meal Ticket By Talking When Silence Would Have Not Only Sufficed, But Been Preferred, Dilbert creator Scott Adams has always been a visionary. From the earliest days of the internet—when his regular blogs would, free of the guiding hands of editors or publishers trying not to Fuck Up The Money, dip into a variety of increasingly wretched topics—Adams has made a second job out of trying to remind people that the guy who writes Cathy comics for nerdy engineering types was filled to the brim with loud, bad ideas.

Now that hard work finally seems to be paying off, as multiple papers owned by mass media firm Advance Publications have decided to drop the strip, after Adams (a self-described “master persuader”) master persuaded them into running a gray box instead of his comic strip with a recent rant in which he called Black people “a hate group” on his online show Real Coffee With Scott Adams. Per Variety, the papers dropping the strip include Advance papers in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Ohio, with Cleveland’s Plain Dealer publishing a letter from the editor announcing that it was dropping the strip. “This is not a difficult decision,” editor Chris Quinn opens with, brutally, declaring Adams’ comments “a racist rant.”

As we generally prefer to spend a little time as possible in our human lives contemplating the mind of The Dilbert Man, we aren’t going to delve too deep into Adams’ comments. You can read the Plain Dealer description, or watch the video yourself, if so inclined; we will note that he was apparently incensed by a poll in which a large percentage of Black people polled expressed unhappiness with the phrase “It’s okay to be white,” which has been adopted by various hate groups after originating as a 4chan trolling project a few years back. The internet: It has a history, of a sort.

According to The Daily Beast, Adams posted a video online today in which he declared himself, with more literalness than people bemoaning this term can usually cite, “cancelled.” (He also said, “If you’re making decisions for your own personal life, you can be as racist as you want,” which, y’know, sounds pretty bad out of context, but also, after watching the video, sounds terrible in context, so, there you go.)