Trollmaster Adams: A Different Take on the “Racist Rant”
Talk about the biggest “Gotcha!” moment in history. I fell for it too!
In the last week, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, has been in an ugly spotlight after doing a “racist rant” in one of his videos. Based on the results of a Rasmussen poll, he expressed his belief, supposedly, that white people should stay away from black people. He said that black people in America are a hate group and that he is no longer helping black people for that reason. He further said that he used to identify as black because black people are the “winning team.”
Although I’ve read the Dilbert comics and enjoyed them, I really didn’t know much about Scott Adams before I watched a two-minute clip that was plucked from the original hour-long video. So when I saw him make those statements with a very straight face, I had little reason to think that he was joking.
After all, social activists online were decrying him as a racist and newspapers everywhere were dropping his strip from their comics section. Anyone who’s read my work on Medium knows that I find today’s social activism to be problematic in many ways. Even so, despite my wariness of herd mentality, I’m generally inclined towards trusting people.
That’s one of the insidious things about herd mentality. Even if most of the time the masses are right, they are still frequently not. This means that they can be absolutely dead wrong when being right matters the most.
I later looked up other material related to the incident, including the original video which is an episode from Adams’ YouTube channel “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”
If you listen to him, he likes to talk about things in a sardonic manner. In the video, before his “racist rant,” he chuckles about “It’s okay to be white” being a question in a serious poll. When discussing North Korea’s nuclear weapons, he says “Don’t you think Kim Jong-un would be less likely to destroy America if you invited him over and gave him a nice two-week vacation in the U.S.? Don’t you think he wants to, like, visit?” Further in he quotes a former NATO commander’s concerns about how Russia feeds propaganda to its citizens that distorts reality and remarks, “Well I’m sure glad nothing like that happens in America, am I right?”
Most of us know, naturally, that it’s extremely unlikely that Kim Jong-un’s mind would be changed by a vacation here and that America’s media is riddled with propaganda. And that’s the point.
This is a guy who writes Sunday comics for a living, so of course he’s going to joke about controversial topics. He’s done so occasionally in his comic strip. Humor isn’t always in-your-face obvious and sometimes it’s meant to highlight certain issues for the audience. Adams himself said as much in a conversation with commentator Hotep Jesus about his words on the Rasmussen poll. The Los Angeles Times also notes that he was deliberately using hyperbole.
I should point out that if you look up “Scott Adams identifies as black” on Google, you won’t find anything prior to February 22nd, when the video was posted, indicating that he ever did so. So yeah, he was probably joking about that too.
Sadly, it seems that Dilbert will no longer be read in just about every American newspaper. At any rate, Adams doesn’t appear moved at all by the fallout. And why should he be? For one thing, he’s well insulated financially with a net worth of $75 million. For another, he’s proven a point. We live in an era where a reporter can be hired by the New York Times despite being repeatedly cruel to white people in the past, but a long-established cartoonist will be dropped from newspapers for satirically-intended remarks about black people.
So when all this blows over, Adams will probably walk away with a smile that says “Gotcha!” to everyone who vilified him or otherwise took him out of context. He can say it to me too. You got me, Mr. Adams. You got me.