Copeland's Corner: March 1, 2023

This isn’t about “cancel culture.” This is about “accountability culture.”

The phrase, “cancel culture,” has become a rallying cry of sorts for the right in recent months. It seems that whenever the transgressions of one of their ideological brethren is revealed to the world and they suffer social, employment or financial ramifications as a result, this is the mantra you’ll be bombarded with by all the bloviators in right wing media. The transgressor is somehow turned into the “victim.” The true “injured party.” Scott Adams, who has made millions of dollars in the past few decades with his workplace comic strip, Dilbert, is now the latest “victim of left-wing outrage.”

On his daily YouTube show recently, Adams used a Rasmussen poll that claimed that nearly half of African Americans don’t believe that “it’s okay to be white,” as a springboard for a diatribe on why whites should self-segregate. He claimed that the poll proved that black people are “a hate group.”

“Based on the current way things are going,” Adams said, “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”

He went on to claim that he will no longer help African Americans because “there’s no point.” By the way, he never explained what he’s ever done to help people of color…only that he’s going to stop doing it.

The blowback from this racist tirade was swift. Between 200 and 300 papers across the country have dropped Dilbert. Adams’ syndicator will no longer represent his work. His publisher has announced that it will no longer publish a book that Adams had authored and set for release in the coming months. Adams is whining “cancel culture,” and complaining that his ability to earn a living has been permanently destroyed. It’s a shame. He’s going to have to find a way to get by on the millions he’s already made from the Dilbert strip, books, and merchandising. He also stands by the remarks because they are “based on fact.”

A few things. First, Rasmussen polls are notoriously inaccurate as the methodology of their surveys is sketchy and nonrepresentative. It skews to the right based upon the people they query in their polling. The company’s polls are frequently outliers to all other polling that’s done. This is the poll that Donald Trump crowed about showing a 50% approval rating for the job he was doing as president when Gallup and every other reputable poll had him at 40%. In the poll Adams is basing his racism on, 1000 people were surveyed with only a tiny percentage of them African American. A grand total of 34 Black people answered the poll “no” when asked if it was “okay to be white?” This number also includes Blacks who answered “not sure.”

This brings us to the question itself. “Is it okay to be white?” is a white supremacist question that began on the extremist social media app, 4chan. 4chan is the app where you’ll find racists, conspiracy theorists and people who believe children are being held hostage by Democrats in the basements of pizza restaurants. The question’s primary purpose was to troll the left. You know, “Own the libs.” It’s since morphed into a rallying cry after being adopted by former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Grand Wizard David Duke.

Elon Musk (who calls his stewardship of Twitter an “exercise in free speech,” yet bans those who criticize or make fun of him) and other Adams apologists are claiming that Adams’ right to free speech is being infringed upon. Several newspapers that have dropped the Dilbert strip have addressed this in their editorials explaining their decision. They say that Adams has the right to say whatever he wants. That doesn’t mean that he represents the values of their paper or editorial staff. In other words, he has a right to free speech. He doesn’t have a right to be carried in any paper he wants. The paper has the right to decide what it will and won’t print.

Other cartoonists are thrilled with the development. They wonder, what took so long for this reckoning? In the past, Adams has espoused garbage of this nature without repercussions. He’s questioned the validity of the number of people murdered in the Holocaust. He’s an anti-vaxxer who calls those who refuse to take the Covid vaccine “the real winners.” Many believe that a less profitable cartoonist would have been banished from the comics’ pages long ago. It wouldn’t have taken an admonishment to avoid people of color before such views were addressed by those disseminating the speaker’s work.

This isn’t about “cancel culture.” This is about “accountability culture.” Adams is being held accountable for despicable, bigoted language. Again, he has the right to say anything he wants. This is America. And we have the right to ignore his work.