You Know You Done Fucked Up If William Saletan Roasts You For Racism!!!

thebulwark  |  Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the comic strip Dilbert, has been canceled for racism. In a video livestream last Wednesday, he declared:

• “I resign from the hate group called black Americans.” (Adams is white.)
• “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the fuck away.”
• “It makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. . . . It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying.”

Adams wasn’t done. The next day, he continued:

• “I’ve designated that to be a hate group—black Americans—a hate group.”
• “If you’re white, don’t live in a black neighborhood. It’s too dangerous.”
• “White people trying to help black America for decades and decades has completely failed. And we should just stop doing it. [Because] all we got is called racists.”

Most Americans would consider these statements vile. But Adams swears he’s preaching practicality, not hate. “It wasn’t because I hated anybody,” he pleaded in his daily livestream on Monday. “I was concerned that somebody hated me.” That somebody, he argued, was black people. “The whole point was to get away from racists,” he insisted.

A week after his original rant, Adams still claims that nobody has disagreed with his main point: that to steer clear of people who dislike you, it’s sensible for white people to avoid black people, and vice versa.

Adams is wrong. Not just morally, but practically. His advice is empirically unfounded and would make everything worse. 

Every time one of these racially incendiary arguments comes along, the cycle repeats itself. The offender gets canceled. His opinion is dismissed as unthinkably repellent. He and his allies seize on that dismissal as evidence that the establishment is suppressing dissent. Nothing should be unthinkable, the dissenters argue. There’s some secret truth, some taboo insight, that the cancel culture is hiding from you.

Sorry, but there’s no great insight here. You can watch hour after hour of Adams’s livestreams, as I have, and you won’t find that nugget of forbidden truth. His reasoning is as sloppy as his research. In every way, he’s just wrong.