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(Trends Wide) — Elon Musk defended “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams after hundreds of newspapers stopped printing the comic strip over Adams’ recent racist comments.
Last week, Adams called black Americans a “hate group” and suggested that white people should “stay away from them.” Adams actually encouraged segregation in a shocking tirade on her YouTube channel. Her comments came in response to a poll by conservative Rasmussen Reports that said 53% of black Americans agreed with the statement: “It’s okay to be white.”
In response to a tweet about the controversy, Twitter owner Musk said Sunday that the “media is racist.” He did not criticize Adams’ comments, and Musk said without evidence that for “a long time the American media was racist against non-whites, now it is against whites and Asians.”
“The same thing happened with the elite universities and institutes in the United States,” Musk wrote. “Maybe they can try not to be racist.”
Musk later agreed tweeting that Adams’ comments were “not good” but had an “element of truth”. She also accused the media of giving black victims of police violence disproportionate coverage to white victims of police violence. Blacks are more likely to be killed by the use of police force than whites, according to multiple studies.
Hate speech on Twitter
The Twitter CEO’s comments come amid a wave of hate speech on his platform. The Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League said in recent reports that the volume of hate speech on Twitter grew dramatically under Musk’s leadership.
Specifically, the Center for Countering Digital Hate stated that daily use of the “n” word under Musk’s leadership triples the 2022 average and that the use of insults against gay men and trans people increased 58% and 62 %, respectively. The Anti-Defamation League said in a separate report that its data shows “both an increase in anti-Semitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of anti-Semitic posts.”
Adams said on his YouTube show last week that “If almost half of black people are not okay with white people — according to this poll, not me, according to this poll — that’s a hate group.”
“I don’t want anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the way things are now, that the best advice I would give to white people is to stay away from black people for the f*cking time…because this is beyond repair.”
Adams has since said on Twitter that he was only “advising people to avoid hate” and suggested that the cancellation of his comic strip indicates that free speech in America is under attack.
Newspapers that pulled the comic strip have been clear with readers.
“Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, was a racist this week…and we will no longer run his comic strip in The Plain Dealer,” wrote Chris Quinn, editor-in-chief of the paper. “It’s not a difficult decision.”
“We are not a home for those who espouse racism,” Quinn added. “Of course, we don’t want to provide them with financial support.”
USA Today, which operates hundreds of newspapers, and the Washington Post also stopped publishing “Dilbert.”
Trends Wide’s Oliver Darcy contributed to this article.
