Hundreds of Newspapers Pull Dilbert Comic after Creator Calls Black Americans a ‘Hate Group’

Hundreds of newspapers across the U.S. will no longer publish the Dilbert comic strip after cartoonist creator Scott Adams said black Americans are a “hate group” and encouraged white Americans to “get the hell away” from them.

Adams’s comments came in response to a Rasmussen poll that found only a slight majority of black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.”

“If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll — that’s a hate group,” Adams said on his YouTube show on Wednesday. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people . . . because there is no fixing this.”

Adams went on to accuse black people of not “focusing on education.”

“I’m also really sick of seeing video after video of black Americans beating up non-black citizens,” he later added.

The video sparked widespread backlash, leading a host of newspapers to pull the long-running cartoon, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The USA Today network, which includes more than 300 newspapers, has canceled the comic strip as well saying it “will no longer publish the ‘Dilbert’ comic due to the recent discriminatory comments by its creator.”

Chris Quinn, the vice president of content for Cleveland Plain Dealer, said Friday it was “not a difficult decision” to cancel the comic saying the paper is “not a home for those who espouse racism.”

In announcing its own decision to entirely pull the comic, The Los Angeles Times said it had printed reruns of the comics four times in the past nine months after the “new daily strip did not meet our standards.”

Adams responded to the backlash in a tweet on Sunday promoting a subsequent interview: “I’m accepting criticism from anyone who has seen the full context here. The rest of you are in a fake news bubble but I trust you suspected that.”

One day earlier, he defended his comments on his YouTube show and said he was wrongly being canceled. He spoke out against racism against individuals but said, “You should absolutely be racist whenever it’s to your advantage. Every one of you should be open to making a racist personal career decision.”

He later said the cancelation means most of his income would be “gone by next week.”

“My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this, am I right? There’s no way you can come back from this,”Adams said.

He told the Washington Post in a statement: “Lots of people are angry, but I haven’t seen any disagreement yet, at least not from anyone who saw the context. Some questioned the poll data. That’s fair.”