Elon Musk Calls US Media ‘Racist’ after Dilbert Row
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his security detail depart the company’s local office in Washington, U.S. January 27, 2023. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
A number of US newspapers declared they would stop running a well-known comic strip whose creator dubbed Black people a hate group, prompting billionaire Elon Musk to label US media as “racist.”
An story about a rant by Scott Adams, the long-running author of the “Dilbert” comic strip and social media platform Twitter, prompted Musk, the owner of both the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and the social media platform Twitter, to tweet in response.
On the social network, Musk tweeted, “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, and now they’re racist against whites & Asians.” Musk has now allowed individuals who had been suspended for using hate speech to rejoin.
The same thing occurred with elite high schools and colleges in America. They could try to stop being racist, perhaps.
Researchers claim there has been an increase in hate speech on Twitter under Musk’s leadership, and Tesla has been the target of numerous lawsuits alleging racism.
Adams, like Musk, has ignited controversy with his social policy stances more and more.
Nevertheless, a video that was shared on Wednesday in which Adams called Black people a “hate group” became the tipping point for many “Dilbert” publishers.
He declared, “I don’t want anything to do with them. That’s a hate group.
The best advise I could give white people, given the course of events, is to stay far away from Black people.
He said that a recent survey by the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports revealed that a small majority of Black respondents agreed with the statement “It’s good to be white.” This sparked his tirade.
Hundreds of newspapers around the country are part of the USA TODAY Network, which announced Friday that it will “no longer print the Dilbert cartoon owing to recent discriminatory comments by its creator.”
The editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, Chris Quinn, stated the decision to discontinue the comic strip “was not a difficult one” for his publication.
Quinn continued, “We are not a place for those who support racism.
Adams’s comic strip would be discontinued by MLive Media Group, which owns eight publications in Michigan, because of his “unapologetically racist rant,” which the company stated it had “zero tolerance for.”
Although it was too late to prevent the comic strip from appearing in the weekend print editions, The Washington Post announced on Saturday that it will remove the cartoon from its pages “in light of Scott Adams’s recent pronouncements.”
