Elon Musk has deployed his Twitter megaphone of 130 million followers to come to the rescue of a beleaguered cartoonist dumped by hundreds of newspapers across the United States for launching a virulent racist tirade.
The Twitter and Tesla boss responded with his own controversial stream of thought over the weekend after the massive removal of the Dilbert comic strip from US newspaper headlines. Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated blacks as a “hate group,” advising whites to “just stay away from them.”
“The media is racist,” was Musk’s response to the widespread decision to end the Dilbert strip. “For a long time the American media was racist against non-white people, now it is racist against whites and Asians.”
He went on to compare the American media to elite educational institutions in America, where he stated that “the same thing happened.”
It was also reported that Musk deleted a tweet in which he responded to a comment by Adams about his comic strip being dropped, saying, “What exactly are they complaining about?”
Musk’s defense of Adams was in stark contrast to the collective decision by hundreds of news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and USA Today, to pull the strip in response to the cartoonist’s overtly racist comments. Several papers had dropped dilbert last year in the wake of a series of earlier homophobic and racist outbursts from him.
The strip was founded in 1989 and, at its peak, was published by some 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries. Adams lit a fuse under the success of her own work in a recent episode from his YouTube show Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
Over the course of the show, Adams misinterpreted a poll by Rasmussen asking people if they disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white.” As the Anti-Defamation League As he has pointed out, the phrase originated with the extremist online forum 4chan as a trolling campaign and was later exploited by white supremacists, but Adams took it literally.
On the back, he declared blacks “a hate group” and expressed relief that he managed to flee from them while living in a neighborhood with a “very low” African-American population.
Musk’s decision to rush to Adams’ aid came against the backdrop of his controversial run of Twitter since taking over the social media platform at a cost of $44 billion last year. Under his leadership, several suspended or banned white supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts have been restored, and racist and antisemitic tweets they have proliferated.
Tesla has also faced numerous lawsuits alleging “rampant racism” and sexual harassment against employees.
On Saturday, Twitter made the latest round of job cuts, laying off at least 200 employees out of a total workforce that shrank under Musk from around 7,500 to 2,000, according to a New York Times report. Among the casualties was the product manager who led the transition to a new paid verification service known as Twitter Blue, according to technology news site Verge.
