The Media Research Center’s Catherine Salgado praised the late Scott Adams for adhering to right-wing talking points in a Jan. 14 post:
Popular influencer and comic strip creator Scott Adams repeatedly made a strong stand for First Amendment rights.
Adams passed away on Tuesday, his ex-wife Shelley Miles confirmed in a video message posted to X in place of his usual daily show. While Adams is most famous for his creation of the office satire comic “Dilbert” and his podcast Coffee with Scott Adams, he was also consistently an advocate for free speech rights.
Adams praised those who practiced or supported free speech while simultaneously strongly condemning the censorship industrial complex under the Biden administration. In October 2023, for example, Adams angrily posted on X, “Free speech is no longer a feature of America. I can’t keep pretending. It feels absurd.”
A month later, he mourned, “Free speech has entered the dustbin of history. We are only allowed to agree with the Narrative or say things that will have no impact, like the opinion you are reading now.” in August 2024, Adams reacted to reports of the Biden administration paying grants to groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index to block ad revenue for right-leaning sites by emphasizing that the government was suppressing free speech.
But Adams did not merely critique the rising and expanding censorship complex that included social media companies, government officials, and private entities as revealed in the Twitter Files, MRC’s 57 censorship initiatives study, and more.
But Salgado failed to mention the thing Adams really will be best known for: Going on a racist tirade in which he declared that “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people” — a rant that caused hundreds of newspapers to drop “Dilbert” and publishers to drop book deals with him. The MRC tried its best to whitewash this controversy, but the person who deserves the most blame for ruining Adams’ career is Adams himself.
In fact, Adams’ fit of racism appears nowhere in Salgado’s article despite it being the ultimate defining point of his career. Weird. Instead, she gushed, “Free speech advocates lost a staunch ally with Adams’ death” — without mentioning his racism.