02/24/2023
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
Scott Adams is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, which has often raised a chuckle from me, and once or twice a guffaw. That aside, I know next to nothing about Scott Adams. I’m vaguely aware he has a social media presence — a vidcast, I think — but I’d never engaged with it…
…until this week, when Adams came out as anti-anti-white. On the race issue, that’s the same position as mine; so I’ve been getting emails saying: “Hey, Derb, Scott Adams agrees with you!”
Is that right? Here’s what the guy actually said.
Well, Rasmussen Poll had a provocative little poll today. They said, er: “Do you agree or disagree with the statement, er, ’It’s OK to be white’?”
That was an actual question. Rasmussen asked, you know, white and black voters — and probably others — er, “Do you disagree or agree with the statement: ’It’s OK to be white’?” Twenty-six percent of blacks said, er, “No. It’s not OK to be white.” Twenty-one percent weren’t sure. Add ’em together, that is forty-seven percent of black respondents were not willing to say: “It’s OK to be white.”
That … that, actually … that’s, like, a real poll. This just happened. Did you have any idea [laughs], would you have imagined that that could have happened?
So I realized, um … As you know, I’ve been identifying as black for a while — years now, ’cos I like, y’know, I like to be on the winning team. And I like to help. I always thought: If you help the black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you know, you could … you can find the biggest benefit.
So I thought, well, that’s the hardest thing and the biggest benefit; so I’d like to focus a lot of my life resources in helping black Americans. So much so that I started identifying as black, to just be on the team I was helping.
But it turns out that nearly half of that team, er, doesn’t think, ah, I’m OK to be white. Which of course is why I identified as black — so I could be on the winning team for a while.
But I have to say, er, this is the first political poll that ever changed my activities. I don’t know that that’s ever happened before. Normally you see a poll, you just look at it and you go, “Aaah, whatever. [Laughs.] Y’know: this is interesting, what other people think …” But as of today I’m going to re-identify as white ’cos I don’t want to be a member of a hate group.
I have accidentally joined a Hate group. So if … if nearly half of all blacks, er, are not OK with white people — according to this poll, not according to me — according to this poll, er, that’s a hate group. That’s a hate group and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.
And I would say, y’know, 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. Just get the f*** away. Where … wherever you have to go, just get away, ’cos there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. Right? You just have to escape.
[Scott Adams has strong reaction to Rasmussen poll about race, National Conservative, February 22, 2023]
[LINKS ADDED]
The main thing to bear in mind here is that Adams is a humorist, always looking to raise a laugh. So how seriously should we take this?
(I’m addressing that question to the dwindling number of Americans who still have a sense of humor in defiance of efforts by our Cultural Revolutionaries to stamp out humor altogether.)
That business about identifying as black, for instance. Has Adams really been identifying as black? Well, he’s been saying he’s been identifying as black on Twitter for three years or so.
That’s an obvious joke on transgenderism and transracialism. His comic strip once had a running joke about a black office worker who identified as white.
I thought the Rasmussen poll that inspired Adams’ remarks sounded kind of interesting. I strongly favor the Cold Civil War theory of our current discords: two big groups of white people who hate each other, with blacks and other races cheering and booing from the sidelines, not very consequential.
So how did white respondents break on the issue of “It’s OK to be white”? Was there a clear and even split between Goodwhites and Badwhites?
I went to the Rasmussen website for the full report. The full report’s behind a subscription paywall — Not ‘Woke’ Yet? Most Voters Reject Anti-White Beliefs, February 22, 2023.
However, the Rasmussen people did release the crosstabs with questions and demographics on Twitter, here.
They look like this:
You’ll see that two percent of whites strongly disagreed with the statement that “It’s OK to be white,” a deep level of Goodwhite commitment; but no overall picture of white sentiment.
You could probably gather up that two percent from the Human Resources Department staff of our business corporations and the twenty thousand Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion administrators at every one of our universities. What about the rest of us?
That aside, I didn’t think Adams’ remarks were very coherent. He read the poll as saying that, quote from him, “nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people.”
That’s not what the poll says. What it says is, that nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people asserting their whiteness. Perhaps they just don’t like identitarianism of any variety.
As I said, though, Adams is a humorist, so we shouldn’t apply fine logical analysis to what he said.
Again: His advice to white people to “get the hell away from black people” is superfluous, as Adams surely knows. Our national patterns of residential and educational choice show plainly that we already do that as far as the law allows.
I’ll admit that I was flattered to see Scott Adams’ monologue compared with my column of eleven years ago, the one that brought me worldwide fame for the proverbial fifteen minutes. It’s nice to see one’s stuff remembered.
It’s apples and oranges, though. I was targeting one particular item of silliness: the romantic fantasy nursed by blacks and Goodwhites that blacks have to tiptoe around in public for fear of evil white supremacists lurking around every corner waiting to shoot them.
On the statistics, as I pointed out, blacks are far more dangerous to whites than vice versa.
I was also, I think, fairer to blacks than Adams is, or is pretending to be for humorous purposes. In my version of The Talk I said:
The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship.
I also urged readers to “consciously seek opportunities to make friends with intelligent and well-socialized blacks,” of whom there are of course many.
Adams doesn’t temper his commentary with any such palliatives.
But then, as I said, it’s apples and oranges. If you’re speaking with a humorous or part-humorous intent, you don’t have to add earnest qualifications to what you’re saying. It’s a different mode of speaking.
All that said, I welcome Scott Adams to the fellowship of the anti-anti-white, and I regret I haven’t paid much attention to him before, other than an occasional glance and chuckle at the Dilbert strip.
If you’re ever in Long Island, Scott, drop me a line and I’ll buy you a drink.
John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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