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Multiple US newspapers have said they will stop publishing the popular Dilbert comic strip after its creator posted a video calling black people a “hate group.”
Scott Adams, who rose to fame in the 1990s with his satirical take on white-collar office life, has increasingly stoked controversy with his views on social issues.
But a video posted on Wednesday – in which Adams referred to black people as a “hate group” – proved to be the last straw for many Dilbert publishers.
“That’s a hate group and I don’t want anything to do with them,” he said.
“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.”
This video is no longer available.
His rant was prompted by a recent poll by conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports, whose results he said showed a slim majority of black respondents agreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white”.
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The USA TODAY Network, which operates hundreds of papers across the United States, said on Friday it “will no longer publish the Dilbert comic due to recent discriminatory comments by its creator”.
Chris Quinn, the editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, said Friday it “was not a difficult decision” for his paper to drop the comic strip.
“We are not a home for those who espouse racism,” Quinn added.
MLive Media Group – which runs eight Michigan-based publications – said it had “zero tolerance for racism,” and would drop Adams’s strip because of his “unapologetically racist rant”.
The Washington Post said on Saturday it would drop the cartoon from its pages “in light of Scott Adams’s recent statements,” though it was too late to stop the strip from being published in the weekend’s print editions.
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