MIAMI, Fla. – After media companies in the U.S. dropped Dilbert’s comic strip in syndication following creator Scott Adams’ alleged racist rant on YouTube, one South Florida federal lawmaker supports the move.
And a local Black college student is boycotting Twitter after owner Elon Musk supported Adams in a social media post.
U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who represents Broward County applauded the South Florida Sun Sentinel for being among the media companies to drop Dilbert following Adams’ rant.
"I’m proud that the South Florida Sun Sentinel dropped Dilbert after its white creator said Black people are a “racist hate group” whom he won’t help, urging whites “to get the hell away from Black people," she said. "Scott Adams is free to share his racist views. Newspapers are free to shun him."
Adams came under fire for calling Blacks a "racist hate group" and encouraged white people to stay as far away from them as possible.
In the YouTube video, Adams responded to a poll conducted by the right-leaning Rasmussen Reports that suggested 26 percent of Blacks disagreed with the statement "It’s Ok to be white."
The Anti-Defamation League has noted that the phrase emerged on the infamous message board 4chan in 2017 as a trolling campaign and has a “long history” in the white supremacist movement.
Adams called Black people who disagreed with the statement in the Rasmuseen poll as a "racist hate group" and said he personally chose to live in a community where few or no Black lived.
"I didn’t want to have anything to do with them," Adams said in the video.
He also urged white to do the same.
Major newspapers across the country dropped Dilbert from syndication following his incendiary remarks and Musk, who is co-founder of Tesla and CEO for SpaceX, subsequently accused the media in a Twitter post of being racist against white and Asian people.
Musk, who purchased Twitter for $44 billion last year, has over 130 million followers.
On his Twitter account, Musk posted, “The media is racist.” He then added, “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”
Brian Levin, a civil rights attorney and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University said, in response to Musk’s tweets:
“Systemic racism requires not only widespread bigotry to be held within a group but also a structural component that allows discrimination and oppression to be imposed on a minority because of an advantage of access and power," he tweeted. "A white billionaire from South Africa who recently lost a high-profile racial discrimination case may not be in the best position to offer counsel.”
Murray Jacobs, a Black local college junior, said he’s boycotting Twitter which he used to promote his small business and garner feedback for his school’s research projects.
No Comment