was gonna happen sooner or later

My boss likes to interrupt our work so he can read the latest Dilbert comic to us out loud. I've never found Dilbert to be all that funny, but the strip amuses my boss. A bit of background: our boss self-identifies as liberal, but he's more in the Tim Pool camp of disaffected ("red-pilled") liberals who look at the current extreme-left-dominated Democrat party and go, "Where the hell did my party go?" So, like a lot of red-pilled liberals, my boss actually sounds more conservative than liberal—not because he's a neocon who wants to spread American-style democracy to all countries whether they want it or not, but because he belongs to a generation of liberals who actually believe in things like freedom of speech/thought/assembly, Second Amendment rights, the idea that chromosomal men can't become chromosomal women, etc.—ideas most obviously espoused by conservatives today. So these days, someone like my boss is considered an antiquated bigot by the likes of the drooling AOC crowd.

That's the background. As my boss reads these Dilbert vignettes to us, though, I've begun to wonder, over the past year, how it is that Scott Adams—creator of Dilbert—hasn't been canceled in all of this time. Well... Adams has now been cancelled. 77 news outlets have dropped Adams's strip from their papers.

A popular comic strip has been canned by 77 newspapers after its creator Scott Adams started incorporating anti-woke plotlines, including a black character who identifies as white.  

Adams' much-loved 'Dilbert' comics have been in circulation since 1989 and frequently pokes fun at office culture, but he announced he was sensationally dropped by publisher Lee Enterprises.  

The media company owns nearly 100 newspapers across the country - including The Buffalo News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Arizona Daily Sun - and has been publishing Adams' jokes about the corporate ladder for years.  

One of his most recent controversial comic strips included a black worker, who identifies as white, being asked to also identify as gay to boost his company's environmental, social, and governance ratings. 

Dave, his reoccurring character, replies: 'Depends how hard you want me to sell it,' before the boss responds: 'Just wear better shirts.' 

In the movie "Sorry to Bother You," black telemarketers are cynically told that the key to success, as a telemarketer, is to use your "white voice." By sounding white, you earn people's trust and respect, and you can move up in the telemarketing world. The movie's message is cynical and Marxist, not to mention as unsubtle as a pizza topped with human fetuses, but to make its central joke, it has to rely on a trope that is a close cousin to the idea of being black but identifying as white. The movie didn't catch any flak for this, but because Adams is a white man with an un-woke message, then of course he has to be crucified.

Here's Tim Pool on the topic of Scott Adams:

Adams's cancellation was inevitable because, well, the left hates humor and can't take a joke. It's ironic to see the left in the role of a morally conservative prude from the old days, but that's where the culture is at: if you don't think Sanctioned Thoughts, you're canceled. If your humor isn't Certified Leftie Humor (i.e., lame), you're canceled. And Big Brother is always watching to make sure you're behaving yourself. Stay in your lane, and you'll be fine. Show any political creativity or rebelliousness, and you've now got a target on your back. More deeply ironic is how today's left sounds just like the Christian fundamentalists it claims to hate: you've got the black-and-white morality, the inability to have a sense of scale (slapping a woman's ass is exactly the same as raping her—just as some extreme Christians would say that swearing is tantamount to murder in the eyes of God), and the wild-eyed fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun instead of understanding that Life is Serious Business, and that This Is Not a Game.

I said above that I don't find Dilbert that funny. All the same, I think Adams has chosen a deliberately bland approach to humor because, over the years, he's been practicing a sort of psy-ops on the nation. Through his comic strip, his books, his interviews, and his video discourses, Adams has been subtly nudging the consciousness of the nation in a certain direction. Not everyone gets him; I'm not even sure I totally get him. But I can sense what he's doing, and on that level, I respect the man. Clever subtlety appears strongest in repressive societies, and my country has been curdling into a repressive society for a while, now, so while Adams's cancelation was inevitable, the existence of people like Scott Adams is inevitable, too. After him, there will be more such folks. You can bet on that.