This was on the front page of my local paper today. It is remarkable how quickly a business can be vaporized these days. Everything Scott Adams said is protected by the First Amendment. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect a business from the owner’s free speech. That would seem to be obvious to most people. If you run a high-profile business and you say or publish things that a lot of folks find highly offensive, there may be adverse consequences. That is because people have the right to do business with whomever they want. And if they think Scott Adams is saying racist things, they have the right to stop doing business with him. Newspapers, which are careful about their reputations, had to decide whether they were going to keep paying Adams for Dilbert. Adams wasn’t an unknown vendor or supplier. He was one of the most prominent suppliers of content to a couple of thousand newspapers. And so if a newspaper kept running Dilbert, it would be obvious that they were maintaining their business relationship with Adams. It’s not like the paper could hide that, because the comic would run every day in the comics section. So newspapers had to make a decision. Either keep running Dilbert, and catch heat from readers offended by his remarks, or stop running Dilbert. Similarly, his syndicate, which is basically the agent who gets the comic to the papers, had to decide whether they wanted to keep him as a client. The syndicate cut him loose.
People like Adams have been around forever. In the old days, they would say stuff and only their friends or work associates would hear it, roll their eyes and just go on. Then the Internet came along. That has changed things permanently for folks who like to share their wisdom with the entire planet. High-profile people who like to share their wisdom now do it on social media or podcasts or Youtube, and sometimes what they share causes huge problems for them. And you wonder, well, what did they think was going to happen?
There are folks out there who like to be provocative and who consider themselves iconoclasts and truth-tellers, fighting against a woke culture, a cancel culture. Fine. That’s protected speech. But if you sell comics to mainstream newspapers and your provocative comments cross over to racism, it’s not just the woke folks that are going to push back. Adams has gotten rich from the money he has been paid by newspapers, and he decided to put them all in a tough spot.