NOTE: This was written before Hillary Clinton essentially clinched the nomination.
With the critical California primary looming, Hillary Clinton has received a key endorsement that will likely help her clinch the “self-absorbed weirdo millionaire who did a comic strip you once kind of liked” vote.
That’s right, folks. Dilbert creator Scott Adams has thrown his support behind Hillary. Sort of.
In a post on his always strange blog yesterday (archived here), Adams offered a bizarre rationale for his choice: He’s endorsing Hillary because he’s afraid that if he doesn’t, her supporters might literally murder him.
No, really. In his post, Adams explains that
Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
Let’s unpack the, er, logic that led to this phony backwards “endorsement.”
Adams has been gushing for months about what he sees as Donald Trump’s “extraordinary persuasion skills,” by which he evidently means Trump’s bellicose, bullying rhetoric designed to appeal to Americans’ worst instincts. But now, in the wake of Clinton’s masterful takedown of Trump in a withering speech last week, Adams sees that she’s got some “solid-gold persuasion” skills of her own.
So naturally Adams has concluded that his life is in danger.
I’ll let him explain it because I certainly can’t:
This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s Trump’s most fervent fans who are pairing Trump with Hitler — though they tend to see Trump’s similarities with their Nazi idol as a good thing.
And I’m also pretty sure that Clinton didn’t force The Donald to retweet such lovely individuals as @WhiteGenocideTM, a resident of “Jewmerica” whose Twitter bio links to a pro-Hitler “documentary,” and who once Tweeted an image of a gleeful Trump getting ready to gas Bernie Sanders in a Nazi death camp. Or self-described “fashy goy” @EustaceFash, who likes to post things like this:
Ein Reich Ein Volk Ein Wall pic.twitter.com/bucwnHRWu0
— Eustace Bagge (@EustaceFash) April 23, 2016
But let’s set that aside for now, because in Adams’ world it is The Hillary who’s responsible when people look at The Donald and notice a bit of a resemblance to The Adolf. Clinton’s “new scare tactics are solid-gold persuasion,” Adams declares.
The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to trigger a race war in the United States.
Yeah, that’s right. It isn’t Trump’s racism and xenophobia, or his repeated incitements of violence against protesters, or his winking cultivation of literal Nazi fans, that might stir up a race war. It’s Clinton mentioning those things in public.
But Adams’ “logic” gets weirder:
And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms.
Dude, dude. Really?
So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd.
He may actually have a point here. Trump’s most violent fans would much rather be beating up people whose skin is a bit darker than that of a pasty-faced white cartoonist.
And so Adams has thrown his support — if you want to call it that — behind Clinton, in order to protect himself from violent monsters like these in the event that she loses, which he thinks she will.
As of press time, this writer could not confirm the color of the sky on Adams’ planet.
@PI – ah, well spotted then. I don’t do a lot of social media aside from good old FB; only heard about this via an online news source (and they only covered it because it involved an Australian …).
And you’re absolutely right, as always 🙂
What this cartoonist HAS accomplished here is that I’m giving a pass on any further reading of Dilbert in books or newspapers, and will encourage Dilbert be dropped from any publication, should the opportunity to do so arise.
Because I don’t care to reward Scott Adams, using the invisible hand of the free market to register my dissatisfaction with his position; presumably the conservative Adams loves him some free market economics.
I’ve pretty much reached the end of my tolerance for conservative whining about being victims (or potential victims) when they are nothing of the kind. It has become a defining feature of 21st century conservatism, once you start looking for it; you see it everywhere, and never more so than among Trump supporters. It is usually found paired with some variant of double standard, where the more stringent standard is applied to others, rather than to conservatives themselves.
Excellent piece; thanks for posting it!
Jew-Merica. What did the Jews ever do for us?
Apart from saving Monticello, that is. Jefferson’s heirs had to sell everything off to pay his debts. Monticello was purchased in 1834 by Uriah Levy, the first Jewish flag officer in the U.S. Navy. Levy admired Jefferson for his commitment to religious freedom and spent his own money to maintain Monticello. It stayed in the Levy family until 1923, when the foundation that now runs it acquired it.
As opposed to Mount Vernon, which became pretty decrepit before being purchased and restored by a foundation.