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.
@Banned
To be fair, he was only elected once 🙂
What I found interesting tho, was the whole ‘living President’ thing. Like if Bubba fell over in the next 5mo (Catholic cross gesture), then it’s OK? But not while he still draws breath, apparently
Most of the ‘We fought the British over this’ people I see are brand ass new. Don’t elect FDR, he’s a communist. Don’t elect Bobby Kennedy, he’s a papist. Don’t elect Hillary… er… um… she’s a dynasty
Beyond the blatant sexism of determining a woman’s worthiness based on her husband’s achievements and the ‘sins of the father’ mindset we actually fought the British over, it’s the same shit repackaged for the new right wing boogeywoman: ‘the Washington insider career politician’. It was stupid then, and it’s stupid now
He’s #3, right after Sandra Boynton and the “Cathy” cartoonist.
Well, you certainly won’t win any feminist brownie points by believing that a woman shouldn’t be given a job because her husband previously had it.
10x funnier than Dilbert
Yuuup. On his blog, Adams is very invested in the idea that he’s a genius at political predictions thanks to his deep understanding of psychology and hypnotic powers. He brags about this a lot, even though Trump winning the nomination is about his only prediction that’s come to pass. Remember when Mitt Romney defeated Obama in a landslide? No? Huh.
He’s setting things up so no matter who wins*, he can claim he saw it coming. Like other tiny people with tiny Internet cults, he’s doesn’t care about the issues nearly as much as he cares about shoring up his ego and getting high-fives from his fans.
*Hillary. Which I can confidently predict even though I have hardly any hypnotic powers and was forced to learn to draw well to compensate.
This makes me even more sad that the guy running the ‘mra dilbert’ (dilbert comics with Adam’s quotes) tumblr has given up… Granted, I’m sure wading through all that manure must be bad for your mental health, so props to David for managing so long 🙂
Or like those guys who think they’re oh-so-smart when they get in a police car and try to beat themselves up so they can claim “police brutality”, all while being completely unaware that modern police cars have cameras for both the inside and the outside.
And thanks to that image, she’ll now haunt mine
If he genuinely believed that, he wouldn’t have mentioned why he’s endorsing Hillary Clinton. I can see two possibilities here;
1) Scott Adams is desperate for attention because his webcomic isn’t nearly as popular as it used to be.
2) Scott Adams is a monumental idiot.
Obviously the two are not mutually exclusive.
Scott Adams was on Real Time recently and made a complete ass of himself. He kept rambling on about hypnosis and persuasion techniques like he’s trying to be Derren Brown or something. Maher treated him as some kind of wise elder/oracle/truthsayer.
Adams also predicted that Trump will win the election in a landslide.
Can I just say that I really hate the “Clinton dynasty!” talking point? Not just because of the underlying misogyny Katz pointed out, but because it’s a fundamental failure to understand what words mean. Dynasties are multigenerational nepotism; two people who worked their ways up from the middle class to the Oval Office and just happened to get married along the way, well, that’s neither multigenerational nor nepotistic.
It’s the Feel Good Hit of the Year! 😉
Yeah, this is Adams trying to be clever and manipulative. I don’t think he realizes how bad he is at being clever. It just comes off as bizarre.
And even according to his own weird theories, surely it’s a bad idea for him to pair Clinton with ideas of strength and power.
I had an argument with Adams years ago about his alternative ‘theory’ of gravity, which was published in one of his Dilbert books. There were about nineteen things wrong with his idea but he kept on insisting that it fit the evidence as well as Newton’s does. It doesn’t. It’s complete nonsense. It’s not even very well thought-through nonsense. I’ve argued with him a few times since.
This is Adams’ MO:
1. Make some smarmy claim of intellectual superiority (over fucking NEWTON, in this case, for fuck’s sake)
2. Argue and argue and argue – without providing evidence or answering any questions – that he’s right until everyone gives up in despair.
3. Pretend that he was joking and only said those things to wind people up.
4. Gleefully proclaim that his mission was somehow accomplished because people who know better noted that he was talking bollocks.
5. Rinse and repeat.
Actually, the original reason, at least in the UK, was to stop people selling their votes. With the secret ballot, any prospective vote-buyer couldn’t be sure the bought voter had fulfilled his* side of the deal. The modern trend to allow postal voting ad lib, in both the USA and UK, is dangerous for that reason among others – although the much larger number of voters makes vote-buying more expensive and hazardous.
*Of course it always was “his” at this time.
And his dog, Colin.
@ latsot
That was always the problem with robber buttons.
From the ‘Beware the Man who Knows One Thing’ link that Her Grace Phryne posted:
Which was kind of sad. Not just because Adams seems to be in The Secret levels of woo, but because I found the animated series better than the comic strip a lot of the tiem. Why? Because it actually forced Adams to pay attention to pacing, and to create stories with beginning/middle/end, rather than just rattling on for weeks at a time before getting distracted by some other shiny idea.
He’s just trying to feed the right-wing persecution complex. “SJWs won’t allow anyone to be Republican, ooga booga!”
Or he might actually have bought into that persecution complex, but I’d be surprised.
I just read a couple of Adams’s other posts on Trump. They are ridiculous, and at the same time, very sad. I know Adams loves to be edgy and do the whole “look at my offensive argument! I’m totally kidding. But not really. Or AM I?” thing. But he’s tying himself in knots, pretending Trump is not Trump. He says, among many other ludicrous things, that Trump’s Islamophobia isn’t racism, because Islam is a religion. Yeah, okay, Scott. You totally persuaded me with your super persuasion technique of bullshit hair splitting.
@YoullNeverGuess
You’re right, I have no idea 🙂
TW for Islamophobia and Racism
One of my favorite jokes about this kinda thing is from Richard Coughlan. Paraphrased:
“Islam is a religion not a race. Obviously there’s nothing racist about being against a bunch of camel riding, towel headed, sand…” Well, y’all can fill in that particular blank
Basically if your defense begins with ‘technically’, maybe it ain’t a good excuse after all
Tweeted recently by Conservative Nation:
http://1v1d1e1lmiki1lgcvx32p49h8fe.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/weaving-twitter.jpg
It’s been re-tweeted multiple times. It’s actually a pic of Aust. actress Samara Weaving, in makeup for a horror/comedy series, Ash vs Evil Dead. Weaving has asked for it to be removed, to no avail.
Sigh.
@Mish: I saw that on tumblr too. All we can do is get the word out to everyone else that they’re touting absolute bullshit once again.
I went to the Kane County flea market last weekend.
A full 50% of the booths selling pro-Trump stuff were also selling pro-white supremacist stuff.
Scott Adams is the new Dave Sim. (And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s not like Dave Sim ever went away either…)