'Stupid' Dilbert creator killed his career because of a highly flawed right-wing poll: analysis

Scott Adams, the creator of the "Dilbert" cartoon strip which has been yanked from newspapers across the country due to his racist comments, has only himself to blame for his troubles because he relied on a highly dubious poll when he attacked Black Americans.

That is the opinion of Slate analyst Aymann Ismel who pointed out the Rasmussen poll that the controversial cartoonist used in his diatribe can, at best, be viewed as an attempt to troll non-conservatives. Instead it appears to have ended Adams' career.

Adams quickly lost his syndication deal and watched as newspapers lined up to pull his strip after posting a video where he claimed, "If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people—according to this poll, not according to me, that’s a hate group,” before advising his fans to “get the hell away from Black people.”

According to Ismel, "I cannot overemphasize how dumb it is that Scott finally filleted his reputation in full over a trolly Rasmussen poll. If you’re not familiar, Rasmussen is a right-leaning pollster that produces semi-mainstream polls but is noted for its murky methods and what the New York Times has called 'dubious sampling and weighting techniques.'"

He then added that Rasmussen has been coy about their methodology when it came to that poll.

"Rasmussen said 13 percent of poll respondents were Black, so about 130 people. If we take the results entirely at face value—which I’d discourage—that means it found about 34 Black people who answered 'disagree' or 'strongly disagree' with the statement 'It’s OK to be white.' We have no more information about why. (Adams got to his figure by also including Black respondents who answered 'not sure.')"

According to the analyst, "Rasmussen apparently assumed its audience would be too stupid to know any of that, and in the case of Scott Adams, it was clearly right. Perhaps some of the people Rasmussen polled were aware of the history of the phrase, which at one point made it into a Tucker Carlson monologue; it’s hard to say, and Rasmussen didn’t care to ask. But the whole charade seemed clearly designed to end up on shows like Adams’, where it purported to become a referendum on whether or not Black Americans hate white people."

"The irony is that the 'it’s OK to be white' troll has now undone Adams worse than it did any supposed campus hysterics... Alas, Adams lived by the poll—and Rasmussen got exactly what it wanted," the columnist concluded.

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