Picture this: it is 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Witchfinder General is patrolling the area in search of accused witches. The bodies of the women most recently found guilty are still hanging by their necks from the gallows; tensions are high, suspicions running wild. And suddenly, onto the town green, strides a middle-aged woman in a long cloak and tall, tapered hat. She scratches a pentagram into the dirt. She mutters incantations. She sacrifices a goat and eats its heart and declares eternal fealty to the Devil himself. And when someone points and shrieks, “Witch!”, she cheerfully replies, “Heck yes, I am!”
Within minutes, she’s been arrested. Within a day, her lifeless body is swinging alongside the others. And for the rest of the week, the townspeople find themselves at a loss to describe precisely what just happened. When a witch presents herself, admits her guilt, and all but throws herself on the pyre, can you even really call it a witch hunt?
As ridiculous a line of debate as this is, it has dominated the discourse about the recent cancellation (ah, or is it?) of Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, after he made comments during a YouTube livestream that were widely derided as a “racist rant”. Citing a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, which found that 47% of black Americans disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be white”, Adams urged white viewers to “get the hell away” from black people, who he described as a “hate group”; within days, multiple newspaper syndicates announced that his long-running cartoon about the absurdities of corporate office life would no longer run in their pages. (According to Adams, the widespread shunning of Dilbert has cost him 80% of his income, although given his estimated $75 million net worth, one might surmise that this is not the financial catastrophe it would represent for a normal person.)
Yet as salacious a topic as Adams’s apparent support for the re-segregation of American society is, some media figures have chosen not to examine it but to use it as a cudgel. Within days of this incident, a certain cohort of writers, artists and public intellectuals received the following, bizarre request for comment from a reporter at the newsletter Popular Information:
In July 2020, you were among a group of writers that signed a letter saying that “it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” My questions are:
Do you object to Adams being dropped by major papers and his syndicate? If not, why not?
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