{"id":612548,"date":"2023-02-27T19:08:42","date_gmt":"2023-02-28T01:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/27\/the-poll-that-did-in-dilbert-creator-scott-adams-is-even-dumber-than-you-can-imagine\/"},"modified":"2023-02-27T19:08:42","modified_gmt":"2023-02-28T01:08:42","slug":"the-poll-that-did-in-dilbert-creator-scott-adams-is-even-dumber-than-you-can-imagine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/27\/the-poll-that-did-in-dilbert-creator-scott-adams-is-even-dumber-than-you-can-imagine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poll That Did in Dilbert<\/em> Creator Scott Adams Is Even Dumber Than You Can Imagine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Politics<\/a><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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\"NEW<\/p>\n

\nHow far poor Dilbert has fallen. <\/span>
\nHENNY RAY ABRAMS\/Getty Images<\/span>
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On the Feb. 23 episode of Dilbert<\/em> creator Scott Adams\u2019 podcast and nightly YouTube livestream<\/a>, Real<\/em> Coffee with Scott Adams<\/em>, he began his hour-long show like he always does, by inviting his audience for a ceremonious \u201csimultaneous sip.\u201d He went on with his standard fare\u2014a handful of headlines accompanied by his quick takes\u2014until he steered to a \u201cprovocative\u201d new Rasmussen poll.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said, \u2018Do you agree with or disagree with the statement \u2018It\u2019s OK to be white?\u2019\u2019\u201d Adams reported. He paused and looked directly into the camera. \u201cThat was an actual question.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adams read the result of the Rasmussen poll: \u201c47 percent of Black respondents were not willing to say it\u2019s OK to be white. That\u2019s actually\u00ad\u2014that\u2019s, like, a real poll,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The rest you\u2019ve probably already seen clipped online: \u201cIf nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people\u2014according to this poll, not according to me,\u201d he said, \u201cthat\u2019s a hate group.\u201d He added that white people should \u201cget the hell away from Black people.\u201d Adams later tried to walk back his comments as misunderstood\u2014\u201ceveryone should be treated as an individual,\u201d he said in another episode<\/a> of his show\u2014but not before hundreds of newspapers<\/a> committed to dropping his strip and his publisher killed a planned book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I cannot overemphasize how dumb it is that Scott finally filleted his reputation in full over a trolly Rasmussen poll. If you\u2019re not familiar, Rasmussen is a right-leaning pollster that produces semi-mainstream polls but is noted for its murky methods<\/a> and what the New York Times has called \u201cdubious sampling and weighting techniques<\/a>.\u201d Rasmussen\u2019s results are often an outlier when it comes to, say, presidential approval numbers, as when Donald Trump famously cited a Rasmussen poll when it claimed to show a 50 percent job approval rating, more than 10 points higher than Gallup\u2019s report at the time.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know the exact methodology used for the poll. In a press release touting its results, Rasmussen teased \u201cadditional information\u201d behind a paywall. I signed up for a platinum membership, but I found only a brief text summary of the findings.<\/p>\n

Rasmussen said it presented 1,000 respondents with a two-question prompt to quantify \u201cthe woke narrative\u201d in America: \u201cDo you agree or disagree with this statement: \u2018It\u2019s OK to be white.\u2019\u201d and \u201cDo you agree or disagree with this statement: \u2018Black people can be racist, too.\u2019\u201d Respondents were asked to choose between \u201cstrongly agree,\u201d \u201csomewhat agree, \u201csomewhat disagree,\u201d \u201cstrongly disagree,\u201d and \u201cnot sure.\u201d The results, as shared on Twitter once the firestorm began:<\/p>\n

Rasmussen said 13 percent of poll respondents were Black, so about 130 people. If we take the results entirely at face value\u2014which I\u2019d discourage\u2014that means it found about 34 Black people who answered \u201cdisagree\u201d or \u201cstrongly disagree\u201d with the statement \u201cIt\u2019s OK to be white.\u201d We have no more information about why. (Adams got to his figure by also including Black respondents who answered \u201cnot sure.\u201d)<\/p>\n

If you have any doubt about what Rasmussen is doing here, I encourage you to take in the big doofus energy in the video below, this time featuring Rasmussen\u2019s head of polling, Mark Mitchell:<\/p>\n

Mitchell, who until a couple years ago worked on Walmart e-commerce, assumes the posture of a wannabe truth-telling media personality: \u201cWe tell you what America really thinks. And I can tell you that increasingly the reality of American public opinion does not match what you\u2019re being told in the news.\u201d He says the \u201cIs it OK to be white?\u201d question \u201cwould literally melt the brain of a mainstream journalist if they try to put these numbers to ink.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just put these numbers to ink, and my brain isn\u2019t melting. But it does hurt a little bit. That\u2019s because, as Rasmussen surely knows, the phrase \u201cIt\u2019s OK to be white\u201d is a right-wing troll that originated in the forums of 4Chan. As the Washington Post chronicled in 2017<\/a>, the term was originally intended as a covert way to force an overreaction from progressives, including liberal journalists, if it started to spread, which in turn would show \u201clefties\u201d hate white people. Soon, signs bearing the slogan did crop up on campuses and other places around the country. The hysteria never arrived<\/a>, but as Mitchell notes, the Anti-Defamation League did mark the phrase a \u201chate slogan\u201d\u2014reasonably, given that it was white supremacists (most notably David Duke<\/a>) who ran with the 4Chan prank in the first place.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s hard to say, and Rasmussen didn\u2019t care to ask. But the whole charade seemed clearly designed to end up on shows like Adams\u2019, where it purported to become a referendum on whether or not Black Americans hate white people. Better pollsters would tell you that if you really wanted to assess Americans\u2019 views on race, as the Pew Research Center has done well<\/a>, you would avoid terms with strong political associations like \u201cit\u2019s OK to be white,\u201d or even \u201cBlack Lives Matter.\u201d That is far from what happened here.<\/p>\n

The irony is that the \u201cit\u2019s OK to be white\u201d troll has now undone Adams worse than it did any supposed campus hysterics. This is hardly Adams\u2019 first rodeo\u2014he\u2019s made sexist comments for years, and once claimed the television network UPN fired him for being white<\/a>\u2014but it seems he may have fried Dilbert<\/em> for good this time. (His most prominent defender so far is Elon Musk<\/a>.) \u201cThe question was probably interpreted differently by people, so I wouldn\u2019t live by that poll,\u201d Adams said in a follow-up interview over the weekend<\/a>. \u201cIf the data shows the opposite,\u201d he added, \u201cI would change my opinion. It\u2019s a data-based opinion. I would apologize.\u201d Alas, Adams lived by the poll\u2014and Rasmussen got exactly what it wanted.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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