Wishing Well

Scott Adams told me never to speak to him again. A couple days ago, the 67-year-old Dilbert creator whose syndicated comic strip was pulled from most newspapers after he made a series of racist remarks, announced that he has terminal cancer. The same kind, he told listeners to his daily Twittercast, as Joe Biden. “I expect to be checking out of this domain sometime this summer,” he said. I will respect his wishes for me to never speak to him again, but I would like to speak about him for a moment, and about the reaction to my sincere well-wishes to him as he faces his end.

Our acquaintanceship was brief and contentious. We met on Twitter, when I questioned one of his typically grandiose, and false, statements that “the news isn’t real.”

Not real? I didn’t understand what he meant and said so. He invited me on his livestream to discuss the issue, an invitation which I accepted. Our interview was cordial but frustrating because I had to keep interrupting him to ask for clarification on terms. Bizarrely, he asked if I am autistic (I am not, nor has anybody ever asked me that before).

Scott Adams with Dilbert.

Afterwards, we kept in touch over DMs. Adams, a self-proclaimed “master hypnotist,” seemed to believe that he could convert me to his way of thinking. That didn’t happen. The end of our acquaintance came only a couple months after we met, when I wrote to him, “You biases are so extreme that you’ve escaped into the same echo chamber that you accuse others of falling into, and when you see evidence you don’t like, you dismiss it as corrupt without any evidence.”

“The personal attack is entirely predictable,” he responded, though I confess I did not think of my note to him as a personal attack. “You’re a total scumbag. Fuck off and never talk to me again.”

And so I have not.

After he announced his diagnosis, I wrote a brief note on Bluesky acknowledging our bad history, concluding my message by saying, “Politics are cruel, no doubt, but this disease is far crueler. I wish Scott the best.”

The reaction to what I considered a tame note of sympathy for somebody with whom my path once crossed shocked me. “Dude’s a monster. Fuck him.” was a typical response.

One person told me that Scott spent years dehumanizing people like them, so why would they wish anything but pain and suffering for him? It’s absolutely correct to state that Adams’s livestream is a paranoid ragefest couched in the familiar “just asking questions here” format so popular among the “do your own research” crowd.

Scott frequently encouraged his audience to dismiss science, mainstream news, and to embrace fringe theories and general bunkum. The so-called free thinker somehow ended up devouring the full MAGA smorgasbord of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, junk science, and institutional mistrust.

His politics are bad. His worldview is bad. But I will be damned if I’m going to succumb to the same hatred he spent the final years of his life selling. And make no mistake, it was all a sell.

Adams would certainly tell you that he is not a hateful person, and I’m sure he believes he is not. His unhinged reaction to my somewhat mild criticism of him speaks otherwise. All I know is that his daily expounding was received across the political spectrum in exactly the way I imagine he envisioned when he began: he found an audience of dupes and, eventually, he ending up hypnotizing himself into believing his own bullshit.

In the end, Scott is nothing more or less than a crank. He’s not the first person to fall prey to his own inflated ego, nor will he be the last. He is not the first person to tumble down the slippery slope of iconoclasm, only to refashion the golden calves he smashed into his own image. Nor will he be the last.

None of us get through this life unscathed. None of us leave without causing and receiving offense. All of us believe we’re the good guy because we alone know the tenderness of our own hearts. I don’t believe myself to be the scumbag that Adams believes me to be, and I don’t believe that he’s the monster those in my replies claim.

I wish Scott well because I wish all of us well. Those of us who have lost loved ones to cancer know the disease’s immutable, alien character. We know the course on which he is on. We know the look of it, and the smell of it, and we’ve heard the low moans in the night. We know how it ends.

Scott Adams is dying from cancer. So is Joe Biden. My mother. Both of my grandmothers. My grandfather. A dear friend. One of my best friend’s mother. A classmate from third grade.

Everybody reading this knows somebody – or somebodies – lost to this invader. I hope Scott has people in his life who will care for him and tend to him in these last months. I hope that he uses his remaining time well. I hope the science he spent so much time dismissing helps to ease his passage. I will not mourn Scott’s death, but even cranks deserve our sympathy. Not because their actions merit it, but because our humanity demands we extend grace to all. I wish him the best.