Politics

Scott Adams, whose comic strip ‘Dilbert’ ridiculed white-collar office life, dies at 68

Published

6 months ago

January 13, 2026

Scott Adams, whose popular comic strip “Dilbert” captured the frustration of beleaguered, white-collar cubicle workers and satirized the ridiculousness of modern office culture until he was abruptly dropped from syndication in 2023 for racist remarks, has died. He was 68.

His first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, announced the death Tuesday on a livestream posted on Adams’ social media accounts. “He’s not with us right anymore,” she said. Adams revealed in 2025 that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Miles had said he was in hospice care in his Northern California home on Monday.

“I had an amazing life,” the statement said in part. “I gave it everything I had.”

At its height, “Dilbert,” with its mouthless, bespectacled hero in a white short-sleeved shirt and a perpetually curled red tie, appeared in 2,000 newspapers worldwide in at least 70 countries and 25 languages.

Adams was the 1997 recipient of the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award, considered one of the most prestigious awards for cartoonists. That same year, “Dilbert” became the first fictional character to make Time magazine’s list of the most influential Americans.

“We are rooting for him because he is our mouthpiece for the lessons we have accumulated — but are too afraid to express — in our effort to avoid cubicular homicide,” the magazine said.

“Dilbert” strips were routinely photocopied, pinned up, emailed and posted online, a popularity that would spawn bestselling books, merchandise, commercials for Office Depot and an animated TV series, with Daniel Stern voicing Dilbert.

The collapse of ‘Dilbert’ empire

It all collapsed quickly in 2023 when Adams, who was white, repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.” He later said he was being hyperbolic, yet continued to defend his stance.

Almost immediately, newspapers dropped “Dilbert” and his distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with the cartoonist. The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts, decided to keep the “Dilbert” space blank for a while “as a reminder of the racism that pervades our society.” A planned book was scrapped.

“He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, the creator of the strip “On the Fastrack,” told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support with him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the consequences of saying them.”

Adams relaunched the same daily comic strip under the name Dilbert Reborn via the video platform Rumble, popular with conservatives and far-right groups. He also hosted a podcast, “Real Coffee,” where talked about various political and social issues.

After Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show on ABC was suspended in September in the wake of the host’s comments on the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Adams stood for free speech.

“Would I like some revenge?” Adams said. “Yes. Yes, I would enjoy that. But that doesn’t mean I get it. That doesn’t mean I should pursue it. Doesn’t mean the world’s a better place if it happens.”

How ‘Dilbert’ got its start

Adams, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Hartwick College and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, was working a corporate job at the Pacific Bell telephone company in the 1980s, sharing his cartoons to amuse co-workers. He drew Dilbert as a computer programmer and engineer for a high-tech company and mailed a batch to cartoon syndicators.

“The take on office life was new and on target and insightful,” Sarah Gillespie, who helped discover “Dilbert” in the 1980s at United Media, told The Washington Post. “I looked first for humor and only secondarily for art, which with ‘Dilbert’ was a good thing, as the art is universally acknowledged to be… not great.”

The first “Dilbert” comic strip officially appeared April 16, 1989, long before such workplace comedies as “Office Space” and “The Office.” It portrayed corporate culture as a “Severance”-like, Kafkaesque world of heavy bureaucracy and pointless benchmarks, where employee effort and skill were underappreciated.

The strip would introduce the “Dilbert Principle”: The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.

“Throughout history, there have always been times when it’s very clear that the managers have all the power and the workers have none,” Adams told Time. “Through ‘Dilbert,’ I would think the balance of power has slightly changed.”

Other strip characters included Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss; Asok, a young, naive intern; Wally, a middle-aged slacker; and Alice, a worker so frustrated that she was prone to frequent outbursts of rage. Then there was Dilbert’s pet, Dogbert, a megalomaniac.

“There’s a certain amount of anger you need to draw ‘Dilbert’ comics,” Adams told the Contra Costa Times in 2009.

In 1993, Adams became the first syndicated cartoonist to include his email address in his strip. That triggered a dialogue between the artist and his fans, giving Adams a fountain of ideas for the strip.

“Dilbert” was also known for generating aphorisms, like “All rumors are true — especially if your boss denies them” and “OK, let’s get this preliminary pre-meeting going.”

“If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others,” Adams wrote in his 1996 book “The Dilbert Principle.”

In one real-life case, an Iowa worker was fired from the Catfish Bend Casino in 2007 for posting a “Dilbert” comic strip on the office bulletin board. In the strip, Adams wrote: “Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?” A judge later sided with the worker; Adams helped find him a new job.

A gradual darkening

While Adams’ career fall seemed swift, careful readers of “Dilbert” saw a gradual darkening of the strip’s tone and its creator’s descent into misogyny, anti-immigration and racism.

He attracted attention for controversial comments, including saying in 2011 that women are treated differently by society for the same reason as children and the mentally disabled — “it’s just easier this way for everyone.” In a blog post from 2006, he questioned the death toll of the Holocaust.

In June 2020, Adams tweeted that when the “Dilbert” TV show ended in 2000 after just two seasons, it was “the third job I lost for being white.” But, at the time, he blamed it on lower viewership and time slot changes.

Adams’ beliefs began bleeding into his strips. In one in 2022, a boss says that traditional performance reviews would be replaced by a “wokeness” score. When an employee complains that could be subjective, the boss said, “That’ll cost you two points off your wokeness score, bigot.”

Adams put a brave face on his fall from grace, tweeting in 2023: “Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out-of-context news of course). Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me.”

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump remembered Adams as a “Great Influencer.”

“He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease,” the president posted on his social media platform Truth Social.

Politics

Uzbekistan can’t win the World Cup. But it’s already won Washington’s attention.

Published

11 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Uzbekistan’s team will head home after its final group-stage match today, against the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the country has worked to use its début World Cup performance — the first ever by a Central Asian nation — to help Washington policymakers put a face to a geographical name once recognizable.

Before the team’s match against Portugal this week, a group of ambassadors, policymakers and government officials met in Houston to discuss the United States’ burgeoning reliance on the “Central Five” nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — for critical minerals. The only one of those so-called C5 countries to qualify for the World Cup is Uzbekistan.

“This emergence of Uzbekistan on the soccer scene as a world-class team playing in the World Cup is sort of a microcosm for what’s happening for the entire C5 region,” Assistant Secretary of Commerce David Fogel said at the panel, which was hosted by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and the State Department. “The C5 region is front and center in everyone’s mind.”

Trump is scaling up America’s footprint in Central Asia in hopes of reducing American reliance on Chinese supply chains, as Beijing grows increasingly dominant in the critical minerals sphere. In November, he hosted Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev at the White House to discuss the nations’ growing economic ties — and Mirziyoyev walked away agreeing to a $400 million investment in American companies’ critical minerals and rare earths supply chains.

That commitment is “good not just for our economy, but also for our national security,” said Richard Parker, the leadership coalition’s senior policy adviser, “when you consider that China really has the market on the processing of critical minerals globally.”

Mirziyoyev has praised his country’s soccer team as representatives of a “New Uzbekistan,” finally emerging from its Soviet era as a geopolitical force on its own terms, but after defeats in its first two matches, it can’t progress further in the World Cup.

Politics

Why soccer is life

Published

41 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Soccer is so much more than just a sport — especially in the UK.

That was the central message from playwright James Graham — creator of the hit play and TV drama Dear England about the psychology of the England men’s football team — when he joined Blue Light News’s Westminster Insider podcast to discuss the powerful relationship between politics and the national game.

For Graham, soccer’s importance runs far deeper than results on the pitch. He recalled the hours after Gareth Southgate missed his penalty in the semifinal against Germany at Euro ‘96: “I remember … not being able to explain in the car home with my parents why I was crying, but the tears were falling out of me.”

“Sport is never just about sport,” he said. “It is about storytelling and national storytelling.”

As the self-styled home of soccer, England has long tied its sense of national confidence to performances in major tournaments. Graham argued that the euphoria, despite eventual defeat to Germany, around Euro ‘96 helped give voters the confidence “to choose a different path” and back a more youthful, confident-seeming leader the following year in Labour’s Tony Blair.

At a time of declining social cohesion, hollowed-out high streets and growing political division, he sees soccer as one of the few institutions still capable of bringing communities together in person, week after week.

And Graham believes politicians could learn from soccer leaders such as Southgate — the man who led England to the World Cup semifinal in 2018 and back-to-back European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 — who communicated with fans “as adults” in a way that was “very human” and “very emotionally intelligent.”

At its best, Graham argues the beautiful game offers a language of identity, emotion and togetherness that politics often struggles to speak.

Politics and soccer: How to play the game. Listen to the full interview with James Graham on Westminster Insider next Friday, July 3.

Politics

How Josh Shapiro became a World Cup super fan

Published

56 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

PHILADELPHIA — Josh Shapiro’s black SUV deposited him at a bougie cafe earlier this week, and the governor beelined to a backroom full of handpicked World Cup social media influencers and began working the room.

For roughly an hour, the Pennsylvania governor and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate worked to build relationships with people who could cast this host city — and, one day, his potential candidacy? — in a positive light. He regaled them with personal anecdotes, waxing eloquent about how the former NBA star turned TV analyst Charles Barkley had said nice things about him, how he once got Jerry Seinfeld to laugh at one of his jokes and how Philadelphia would play host to UFC 330. (“I am not putting a claw on the governor’s residence lawn,” Shapiro joked. “We’re going to do it in a proper venue.”)

But what the governor, wearing a navy U.S. Men’s National Team polo and FIFA-themed Adidas Stan Smiths, really wanted to talk about was the World Cup.

“I don’t know that we’re gonna make a run all the way to the end here, but there’s something really exciting — I mean people who don’t know anything about soccer are tuning in and watching and getting pumped up,” Shapiro told them. “I think sports is an amazing thing, and it has the effect of changing the psychology of the entire city.”

Shapiro, more a Sixers than a Philadelphia Union guy, is among those recent converts to the world’s game. As of this week, he’s been to three matches at Lincoln Financial Field — more than any other potential 2028 presidential candidate. Save New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has blitzed soccer media to chat about arcane ball knowledge such as being “personally affected when Championship Manager became Football Manager,” perhaps no other Democratic politician has so fully embraced the tournament. (Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas may also have a claim.)

“I’m especially proud to see people from all across the world coming here to Philadelphia and being greeted not just by a governor who’s happy they’re here, but by Philadelphians and Pennsylvanians who are thrilled to see them here,” Shapiro told me in an interview. I think we are better than [President] Donald Trump’s cruel rhetoric. We are better than his cruel policies, and I think we’re seeing that on display here during the World Cup in Philly.”

Shapiro’s approach to the tournament could pay political dividends for him. “The U.S. team is kicking ass. And Trump is ignoring it,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left think tank Third Way. “Democrats should own it all — go to games, watch them in bars with fans, brag about our team, hang out with the Scots. Show the country that we’re normal, patriotic and fun-loving.”

After breakfast with the influencers, Shapiro made his way to the official FIFA Fan Festival at Fairmount Park’s Lemon Hill, and fist-bumped lines of volunteers. He darted over to a fan zone area where he assembled a collectible Bank of America Fan Band, selecting charms that would spell out “250” for the Semiquincentennial.

In nearly every interaction, he conducted an informal poll on who revelers thought was the tournament’s greatest player, namechecking Argentinian and French maestros.

“[Lionel] Messi or [Kylian] Mbappé?” he’d ask. It is, one of his staffers told me, a tic he has, a way to put people on the spot and also gather intel.

Next, he went over to a makeshift arcade featuring a video game called Soccer Jawn — a homage to the old Atari Pong — posing for selfies along the way. He took the controls of the game and rotated through several new acquaintances and opponents: a staffer, then a kid visiting from Virginia. His father, who said he was a fan of Shapiro, watched.

“Who do you think is better: Mbappé or Messi?” Shapiro quizzed again.

Mbappé, the kid replied.

Shapiro fist-bumped the kid and moved on to grip more hands and poll more people, stopping for selfies along the way.

“I think the world needs some more togetherness, needs some more cheer, and this is a great opportunity,” Shapiro told reporters in a gaggle.

A reporter asked whether he disagreed with former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who rejected FIFA and Chicago serving as a World Cup host.

“I’m not going to comment on Rahm, because I didn’t hear him say it, but I’ll just say we’re looking at $770 million in economic impact here, and remember it’s across the state with Reading, with Pittsburgh and Scranton, of course, here Philly, which is the center of the soccer universe,” Shapiro said. “I think you’re seeing with the record-setting crowds we’ve had here at fan fest, it’s not just people here, it’s people in our hotels, our restaurants, our bars.”

Later, Shapiro headed in the direction of the Linc, or Philadelphia Stadium in FIFA parlance, where he would take in the first half of Iraq vs. France, seeing Mbappé himself score a brace, including a back post screamer in the 13th minute. First, though, he sat for another interview on the World Cup, this time with NPR Sports in America.

Back at the FIFA Fan Festival, Shapiro spoke with me about his endorsed slate of congressional candidates, his recent meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Philadelphia’s ties to the men’s team.

The Commonwealth is home to three U.S. players: Matt Freese from Wayne, Christian Pulisic from Hershey and Auston Trusty from Media, I pointed out to Shapiro.

“Freese first off has just been lights out at goalie,” Shapiro said. “Hopefully, Pulisic is going to be healthy for Thursday night. [He was.] I got a soft place in my heart for Trusty.”

Shapiro explained that Trusty’s mom was partners in a law firm with the mother of his own son’s girlfriend. The group went out to dinner last week, though Shapiro didn’t join. The governor did make a video for Trusty and sent it to him. “Just letting them know how proud we are of him,” Shapiro said.

Trusty, Shapiro said, is “someone who can surprise us going forward.”

A press wrangler told me I had one more question.

“Messi or Mbappé?” I asked Shapiro.

“Mbappé today may be a slightly better player,” Shapiro said. “Messi has that thing that Michael Jordan had, which is just playing it at a different level, where it’s not just that he’s the best player on the pitch; he’s just in a different universe. He just does things that others simply can’t do. So, I mean, the three goals he had in that first game, actually, the first one, was extraordinary. I think Messi overall. Mbappé is pretty damn good right now.”