Scott Adams quietly passed away on January 13, 2026, leaving behind a complicated legacy that the mainstream press rushed to simplify and smear. For the conservative world and for millions who laughed at the absurdities of office life, his death marks the end of a voice that refused to bow to the new cultural orthodoxy.
Long before the culture wars swallowed him, Adams was the cartoony conscience of corporate America — the mind behind Dilbert, a strip that spoke truth about bad bosses and bureaucratic nonsense and earned him national recognition and awards. His rise from a cubicle engineer to a household name was the kind of American success story the left now tries to erase whenever convenient.
As Adams grew bolder in his political commentary, he drew the ire of the establishment media and the leviathan of cancel culture, largely because he sided with common-sense critiques and recognized Donald Trump’s outsider appeal early on. He pivoted to digital platforms where free thinkers still had a chance to be heard, and that move made him a target for relentless partisan attacks rather than a subject of honest debate.
The moment that sealed his fate in the eyes of the legacy press came in 2023, when his blunt, politically incorrect remarks about race led to swift corporate and editorial purges of his work. Newspapers and publishers dropped Dilbert and treated him like a pariah, proving that dissenting opinions in America now carry professional death sentences.
Now that he has died, the same outlets that cheered his cancellation are using his passing to relitigate every controversy rather than to assess a full life honestly. That predictable posthumous pile-on is less about journalism and more about ideological score-settling, a final demonstration of the media’s refusal to allow conservatives a fair hearing even in death.
Make no mistake: Adams was no saint, and he paid the price for his worst choices. But the larger lesson conservatives must take from his life is the need to defend the right to speak and to think differently without fear of ruinous reprisals. We should mourn the man for his humor and his courage to stand against the cultural mob, not simply celebrate the parts of him the media finds comfortable.
In his last year he battled metastatic prostate cancer with the kind of stubbornness his critics never acknowledged, enduring hospice care and the private dignity of a man who never asked the left for mercy. His willingness to keep speaking into the end — to challenge groupthink and to urge people toward independent thought — is the kind of backbone our country needs more of, not less.
If conservatives are to honor Scott Adams properly, we will remember both the cartoons that made us laugh and the fight he pursued against a stifling orthodoxy. Let his passing be a call to protect free expression, to resist the cancel culture machine, and to cultivate a media environment where bold ideas can be contested publicly instead of being destroyed privately.
