Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who has gained new fame for his predictions and analysis of the 2016 presidential race, told Breitbart News on Sunday that growing violence in America benefits Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump’s expense.
“All domestic violence, as long as it’s not terrorism, seems to play against Trump, because they have successfully framed him as the ‘divider,’ the one who is dividing society,” Adams said in an interview via FaceTime.
Adams described the political effect of violence in the context of his overall theory of persuasive techniques, which he says are shaping the election more than rational arguments about policy and experience.
Last week, Breitbart News noted the emergence of a Democratic National Committee memo, via Wikileaks, detailing plans to link Trump to “incidents of violence,” regardless of whether they were carried out by anti-Trump protesters or by Trump supporters.
Breitbart News observed:
And for the left, that was precisely the point: creating violence is a no-lose strategy. If protesters can provoke Trump supporters to be violent, they embarrass Trump and cast him as a fascist. And if the protesters themselves are violent, voters will understand that a Trump victory will be met with violent mob resistance.
Adams agreed with that analysis, noting that the media have been convinced that Trump is “literally a mortal danger to civilization in general.”
They believe that, Adams noted, despite all evidence to the contrary:
“The reality in terms of of what he’s said has been pro-American, unambiguously. And he’s never said a word against any American, unless they were professional journalists.
“But for Americans, of all ethnicities, religions, and types, if they’re legal, and American, he’s unambiguously on their side.”
In the case of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the presiding federal judge in the Trump University fraud case, whom Trump attacked for being “Mexican,” Adams said that while the incident was a “gigantic negative,” Trump was merely referring to him in a way that Mexican-Americans often use themselves, and that might not have struck people as divisive in another context.
Some of the political violence in the news today, he said, was contrived for political purposes — and yet real.
“As an objective observer — well, no one’s objective — but as an observer, I would say that the mainstream media, along with the Clinton supporters have created a vision of the world in which there is a racial divide that’s actually bigger than the actual racial divide.
“And I think that is actually inspiring some people to kill cops … you can see why people would be inspired to violence if they believed that they are fighting against an evil that’s of a Hitler-like size.”
Trump cast himself as the “law and order” candidate at the Republican National Convention — but that may not matter if people believe Trump is to blame for violence, regardless of how or why it occurs.
Rather than Trump, Adams said, his opponents bore more of the blame for growing division and violence.
“I would say, whoever has framed this as a fight against ’white supremacists versus every other group’ has a lot more responsibility for the violence.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.