13. January 2026 – THE FLENSBURG FILES

Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, who became controversial for his right-wing statements, has died following a battle with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 68.

Members of The Scott Adams School (formerly called Coffee With Scott Adams) shared the news of Adams’ death on Tuesday.

Adams started writing blog posts praising Donald Trump in 2015, and his daily video podcast featured a range of conservative guests. His writings and podcasts began to question the Holocaust and oppose the COVID vaccine.

In February 2023, “Dilbert” was dropped from syndicated newspapers in the United States following comments made by Adams on his “Real Coffee with Scott Adams” livestream that Black people were a “hate group.” In March 2023, Adams relaunched “Dilbert” as “Dilbert Reborn” on the subscription site Locals.

Adams revealed his cancer diagnosis in May, the same day former President Joe Biden announced he had an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer. “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it — well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said. “I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”

Although he endorsed Trump twice, he added, “I’d like to extend my respect and compassion for the ex-president and his family. They’re going through an especially tough time, it’s a terrible disease. If you’re wondering if I’ll get better, the answer is no, it will only get worse,” he said. “There’s only one direction this goes now.”

Born in Windham, New York in 1957, Adams started drawing comics at age 6, citing the “Peanuts” comics as an early inspiration. Adams graduated with a BA in economics from Hartwick College in 1979, moving to California that same year to begin his career. From 1979 to 1986, Adams held various office jobs at Crocker National Banker, including computer programmer, budget analyst and teller.

In 1986, Adams earned an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and began working at Pacific Bell, during which time he created the “Dilbert” comic, whose title was suggested by Adams’ former boss. Adams launched the comic with United Media while at Pacific Bell, and would go on to draw inspiration from his Pacific Bell coworkers for a number of “Dilbert” characters.

By 1994, “Dilbert” was syndicated in more than 400 newspapers, and in 1995, Adams left Pacific Bell to become a full-time cartoonist. In 1996, he published his first book, “The Dilbert Principle.” In 1997, Adams was awarded the National Cartoonists Society‘s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist and Best Newspaper Comic Strip.

The “Dilbert” comic was adapted as a television series in 1999, for which Adams served as executive producer and showrunner. The series ran for two seasons on UPN and was nominated for a 1999 Primetime Emmy. In addition to his work as a cartoonist, Adams also wrote books on theology, including “The Religion War.”

Adams married Shelly Miles in 2006 and was the stepfather to her two children, Savannah and Justin, the latter of whom died of a fentanyl overdose in 2018. Miles and Adams divorced in 2014. In December 2019, Adams announced his engagement to Kristina Basham; the two were married in July 2020 and divorced in March 2022.
Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ Creator, Dies at 68

If there is one thing that is telling in connection with the surge in ICE troops and the subsequent oppositional protests in Minnesota, it is this: Trump is desperate to keep hold of power, even if it means declaring martial law. Instilled violence against citizens to intimidate and oppress, demonizing the state for fraud that does not exist and normalizing violence is all part of the game. And it is no secret that he has hinted at cancelling mid-term elections in November.

And as Tony Pentimalli explains in this guest post, even if Trump jokes at not having elections or even considering them optional, it should raise alarm bells among Americans and also overseas, for the thought of cancelling elections would be the one of the last hurdles cleared for an authoritarian regime.

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If a sitting president tells a room of lawmakers that elections may no longer be necessary, that should be the lead story everywhere. Front page. Top of the hour. Boston to Los Angeles. No qualifiers. No euphemisms. No burying the line beneath polling analysis or personality profiles. And yet that is exactly what happened. The comment landed, drew laughter, and drifted through the news cycle as if it were color rather than a statement about how power should function.

That response is not incidental. It is functional. Silence is not just neglect here. It is the condition that allows momentum to continue uninterrupted.

Speaking to roughly seventy Republican lawmakers at the Kennedy Center, the president said their policies were so good that elections should not even be necessary. He added that the media would call him a dictator for suggesting it. The room laughed. The press paraphrased. Editors and producers made choices. Political leaders made choices. The moment passed not because it was misunderstood, but because it was treated as manageable.

That decision matters more than the joke itself.

This was not rally theater. It was a closed room test. A president measuring whether the idea that elections are optional would provoke immediate resistance. It did not. No interruption. No correction. No walkout. Silence functioned as permission.

The political context explains why. Trump’s approval rating has hovered around forty percent. He dismisses polls publicly while responding to their implications privately. He complained about polling. He warned Republicans that losing the midterms would lead to impeachment. “If we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” he said. Elections were framed not as democratic accountability, but as a threat vector.

The law is clear. A U.S. president has no authority to cancel or suspend congressional elections. Congress sets the timing. States administer them. Courts oversee disputes. Even during war or national emergency, there is no mechanism allowing a president to halt them unilaterally. That structure exists because accountability, once treated as optional, evaporates quickly.

But law does not explain behavior when power is already consolidating.

Here is the elephant the coverage keeps skirting. Since Trump’s return to office, his agenda has not stalled. It has accelerated. Project 2025 is no longer a theoretical roadmap. It is being executed. Stephen Miller’s immigration machinery is embedded across agencies. Russell Vought’s campaign to dismantle administrative independence is underway. Civil service protections are being stripped. Regulatory rollback is accelerating. Loyalists are being installed. Enforcement is being centralized.

This is not chaos. It is momentum.

It is working because it is moving quickly, through executive power, before opposition can recover. It is working because democratic friction has been weakened. It is working because aligned billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel provide capital, infrastructure, and ideological cover.

From that vantage point, elections are not sacred rituals. They are interruptions.

A midterm loss would slow the project, trigger oversight, reopen impeachment, and reintroduce resistance. Why risk that when the agenda is advancing, the bureaucracy is bending, and the courts are lagging behind the pace of change?

Seen this way, the remark about elections was not frustration leaking out. It was strategic clarity. Elections are inconvenient when you are winning without them.

Trump has made this logic explicit before. He suggested delaying the 2020 election. He praised Ukraine’s suspension of elections under martial law. “So during war, you cannot have elections,” he said. “So if we happen to be in a war, no more elections. That’s good.” The pattern is consistent. Democracy is tolerated when it cooperates.

January 6 was not an aberration. It was an enforcement action when democracy refused to comply.

At this point, there is no good faith interpretation left. When a president who attempted to overturn an election suggests elections are unnecessary while his agenda consolidates power unchecked, it is not humor. It is strategy revealed.

What matters now is not whether democracy might fail someday. The system is already compromised. The patient is already ill. And the forces reshaping it are not losing ground. They are gaining it.

If elections can be treated as optional without immediate institutional resistance, the boundary has already moved. The next justification will come wrapped in emergency, efficiency, or national necessity. Each step becomes easier because the last one carried no cost.

The obligation now is clarity. If the right to choose our leaders is non-negotiable, then any agenda that treats elections as an inconvenience must be confronted for what it is.

And silence, at this stage, is not caution.

It is collaboration.

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*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on BlueSky: @tonywriteshere.bsky.social

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