When Don't You Separate Art & Artist?

 I've followed the Chive on Facebook for a while.  Mostly they just post silly PG-13/R-rated content and sometimes lame "articles" that are really just cherry-picking a bunch of Tweets to assemble them into a listicle.  One day I came across this joke:

I just skimmed and went, "Oh, ha ha."  I mean it wasn't a great joke.  Pretty obvious, really.  A basic "dad joke."  Then I saw they were quoting Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert who only a short time before this posted had been making racist remarks (again).  And so then there's that uncomfortable moment of realizing that they were using a hacky joke by someone who is basically a Nazi.  Cringe!

When I mentioned this in the comments, someone attacks me saying I'm not "mature" enough.  "You're just a child!"  Though they didn't say it in so many words, I think they were saying a "mature" person would separate the art and the artist.  It's just a joke, right?

Thinking it over, I don't really think so.  This wasn't a Dilbert comic strip or episode of the TV show.  This wasn't fiction at all.  This was the actual guy's social media account.  The same kind of account from which he makes his racist rants.  Quoting a dad joke off there is really not cool.  Because that's how you normalize guys like that.  It's like saying, "See, he's not such a bad guy!"  When he's a huge piece of shit.  People like Jimmy Fallon doing that helped to get Trump elected despite being a huge piece of shit.

And like I was saying, there's no fictional product to shield this.  If this was a Dilbert cartoon then fine, it's not coming straight from the horse's mouth--or ass.  Though being somewhat knowledgeable about recent events, I'd still find it pretty cringey.

I was never much of a Dilbert reader and didn't really like the show that much (Dogbert was kinda funny as sort of a mashup of Brian and Stewie on Family Guy), so I definitely wouldn't be a huge defender of Adams in the first place.  But if it were still on somewhere I could watch it, I'd probably watch Seinfeld even though Michael Richards is a racist shithead.  I mean, Kramer is just a character in the show, not an actual guy.  Just like I could still watch Kevin Spacey in movies like LA Confidential or American Beauty because he's playing a character.  If I wanted to rewatch The Mandalorian I wouldn't fast-forward the parts with Gina Carano because again it's just a character.  In those cases you can be "mature" and separate the art and the artist, but when it's nonfiction like a social media account, it just doesn't seem the same to me.  It's not being filtered through a writer, director, producer, etc.; social media accounts are basically the person his/herself.  Even if an intern wrote it, it's still being presented as Adams's own words, not the words of a fictional character.

And it's not like Adams is my employer or anything.  I mean, if I were at work and a boss makes a tawdry joke I'm not going to quit on the spot.  In a perfect world maybe I would, but in the real world I need money.  And reporting it to someone would just be a waste of effort and in the end probably wouldn't accomplish anything.  But again, this is not that.

What annoys me the most is you put this up and then I'm just scrolling through my Facebook and see this and now you're pulling me into this.  I have enough shit to deal with that I don't need the guilt of chuckling at a joke from a racist shithead.  It's kind of like the Kid Rock Bud Light thing only for good reasons instead of homophobic ones.

Basically all brands (including the Chive) should just not get involved in this dumb shit.  And if you are, at least do it for a better joke.  Like the Chris Rock-Will Smith thing, lost in the shuffle is that it wasn't even a good joke!

Anyway, I don't think "a child" would give this that much thought.  Now, what do you think?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Oh, right, Ben Stein wasn't all that great either.  Awkward.