|
 |
Welcome back to False Flag! With JVL out in Minnesota, I’m sliding into his timeslot today. And I have a big announcement—starting next week, I’ll be hosting a weekly live show every Monday morning at 10 a.m. ET on The Bulwark’s Substack and YouTube pages breaking down the latest in MAGA media news. Our in-house curmudgeon, Sam Stein, is along for the ride.
Monday is the perfect day for this, because weekends tend to be packed with right-wing media news. Feuds blow up. People make bad decisions. Consider, for example, that looksmaxxer Clavicular was arrested and framemogged in the course of just one weekend. I hope to see you there!
But first, today’s newsletter: The January death of cartoonist Scott Adams was keenly felt across the pro-Trump internet. But now an eerie replica of the MAGA philosopher-king has arisen, thanks to some AI necromancy. Many people, including the Adams family, don’t love it!
Plus: New court documents—exclusively reported here—offer a further look at the meltdown of far-right pundit Elijah Schaffer. It’s a smorgasbord of wild content. To read the whole newsletter, and to support our work, sign up for a Bulwark+ membership today!
–Will
Dilbert Creator’s AI Resurrection Not So Comic for His Family
Plus: Elijah Schaffer’s wife says he’s taking huge amounts of kratom.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
AI Scott Adams Unsettles MAGA
WHEN DILBERT CREATOR and right-wing internet personality Scott Adams died of prostate cancer on January 13, many MAGA luminaries came out to praise his legacy and lament the void he’d left in the conservative commentariat. But this month, the pugnacious cartoonist was back—or at least videos of someone looking an awful lot like him started appearing online, offering remarks on current events that had taken place well after Adams’s death.
Dubbed “AI Scott Adams,” the synthetic creation, which first popped up on X and YouTube, looks and sounds nearly identical to the actual Adams. Its appearance has sparked a clash between the Silicon Valley wing of MAGA, which finds it all pretty remarkable, and many of Adams’s fans and family, who are horrified.
“Yes, according to parts of the internet, I’m dead,” the Adams simulacrum declared in one video, before taking a sip of coffee. “Which is interesting, because I’ve never had fewer meetings. Turns out when you remove the biological body, you also remove back pain, food decisions, and about half the reasons people make bad arguments. So overall, I’d say death has been a productivity upgrade.”
If that wasn’t unsettling enough, AI Scott Adams then segued into a Dilbert-style riff about how often printers jam.
The resemblance between AI Scott Adams and the real Adams really is striking. Just take a look at the two side-by-side:
 |
 |