• Carnelian@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    He’s always been a bit off, but most of his weird statements over the years never got attention.

    Towards the end of his life though he appeared to get heavily into some alt right rhetoric. As I understand it, this all came to a head during an episode of his podcast in 2023.

    There was some thinly veiled right wing think tank that conducted some “poll” asking people “do you agree with the statement: it’s okay to be white” and they presented in big bold letters after that only half of black people responded “yes”

    At the time that particular expression had become a popular slogan for white supremacists.

    But Scott covered the story at face value and presented it as like “black people are an anti white hate group, white people should stay away from them for their own safety”

    Literally overnight he lost basically everything. Every newspaper dropped him. He tried to relaunch as a direct to consumer subscription service, but his health declined so rapidly I’m not sure if anything happened with it.

    But yeah that incident caused people to go digging into his past statements as well and as a result lots of people consider him to be awful

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      He’d been increasingly alt right since the teens, I remember mocking him for it back in the day. Definitely took the new atheism to alt right pipeline. But yeah '23 is when he crossed the line for normies

      • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah he definitely lost the plot long before then, I feel like that was just the moment when it all went viral