I've always seen Jim Goad as a sort of key to understanding the primordial origins of any alt-conservative sentiments in America that would evolve into all the modern NEET groypers and the like. He was super prolific in the 90s during zine culture and I think he represents a moment where all the edgy punk rawk Gen Xers decided they could be rightwing while shrugging off all the responsibilities (or the facade of them) to your family and society being traditionalist previously entailed. What was left was the raw, explicit hatred of women and the racism without any of the performative monogamy or teetotaling. And of course tons of smug male Gen X overestimation of how fucking cool you are and how interesting your dirtbag druggie/drunk life is and how good you are at writing and being an artist. Which somehow pays off because you can always find a group of similarly entitled freaks who wormed their way into media connections. Notably the multi-millionaire "ironic nazi" founder of Vice Gavin McInnes.
Well put, and I agree. If you were to read Goad's writing, starting from
Answer Me! onwards
, you'd see an umbilical cord of sorts with his writing to the modern day right. Even Jim mentioned this in a way, in the comment section of an article titled
Let’s Scare Karen to Death. Modern day groyper/"women voted for this" types came at him, and he shot back, with a thought process not too terribly unlike Nulls. Funny you mention McEnnis, he and Goad have a friendship, and back when Vice was still a bit of an edgy mag, circa 2005 or so, Jim wrote a few articles. As an aside, didn't Gavin stick something up his ass Amazing Atheist style on his Internet show?
I will say, I do enjoy
The Redneck Manifesto, and even that has a few similarities to talking points and interests of the modern right. A mention of a right wing militia dude being invited on Donahue, only for Donahue to possibly be shocked that he's black (proto-le based black conservative man shit), lines pulled from
Industrial Society and It's Future, specifically a line where Kaczynski shits on liberals, and Jims "I left the left" rhetoric. Still, a pretty good book on classism and elite hate for Southerners, particularly poor ones, a conversation that hit mainstream during Trump. The parts about Hollywoods depictions of Southerners really shines, even if a lot is likely lifted from the book
Hillbillyland by former Appalachian State University professor J.W. Williamson.
even mentioning fibromyalgia [how the fuck did that get memed into being hypochondria? I know Josh said something like that on a recent stream, too, but I remember Paul F Tompkins going out of his way to say it "wasn't a thing" during a podcast.
This may be more of a pickme thread thing, but radfem turned turbo-pickme Meghan Murphy also said this. You may know her from being banned by Jonathan "Wax My Balls" Yaniv off Twitter. She took the ban with grace, leaving Canada for Mexico, a country with an extremely high femicide rate, losing about 50 IQ points, and ditching any ideals she once had. Thankfully, many women called her dumb, told her to use google or patiently explained the female auto-immune system to her. Not that she cared, because she got her rightoid male clicks.
