His stuff sounds interesting, I will have to look into it more.
I bought a copy of The Redneck Manifesto in the wild in the mid/late 2000s. At the time, it was something I have never read that sort of encapsulated how I felt about how rural whites, particularly poor ones, and ESPECIALLY Southern ones, were viewed by many as The Great Satan. I first began to notice this maybe around the age of 14, and for me, that means around 1999 or so. It was pretty early in my life, and I was already a bit disgruntled with liberals/the left, though all these years later, I am still no right winger. It's a group of people who have always existed as an acceptable target in a world where the "acceptable" target list gets smaller with each decade. The Bush Jr years really showed that the loathing mentality towards rural, particularly Southern, whites was alive and well, and even more vitriolic than in the 90's. I don't know if you were there, but I can remember after Bush Jr winning in 2004, rich Hollywood celebs did their "national divorce" bits. There used to be a site run by a particularly asshurt cretin called "Fuck The South", where it catalogued unsavory stories from the South (because such stories exist nowhere else, naturally). Bands pointedly would not tour the whole region in acts that nowadays would be called virtue signalling. This rhetoric cooled for about five minutes when Obama won his first term, or so it seemed to me. Then again, maybe I was just too busy getting drunk and going to concerts. Then, of course, came Trump. The Yankee billionaire businessman who was surely going to save the poor Southern and Rust Belt whites! Fucking Helen Keller could see how that would turn out, but he said the words in 2016 that actually hit on some of the rage and depression that class of people felt. So they voooted. And the think pieces were born anew.
It's a book that, in my mind, was genuinely ahead of it's time. Stereotypes and thunk-provoking think pieces about The Great (usually) Confederate Unwashed were nothing new. But someone, especially a Yankoid outsider, defending them was. It hit on a lot of topic that you can find on all sorts of corners of the Internet now, like this one. It pulls quotes and references books like Cracker Culture, Albion's Seed, and Industrial Society and It's Future, stuff that people here have mentioned. The writing isn't as edgy as some corners of the modern day Internet, but it isn't as performatively fake religious as much of the online right is either. And Jim, growing up Catholic and abandoning it, had a loathing for the performatively religious. Our lovely resident multi-colored "white nationalists" may be upset to find out that, while it takes shots at the negroes, and talks about race and white identity, it's probably more about class than anything. Jim Goad and his views are very much in-line with a good chunk of the modern right. But the book itself is almost genuinely leftist, and not in the nu-tranny left sense, a statement that is probably making Jim roll over in his grave right now. Most of all, the writing is fun and it can make you laugh. Something that is needed when so many people in the political sphere are humorless.
ANSWER Me! is for the edgelords. Shit Magnet is for the incels. But The Redneck Manifesto is for people like me.
