Twenty years ago, Jim Goad was Portland’s hottest new writer.
When he gave a reading of his first book in May 1997, fans spilled onto the sidewalks outside Reading Frenzy, the downtown counterculture bookshop owned by now City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. They were there to get a look at the 35-year-old author with a rockabilly bouffant and a heart tattooed on his sculpted biceps.
“There were people out the door, peering in the windows,” he now remembers.
Goad was then a breakout name in Portland, where he lived for 11 years. The Temple University graduate arrived here with a bit of notoriety as the creator of a crass zine called Answer Me! that printed “ironic” essays in favor of rape and abusing women. In Portland, he wrote his first and most infamous book, The Redneck Manifesto, which earned him a $100,000 book deal from Simon & Schuster.
Early reviews of Redneck—which opened with a chapter called “White Niggers Have Feelings Too” and uses the N-word a total of 76 times—were mostly positive. Florida’s Sun-Sentinel called it a “furious, profane, smart and hilariously smart aleck defense of working-class white culture,” while Publishers Weekly said he was “writing at the top of his voice” and “merits a listen.” Kirkus Reviews wrote that while Redneck was “sure to infuriate the liberal reader, he is also likely to make that same reader laugh ruefully, and often.” WW praised the book’s “brutally candid critique of American race relations.”
That book was the closest Goad got to mainstream success.
Twenty years later, Goad has become instead a leading figure in far-right fringe media. Best-selling author Michael Malice called him “godfather of the new right.”
In 2016, Gavin McInnes, a co-founder of Vice Media who later founded the Proud Boys—a far-right men’s organization whose members dress in MAGA hats and Fred Perry polos—called Goad “the greatest writer of our generation.” McInnes lists The Redneck Manifesto as one of three “required” books on modern Western culture, alongside Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray.
“This is Proud Boy Holy scripture,” reads a review of Goad’s book on the Proud Boys’ website. “This book could be our bible.”
Goad’s popularity during the Trump era has seen a resurgence. Goad says his former publisher doesn’t give him figures, but The Redneck Manifesto’s sales are accelerating. It’s been through 17 printings, and its Amazon sales rank shot up 200,000 places between 2012 and 2017. It’s currently the No. 30 top-selling book in “minority studies.”
“People see that Trump got elected, and they want to know how this monster came to power,” says Goad. “They come to me for the etiology of the disease.”
Portlanders often view the alt-right that elected Trump as a phenomenon foreign to our city. But the “bible” of the Proud Boys was written right here. If you want to know where the angry white men of the alt-right came from, it’s important to try to comprehend Jim Goad.