On February 1, 1996, a jury in Whatcom County Superior Court acquitted two booksellers of promoting pornography. Ira Stohl, 45, owned the Newsstand International in downtown Bellingham, Washington, a store that stocked more than 3,000 titles. Kristina Hjelsand, 25, managed it. Each had faced up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for selling a magazine.
The magazine was the fourth and final issue of ANSWER Me!, a zine written, designed, and published by a married couple in Portland, Oregon. The issue concerned rape. It contained testimony, crime reporting, jokes, pornographic collage, and a centerfold board game called “The Rape Game.”
The prosecution began with a Western Washington University student who saw the issue on the shelf and asked the store to stop carrying it. Stohl and Hjelsand refused. She took her complaint to the Whatcom County Crisis Center, which serves victims of rape and domestic abuse, and its director carried it to the police, calling the magazine destructive as well as offensive. The county prosecutor offered to drop the matter if the booksellers promised never to sell anything like it again. They refused that too. On Valentine's Day 1995 he filed a felony charge in state court. A half hour later the booksellers' lawyers filed a civil-rights claim in federal court. While the case was pending, the store took the magazine off sale but kept a copy on display, chained and padlocked, under a sign explaining that the prosecutor forbade its sale.
The trial ran ten days and drew packed galleries. Under the test from Miller v. California, the state had to prove the work appealed to prurient interest, depicted sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value taken as a whole. Rape survivors testified for the defense that they found parts of the issue therapeutic. A psychologist testified that its themes run through literature and film. The publisher himself was scheduled to testify and got sent home after two days; the defense was winning without him. The lead juror, a 53-year-old retired Navy man, said afterward that the state never proved the booksellers knew the material was obscene, and that the jurors split on the question of the magazine's value. In 1997 a federal jury in Seattle awarded Stohl and Hjelsand $1.3 million for prior restraint and retaliatory prosecution, reported at the time as the largest civil-rights judgment in Washington history. “But it is vindication,” Stohl told a reporter, back at his register by ten the next morning.
The man whose magazine occasioned all of this watched from 250 miles south. He had built a publication so extreme that the state tried to jail people for selling it, and a jury of ordinary citizens in a mid-sized county seat declined. That result compresses his career into a single verdict. Juries, readers, editors, and critics kept examining Jim Goad's work and finding that American law and American appetite had more room for it than respectable opinion assumed.
Ridley Park
James Thaddeus Goad was born on June 12, 1961, in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, a borough of row houses and refinery smoke southwest of Philadelphia. His father, Alton Howard Goad, worked as a plumber. His mother was Margaret Mary Goad. Jim was the youngest of three sons in a working-class Catholic home.
The oldest son, Alton Howard Goad Jr., called Bucky, was born out of wedlock in the mid-1940s while his father fought in Europe. Bucky could neither hear nor speak. In 1969 he was stabbed to death in Paris at 25. Jim was eight. He carried the fact of the murder his entire life and learned its circumstances only decades later from his surviving brother, John, thirteen years his senior. Near the end of his career Goad wrote “Ode to Bucky Goad,” reconstructing that life from what John could tell him, and judged it the best thing he ever wrote. Its opening announces a brother who “had the life stabbed out of him.”
Goad described his father as a man who beat him and his mother, his mother as cold and evasive, and the nuns at his parochial school as sadistic. The account comes from his own memoir and essays; no independent record of the household exists. In his telling, childhood taught him that weakness invited predation and that hitting back ended torment faster than appeals to fairness. He carried that lesson into everything: his prose, his politics, his crimes, and his theory of what politeness conceals.
He was verbally quick and wanted to act. After high school he moved to New York and, by his friend Greg Johnson's account, won a place to study under Stella Adler (1901-1992). He chose journalism instead, at Temple University in Philadelphia, and graduated in 1985. The acting ambition never left. The trucker costumes, the radio voice, the country-singer alter ego, the glowering author photos: a man playing, with full commitment, a character named Jim Goad.
Debbie
After college he moved to Los Angeles with Debra “Debbie” Rosalie, a caustic Brooklyn-born Jewish woman several years his senior. They married in 1987. He took work at the Los Angeles Reader, an alternative weekly, and covered crime and the city's margins.
Alternative journalism had its own catechism. The counterculture of the late 1980s permitted attacks on churches, police, corporations, and suburban respectability. It grew careful around race, sex, feminism, and victimhood. The Goads decided to publish something no editor could touch.
Debbie was a partner in the enterprise, an editor, publisher, and contributor with her own appetite for taboo material, and any account that reduces her to the writer's wife misstates how the magazine got made.
ANSWER Me!
Four issues of ANSWER Me! appeared between 1991 and 1994. Each ran like an anthology: essays, interviews, found documents, crime photography, cartoons, confession, insult. Subjects included murder, suicide, pedophilia, racial conflict, and celebrity pathology. Interview and feature subjects included Timothy Leary (1920-1996), the pimp turned memoirist Iceberg Slim (1918-1992), Anton LaVey (1930-1997), the death-row murderer Richard Ramirez (1960-2013), David Duke (b. 1950), and Al Sharpton (b. 1954). The Goads treated the racist and the race hustler as specimens of the same genus, which offended both clienteles.
The magazine belonged to a network that included Adam Parfrey (1957-2018) and his Feral House press, the noise musician Boyd Rice (b. 1956), the cartoonist Nick Bougas, and the underground illustrator Jim Blanchard. These scenes traded in totalitarian imagery, moral panic, and the psychology of taboo. ANSWER Me! worked on the reader the way a power-electronics performance works on an audience. It imposed an experience. Disgust, laughter, anger, arousal, and shame arrived mixed, until the reader could no longer hold a stable position of superiority to the material.
The uncertainty about Goad's sincerity was the engine. Some pieces were satire. Others voiced beliefs he later stated without irony. The magazine refused to mark the border, and that refusal gave it power and created its permanent problem. A writer who makes his own sincerity part of the entertainment loses control over which readers take the material as joke, permission, confession, or instruction.
Press accounts linked the zine to a 1994 shooting at the White House and to several suicides, and its sale was prosecuted as obscenity in Washington State. The controversy sold copies. Later issues reached print runs around 13,000, large for an independent zine before the public internet, and the four issues have been reprinted for three decades, most recently in a hand-colored deluxe edition of 448 pages. What began as disposable newsprint became an archival monument. Read now, ANSWER Me! looks like a paper prototype of the image boards that arrived a decade later: anonymous testimony, forbidden pictures, extremist personalities, cruelty as humor, and the standing question of who is kidding.
The Manifesto
On the strength of the zine, Goad signed a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster in 1994, with a reported advance of $100,000. He and Debbie moved to Portland, and he wrote The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats, published in 1997.
The argument runs like this. Contempt for poor Whites remains the last acceptable bigotry among educated Americans because public morality reads disadvantage through race alone. People who would never utter an ethnic slur say “redneck,” “hillbilly,” and “white trash” at dinner parties. Goad set poor Southern Whites, indentured servants, miners, mill hands, and tenant farmers inside a long history of exploitation, gave a chapter to White servitude and convict labor, and argued that the rich have for centuries pointed poor Whites and poor Blacks at each other while keeping the property. Race, in the book's strongest passages, works as a diversion from a class war the winners prefer not to name.
The book is a polemic assembled from history, statistics, memoir, and insult, and its evidence varies in quality. Its force comes from somewhere else. Goad's subject was what it feels like to be regarded as dirty, stupid, genetically defective, and politically expendable, and he understood that humiliation moves people harder than any calculation of material interest. Political science rediscovered this two decades later and called it status threat.
A tension sits in the book that governed the rest of his life. Its argument is universal: the poor of every color share an enemy. Its emotional center is narrower: the defense of poor Whites against contempt. Over the following twenty years the universal argument receded and the grievance remained.
May 29, 1998
While the book made his name, his life came apart. Debbie was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In 1997 Goad began an affair with Anne “Skye” Ryan, a Portland stripper he described as fifteen years younger and, in his phrase, “a thousand times more fucked-up” than he was. In November 1997 Debbie obtained a restraining order, alleging he had hit her, kicked her, and threatened to kill her. They divorced in December.
The affair with Ryan ran on threats, fights, wrecked property, and mutual obsession, with violence in both directions; recordings Goad kept preserved her threatening him. None of that governs what happened on May 29, 1998. During an early-morning drive outside Portland, Goad beat her and left her by the road. She suffered facial fractures, an eye swollen shut, a bite wound to her thumb that reportedly took twenty-six stitches. Ryan acknowledged violence of her own and observed that it did not mean she deserved this. Goad pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping, attempted assault, and misdemeanor assault, accepting three years rather than risk trial on charges carrying far longer terms. Asked whether he felt remorse, he answered: “Absolutely not. I enjoyed it.”
Debbie withdrew her restraining order after his arrest and said he had changed. She died of her cancer in 2000, the year he got out.
The beating cannot be fenced off from the work. A man who had published material appearing to make light of violence against women had put a woman in the hospital. Satire remained a possible reading of the rape issue; it stopped being a sufficient one. And the episode displays the move that organizes his entire moral output. Goad rarely denied harm. He widened the frame instead, until his victim's conduct, the courts, his childhood, and the selectivity of public outrage all crowded in beside the question of what he had done, and the question lost its place in line. He was usually right that the outrage was selective. The beating was still his.
He served about two and a half years, split between jail and prison, and wrote most of his second book inside. Mainstream houses declined it; Simon & Schuster's contract did not survive his conviction, and Feral House published Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt in 2002.
The title states his theory of himself. A shit magnet is the person on whom families, lovers, institutions, and movements deposit the aggression and guilt they refuse to own. Goad concedes his conduct and then argues that his accusers need him. They select a designated monster so they can skip self-examination.
The theory names something real. Groups do concentrate guilt on scapegoats. Outrage does function as moral advertising. Offenders do get painted as pure evil so everyone else can disown the same impulses. The theory is also a perpetual-motion alibi. Every accusation becomes evidence of the accuser's need. Every punishment confirms the punished man's victimhood. Goad could admit almost anything because each admission fed a larger indictment of everyone judging him.
As prose, Shit Magnet may be his strongest sustained performance: fast, comic, repellent, exposed, and controlled. New York Press set its temperature next to Céline and Klaus Kinski. The refusal of repentance gives the book its power and fixes its limit. It lets Goad describe impulses that respectable memoirists hide, and it locks him inside an adversarial posture where conceding another person's suffering feels like losing the case.
One reader hated it on principle. Greg Johnson (b. 1971), later the founder of the white-nationalist publishing house Counter-Currents, had admired The Redneck Manifesto. Writing under the pen name J. P. Nash, he reviewed Shit Magnet under the title “Redneck Rousseau,” calling it the most repulsive exercise in self-pity since Rousseau's Confessions and nearly as brilliant from a literary standpoint. Goad put him on his enemies list and kept him there for seventeen years.
Prison hardened his politics along racial lines. In the Manifesto, race had been a trick the rich play on the poor. On the yard, in his account, men sorted into racial alliances the moment official order and middle-class manners fell away, and he came to read the yard as American society compressed, the tribal order under the drywall. The inference has an obvious limit. Conduct produced under confinement, among men selected by violence and sorted by the institution, reveals little about how people organize when free. But the yard gave him his governing picture, and his later racial politics grew from it.
Portland Again
He returned to Portland in the fall of 2000 a local pariah on parole. Frank Faillace, who owned the nightclub Dante's, helped him find work. Goad designed and later edited Exotic, a free guide to the Northwest sex industry, worked in radio, and went back on stage. He built a country persona called Big Red Goad, recorded an album called Truck-Drivin' Psycho, and in 2007 toured as an opening act for Hank Williams III (b. 1972).
With Jim Blanchard he made Trucker Fags in Denial (2004), a comic about two violently homophobic truckers who sleep with each other while maintaining, to themselves, that they are straight. The title promises cheap offense; the structure underneath is a study of public aggression as defense against forbidden self-knowledge. In 2007 Feral House issued Jim Goad's Gigantic Book of Sex, a garish large-format compendium that revived the visual language of ANSWER Me! and showed how much of Goad was layout artist and collector rather than essayist alone.
Georgia
In the mid-2000s he moved to the Atlanta area, married his second wife, Shannon, and in 2008 became a father. His son, Zane, is autistic. Fatherhood entered his writing as a subject he handled without armor, and the late personal essays about Zane, family, and grief carry little of the defensive theater that runs through the political columns.
In 2008 a seizure led doctors to a meningioma the size of a plum between his brain and skull. Removing it took nine hours; surgeons left tissue they could not safely reach, radiation followed, and seizures recurred for years. The illness essays are among his most direct, because disease dissolved his lifelong genre. A tumor cannot be humiliated, exposed as a hypocrite, or beaten to the punchline. The contest over guilt, his one great game, had no opponent, and what remained on the page was a frightened man taking inventory.
The Online Right
In April 2009 he began a regular column at Taki's Magazine, and the short comic polemic turned out to be his true form: eight hundred words, an enemy, an escalation, a closing insult. He wrote on crime, sex differences, racial conflict, media panics, and the migration of taboos.
His revival coincided with the growth of an online right that owed nothing to the Republican establishment: younger, secular, racially conscious, fluent in message-board humor. Goad fit it better than he had ever fit anything. He carried no attachment to free-market doctrine, evangelical religion, or patriotic uplift. His politics started from enemies, humiliations, and group conflict, and the new audience read politics the same way.
He supported Donald Trump (b. 1946) in 2016 on the logic of retaliation. Trump's victory would distress the class of journalists, academics, and administrators who had spent decades instructing working-class Whites how to speak and when to apologize, and for Goad that distress was the point. His insight here was real and preceded the political science: status and revenge sit at the substance of politics, and voters will choose a candidate as a projectile. His limit was treating the enemy's pain as proof the throw was justified.
His fingerprints ran through the era's style. Gavin McInnes (b. 1970) treated The Redneck Manifesto as formative, and elements of ANSWER Me!, the aggressive layouts, the taboo tourism, the calculated doubt about whether the writer was kidding, had already resurfaced in early Vice. Proud Boys circles later spoke of the Manifesto as near-required reading, and Michael Malice (b. 1984) called Goad a godfather of the new right. Goad designed none of these organizations and commanded nobody. He supplied part of the inheritance; other men spent it. The lineage marks a larger turn: imagery the 1990s underground used to test the limits of expression functioned, by the 2010s, as political identification, with irony no longer separating play from belief.
Four collections published through Obnoxious Books of Stone Mountain, Georgia, track his movement from general transgression to explicit racial politics. The New Church Ladies (2017) casts social-justice activism as a successor religion, with privilege as original sin, apology as confession without absolution, and excommunication intact; the analogy illuminates the ritual structure and settles nothing about the underlying claims. Whiteness: The Original Sin (2018) drops the class frame of the Manifesto and defends White solidarity as such, on the ground that every other group organizes around its interests. The Bomb Inside My Brain (2019) gathers the personal essays, Bucky first, and shows what he could do when the courtroom in his head adjourned. Gender Psychosis (2020) attacks the era’s settlement on sex and gender with a method that had become habit: find the conceptual instability, land the mockery, and treat the laugh as the proof.
Counter-Currents
In November 2019, Goad posted a snide remark about Johnson's arrest and deportation from Norway ahead of a far-right conference. Johnson answered with flattery he insists was sincere. A private message came back: “Magnanimous reply, Greg.” They talked, relitigated the seventeen-year-old review, and became friends; Goad argued his case against “Redneck Rousseau” like a lawyer, Johnson accepted it, and Goad allowed that the review was at least well written.
Johnson ran the numbers, talked to donors, and made an offer. In October 2020 Goad joined Counter-Currents and delivered two columns a week until January 2025, more than four hundred pieces, filed like clockwork and needing little editing. The wild man of American letters was, as an employee, punctual, meticulous, and drama-free.
He set one condition: he was joining a paycheck and a platform, never a movement. He had once withdrawn from an American Renaissance conference because its program copy implied he belonged to one, and he told Johnson that Catholicism had swallowed his adolescence and he feared any cause would do it again. Johnson had no objection, holding that white nationalism gains when non-members defend its right to a hearing. The distinction mattered to Goad's self-understanding. It changed almost nothing about the public fact. A man publishing twice a week at the principal organ of American white nationalism is one of its voices, whatever he declines to join.
They met in person in 2022, on a sweltering Atlanta day. The OK Cafe was mobbed, so the country-fried satirist and the white-nationalist publisher had lunch in a Jewish deli. Johnson had braced for the difficult man of the memoirs and found none of him. In four and a half years of collaboration he reported zero drama. Goad's online detractors spent those years brandishing revelations about his past, every one of which came from Goad's own books, prosecutors reading the defendant's published confession back to him as discovery.
Albuquerque
Goad and his third wife, Norma, left Georgia for New Mexico in the fall of 2024, chasing a fresh start. The move landed on top of his second round of prostate cancer treatment and ongoing cardiac trouble, and it crushed him. Johnson, in regular contact, described him afterward as anxious and depressed. The man who had sampled every street drug in his youth now abstained from anything psychoactive and refused suggestions of medication for either condition.
He stopped writing in January 2025. Counter-Currents began recirculating old columns under the heading “The Best of Jim Goad” and called it a break. His final livestream, a three-hour episode of his show Hardballs, went out on February 9, 2025, under the title “Return of the White Panther.” Johnson offered to pay for reprints; Goad sent a few, then stopped, saying there was no more good material, a sentence Johnson read as the depression talking, since the material ran to thousands of pages.
On June 14, 2026, Johnson called to tell him one of his closest friends was terminally ill and asked whether he could write the obituary. He could barely manage email. His cancer had returned. In their last conversation, a week before the end, Johnson asked after Norma. “Just an angel,” Goad said. He had told Johnson years earlier that when he met her he felt he did not deserve a woman who only wanted to make him happy, and that he had decided to stop punishing himself.
He died in Albuquerque on June 22, 2026, ten days past his sixty-fifth birthday. He was survived by his brother John, his son Zane, his former wife Shannon, and Norma. He was preceded by his parents, by Debbie, and by Bucky, dead in Paris fifty-seven years.
The Ledger
Goad's deepest subject was humiliation. He registered accents, teeth, jobs, neighborhoods, and credentials the way a pointer registers birds, and the people in his writing measure one another constantly while pretending to judge nobody. His defense of poor Whites was a defense against contempt before it was any economic program. His racial writing fixed on shame, apology, and collective guilt. His sexual writing pulled the humiliations out of desire. His memoir recounts a life spent returning shame to its senders. He saw what polite analysis misses, that people need dignity and protection from contempt at least as much as they need income. He rarely found a stable form of dignity. He usually found retaliation.
His second subject was scapegoating: the family that loads its conflicts onto one member, the elite that points poor groups at each other, the moralist who purchases purity with someone else's exile. He was brilliant at exposing the selectivity of outrage, at asking why some cruelties become national obsessions while others draw silence, at cataloguing the pleasures of condemnation. The theory failed only where he needed it most. A society can select a man as its monster, and the man can still have done monstrous things. Goad spent thirty years declining to let both propositions stand at once.
His trajectory on race runs through three books. In The Redneck Manifesto, race divides natural allies for the benefit of the rich. In the prison writing, race becomes the alliance that forms when order fails. In Whiteness, race becomes an identity Whites must defend because everyone else defends theirs. Class solidarity, then racial realism, then racial advocacy. He kept the class resentment to the end; the educated moralizer insulated from his own policies remained the fixed enemy. What he abandoned was the hope that class could beat race.
As a stylist he built from short declaratives, rapid escalation, physical imagery, autobiographical interruption, and vulgarity deployed as punctuation. The prose reads spontaneous because the construction is hidden; the jokes land where he placed them. He was a satirist before he was a thinker, strongest when the argument stood on an observed scene, weakest when he stretched an anecdote into a law of history, and habituated to treating a successful mockery as a completed proof.
He fits nowhere in American letters, which is a location. Too politically toxic for the anthologies, too talented to file under internet racist, too allergic to membership to serve any movement reliably, too implicated in real violence to romanticize as a free-speech martyr. Several things about him are true together, and his career resists every account that keeps only one. Elites do hold poor Whites in contempt, and his racial politics were what they were. Progressive institutions do reproduce religious forms, and identifying the ritual refutes no claim. His accusers did condemn selectively, and Anne Ryan did not deserve what he did to her on that road.
He spent his life arguing that respectable society needs monsters to carry its guilt, and he was probably right. He also volunteered.
I Knew Jim Goad
As a writer of modest talents, I have to travel to where the buses don’t run no more to try to find compelling material nobody else has.
Out there beyond polite society, I met Goad. He was a great writer and a difficult man.
I said several times between 2002-2020 that he was the best word-for-word writer today. I respected his ability but rarely enjoyed it, just as I don’t enjoy Christopher Nolan movies, but I’m told they are good.
Goad had a fierce morality and acted like he was the last righteous man. He was loyal to his friends and he didn’t reveal confidences.
Like Donald Trump, he was hard to fool and hard to manipulate.
When I found out today that Goad died, my first, second and third reaction was relief.
That’s the same reaction I had to the death of my father, and to the end of other difficult people I knew such as Mark Kramer and Rodger Jacobs.
I’ve had almost no communication with Goad since the December 2019 Saturday Night Massacre.
We won’t see his like again.
That show changed how I did things. I never wanted to repeat it. It was wildly popular, but I didn’t like how it went down, I didn’t like how I felt after, and I didn’t like that it ended my friendship with Jim Goad.
I particularly didn’t like the possibility that Goad had put me in his sights for a war. I chose a low-key response to his accusations, if I made any response, and after he vented about our December 2019 interview for weeks, he eventually moved on to other targets.
I use “friendship” in the Los Angeles sense. I met Jim Goad once. I interviewed him several times. He interviewed me once.
I don’t recall Goad was much of a listener. Like my father, Goad wasn’t an easy man. He did not seem comfortable unless he was the center of attention, and he rarely seemed open to the possibility that others might know things he didn’t.
I paid Goad about $250 in 2004 to edit my memoir.
I just searched my gmail account. In 2010, Jim responded to me on Facebook:
Heyo, Luke.
The only friend I keep on here is the wife.
Pico-Robertson? My first job in LA was at 1144 S. Robertson.
Got 1380 on my SATs—700 math, 680 verbal.
In 2013, I emailed Jim that I enjoyed his article on Takimag about Australia.
The Guilty Scapegoat: Jim Goad Through René Girard
In 2002, Feral House published a memoir by a felon just out of an Oregon prison. Shit Magnet argues that families, lovers, courts, and crowds select a designated carrier for the aggression and guilt they refuse to own, load him, and expel him, and that the expulsion reveals the crowd more than the carrier. The author, Jim Goad, held a journalism degree from Temple and wrote from county jail and state prison with no visible acquaintance with French theory.
Twenty years earlier, René Girard (1923-2015) had published Le Bouc émissaire, translated as The Scapegoat in 1986, the middle statement of a theory he built across four decades: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Violence and the Sacred (1972), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999). Girard argued that human communities discharge their internal violence by converging on a single victim, that the operation works only while it stays hidden, and that a long revelation, running through the Hebrew prophets and culminating in the Gospels, has been dragging it into the light, with consequences the modern world has barely begun to absorb.
Nothing in Goad's work cites Girard. Across four zines, seven books, and more than a thousand columns, I find no reference to him, and the vocabulary never overlaps where borrowing would show. The convergence appears independent, and independent convergence carries evidentiary weight. When a Stanford professor of comparative literature and a convict who edited a strip-club magazine describe the same social operation from opposite ends of it, the operation is probably there.
The convergence also carries a problem, and the problem is the reason to write this essay rather than a footnote. Girard's exemplary victims are innocent: Job, Joseph, the Servant of Isaiah, Jesus, the medieval Jews accused of plague-poisoning, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935). The theory's rhetorical force has always leaned on that innocence. Jim Goad beat Anne Ryan on a road outside Portland in 1998, put her face in fractures, and told an interviewer he felt no remorse and had enjoyed it. He was a scapegoat by his own diagnosis and a batterer by his own plea. A guilty man who correctly describes his own scapegoating is a case the Girardian literature has not confronted, and he tests the theory at the joint where it is least examined and most needed.
The Theory
A summary, for readers who need one, of what Girard claims.
Desire is imitative. We want what models want, and the model becomes a rival for the object, and the rival becomes an obsession that displaces the object. Rivalry spreads through a community by the same imitation that started it, differences collapse, everyone becomes everyone's double, and the community approaches a war of all against all. At the peak of crisis, the violence of all against all converts into the violence of all against one. The community converges on a single victim, kills or expels him, and discovers peace. Because the peace is real, the community concludes the victim caused the disorder and his removal cured it. He becomes retroactively monstrous and, in archaic religion, retroactively divine, since he carried away the plague. Myth is the crowd's memory of this event, written by the persecutors, and it works only because the persecutors believe it. Girard called the process the victimage mechanism and insisted on one operating condition: concealment. A community that sees itself choosing an arbitrary victim can no longer receive the peace.
In The Scapegoat, Girard extracted four stereotypes from persecution texts. A crisis of undifferentiation, plague or famine or social collapse. Accusations of crimes that attack the foundations of order: violence against kin or king, sexual crimes, religious desecration. Victims bearing the marks of victimhood, which are marks of difference, foreignness, deformity, and the extremes of status, since crowds select kings as readily as beggars. And the violence, collective and unanimous.
Then the historical claim. The biblical texts, alone in the ancient world, take the victim's side. Joseph is innocent; his brothers lie. Job refuses the friends who demand he ratify his own guilt. The Passion narrates a lynching from the position of the lynched and shows the crowd unanimous and wrong. This revelation, on Girard's account, slowly poisoned the sacrificial well. Modern people can no longer persecute in good conscience because they have learned to look for the victim. Concern for victims became, in his late formulation, the defining sacred of our era, the one value no modern institution dares blaspheme.
And then the twist that Girard's admirers quote less often. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, he argued that the concern for victims, once it became the supreme social currency, began to function sacrificially. Communities now compete for victim status, hunt persecutors as the new class of the guilty, and persecute in the name of anti-persecution, with a good conscience the old crowds might have envied. The revelation of the scapegoat did not end scapegoating. It forced scapegoating to disguise itself as the defense of scapegoats.
Hold that last sentence. Jim Goad's entire career happened inside it.
The Naive Replication
Set the shit magnet beside the scapegoat and check the fit.
Goad's carrier absorbs the guilt of the group. Girard's victim absorbs the violence of the group. Goad observed that the accusers need the accused, that outrage functions as moral advertising, that the crowd projects onto the monster the impulses it disowns, that the selection is far less about what the man did than about what the crowd requires, and that once selected, the carrier can do nothing right, since every act confirms the role. Each of these has a page number in Girard. The projection of disowned impulses is the double relation. The crowd's need for the monster is the transference. The impossibility of exoneration is the retroactive rewriting that turns the chosen victim monstrous. Goad even caught the religious register, subtitling his memoir with a word, “miraculous,” that gestures at the sacred aura Girard says clings to the carrier of collective guilt.
Goad also reinvented Girard's method. The Scapegoat teaches the reading of persecution texts against their authors: the medieval account of Jews poisoning wells records a real persecution and a false crime, and the interpreter's job is to believe the violence and disbelieve the accusation. Goad read his own press this way and taught his readers to. He collected his denunciations, reprinted them, annotated them, and displayed the pattern: the accusers describing their own appetites, the punishment exceeding any stated offense, the unanimity forming before the evidence. His detractors spent decades brandishing revelations about him that came, every one, from his own books. He had grasped what Girard grasped about myth: the persecution text convicts its writers, and the victim who controls his own record deprives the crowd of its pen.
What Goad lacked was the upstream half of the theory and the exit. He had no account of mimetic desire, so he could describe the crowd's convergence without explaining it, and he treated the appetite for scapegoats as a constant of human rottenness rather than the discharge of a rivalry that implicates everyone, himself included. And he had no equivalent of Girard's renunciation. Girard's theory terminates in a demand: seeing the operation obliges you to quit it, to refuse rivalry, to decline the persecutor's position even when your turn comes. Goad's theory terminates in a license. Since the crowd is guilty, the carrier is owed, and what he is owed is retaliation. The two systems share a diagnosis and part at the prescription, and the parting is the story of Goad's life.
The Marks
Run the four stereotypes over the case.
The crisis. Goad's two great persecution episodes each sat inside a period of cultural undifferentiation, when a settlement about what could be said was visibly failing. The obscenity prosecution came in 1995, mid-panic over transgressive media, when the boundary between speech and harm was contested in courts, legislatures, and newsrooms. His later ostracism ran through the 2010s crisis over race and sex in which every institution renegotiated its taboos in public. Crowds form when differences fail. Both times, his moment found him.
The accusations. Girard's persecutors charge their victims with crimes that collapse the foundations: sexual violation, desecration, poisoning the common life. Goad drew the set. Promoter of rape, in Bellingham. Desecrator of the sacred, since obscenity is blasphemy against whatever a society holds holy, and by the 2010s the holy was the victim, making his anti-victimism the era's exact profanation. And poisoner of minds: the zine was linked in the press to a White House shooting and to suicides, a modern rendering of the well-poisoner, the marginal man whose artifact spreads invisible death through the community.
The marks. Girard's crowds pick from the extremes of status and the borders of category. Goad was a category error on legs: a Temple journalism graduate performing White trash, a Simon & Schuster author with a $100,000 advance writing as the voice of the trailer park, a man too low for the literary world and too lettered for the class he championed, king and beggar in one body. Crowds love a hybrid. He completed the marks in 1998 by supplying the violence, after which the selection could present itself as pure response.
Which raises the sequence, and the sequence is the tell. The transference preceded the crime. Bellingham happened in 1995 and 1996. The beating happened in 1998. The apparatus of his expulsion, the prosecutions, the bans, the blame for other men's bullets and other men's suicides, was running at full capacity while his record held nothing but words. Whatever the crowd was discharging through Jim Goad in 1996, it was discharging it before he earned it. Girard's test for scapegoating has never been the victim's spotlessness. It is the direction of causation: does the community hate this man because of what he did, or does it assemble what he did into a warrant for a hatred already in motion? For Goad the timeline answers.
The Interrupted Sacrifice
The Bellingham trial deserves a Girardian reading of its own, because it displays the one modern institution Girard credits with containing the crowd.
The first chapter of Violence and the Sacred argues that the judicial system replaced sacrifice as the brake on vengeance. Sacrifice deflects the community's violence onto a substitute; courts rationalize it, monopolize it, and end its circulation by delivering a verdict no one may avenge. The two systems do the same work by opposite means, and the difference shows when a community tries to use a court as an altar.
Whatcom County tried. The elements assembled like a textbook: a complainant speaking for victims, a crisis center as the shrine of the new sacred, a prosecutor offering the accused absolution in exchange for ritual submission, the promise never to sell such a thing again. The booksellers refused the ritual, and the case went to the institution designed to interrupt unanimity: twelve strangers, deliberating under a rule that required proof rather than consensus. The jurors split on the magazine's value, which is to say the crowd failed to form, and acquitted on knowledge, which is to say the court insisted on the individual question, what did these two people do, against the sacrificial question, what does this community need to expel. A year later a federal jury made the county pay $1.3 million for the attempt. Girard held that archaic sacrifice punishes the substitute and modern law punishes the deed; in Bellingham the law went one step further and punished the sacrificers.
Goad watched his own attempted expulsion fail in a courtroom 250 miles away and drew the available lesson. The crowd wanted him and the institutions would not always deliver him. Both clauses proved true. Neither made him innocent of what came next.
The Guilt Problem
Now the center of the case.
Girard's readers often soften his theory into a comfort: scapegoats are innocent, therefore the accused are wronged, therefore suspicion of every crowd is wisdom. Girard's actual claim is narrower and harder. The victim may well have done something. Oedipus perhaps killed a man at the crossroads. The theory's target is the transference: the crowd's belief that this man is the cause of the crisis and his expulsion the cure. The lie of persecution is causal before it is factual. A community can convict a guilty man of a real crime and still be scapegoating him, if what it discharges through his punishment exceeds his act, precedes his act, and would have found another carrier had he stayed home.
Nearly every case in the literature dodges this distinction, because the exemplary victims are innocent on both counts, of the act and of the crisis, and their innocence lets readers merge the two. Goad forces the separation. The act is undeniable: he pleaded guilty, he described the beating, he refused remorse on the record. Hold his guilt constant, and everything in the community's response that his guilt cannot explain becomes visible as surplus, the way a fixed weight on one pan of a scale exposes whatever else is loaded on the other. The surplus is measurable. It includes the persecution that predated the crime. It includes the transfer of blame for suicides and shootings he did not commit. It includes the durable rule of his reception, that his conviction retroactively settled the meaning of everything he wrote before it and licensed the misreading of everything after. A guilty scapegoat is the controlled experiment the theory never ran: subtract the crime, and what remains is the scapegoating.
Then turn the result over, because its underside says something about the present that Girard reached by deduction and Goad demonstrated in the flesh. If concern for victims is the modern sacred, then modern communities can no longer persecute the innocent in good conscience. The old marks, foreignness, deformity, mere difference, now disqualify a victim rather than nominate him. What remains eligible is the guilty. A man with a real crime in his file is the one carrier a victim-centered culture can load without limit, because every ounce added to him presents as defense of his victim, and no one audits the weight. His guilt functions as the concealment Girard said the operation requires. Persecuting Jim Goad never looked like persecution. It looked like the protection of women, and sometimes it was, and the operation ran inside the resemblance. The guilty scapegoat is the perfect scapegoat of the post-sacrificial age: the only man left whom the crowd can be unanimous about while feeling like the Gospel.
Goad understood this and, as the biography's ledger put it, volunteered. He kept his guilt in print, refused the repentance that might have retired him from the role, and billed the crowd for the surplus while collecting the notoriety. The arrangement served both parties for thirty years. The culture got a monster it could strike with a good conscience. The monster got an audience, a theory, and an alibi.
Doubles
The alibi is where his system rotted.
Rivals converge. The longer two parties fight, the more alike they become, until each is the other's double and neither can see it, since the energy of rivalry goes into asserting the difference the rivalry is erasing. Goad staged this insight before he lived it. ANSWER Me! ran David Duke and Al Sharpton in the same pages, the White racist and the Black demagogue displayed as specimens of one genus, and the offense both clienteles took was the offense doubles always take at the mirror. It was Girardian editorial practice before the letter, from a man who had never read a word of him.
Then he became the exhibit. Goad's great late enemy was victim culture, the church ladies of The New Church Ladies, the professional bearers of grievance who convert suffering into status and accusation into liturgy. His portrait of them matches Girard's chapter on the sacrificial turn of victim-concern closely enough to interfile the pages. But Goad's own account of himself was a victim claim, the largest and longest-running in his corpus. Shit Magnet is a grievance liturgy: the beaten child, the framed defendant, the man punished for everyone's sins, the carrier owed restitution by the crowd. He mocked the victim card in his columns and played it across four hundred pages of memoir, and the contradiction never registered, because rivalry hides resemblance from the rivals first. The anti-victimist became the completest victimist of his scene. Girard and Goad agree on the diagnosis of victim culture; they part at the prescription; and Goad's prescription, retaliation, delivered him into the double bind his own zine had illustrated with Duke and Sharpton twenty-five years before.
The positions circulated through his private life the same way. Girard denies that persecutor and victim are kinds of people; they are stations in a rivalry, and the man in one station is a candidate for the other. Goad's affair with Ryan was a rivalry of doubles by his own description, she was his mirror with the damage amplified, and it escalated as doubles escalate, threat answering threat, until the stronger party did what the stronger party in an unbraked rivalry does. He spent the rest of his life theorizing the station he suffered in and never the one he acted from. The memoir's title names a man violence happens to. The plea sheet names the other man. Both were him, and his system had no page for the second.
Bucky
There is one text where Goad wrote from the far side of his own theory, and it is the one he called his best.
His family had a founding victim. Alton “Bucky” Goad Jr., deaf, mute, born out of wedlock, was stabbed to death in Paris in 1969, and around him the family built the small myths families build: the mother's insistence that Bucky was born deaf, which the surviving brother later called a lie, the decades of silence about the circumstances, the child Jim told nothing. Girard says myth is the community's cover story for its victim, and the family myth performed to specification, converting a wound into a settled tale and the tale into quiet.
“Ode to Bucky Goad,” written near the end and placed first in The Bomb Inside My Brain (2019), unwrites the myth. Goad reconstructs the life from his brother John's testimony, names the lies, and gives the victim the record he was denied. The essay contains no self-defense, no widened frame, no bill presented to the crowd; the writer for once claims none of the victimhood and does all of the revealing. It is a persecution text turned inside out, written wholly on the victim's behalf by a man who spent his career litigating his own case, and its stature in his corpus, by his own ranking, suggests he knew the difference between the two kinds of writing even if he could manage the higher kind only once, and only for the dead.
Conversion
Girard began with novels, and Deceit, Desire, and the Novel ends every great one the same way: the author, through his hero, sees the mimetic lie he has lived, renounces the rivalry, and writes from the far side of the renunciation. Girard called it novelistic conversion and thought no one told the truth about desire without it.
Goad's conversion, on the evidence, ran half its course. The domestic half completed. He told his friend and publisher that he had not felt he deserved his third wife, a woman who wanted only his happiness, and that he decided to stop punishing himself, which is a renunciation of rivalry with the self, the model-obstacle he could never outrun. His last recorded words about her, a week from death, were “Just an angel.” The public half never came. The columns kept the feud economy to the end, enemy by enemy, and the racial politics of his last decade hardened the crowd-logic into doctrine, the tribes eternal, the war constant, the only question which side loads the victim. He died a man who had renounced the war at home and franchised it in print, and Girard's theory predicts the split will not hold, since the operation renounced nowhere in particular is renounced nowhere at all.
What does the case give the Girardians? Three things, stated without ceremony. An independent replication: a subject with no access to the theory who reconstructed its downstream half from inside the victim position, which is evidence the pattern exists outside the books that describe it. A test instrument: the guilty scapegoat, who separates the act from the transference and makes the surplus measurable, and who reveals the selection rule of a victim-centered age, that the crowd now feeds on the guilty because only the guilty can be eaten with a good conscience. And a warning the master himself issued in his last books and the case history confirms: revelation without renunciation does not end the operation. It arms it. Goad saw the scapegoat machinery as few men have seen it, from the altar, with the knife coming down, and he used the sight to sharpen his own knife. The seeing saved his prose. It never saved him, and on Girard's terms it could not, because the theory was never the exit. The exit was the one thing Goad, to his last column, declined to want.
Nothing Left to Reveal: Jim Goad Through Goffman’s Stigma
Jim Goad’s enemies spent thirty years trying to expose him. They surfaced his prison record, his plea sheet, his cruelties, his drug history, his sexual embarrassments, and they presented each find as an unmasking. Every item came from his own books. He had published his worst facts first, at length, under his own name, with jokes, and the men who thought they were prosecuting him were reading his memoir aloud. A writer cannot be blackmailed with his own publicity. That condition was an achievement, built deliberately over decades, and there is a body of theory that explains what he built, mostly by describing its opposite.
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) published Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity in 1963. The book maps how people carry attributes that disqualify them from full social acceptance: the physically marked, the mentally ill, the ex-convict, the addict, the prostitute, the member of a despised race or creed. Goffman’s stigmatized are managers. They pass when they can, cover when they cannot, ration disclosure to the trusted, read every room for what it knows, and organize their lives around the control of discrediting information. Goad ran every one of these operations in reverse, at maximum amplitude, for his entire adult life, and made the reversal pay. He is the limit case Goffman never wrote, and pushing the theory through him shows which parts of it are foundation and which parts are furniture.
The Book
Goffman’s terms, briefly, since the essay spends them throughout.
Every person carries two identities. The virtual social identity is what others assume him to be on first evidence; the actual social identity is what he is. Stigma lives in the gap: an attribute that, once known, breaks the assumptions and spoils the identity. Goffman insisted the attribute alone is nothing; stigma is a relation between an attribute and an audience’s expectations, which is why the same trait can disqualify in one room and confer rank in another. He sorted stigmas into three families: abominations of the body; blemishes of individual character, the family that includes imprisonment, addiction, dishonesty, and radical belief; and the tribal stigmas of race, nation, and religion.
The master distinction runs between the discredited, whose stigma is already known or visible, and the discreditable, whose stigma could be discovered. The discredited manage tension in encounters. The discreditable manage information, and information management is the book’s heart: to pass, to cover, to segregate audiences, to ration the truth, to live alert. Goffman traces the moral career of the stigmatized person, who first absorbs the normal point of view, then learns he is disqualified by it, then acquires his people, the own who share the stigma and the wise who sympathize without sharing it. And he describes the settlement normals offer, which he called good adjustment and phantom acceptance: the stigmatized person should carry his difference cheerfully, stay off the limits, and spare normals the test of their tolerance, in exchange for an acceptance that is never full and can be withdrawn at the first sign of pressing.
Two of his minor categories do major work here. Minstrelization: the stigmatized person performs the full stereotype of his kind before normals, playing the role they wrote. And the professional of stigma: the representative who makes a career of his category, speaks for it to normals, and in the speaking ceases to be an ordinary member of it.
The Moral Career of Jim Goad
Goffman’s careers begin with learning the normal view before learning that it condemns you. Goad’s began in a Ridley Park row house where the condemnation arrived physically, from a father’s fists and a parochial school’s discipline, and the lesson he reports drawing was structural before it was moral: there are the marked and the markers, and the marked child’s appeals to fairness change nothing. His brother Bucky carried the family’s visible stigma, deaf, mute, illegitimate, and the family managed Bucky’s information the way Goffman’s families do, with silence and a protective myth. Jim watched information management from the inside of a household that practiced it on one of its sons.
The Temple degree made him discreditable in the other direction, a working-class kid passing upward, and Los Angeles alternative journalism taught him the going rates of respectability. Then, from 1991, he ran the experiment. ANSWER Me! was a machine for acquiring character stigma on purpose: obscenity, cruelty, association with murderers and racists, each issue a fresh entry in a record of his own making. The 1998 beating and the prison term converted him from discreditable to discredited by the state’s own instrument, a felony record, the character stigma Goffman lists by name. And then, at the point in the career where Goffman’s subjects reach for management, for the quiet job, the sealed record, the fresh town, the rationed truth, Goad wrote Shit Magnet, four hundred pages that disclosed everything a hostile investigator might ever find and a great deal no investigator could, the fantasies, the grudges, the shames with no paper trail. He converted the remainder of his discreditable material into discredited material voluntarily, in a single transaction, at retail.
Goffman knew voluntary disclosure. It appears in the late phase of his moral career as a private mercy: the person who finds concealment more exhausting than exposure, tells his circle, and wears the mark to stop flinching. What Goad did shares the moral career’s final position and nothing of its scale, audience, or purpose. Goffman’s discloser retires from information management. Goad industrialized it.
The Inversion
State the strategy in Goffman’s terms and its logic comes apart into four moves.
First, total disclosure is information control by flooding. The discreditable person restricts the supply of discrediting facts; Goad saturated the market with them. Both operations govern the same variable, who knows what and when, and the flood governs it more securely than the dam, because a dam can fail from one leak and a flood cannot fail at all. After Shit Magnet there existed no fact whose emergence could change Goad’s standing, because emergence was impossible; everything had already emerged, in his voice, with his framing attached. The anxious vigilance Goffman describes as the discreditable person’s tax, the scanning of every conversation for what it knows, the dread of the old acquaintance, was a tax Goad never paid again after 2002.
Second, first disclosure captures the framing. Goffman’s passer who is exposed gets narrated by his exposer; the discrediting fact arrives inside the discoverer’s story, as revelation, as gotcha, as proof of fraud. Goad’s facts could only ever arrive inside Goad’s story, which he had told first, funnier, and in more damaging detail than any enemy could improve on. His detractors’ unveilings read as plagiarism because they were: the exposé of Jim Goad had one author, and he held the copyright. Goffman treats timing as tactics. Goad’s case promotes it to strategy: in the economy of spoiled identity, whoever discloses first owns the spoilage.
Third, the flood immunizes retroactively and only retroactively, a limit the essay returns to.
Fourth, and this is the move Goffman’s framework strains hardest against, the disclosure was priced. Goad sold the record he built: the zines, reprinted for three decades at rising prices; the memoir; the confessional columns; the persona. Stigma became inventory. Goffman’s stigmatized spend to manage their mark, in effort, vigilance, and forgone life; the mark is a cost center by definition, and the book’s economics never contemplate the mark as an asset. Goad ran spoiled identity as a business and the business sustained him for thirty years, which means the theory’s accounting, and the assumption beneath it, needs a second column.
Minstrel and Professional
Goffman named the performance Goad made of his class.
Minstrelization is his term for the stigmatized person who acts out the stereotype before normals, giving them the full expected show. Big Red Goad, the trucker costumes, the outlaw-country album, the tour with Hank Williams III: a Temple journalism graduate performing White trash for audiences who paid to see it. The performance ran with a torque Goffman’s minstrels lack, since Goad performed the stereotype while publishing a book that indicted the audience for holding it. The Redneck Manifesto argues that “redneck” is the one slur educated people permit themselves; Big Red Goad collected the slur’s box office. He minstrelized and prosecuted the minstrel show’s customers in the same career, sometimes in the same week, and the two acts fed each other, the book lending the costume irony, the costume lending the book authenticity.
Even the authenticity was managed, because Goad’s class stigma was partly elective. He held the credentials to pass upward and refused. Goffman’s framework runs on imposed marks; his subjects would surrender their stigmas if they could, and the book contains no theory of the man who reaches for one. Goad reached twice. He adopted the White-trash identity his degree exempted him from, and in his last decade he acquired the era’s most disqualifying tribal stigma when he moved his byline to a white-nationalist publisher in 2020; accounts differ on how much choice the move reflected, since his mainstream venues had been closing for years, but the man who wrote his way into Simon & Schuster in 1994 had options short of Counter-Currents, and took none of them. Elective stigma is a hole in Stigma, and Goad spent a career inside it.
He also became Goffman’s professional, the representative who makes the stigma a livelihood, with the professional’s standard fate. Goffman observes that the spokesman for a category exits it: representing the stigmatized to normals is a career available to almost no ordinary member, and the representative’s interests quietly diverge from theirs. Goad professionally represented the despised poor White while holding a five-figure advance, downtown bylines, and the acquaintance of everyone interesting in three cities, and the divergence shows in the record: the men he spoke for do not generally publish with Simon & Schuster, tour with musicians, or sell deluxe reprints of their juvenilia. None of this convicts him of fraud; Goffman’s point is colder, that the profession of stigma is a profession, with its own ladder, and the ladder leads away from the people at the bottom of it.
The Own and the Wise
Goffman’s stigmatized find two shelters: the own, who share the mark, and the wise, normals granted backstage access who sympathize without sharing. Goad’s biography sorts by these categories with almost no residue.
The own came first as the transgressive underground, Feral House and the zine network, a community of the character-stigmatized where the marks ran in the other direction: within the in-group, Goffman notes, the stigma symbol converts to a prestige symbol, and in Goad’s scene an obscenity prosecution was a laurel and a felony was a credential. Frank Faillace, the Portland club owner who hired the pariah in 2000, is a textbook instance of the wise, the normal whose business puts him backstage with the discredited and who extends work without requiring reform. And the last decade supplied the strongest case: the dissident right functioned as a full stigma economy, a labor market where mainstream disqualification was the hiring criterion, with its own publishers, donors, price structure, and honor. Greg Johnson could pay Goad because Goad’s spoiled identity was, on that market, blue-chip. The two men’s reconciliation scene, the publisher bracing to meet the difficult man of the memoirs and finding a punctual professional, is Goffman’s virtual and actual identity meeting over lunch: Johnson had absorbed the character Goad published, and the discrepancy this time ran in Goad’s favor, since a man who discloses his worst first enjoys a lifetime of exceeding expectations.
One clause of Goffman bears on the membership question Goad litigated to the end. He insisted he joined no movement, and within Stigma the insistence reads differently than he meant it: affiliation with the own is the standard resolution of the moral career, the stigmatized person’s arrival among his kind, and Goad’s refusal of arrival, his standing claim to be a category of one, is the professional’s occupational stance, the representative who must stay distinguishable from the represented to keep the job. The cat who walked alone was walking a market position.
Courtesy Stigma
Goffman gave a name to what happens to the people standing next to the marked man. Courtesy stigma: the spoilage that spreads through connection, to the family of the convict, the spouse of the addict, the child of the traitor. It is the piece of his framework Goad’s strategy priced worst, because the flood that cost Goad nothing after 2002 was paid for continuously by people who never chose it.
Debbie Goad co-authored the scandal and shared its returns, the nearest thing to a partner the strategy ever had, and the record she left is entangled with his to this day; accounts of her run through accounts of him, on his terms, because he owned the archive. Anne Ryan is known to the public in perpetuity as the woman Jim Goad beat, an identity assigned by his crime and fixed by his memoir’s four hundred pages of context she never elected to appear in. His second and third wives married the most disclosed man in America, a condition that forecloses the ordinary privacy of a marriage before it begins. And his son carries the surname of a professionally spoiled identity together with a disability, a double load Goffman’s chapter would have treated without blinking. Total disclosure is unilateral. The discloser spends an estate he holds jointly with intimates and signs alone, and Goffman’s relational definition of stigma, a language of relationships and never of attributes, predicts what the case confirms, that identities are held in common and one holder can spoil the account for all of them.
The Limits
The strategy had a perimeter, and marking it is part of the case’s value.
The flood immunizes the past only. Disclosure of a record cannot protect against acts not yet committed, and the 1998 beating demonstrated the gap: no prior confession covered it, because it postdated them all, and the mark it left was applied by a court rather than negotiated by an author. Goad’s answer, disclosing the beating too, restored the system going forward, but the sequence shows the strategy’s tense. Preemptive disclosure defends history and mortgages nothing about tomorrow, and a man whose livelihood is his record has a professional incentive the theory should note with suspicion: new spoilage is new inventory.
The flood governs information and never consequence. Total disclosure made Goad unexposable and left him fireable, deplatformable, and prosecutable; Simon & Schuster did not survive his conviction, mainstream venues closed serially, and the immunity he built operated inside a shrinking territory. Goffman’s distinction holds here: information management addresses the encounter, and institutions do not hold encounters. A publisher dropping an author consults the record’s existence, on which Goad’s strategy had no purchase, rather than the record’s authorship, on which it had everything.
And the strategy is irreversible. Goffman’s passer keeps an exit; the discreditable person can, at cost, go on managing forever, and some do until the grave. Goad’s single transaction in 2002 closed every exit permanently. There was no future in which Jim Goad rejoined the unmarked, no town far enough, no name change deep enough, and the biography’s observation that he needed rejection to confirm his role has a Goffman rendering with the sentiment removed: a man whose entire identity capital is banked in his stigma faces ruin at the prospect of acceptance. His late-career acquisitions of fresh disqualification, the racial politics, the venue, look from inside this frame like a portfolio manager protecting his position.
What the Case Gives the Theory
Stigma rests on an assumption Goffman states early and never audits: the stigmatized person holds the same beliefs about identity as the normals who disqualify him, wants what they have, and manages toward the best acceptance available. Every strategy in the book, passing, covering, disclosure etiquette, good adjustment, is a tactic of the acceptance-seeker, and the phantom acceptance normals offer is the framework’s horizon, the most the marked can win.
Goad’s case shows the assumption is a parameter rather than a foundation. Renounce acceptance, and the machinery does not stop; it reverses. Concealment becomes broadcast, covering becomes flaunting, disclosure etiquette becomes assault, and good adjustment becomes a standing campaign to test every limit normals ask the stigmatized to spare them. What survives the reversal untouched is the deep variable, control of information about the self, which turns out to be the theory’s real foundation, indifferent to the direction of its use. Goffman mapped one region of the space, the region where the marked seek entry. Goad occupied the other region for thirty years and filed reports, and his case supplies its first principles: disclose first and own the framing; disclose totally and retire the exposure threat; price the record and convert the mark to capital; accept irreversibility and the spoilage of intimates as the standing costs; and expect immunity to cover the archive, never the institutions and never tomorrow.
Goffman wrote that the stigmatized and the normal are the same person in different rooms, each of us discreditable somewhere. His book teaches the anxious craft by which people keep their rooms from finding out about each other. Goad demolished the walls of his own house, sold tickets to the wreckage, and lived in it in full view for thirty years, and the lesson of his tenancy runs in both directions at once. No one ever exposed him. He was never once safe.
The Injuries Surface: The Redneck Manifesto and The Hidden Injuries of Class
In 1972, two young researchers published a book built from a hundred and fifty interviews with working-class Bostonians. It argued that the deepest wound of class in America arrives as humiliation, gets worn as personal failure, and stays hidden because its bearers blame themselves. In 1997, a zine publisher with a Simon & Schuster advance and a coming felony published a book arguing that the deepest wound of class in America arrives as humiliation, gets worn as personal failure, and stays hidden because polite society has agreed to call its bearers trash. The first book is written in the register of the clinic. The second is written in the register of the bar fight. They are the same book, and nobody has read them together, and the distance between their registers turns out to be a history of American politics.
Richard Sennett (b. 1943) and Jonathan Cobb called their book The Hidden Injuries of Class. Jim Goad called his The Redneck Manifesto. Twenty-five years separate them, and then another two decades separate Goad's book from the moment the academy caught up with both: the post-2016 literature on status threat, rural resentment, and the dignity of working men, which measured with regressions what Sennett and Cobb had heard in living rooms and Goad had shouted from a stage. The genealogy runs 1972, 1997, 2016, and the middle term is missing from every bibliography, because the middle term has a criminal record and a title you cannot say on the radio.
Boston, 1970
Sennett and Cobb interviewed at the turn of the seventies: janitors, meat-cutters, pipefitters, bank clerks risen from manual work, the men of White ethnic Boston, third-generation Italians and Greeks and Irish, in the years when the papers were full of hardhats and backlash. The book they wrote refused the era's two available stories about such men, the bigot of liberal commentary and the noble worker of left pamphlets, and listened instead for what the men said about themselves when the subject was their own worth.
What they heard was a wound administered by an idea. American society, the book argues, legitimates its inequalities through what the authors call badges of ability: the belief that positions are earned by talent, that credentials certify inner quality, and that a man's station therefore reads as a verdict on the man. The worker lives under this verdict. He half-rejects it, knowing his work takes skill and his bosses bleed like anyone, and he half-accepts it, which is the injury, because acceptance means his standing testifies to his inadequacy. The men could not speak of class as an external force without hearing themselves make excuses. So the injury went inward and went silent, discussed, when discussed at all, in the idiom of personal failing: I had no head for school, I should have applied myself, men like me don't talk right.
Two portraits carry the book. A bank clerk the authors call Frank Rissarro, risen after long years of manual work into a white-collar job he describes as pushing papers, treats the educated interviewer with a deference bordering on apology, dismisses his own advancement as luck, and holds the educated in a suspension of awe and contempt: they possess something real that he lacks, and what they possess produces nothing a man can touch. A Greek immigrant the authors call Ricca Kartides cleans other people's buildings, absorbs the daily arithmetic of being seen as a function rather than a man, and stakes his dignity on a single project, that his children will live in a home of their own and never stand where he stands. This is the book's second great finding: the worker redeems the verdict against him through sacrifice. His compromised present becomes the purchase price of his children's future, and dignity deferred is the only dignity on offer.
The sacrifice contains its own injury, and Sennett and Cobb do not flinch from it. The children the sacrifice educates become the kind of people who sit in judgment on men like their fathers. The badge system the father could not beat, he buys for his son, and the son returns from college fluent in the idiom that measures the father and finds him wanting. The book closes its circle there: class injury reproduces through the love that tries to escape it.
The interviews reproduced the relation they studied. The men deferred, apologized for their language, promoted the interviewer to judge. The authors saw it and said so: there was no room in which these injuries could be spoken as accusation, because every available room, the interview included, was furnished by the other side. The injuries stayed hidden for lack of a language shameless enough to carry them.
Portland, 1997
Now set The Redneck Manifesto beside it, clause by clause.
Goad's opening claim is the badge system observed from the parking lot. Educated Americans who would resign over an ethnic slur say “redneck,” “hillbilly,” and “white trash” without a flicker, and the permission is the tell: these words carry a verdict the speakers believe, that the people so named earned their station through defect, that their poverty certifies their quality. Sennett and Cobb located the verdict inside their subjects, swallowed and self-administered. Goad located the identical verdict in the mouths of its administrators and spat it back. The two books describe one tribunal from its two rooms, the chamber where the sentence is passed and the cell where it is served.
Goad's counter-history performs the same work as Sennett and Cobb's counter-argument. They attacked the badge system's premise with theory: ability is a social fiction rationing dignity. He attacked its premise with archive: the chapter on White servitude and convict labor, the redemptioners and transported felons and mill hands, a lineage of the exploited assembled to break the reading of poor-White poverty as heritable failure. Where the Boston book says the verdict is illegitimate, the Portland book says the evidence was fabricated. Different idiom, one motion: both books exist to overturn a conviction.
And Goad's center of gravity sits where theirs sits, on humiliation rather than income. The Manifesto spends almost nothing on wages. Its subject, announced in the subtitle, is scapegoating: what it feels like to be regarded as dirty, stupid, genetically defective, and expendable, and what that regard does to the regarded. Sennett and Cobb built the same finding from the inside, that the injury of class is a dignity injury, that the ledger the men kept was moral rather than monetary. Twenty-five years apart, with no visible contact, the therapist and the brawler filed the same diagnosis.
The books even share the enemy. Sennett and Cobb, men of the left, aimed their hardest pages at the meritocracy their own class administered, at the liberal professional whose compassion for the worker rests on the assumption of standing above him. Goad aimed at the identical figure with identical logic and different ammunition. The Manifesto's villain is never the factory owner. It is the documentary maker, the columnist, the sociology department, the class that produces verdicts, and in this the profane book keeps a discipline the polite reader misses: Goad understood, as his Boston predecessors understood, that the wound was administered by the credentialed, and he kept his fire on them for four hundred pages.
The Register
So the twin claims. Now the difference, which is the essay's real subject, because the difference explains what happened to the claim between 1972 and 2016.
Sennett and Cobb's injuries are hidden by a structural gag. The worker cannot voice the accusation without indicting himself, since the only language of worth he possesses is the badge language that convicts him; to say “the system insulted me” in respectable English is to hear the reply, resentment is what failure sounds like, and half-believe it. The men whispered, deferred, apologized. The book's title names its finding and its limit: the authors could reveal the injuries only because the injured could not.
Goad solved the language problem, and the solution was the obscenity. A man with no respectability has no respectability to protect, and every sentence of the Manifesto is built to burn that bridge in advance: the profanity, the insults, the wallowing in every slur before reclaiming it. The style that reviewers read as shock-peddling was structural. Shame polices the speech of the ashamed through the fear of confirming the verdict, and Goad's register is what speech sounds like when that enforcement fails, when the speaker has pre-confirmed every verdict and stands in the wreckage with nothing left to protect and a list of grievances. Sennett and Cobb's men could not accuse because accusation cost dignity they were still defending. Goad liquidated the dignity account and bought a voice with the proceeds. The hidden injuries of class stopped being hidden the day they found a spokesman with no deposit at risk.
And the spokesman was, to the letter, the figure Sennett and Cobb's closing chapters predict. Their great finding about sacrifice is that it manufactures its own betrayal: the worker's deferred dignity funds an educated child who returns a stranger, fluent in the judging idiom. Goad is that child. A plumber's son out of a violent row house, carried by the sacrifice economy to a Temple journalism degree, equipped by it with exactly the fluencies that certify a man to sit in judgment on his origins. The standard career from there is the one Sennett and Cobb mourn, the son as caseworker, journalist, professor, mild despiser of his father's kind. Goad ran the career in reverse. He took the credential's fluency back down the ladder and put it in the mouth of the class he came from, wrote the accusation they could not write, in their diction fused with his education, and aimed it up. The Hidden Injuries of Class ends with the educated child estranged from the injured father. The Redneck Manifesto is what the estrangement writes when it comes home armed.
The Race Clause
Both books had to meet the same objection, and their answers converged before their authors diverged.
Sennett and Cobb interviewed at the height of White backlash and addressed it head-on: the anger of their subjects at Black Americans and student radicals was, in their reading, a defense of the sacrifice ledger. The worker who has paid for his standing in decades of deference watches others appear to claim standing without paying, and his rage is the rage of a creditor watching the currency debased. It is class injury exiting through the nearest available door. The authors treated the racial channel as a misdirection of a real wound, and warned, in substance, that a society refusing the wound a class politics would receive it as a race politics.
The Manifesto, on its strongest pages, holds the same line with harder language: race in America is a diversion, the rich have pointed poor Whites and poor Blacks at each other for three centuries while keeping the property, and the redneck's supposed racism is the scar of a con run on both parties. In 1997 Goad stood, on this argument, closer to the Boston social democrats than either party would have enjoyed hearing.
Then he became their warning. The later career, the prison-yard tribalism, Whiteness in 2018, the white-nationalist byline from 2020, walked through the door Sennett and Cobb had marked. The diversion thesis requires a destination, some politics in which the class wound can be honored as a class wound, and no such politics arrived, and Goad's grievance took the channel that was open. His trajectory from the Manifesto to Counter-Currents is the Sennett-Cobb prophecy run to completion in a single career: the hidden injury, denied a universal address, delivered to a tribal one. The books part company there for good. The Boston authors kept faith with a politics of shared dignity they could describe and never locate. Goad concluded the location did not exist and enlisted with the misdirection he had spent his best book exposing.
2016
On September 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton (b. 1947) told a fundraiser that half of her opponent's supporters belonged in a basket of deplorables. The remark detonated because it confirmed, in the enemy's recorded voice, the thesis of a book published nineteen years earlier: that a verdict on the White lower orders circulates among the credentialed, that it is spoken comfortably in safe rooms, and that its targets know. Goad had built a four-hundred-page brief around the prediction. The campaign entered it into evidence.
The academy arrived within two years, and the arrival deserves listing, because each entry re-derives a piece of the 1972-1997 corpus. Diana Mutz’s 2018 analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found status threat, rather than personal economic hardship, drove the 2016 vote: the dignity finding, regressed. Arlie Russell Hochschild (b. 1940), in Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), reconstructed her Louisiana subjects’ deep story as a queue toward a dignity summit with others cut ahead: the sacrifice ledger and the debased currency, ethnographed. Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment (2016) heard rural Wisconsinites keep moral accounts of who works and who is honored: the badge system, from the cell side. Michèle Lamont (b. 1957) had already mapped, in The Dignity of Working Men (2000), the moral boundaries workers draw to defend worth the market denies them, and Anne Case (b. 1958) and Angus Deaton (b. 1945) were tabulating what they named deaths of despair, the mortality of the verdict. This literature is careful, quantified, and almost wholly innocent of its own genealogy. Sennett and Cobb appear in it occasionally, as a courtesy citation. Goad appears nowhere, and his absence costs the literature its middle term: the account of how the injury moved from hidden to weaponized, which is the transformation the 2016 result forced everyone to explain.
The missing account is the register story this essay has told. The injury of 1972 could not become politics because it had no speakable form; the men blamed themselves in private and deferred in public. Between Boston and the deplorables speech, someone had to build the form: a language in which the class verdict could be named as an insult, returned as an accusation, and worn as an identity rather than a confession. Goad built a working prototype in 1997 and demonstrated every property the later politics would exhibit, the contempt inventory, the credentialed enemy, the pride assembled from slurs, the fury that reads as irrational until you see the moral ledger under it. The politics that followed did not follow from him; a career is a specimen here, never a cause. But the specimen is dated 1997, and the datestamp is the contribution: the sequence hidden, spoken, mobilized, measured now has all four of its terms, and the second term has a name.
One more publication event completes the genealogy, from the same year as the deplorables speech. Hillbilly Elegy (2016)
, by J. D. Vance (b. 1984), later vice president, gave the educated classes the account of poor Whites they could praise, and its architecture is the Manifesto's photographic negative: the same terrain, with the self-blame restored. Vance's book locates the wound substantially in the culture of the wounded, counsels discipline, and flatters the badge system by embodying its promise, the hollow kid redeemed by Yale. It became the respectable text of the White working class in the exact season that class went to the polls, and its reception measures what the Manifesto was for. Sennett and Cobb had shown the injured administering the verdict against themselves; Vance administered it in hardcover to applause; Goad's book, whatever its crimes, is the one document in the lineage in which the defendant declines to sign the confession.
Read in sequence, the three moments make a single finding and a single history.
The finding, stable across fifty years, three methods, and two registers: class in America wounds through dignity before it wounds through money; the wound is administered by a merit story that converts station into verdict; its bearers keep moral ledgers the political economy never sees; and the wound, unspoken, waits.
The history is the career of the wound's language. In 1972 it had none, and two outsiders transcribed the silence. In 1997 an insider, educated out and returned, built it a voice by paying the voice's price in respectability, and the resulting book was too profane for the people who assign knowledge, so the finding circulated for two decades in zines, bars, comment sections, and gradually a politics, unread upstairs. In 2016 the politics won a presidency, and the upstairs commissioned studies. The studies confirmed 1972.
Sennett and Cobb wrote that the injuries were hidden. They were hidden from the people who write books, which is a different thing, and the fifty-year lag between the diagnosis and the measurement is the distance between those two kinds of hiding. Goad closed the distance early, in the only register that could carry the cargo, and was disqualified from the record by the same tribunal his book described. There is a term for that in his own vocabulary. The finding about scapegoats got scapegoated, and the men in the interviews could have predicted it, quietly, in the idiom of personal failure, being careful, as always, about their language.
The Ally Who Refused the Label: Jim Goad Through Alliance Theory
Everyone who wrote about Jim Goad agreed he had no ideology, and the agreement crossed enemy lines. His detractors on the right called him an edgytarian with no identifiable politics. His admirers called him a pure independent, beholden to nothing. His publisher’s memorial honored his lifelong insistence that he belonged to no movement, explained it by temperament, the cat who walked alone, and by biography, the teenage Catholicism that had swallowed him once and taught him what causes do. Goad’s own account matched: a category of one, a man who feared that joining anything would consume him.
The trouble with this consensus is the direct deposit. From October 2020 until January 2025, Goad drew a twice-weekly paycheck from Counter-Currents, the principal publishing organ of American white nationalism, and delivered more than four hundred columns of reliable fire at the coalition’s enemies. Before that, eleven years at Taki’s Magazine, serving an adjacent readership. A man with no side spent his last sixteen years as one side’s most productive artillery, and the question is what to call the arrangement, since “loner” fails arithmetic and “true believer” fails the record.
There is a theory built for the question. In 2023, Psychological Inquiry published “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems,” by David Pinsof, David O. Sears (b. 1935), and Martie Haselton. The paper argues that political belief systems have no moral thread. They are patchworks of ad hoc justification generated by a deeper activity, the choosing and supporting of allies, and their famous inconsistencies mark the joints where different allies’ claims got stitched together. The difference between a liberal and a conservative lies in whom they count as allies, and the values are wallpaper. Run this apparatus over Goad’s career and two things happen. The incoherence that both his enemies and friends recorded resolves into a legible structure, and his signature claim, the refusal to join, stops looking like temperament and starts looking like the most disciplined alliance strategy in his coalition.
The Theory
The paper’s machinery, briefly, because the essay applies each part.
Alliances are older than politics; primates form them, and the human mind carries a dedicated psychology for the work. The choosing runs on three criteria. Similarity: shared markers, tags, and styles make coordination cheap, so people assort by them and advertise them. Transitivity: good allies share your allies and rivals, since misaligned loyalties breed infighting and betrayal, which is why the enemy of my enemy recruits me and why joining a group means inheriting its entire enmity portfolio. Interdependence: good allies deliver benefits, protection, knowledge, money. The criteria feed each other and feed on accident, small initial conditions snowballing into structures nobody designed, which is why the alliance map of any society, the paper insists, has no deeper pattern than the friendships and feuds of a high school.
The supporting runs on three biases the authors call propagandistic. Perpetrator biases: for allies who have done harm, downplay responsibility, stress mitigation, embellish intentions, minimize the damage. Victim biases: for allies with grievances, embellish the harm, deny the mitigation, attribute the perpetrator’s motives to malice, and, where rival coalitions both claim wounds, compete for the deeper one. Attributional biases: credit allies’ successes to their character and their failures to circumstance, and reverse the polarity for rivals. Belief systems are what these biases secrete as they run across a particular roster of allies and rivals. Change the roster and the beliefs follow, with the rationalizations arriving afterward, dressed as discoveries.
The paper documents its case with survey data, cross-sectional, anonymous, and shallow in time. What it lacks is a subject you can watch across decades, whose roster changes are dated and whose rationalizations are published. It lacks a corpus. Goad kept one.
The Portfolio
Goad’s alliance history is a stochasticity exhibit, a chain of accidents compounding into a structure that no reading of his values could predict.
A marriage assembled his first alliance: Debbie brought half the sensibility and half the labor of ANSWER Me!, and the zine’s scandal assorted him into the Feral House network, Adam Parfrey’s world of transgressive publishing, where the similarity markers were obscenity and nerve and the interdependence was real, printers, distributors, contributors, legal support, reprint income. Prison stripped the portfolio to its floor and demonstrated the theory’s grimmest clause, that alliances form on whatever marker is available when protection is scarce. Portland afterward supplied Frank Faillace, a club owner delivering the benefit that defines an ally in the paper’s terms, employment when no one else would. Taki’s Magazine attached him in 2009 to the widening anti-progressive coalition, where transitivity did its patient work: his fixed lifelong rivals were the credentialed moralizers, and as a coalition of that class’s other enemies coalesced through the 2010s, the enemy-of-my-enemy calculus pulled him toward every faction of it, the libertarians, the race realists, the male grievance writers, the board-culture kids, without requiring him to share any faction’s doctrine.
And the last alliance of his life formed from a textbook initial-condition flip. Greg Johnson had been a seventeen-year rival over a book review. In November 2019 Goad posted a snide remark about Johnson’s deportation from Norway; Johnson answered with flattery; a private message came back approving the reply; and within a year the rival was the employer. No value changed hands in that exchange. A single message rerouted the network, the interdependence followed, Johnson consulting donors and making an offer, and the belief system, as the theory predicts, repriced afterward: the review Goad had resented for seventeen years was renegotiated into a compliment about the prose. The paper says small variations snowball into seemingly arbitrary structures. One tweet moved Jim Goad from Taki’s to Counter-Currents, and half of what he published thereafter follows from the move.
The Patchwork
Now the beliefs, which is where the theory earns its way, because Goad’s corpus runs the three propagandistic biases so faithfully that parts of it read as the paper’s supplementary material.
Take the attributional bias first, since the authors chose Goad’s own constituency as their illustration. The paper documents working-class White Americans attributing their standing to external causes, immigration, globalization, reverse discrimination, while the wider conservative coalition attributes poverty in general to internal defect, and it lists this exact asymmetry among the double standards that alliance loyalty generates. The Redneck Manifesto is that asymmetry at book length, composed twenty-five years before the paper: four hundred pages transferring the causes of poor-White condition from character to circumstance, from defective stock to indenture, convict labor, and a rigged class war. Within Alliance Theory the book is a sustained attributional intervention on behalf of an ally group, and its counter-history chapter is the paper’s competitive victimhood run in print, an entry filed in the national grievance tournament under the heading our servitude too.
The victim bias pairs with its mirror. Goad embellished the wounds of his allies, the mocked, the deplatformed, the class-slurred, with full orchestration, and spent equal energy deflating the wounds of rival-aligned groups; The New Church Ladies is a book-length audit of the other coalition’s victim biases, accurate about every tactic because its author ran the same tactics for his own side and, most productively, for himself. Which brings the perpetrator bias, and the essay’s coldest paragraph. The paper, drawing on the accounts literature, lists the perpetrator’s four moves: downplay responsibility, emphasize mitigating circumstances, embellish intentions, minimize the harm’s severity and duration. Shit Magnet executes all four across its length, the childhood as mitigation, the victim’s conduct as shared responsibility, the honesty as embellished intention, the selective public outrage as proof the harm was inflated, and it executes them under a title that claims the victim position for the author of the violence. Goad ran victim biases and perpetrator biases about the same events at once, which the theory permits without strain, since both are ally-support routines and Goad’s one permanent, fully transitive, never-renounced ally was Jim Goad. The alliance of one is still an alliance, and it publishes propaganda like any other.
Assemble the corpus and the famous incoherence dissolves. Class-war economics beside racial identitarianism, libertine pornographer beside scourge of decadence, free-speech absolutist beside enemies-list keeper: no value reconciles these, and Alliance Theory says stop looking for one, because none of it was ever value-shaped. Each position services a node in the portfolio, the poor Whites, the transgressive underground, the anti-moralizer coalition, the self, and the contradictions sit at the joints between allies, exactly where the theory locates everyone’s contradictions. Goad differed from the ordinary partisan in one respect only: his portfolio was idiosyncratic, so his patchwork looked strange, while the ordinary partisan’s patchwork, equally unprincipled, looks normal because millions share it. The detractors who called him ideologically incoherent were measuring him against a standard the paper spends thirty pages dismantling. Nobody passes it. Goad merely failed it in an unfamiliar pattern.
The No-Label Clause
Now the center, the refusal to join, which Alliance Theory reads with colder eyes than anyone who knew him.
Start with what a declaration of membership is, in the paper’s terms. Labels and tags are coordination devices, focal points that create common knowledge of an alliance: once a man says I am one of you, everyone knows, everyone knows that everyone knows, and the alliance can rely on him at full price. The price is transitivity. The declared member inherits the group’s complete roster, every ally and every rival, every feud in progress and every feud to come, and his own network gets audited against it. The paper treats the apparatus, marker, declaration, inheritance, as the standard technology of alliance, the way coalitions scale past personal acquaintance.
Goad’s career-long move was to supply every component of alliance except the declaration. Similarity: he wore the coalition’s markers, the taboo-breaking, the enemies, the register, and had helped invent several. Interdependence: he took the money and delivered the columns, the most measurable ally-support in his scene, twice a week, on schedule, for years. Support in conflicts: four hundred pieces of coordinated fire at the coalition’s rivals is support by any behavioral definition the theory recognizes. What he withheld was the focal point, the sentence that would convert the arrangement into common knowledge and trigger the inheritance. He backed out of an American Renaissance conference over program copy implying he belonged to a movement, which is to say over the label alone, since he had no objection to the audience or the venue. He joined Counter-Currents with the non-membership stipulated up front, and Johnson, flexible on the point, built a doctrine to accommodate it, that outside voices help the cause more than members.
What did withholding the declaration buy? Three assets, each legible in the record. First, uninherited rivalries. The dissident right of Goad’s era was a shatter-zone of feuds, Spencer against Johnson, factions against factions, purges and counter-purges, and a declared member of any camp acquires its full enmity list. Goad guested across all of them, McInnes and Malice, Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer (b. 1978), Peter Brimelow and Kevin MacDonald, men who in several pairings would decline one another’s calls. Only a node without declared transitivity can bridge a structure that fractious, and Goad’s interview traffic, his reach, and a share of his income ran across exactly the bridges a membership card would have burned. Second, cheap exit. The undeclared ally can switch sides, or go home, at the cost of a shrug; the declared member pays the traitor’s price. Goad never used the exit, but an option’s value never depended on exercise, and a man who had already lost one career to one conviction had reason to price reputational exposure carefully. Third, deniable signaling. The old ANSWER Me! ambiguity, the refusal to say where the joke ended, let multiple audiences read him as their own; non-membership was the same ambiguity raised to the level of political identity, and it kept every audience’s hope alive.
Set this against the two accounts on record. Johnson’s memorial explains the non-joining as psychology: the scarred ex-Catholic who feared consumption, the constitutional loner, the scrupulosity he once teased as autistic. Goad’s self-account agrees, a category of one. Alliance Theory does what it always does with the reasons people give, files them as the rationalization layer, the wallpaper over the alliance logic, and notes that this particular wallpaper was an asset, since a non-joining explained by temperament threatens nobody, while a non-joining understood as strategy would have invited every faction to reprice him. The claim requires care, and the theory’s own architecture supplies it: alliance psychology is evolved machinery, running beneath awareness, requiring no cynicism and no plan. Goad’s fear of consumption was almost certainly sincere, and the sincerity changes nothing about the function. The fear kept the declaration unsigned; the unsigned declaration kept the options open; the options paid, in reach, in income, in survivable feuds, for twenty years. Temperament and strategy converged on the same conduct, and the theory’s contribution is the observation that when a disposition pays that reliably, the disposition is doing coalition work whatever it feels like from inside. The cat who walked alone walked a portfolio.
The Natural Experiment
One test separates Alliance Theory from the value theories it attacks: when alliances and values part company, which one moves? The paper answers with surveys, Republicans repricing Putin inside two years, partisans reversing on the FBI, and the surveys share a weakness, anonymous respondents observed once. Goad supplies what the method lacks, a single subject with a dated corpus, forty years long, publishing his rationalizations in real time.
Track the one variable against the other. His rival was constant from 1991 to 2026: the credentialed moralizer, under successive names, the censor, the church lady, the media class. His ally roster changed three times, and his belief system changed three times, on schedule, each time re-deriving first principles that matched the new roster. In 1997, allied with a class, the poor of both colors sharing an enemy, he published the diversion thesis: race is a con run on natural allies. In prison, allied of necessity with a race, he discovered the yard revealed human nature: tribes are the bedrock. From 2018, allied with an identitarian coalition and then salaried by it, he published Whiteness: racial solidarity is obligatory because every group practices it. Three ontologies of race in one career, each presented as a discovery about the world, each arriving just after the alliance that required it, none arriving before. Values-first psychology has to narrate this as two conversions and find the arguments that drove them; the arguments are what the corpus conspicuously lacks. Alliance Theory narrates it as a roster updating and a belief system doing its secretarial work, and the timestamps side with the secretaries.
That is the case’s contribution, stated for the record. Alliance Theory’s evidence base is wide and shallow; Goad is narrow and forty years deep, a longitudinal confirmation the literature does not currently hold, with the mediating events, a marriage, a cellblock, a tweet, identified and dated. And he adds a theoretical article the paper omits: the undeclared ally as a standing position in alliance structures, the actor who supplies similarity, interdependence, and conflict support while withholding the focal point, harvesting a bridge’s reach and an option’s insurance from the gap between conduct and declaration. The position is stable, the position is paid, and the position is invisible to any method that sorts people by the labels they accept. Survey research would have coded Jim Goad as an independent. He was the hardest-working man in the coalition, and the coalition’s own historian wrote a eulogy certifying he was never in it. Alliance Theory is the instrument that reads both facts at once, and reads the eulogy as the final service one ally rendered another: the alliance-obscuring story, delivered over the grave, priced into the friendship, and believed by every mourner including its author.
Jim Goad: Fucked Around, Found Out, Invoiced the Wrong Parties
The setup. In 1990 Jim Goad held a ticket most transgressors never see: a Temple journalism degree, a staff position at the Los Angeles Reader, a sharp wife who could edit, and a prose gift that would have carried a respectable career in the alternative press. He knew what the ticket was worth and he knew the price of tearing it, because the price was posted. The 2 Live Crew obscenity prosecution ran in 1990. The Mapplethorpe and NEA fights ran through 1989 and 1990. Every American who published in those years had current information about what happened to people who crossed the decency line, and Goad had more information than most, since he covered the margins for a living. His fucking around was fully informed. That is what makes him a pure case for the frame, and what makes his ledger worth auditing, because the audit shows the frame’s central promise failing on schedule.
The first transgression. ANSWER Me!, 1991 to 1994, was the most knowing provocation in American print, four issues engineered to draw maximum institutional response, and the response arrived: bans, blame for a White House shooting and several suicides, and a felony obscenity prosecution. Now read the invoices. The prosecution named Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand, two Bellingham booksellers who had not fucked around at all; they had stocked a magazine among three thousand titles and declined a prosecutor’s demand for a promise of future obedience. They found out: a year under felony charges, a ten-day trial, their names in every paper. Then the county found out: acquittal, followed by a $1.3 million federal judgment for retaliatory prosecution. And Goad, the author of the provocation, found out that Simon & Schuster pays $100,000 for it. The frame says poke the bear and get mauled. The record says Goad poked the bear, two shopkeepers got mauled, the bear’s handler got sued, and the poker got a two-book deal. In a country with a First Amendment and a scandal-hungry market, the costs of provocation are externalized and the profits are internalized, and Goad understood this before the theorists did.
The second event is in the ledger and must be entered under the correct heading, because it is the event everyone uses to balance the books and it does not belong to the frame. The beating of Anne Ryan on May 29, 1998, was not fucking around. Fucking around, in the strict sense this frame requires, is a knowing public transgression against an institution or audience whose response can be predicted; its natural habitat is speech, publication, career risk. The beating was private violence against a person. Goad found out fully and, for once in his life, fairly: a guilty plea, three years, the record permanent. The frame has nothing to add to the crime except one structural observation about what the crime did for everyone else. The culture had been trying to invoice the zine for seven years and failing; a jury had ruled the speech unpunishable. The felony gave the institutions the handle the speech never offered. Simon & Schuster’s relationship died, the mainstream closed permanently, and the sentence for the crime became, in public accounting, the long-delayed bill for the provocation. Institutions that cannot punish protected speech wait for the speaker to hand them something else, and speakers of Goad’s kind, run on rage, reliably hand it to them. That is the one FAFO lesson the beating contains, and it convicts the institutions of patience and Goad of the crime, in that order and separately.
The third transgression was the memoir. Publishing Shit Magnet in 2002, remorseless, with “Absolutely not. I enjoyed it” already on the record, was a knowing choice made with complete information: he was a parolee and a pariah, mainstream houses had declined the manuscript, and he could see the fork. Contrition and quiet might, in time, have bought partial readmission. Full disclosure at full volume bought permanent exile and one asset in exchange, unblackmailability, plus a market position: the professional transgressor, unexposable, selling the record. He took the deal with open eyes. What the book fails is the frame’s discipline. The first question FAFO asks, before any complaint about the response, is: did I fuck around, and did anyone respond in a way I could not have predicted from prior evidence? Goad’s answers were yes and no, respectively, for every episode of his life. The responses to him were the most predictable in American letters; he predicted them in print, repeatedly, in advance. Shit Magnet is four hundred pages of refusing the first question, a betrayal narrative filed by a man with no betrayal available, since a covenant was never offered and every consequence arrived exactly as posted. He administered find-out to his enemies for forty years and never once audited his own fuck-around, and the memoir is the audit’s absence, bound and sold.
The fourth transgression was the last acquisition. Moving to Counter-Currents in 2020 was a knowing purchase of the era’s most disqualifying association, made by the man best informed in America about what such associations cost, because he had spent a decade watching the cancellations and writing them up. He found out what he already knew: total foreclosure of return, in exchange for a salary, a captive audience, and insulation, a habitat where his stigma was currency. And there he met the practitioner’s terminal problem, which the frame never mentions because the frame assumes an inexhaustible bear. Provocation is priced by the shockability of its audience. At Counter-Currents nothing Goad could write shocked anyone; the readership had been selected for unshockability, and the wider culture had stopped listening. He had poked his way into the one room with no bear in it. The columns stayed sharp and the finding out stopped, because there was no counterparty left with anything to teach him. A career built on drawing responses ended in a venue constitutionally incapable of responding, and his production held steady to the end, which suggests the poking had long since stopped being a means.
Then the creditors who never negotiate. The tumor in 2008, the prostate cancer twice, the heart, the return of the cancer in 2026. These enter the ledger to mark its boundary, since no transgression can be causally billed here and the frame must not pretend otherwise; the man had abstained from drink and drugs for decades. Their function in the audit is comparative. Every cultural counterparty Goad ever provoked eventually negotiated with him: prosecutors lost, publishers paid, reviewers became employers, enemies became guests, the deluxe reprints of his most banned work now sell as archival monuments. Two counterparties in his life never negotiated. The court, once, when he committed an act that was a crime rather than a provocation. And the body, which cannot be provoked, cannot be shocked, holds no press conference, and collects in full. The folk theory says the world invoices those who fuck around. The Goad ledger, read to the bottom, says the culture pays them, the law bills only crimes, and the body bills everyone, on its own calendar, without reference to conduct.
The evaluation. Wins: he was never exposed, never blackmailed, never successfully prosecuted for a word he published; he converted provocation into income for thirty-five years, kept his entire catalogue in print, and died with his most notorious work selling in hand-colored collector’s editions. Losses: the large audience, two marriages, the anthologies, respectable memory, and the entries on other people’s ledgers, Ryan’s face, Debbie’s entangled record, the booksellers’ year under charges, a son carrying the name; the frame counts what the transgressor’s account debited from parties who never signed. Naivety: almost none, which is what makes him diagnostic; he priced every institutional response correctly for four decades, and his single mispricing was the belief that the outlaw position was freedom, when the record shows a role that could never be resigned, a cage with a salary, occupied to the end because the occupant had made re-entry impossible in 2002 and unnecessary income thereafter. Bravery: real, early, and depreciating. Publishing issue one while holding a respectable career risked something; that was courage. After the total disclosure of 2002 he had nothing left to protect, and provocation without exposure is a performance of courage rather than the thing, which is why the bravest people in his story are Stohl and Hjelsand, who had stores, unmarked names, and a prosecutor’s easy exit on the table, and refused it.
Jim Goad spent his life proving the bear pays cash, and died owing nothing to anyone except the two collectors who never read him.
A Pleasant Chat With Jim Goad
I call author Jim Goad 12/28/02: “So you used to get letters while you were in prison from Nice Jewish Girl.”
Jim: “What happened to her?”
Luke: “I believe she got married.”
Jim: “I had letters from her. I wrote her that I had a pornographic dream about her that she was really homely but it didn’t matter. I never heard from her after that.
“She used to go out with this really Frankenstinian character up here, Steve Schultz. He looks closer to the Frankenstein monster than any human being I’ve ever come across. He’s an insufferable anarchist book-peddler.”
Luke: “I was in Oregon in September 2001 for the first time in my life and I loved it.”
Jim: “Every major calamity that has ever befallen me has happened here but it’s still eminently livable.”
Luke: “It’s beautiful.”
Jim: “Yeah. It’s been the Bermuda Triangle for me but otherwise… I’ve lived in Oregon for nine years. Two years [in prison] in Salem and the rest in Portland.”
Luke: “The state seems overwhelmingly white.”
Jim: “Portland is the whitest metropolitan area in the United States.”
Luke: “I hear it was voted the number one city in the country to raise kids.”
Jim: “Well, raise white kids, I guess.”
Luke: “I didn’t see graffiti or filth.”
Jim: “There’s none of that. The place I worked was in the most urban part of Portland [and it was clean]… I’m a big aficionado of bad slums. There’s nothing on the West Coast that compares to Portland. We’re sheltered.
“I think the state was founded by the Ku Klux Klan shortly after the Civil War [1865]. It was an all-white state when it started.
“I was physically attacked by anti-Nazi skinheads for wearing an iron cross [German fascist symbol with ancient roots]. That’s where the action is – the radical violent anti-racists. They’re called SHARPs – Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice. They argue that the skinhead movement was founded in the late sixties in England by a black guy. I don’t care whether it was or not. An asshole is an asshole. These guys attacked me and they wound up getting more than they bargained for.”
Luke: “When was this?”
Jim: “I’m not going to get specific about it. I don’t want to alert the authorities.”
Luke: “Do you get in many fights still?”
Jim: “Not really. I have a reputation of being a loose cannon and a bit nuts and people don’t want to disturb that. It’s been years since I hit anyone first. I went to prison [for two years for beating his girlfriend Anne to a pulp while his wife Debbie was dying of cancer] for hitting back.”
Luke: “Why were you wearing an iron cross?”
Jim: “Maybe it resonates with something in my genetic memory. I like the way it looks. When they said, ‘What’s with the iron cross?’ I said, ‘It’s a white thing, why don’t you hit me.'”
Luke: “Were they white guys?”
Jim: “Of course. The whitest of the white. Apparently they have one black member somewhere that they like to trot to parties to prove that they are not racist.
“It baffled me because I’m there bleeding and arguing with them about grammar. ‘I don’t know why you had to attack me. Why don’t you debate me? I’ll spot any of you 40 IQ points and still out-argue you.’ They replied, ‘Hey dumbass, ‘out-argue’ is not a word.’ I screamed, ‘It’s a hyphenate,’ with blood streaming down my face.”
Luke: “Do you have other Nazi paraphernalia that you are into?”
Jim: “I wouldn’t classify an iron cross as Nazi paraphernalia. Apparently it has a history like a swastika, which is an ancient Sanskrit symbol. I don’t know much about [the iron cross] except that I like the way it looks and that it shows I suffer no guilt for being of European extraction.”
Luke: “Would you ever insult someone simply on the basis of their race?”
Jim: “They give you so many reasons to insult them otherwise you never really have to get to that point. I tend not to hold accidents of birth against people. I am much more attuned to willful decisions people make than skin color or genitalia. How do they deal with you one on one? How ethical are they?
“I laugh at how prisoners scapegoat sex offenders, particularly child molesters. A significant proportion of those guys [convicted for sex crimes] have done nothing. I was with a guy in the kitchen, cutting carrots to prepare the veggie trays. He’d been there for nine years. He was a convicted child molester. He said he was going home after nine years. My ex-wife’s sister finally came forward and said my ex-wife had made it all up to get back at me for a bitter divorce. The girl who put me in prison [Anne Ryan] accused me of rape three weeks before all this went down. She used to beg me to rape her. I’m the guy who did the rape issue of Answer Me. No one would’ve believed me. I could’ve gone away for eight years on that alone.”
Jim Goad writes alt.recovery.catholicism 12/19/02: “Although I went to Catholic school for 12 years, I’m new to this group… I’ve been assigned a feature article for a national magazine [Hustler] on the subject of sexually abusive nuns. Any stories, comments, and leads would be greatly appreciated. If you don’t want to post publicly, feel free to e-mail me.”
Theresa Reed responds: ” Hi, Jim. How nice of you to visit.”
Jim replies: “You mean you’re STILL recovering? Sheesh! Sorry about firing you from that writing gig. And sorry you never got that job at that national mag I’m writing for now.”
Theresa responds: “Don’t be [sorry]. Besides, I’m not sure canceling a column is the same as “firing” someone. Which job was that? Didn’t realize I was ever trying to get a job with Hustler.”
Luke: “Do you know about porn’s trade magazine, Adult Video News?”
Jim: “I know about them. One of the writers in the stable that I inherited at Exotic Magazine writes video reviews for them and she’s real proud of it.”
Luke: “Sounds like Theresa Reed aka Darklady [who weighs about 250 pounds].”
Jim: “She casts a giant shadow wherever she walks. I toyed with all the writers I inherited and fired them one at a time and then wrote about firing them and why I fired them. She was the primary architect of this whole sex-positive literary movement up here. I’ve never understood why you have to be positive about sex. I think you’re programmed to enjoy it. After I fired her, I wrote that I was not sex-negative, just negative about sex with Darklady.
“A local competitor hired her to write a response piece. I haven’t seen that. I got some cordial emails from her recently, which baffled me. She’s an obsessive type. If you slight her, she’ll never forget about it. “Her claim to fame is that she once had lunch with Larry Flynt and that she was unbearable to deal with after that. That she was telling everybody how lucky they were to have her there when she could just go off and work for Flynt. Apparently he never offered her a job.
“Sex for cash is inherently dishonest. People have to pretend. Once you put money into it, the laws of natural attraction are gone. I understand that it exists for people who have no skills and they need a paycheck. It’s all the window-dressing and the dummying it up with perfume that I find nauseating. “I’m speaking as the person who did the rape issue of [the zine] Answer Me and went to prison for domestic violence and has been blamed for White House shootings and neo-Nazi suicides, but I felt so much above [the sex industry] all that. It was just so tacky and dumb and shallow. After a certain point in adolescence, consuming pornography is really sad.
“It baffled me how people [in the sex industry] would come close to killing one another, then if they could find a common enemy, they’d patch up everything. I’d never seen that happen in any other kind of sub-community. I just wondered how they could sleep at night knowing that everyone around them could not be trusted. It takes a certain breed and I am not that breed.
“We had a guy, John Voge, who jumped ship for another clone stripclub guide that came into town with a lot of money. He was so cut out for the industry. He was insanely shallow, vain, and really thought Portland needed another queen of tattooed strippers every year. He had a lot of rock star pretensions. I wanted to call him John Bon Jovi.”
Luke: “I’ve read you have a fetish for Jewish girls. What’s up with that?”
Jim: “Oh yeah. This goes back to the seventies when I would salivate over Carol Kane [Andy Kaufman’s bushy-haired wife on Taxi] or Madeline Kahn. I can’t explain my fetish.”
Luke: “How do you feel about Jews as a people?”
Jim: “You’ve got to love the Jews. As I said in The Redneck Manifesto, ‘I’m no fan of white supremacy. Everyone knows the chinks and the Jews are superior.’ You’ve got to love any tribe that consistently outpaces whitey by 15-points on standardized IQ tests.”
Luke: “Normally people hate people who excel them.”
Jim: “I try to let it rub off. Jealousy is one of the lowest things humans are capable of. I admire the Jews and the chinks. It trips people up because it’s a racist notion but it’s not a supremacist notion so they are not sure what to make of it. I don’t believe in equality but I don’t believe my group is the best.”
Luke: “Do you believe in the book The Bell Curve and its intelligence rankings for different races?”
Jim: “I’ve never seen anything that adequately refutes it. From my experience, Asians and Jews are amazing. I did an article for Playboy about 13 years ago about Vietnamese gangs in Orange County. Wow. I knew that I would never be able to put a raft out of popsicle sticks together and go over there and have a Lexus within two years.
“It makes sense that leaders would foment the idea that people are equal because it quells unrest. If they just came out with genetic spreadsheets that quantify genetic inequities there’d be rioting in the streets.
“Apparently blacks in America have a higher standard of living than blacks anywhere on the planet, which doesn’t bode well for any argument that they are kept down here.”
Luke: “Do you think the average black is as intelligent as the average white?”
Jim: “No. I’m sure there are exceptions. I’m sure there are blacks who are smarter than I am. I think there’s mountains of anecdotal and quasi-scientific evidence out there that would bolster that view.”
Luke: “How do you feel about the horde of Mexicans crossing the border?”
Jim laughs. “A horde of Mexicans? You can approach that from a number of angles. Do they have aboriginal rights to most of the South West [United States]? Probably if you believe in aboriginal rights. I’m sure employers of unskilled labor are happy about it. I think the United States is becoming increasingly balkanized and I doubt there will be a United States in 50 years.
“Nations tend to come together and stay together based on ideas and the ideas are almost always farcical, but they need strong ideas to keep them together. I don’t think America has an identity at this point. I think increased percentages of nonwhite Europeans, or of populations that weren’t here 50 years ago, is going to complicate matters. I can’t see how it would help. A lot of people who champion such things live in all-white neighborhoods and don’t have to deal with the underside of such a phenomenon.
“I noted in The Redneck Manifesto that the neighborhood I lived in Portland, which is the white-trashiest neighborhood in the entire city, is the only place you will see whites and blacks together in bars. “I said in an interview that I used to dislike Mexicans but in prison I came to respect their solidarity and views on women. That’s always the biggest joke – when the white male gets nailed for misogyny, do you have any working knowledge of any other culture on the planet? Name one that is less misogynic than white males. The Asians, blacks, Hispanics are atrocious if you find such things atrocious.”
Luke: “Do you think different ethnic groups can ever live together in peace?”
Jim: “Did they in [ancient] Rome? One of the reasons I split with leftism. They encouraged us not to deny sexual instincts, which I agree with. But to my dismay, leftists deny that people are tribal. That’s hard-wired into them. Even at the height of my PCness, and I’d be watching a basketball game, and feel a surge when the white guy made a basket, in spite of my better wishes. I think everyone is that way. A lot of the problems these days are because whites are denied any identity except a guilt rap.
“I remember being in Berlin in 1985 at a youth hostel and seeing this painting on a wall of Dresden. There were two women. One was starting a ‘Sieg Heil’ [Nazi salute] and the other one was rushing over to stop her. I wondered what the painter was trying to say with that. From what I gather, Germany was humiliated after World War I and denied any identity and along came Hitler. I’m concerned what will happen when white people in America decide they don’t really need to feel guilty any more. I think the sort of identity that will come will be frightening.
“More than any one incident, it was interviewing Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance in the late eighties, when I was as pro-black as they come… I said to him, ‘You’re not big on equality.’ He said, ‘No, and neither is anyone in power. When they say all men are created equal, I laugh, because no one in power believes that.’ That shifted everything. Someone who I did not expect to be enlightened about anything completely altered my view of reality.
“If you look at who’s spreading racial tolerance, it’s the Ford Foundation, all these billionaires. They feel superior to everyone. What vested interest would they have? To keep a placid cooperative workpool?
“Asians and Jews tend to be the most exclusive and to frown the most on intermarriage. They don’t seem to be floundering.
“Probably my next big project is an encyclopedia of race. I may have entirely different views after I research everything I’m curious about.”
Luke: “Are you still shut out of mainstream journalism opportunities?”
Jim: “I don’t know. I guess. I’ve never really aspired for that kind of acceptance. The Redneck Manifesto got published by accident. A black guy, Darius James, was a fan of mine who heard I was writing an essay, ‘White Niggers Have Feelings Too’. He encouraged me to turn it into a book proposal, which I did. I did had a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster and walked away from the second book.
“The contract said the first book would be Redneck Manifesto and the second book would be a graphics-intensive encyclopedia of white trash. When I gave them my outline for Redneck Manifesto, the last chapter was about going into the backwoods for a few weeks and getting oral testimony from all the bubbas and unsung peckerwoods. My editor said he liked that idea enough to make it into the second book. So I poured all my white trash research into the first one. Then the time came around to talk about the second book. They wanted the encyclopedia. I said I’d said everything I wanted to say about white trash in the first book. I proposed a racial encyclopedia, which they shot down. I proposed a novel about a cop in Beaverton, Oregon, who’s driven insane by the fact that there’s no crime there. They shot that down. So I walked.
“I realize I sound self-righteous. It’s one of those character-traits that I wish I didn’t have. But there’s this retarded obeying-the-muse thing that seems to do me more harm than good. I can’t really write something that I am not sincere about.”
Luke: “Have you ever taken psychotherapy?”
Jim: “They threw shrinks at me from early on. I think a lot of therapists get into it for kinky reasons. They like the power they have over their patients. I’m definitely morally opposed to psycho-pharmaceuticals. I tend to agree with [Unabomber] Ted Kazinski that they make you tolerate situations that billions of years of evolution have wired you to be intolerant of.
“I’ve rarely found a therapist who I thought was as bright as I am. It bears all the trapping of a folk religion. They are priests. I’m suspicious of placing that much power into someone else’s hands. I found one or two that were insightful but either I beat up my landlord and had to move out of New York or some other situation where I stopped seeing them.
“Instinctually, a child seeks to please his parents. By being self-destructive, I took a lot of heat off my parents. They didn’t know what to do with me. I was a lot smarter than they were. Dad was a plumber and Mom was a housewife. If I had risen above that, it would’ve shamed them.”
Luke: “Have you soured on marriage?”
Jim: “Debbie [Jim’s late wife] was the girl I loved. Seeing her dying devastated me. Part of my mind cracked and plunged head long into sick behavior. I’ve been with a Jewish girl the past nine months that I’m fond of. She’s eleven years younger. They’re all younger.
“When I first got out of prison, I started raiding this bitter divorcee’ bar in Portland because I figured nobody would know who I was, and I pretended to be Jim Stockton from Salem, a paper salesman just passing through, and have one-night stands. You realize the face goes first. A lot of 50-year-olds have intact bodies and tend to be warmer than younger chicks. Older women don’t tend to be afflicted with the borderline personality disorders and the psychological pitfalls that befall a lot of younger women these days.
“I can’t tell you how many women wanted to explain to me upon my release how not all women are the way my ex was. A lot of them tended to be turned on that I never apologized [for beating his girlfriend Anne] and that I was entirely justified in what I did and the injustice was in having to go away for it. I saved that girl from going to jail so many times [by not reporting her to the police for violating a restraining order]. In the scheme of things, I don’t think getting beaten-up is as bad as getting put away.”
Luke: “Did you figure out why you got into such a self-destructive relationship with Anne?”
Jim: “I remember reading an article that Spin did when I was in jail… The woman who introduced me to my wife said “a lot of parents beat their kids because they can’t help it, but I think his parents had a conscious desire to destroy him as a person.” My parents had a miserable marriage. They were Catholic. I came along 13 years after my nearest sibling. I insured that they’d be around for at least another 18-years together. I bore a lot of the brunt of their misery. Somewhere along the line, my ideas of love and destruction were fused.”
Luke: “Do you believe in God?”
Jim: “I believe there has to be something. I’m a megalomaniac but not so bad that I think I have a pipeline to the divine. I tend to think that God is sadistic and that he puts us here for his own amusement.
“My ideas about what is ethical and how they differ from society at large come from comparing Mom against Dad, who was raging and violent and a drunk but he didn’t try to hide it. After Dad died, Mom didn’t have another man for ten years until she married his brother. I used to tell my aunt all the shit my parents would pull and she’d say I was hallucinating. Then my Mom bragged to my aunt that when her new husband was showering, he fell down and cracked his pelvis. He was pulling himself by his elbows across the floor, screaming for her help, and she bragged to my aunt that she pretended she was asleep. That sort of detached aggression troubles me.
“That’s how I justify myself vis-à-vis the girl who sent me to prison. She was openly violent and aggressive but she could also conscience calling the cops and putting someone away that she claimed to love when she knew that she was a willing combatant.
“The reason rats are all hated in prison is that rats are all guilty of something. Convicts don’t hate the old granny who’s robbed and calls the cops. They hate the petty drug-user who turns his dealer in or the crime partner who turns against his partner.”
Luke: “Do you hate rats?”
Jim: “I hate anyone who tries to force his guilt on someone else. Guilt projection and slaying of the scapegoat tends to be the way of the world. That’s the ultimate in immorality as I define it.”
Luke: “How do you feel about cops?”
Jim: “For the most part, they’re dumb-asses doing their job. I marveled in prison at the guards. Their people-skills were incredible. All the lying and pestering they would have to deal with. There’s no way I could’ve done as good a job. I always argued with anarchists about cops. Cops are just hired dogs, they’re not pulling any strings.”
Luke: “Where do you get your moral code from?”
Jim: “From what harmed me and what didn’t. I know what it is like to be beaten up. I also know what it is like to be locked up. Nobody gets outraged about that. If anyone had known what a moral dilemma I had at the time – a crazy woman dying of cancer [Debbie] and a crazy stripper [Anne Ryan]. I didn’t want anyone to die. My social skills are abysmal. I didn’t handle it well. As far as intent, I probably had better intentions than either of them. I couldn’t send that girl [Anne] to prison. I considered that immoral. I could lose my temper and hit someone, but to put them away, no.”
Debbie died in August 2000 after more than three years of cancer.
Luke: “So what are your plans for the next few years?”
Jim: “I’m doing a lot of freelance [writing] right now but I hope to find something I can do aside from write. I’ve always hated to write. I’d rather do radio or something easier and more rewarding. I did a show here for 13 weeks with a guy I met in prison. He was a member of SHARP and then had a change of heart when he went to prison when he realized that no one respects a non-racist in prison. Radio is the easiest thing on earth. I don’t know how anyone with a radio job could find a reason to complain about anything. It was KGUY – guy talk with guys talking about guy things. Sports Nuts and Greaseman [syndicated shows].
“We did an episode called ‘Celebrating the Jew’ right before we got canned. The station went country and told us that was the reason they were letting us go. But they didn’t go country on weekends.
“We were apologizing for the Holocaust. We learned in prison that those sort of decisions were called thinking errors. We came to the conclusion that Hitler was afflicted with a whole series of thinking errors that led up to his catastrophic acts and maybe if he had taken one of these six-week ‘cage your rage’ classes they forced us to take, world history might have been significantly altered.”
Luke: “How do you think society should deal with the Jews?”
Jim laughs: “One of my favorite articles was called, ‘Judge Orders Hitler To Undergo Therapy After Crazed Fuhrer Goes Berserk In Court.’ I said that when Hitler first moved to Portland, he got into trouble immediately with a local newspaper for saying that the Jews run everything. And the city’s Jewish mayor, Jewish chief of police and Jewish head of the Chamber of Commerce demanded an apology. “How do you deal with the Jews? You learn from them, I suppose. I would think there’s nothing but a wealth of information there.”
Luke: “Don’t you think they’re too pushy?”
Jim laughs: “No. The Jews I run across, self pity tends to be a prominent character component. Carrying the weight of the world. My wife was one of them.”
Luke: “Did you ever contemplate converting to Judaism?”
Jim: “As a stunt. I was going to do a fifth issue of Answer Me about race, and I was going to convert to Judaism, in the way that Seinfeld did so he could tell jokes.
“Any monotheistic religion is years behind any religion the East came up with. Apparently monotheism is one the building blocks of modern society. I think the Hindus, Buddhists and Dhaoists are all light years ahead of Western religion.”
Luke: “If they are light years ahead of us, why don’t you go live with them?”
Jim: “They probably wouldn’t accept me. I’ve got a big nose and I smell more than they do. They probably don’t want any white people in their neighborhood. Moving costs are always a consideration.
“One main objection I have with Asian culture is that they don’t tend to be big on individuality. A personality-type such as me would do even worse over there.”
Luke: “What should we do about the Saracen menace?”
Jim chuckles: “I think conversion [to Islam] is the only option. They are ahead of us on the gender curve. They know how to deal with the female problem. The most visited page on my site is the ‘Muslim Girls Turn Me On’ article. One of my favorite lines was, ‘I was looking for a sultry Saudi siren, or a classy Pakistani lassy with a sassy chassis.'”
Luke: “What about the Muslim terrorists assaulting our country on 9/11?”
Jim: “I’m pissed at them for taking the focus off of domestic terrorism, which was very exciting. I remember when the Oklahoma City bombing happened, everyone immediately thought it was at the hands of Arabs. Wait a second. There are Americans so disgruntled that they blow things up? That was an exciting idea.”
Luke: “Did you get anything out of those cage your rage things?”
Jim: “They guided us through brain neurology and this idea that no matter how impulsive your acts seem, there’s always this split-second window of decision making and you should try to extend the split-second as long as possible. I used to go on the net and post like a maniac whenever anyone would slight me. I self-imposed a 24-hour rule. If I was still upset after 24 hours, then go ahead. But I was never upset after 24 hours.
“At Oregon State Penitentiary, a burly guy with a long gray ponytail and a long gray beard walks in and says, ‘Hello, my name is Bob. I’m from Canada and I like to kill people. And I’ll be your guide for this anger management class.’ Maybe you know a little something about anger, Bob. He was a murderer with no fondness for the system but I think they realized that he could be more persuasive than some sheltered woman from Beaverton, Oregon telling us about anger.”
Luke: “What did you mean when you said people who aren’t racists aren’t respected in the penitentiary?”
Jim: “The first few days in jail, I was puzzled at the sight of white power guys playing cards with blacks. You don’t see these guys outside of prison. You don’t see guys with ‘100% peckerwood’ tattooed on their throat down at the mall. You don’t see ‘white’ on one tricep and ‘pride’ on the other at the gas station. Every black guy who was in my cell said he respected nazis and no one else because they presume everyone is tribal and everyone is a racist. They know where they stand with the nazis. They’re not going to stab them in the back. They will stab them while looking at them, which is preferable. Oregon is a strange case because it is so white. The peckerwoods run the prisons. They’re about 60% of the prison population, with the rest Mexicans, blacks and the occasional lapsed Asian and Jew. If it was any closer, there probably would be more trouble but because of the overwhelming white quotient, a weird peace was attained.”
Luke: “What’s a peckerwood?”
Jim: “A Southern pejorative term for a low-class white that’s been reclaimed by hardcore white convicts. ‘He’s a solid peckerwood’ is about as high a compliment as you are going to get in prison. That means there is a white guy who does his own time and doesn’t get anyone else in trouble for what he does and someone you can probably count on to have your back in a fight.
“The peckerwoods took to me for some reason. I was this weird writer-guy and I expected a lot of hassles. There was one guy who looked like Otto von Bismark. Chiseled out of granite. In his fifties. Busted for something speed related, which all the white guys were in for except me. I got in a fight in the minimal security and they rolled both of us up. I told [Otto] I was gone. He kissed me on the head like the godfather. There was a guy named Snake, who’d done 15 years in California. He had ‘100% Peckerwood’ on his throat. He was the most charismatic individual I’ve ever run across in my life. Everyone, black and white, respected him and he could probably do damage to anyone who didn’t. He could sniff out people’s bullshit faster than anyone I know and then either make you laugh about it or walk away with your tail between your legs. Snake took to me. We would walk the yard. He said people are afraid of me because I figured out their game but they are more afraid of you because you can put it on paper. I’m a paranoid obsessive type as it is. I was always worried about something. I’d talk to Snake and he would usually calm me down.
“I had the same scenario in county jail with a Blood [gang member] named Marquise. We had great conversations. You have the greatest conversations of your life in there because there’s nothing else to do.
“The US is incarcerating ten times as many people as ten years ago, which results in a dilution of the hardcore convict pool. They will give you new criminal charges for crimes you commit in prison. If you assault somebody, you might face a felony charge. Plus, many of these guys are really doped up on state-sponsored medication. Most of them are in there on drug charges and then the state virtually crams drugs down their throat.
“For two months in county jail, I tried the only psycho-tropic medication I ever will try – Paxil. That was horrifying. I awoke in the middle of the night to the sounds of screams, only to realize they were inside my head. I’ve never had auditory hallucinations before or since, despite a long pedigree of drug use.”
Luke: “How have you learned to handle your critics?”
Jim: “Opinions don’t bother me but, like anybody, I’m bothered if they’re wrong about facts or my alleged motives. I was called mercenary. You’ve got to be kidding. I never make any wise financial or career decisions. Money is obviously not my motivation. I find that people who will take potshots like that rarely, if ever, like to be confronted about it. That was one thing that impressed me about Darklady. She was willing to talk about a few things via email, which is rare. That’s been the biggest frustration for me throughout every scandal I’ve been involved with.
“In the obscenity trial [of two Seattle bookstores that sold the rape issue of Jim’s zine, Answer Me], both the defense and the prosecution were way off the mark trying to figure out what it was I wanted to say. I was not allowed to explain myself because [the defense] didn’t think it would reflect too well.”
Luke: “Which people who’ve written about you have infuriated you the most?”
Jim: “That was way back in the zine days. I was not above threatening to kill people for a negative review. Usually it takes the form of accusing me of insincerity or mercenary motivations or something so off the mark that I’m astonished. What I do now is passive-aggressively email them grammatical corrections, just to make them scratch their heads. ‘Well, he’s a woman-beating maniac but he knows Strunk & White’s Elements of Style better than I do.’ That completely upends their world.”
Luke: “How have you liked becoming a media figure?”
Jim: “I’m not somebody who patronizes pop media much. I’ve seen few Hollywood movies. I relished the attention for a while during zinedom’s golden era.
“I think we all know what is wrong with us. The question is – Do you have the bravery to confront it?
“My mother hated my father while he was alive and then he died and he became a saint. If you invest 40 years in something, you better not come clean and admit it was all a waste or you will have a psychological breakdown.”
Luke: “Does growing older scare you?”
Jim: “Hell yes. I said in Shit Magnet that the only obscenity is my own mortality. Everything else is fair game. It’s horrible. Give me $2000, it’s going straight to plastic surgery. I had hair transplants and a nose job when I was in my early twenties.”
Luke: “Do you think that’s manly?”
Jim chuckles: “I guess it’s not considered manly to be obsessed with your looks. I guess not. In the animal kingdom, male creatures are extraordinarily vain.”
Jim has no kids. “The way I fawn over animals is embarrassing to everyone but me. I suppose I have the instincts to take care of something small and cute.”
Luke: “Is that because relationships with animals are tension free?”
Jim: “Probably. And they don’t understand what you’re saying. Part of being human is having guilt. That’s one of the things I tried to figure out in Shit Magnet. Does guilt make you better or worse than animals? Animals live without guilt and they all seem innocent. Doesn’t the Eden myth say that the knowledge of good and evil is what caused problems? To live on the sociopathic plane, the amoral, that seems the purest way to live. The world that animals inhabit. What’s wrong is what gets in the way of their food supply.
“Fundamentally, I think that’s how humans define right and wrong too. Whatever threatens you is evil and whatever validates your idea of who you are is going to be considered good. It’s laughably relative. I don’t think there are any universals there.”
Luke: “If your favorite pet and a stranger were drowning, who would you save first?”
Jim breaks in. “Definitely the pet because I know the stranger is guilty of something. The suffering of other humans is neither here nor there for me. Schopenhauer said that every tear we cry is really for ourselves. Empathy is our way of projecting ourselves into a person’s plight and feeling bad for ourselves. There are few selfless acts.”
Luke: “What is it you most want?”
Jim: “It’s a fatal flaw, but to be understood. I doubt it will ever happen. I’d like three or four people I could explain myself to without having them walk away scratching their heads. That’s my idea of nirvana.”
Luke: “You want other people to understand that you are not a bad guy?”
Jim: “It has nothing to do with bad. I wish I was what they think I am – an unfeeling monster. That sounds like a treat. You don’t have to deal with misery or self-doubt. The agony I dealt with during my whole prison situation was, ‘Jesus Christ, I could’ve put her away.’ I didn’t do it, I still couldn’t do it, and this is what happens. Where I’m coming from is much more complex. “I don’t want races to be unequal. I don’t want women to be skilled at the art of manipulation. I want everyone to get along but it’s just not that way. I write about it out of some Tourettes-like compulsion to speak what I think is the truth, no matter what the consequences.”
Luke: “Tell me about your friends?”
Jim: “I don’t think they can be categorized. I’ve found an initial dislike or altercation tends to pave the way for a good long friendship. I’ve had a lot of friendships with males I got into fist fights with. There’s no male-bonding experience like a fist fight.”
Luke: “How would your closest friends describe you?”
Jim: “Intense, uncompromising, honest to my own detriment, paranoid, obsessive. The guy (Shawn Tejaratchi) who did my cover for Shit Magnet and handled my affairs while I was in prison says I’m the most sensitive guy he’s ever met.”
Luke: “What are the most common things your friends say to you?”
Jim: “They think I obsess about right and wrong. The writer I identified with in prison was Dostoevsky. Like me, he was diagnosed as mildly epileptic. Someone wrote to me in prison that one of the classic diagnoses for epileptics is an obsession with guilt. Reading Dosoevsky’s ‘Notes From The Underground’, I was amazed how his thought patterns mirrored mine. On one page he was saying the most sociopathic things you could imagine and the next page he was in church praying for redemption. I wish I was this monstrous asshole. More often than not, I’m frustrated and outraged that people don’t see the bigger picture. As I say in Redneck Manifesto – If you say you’re ethnically sensitive, why is every other word out of your mouth, ‘hillbilly, cracker, white trash’? If racism is wrong because it is wrong to feel better than other people, then why are you shitting on these West Virginian coal miners who statistically are more likely to die than soldiers on the battlefield.
“With Shit Magnet, a lot of it was about gender. I grew up having the shit kicked out of me by nuns and then came into a cultural climate that has a presumption of female innocence about everything. The article I am doing for Hustler is about sexually abusive nuns. There have been many of them, far more egregious than what priests are alleged to have done. Raping kids with sticks to get the devil out of them and forcing them to eat shit. Apparently these charges have credence because the Church settled a bunch of these cases.
“I see a bigger picture. You are not better because you are a black woman. You’re a human being. You are just as bad as I am. That’s egalitarian. These people who claim to be anti-sexist and anti-racist are sexist and racist. I don’t see equality in intellectual aptitude but everybody is prone to be an asshole. That’s the only equality I know of.”
Luke: “Why are you obsessed with right and wrong if you don’t believe in right and wrong?”
Jim: “That’s a good question. There have been times in my life when I’ve been able to live like an animal. If I could pinpoint something, it’s probably faulty neurological wiring. There’s probably a pharmaceutical out there that would nip [Jim’s guilt] in the bud.”
Luke: “What’s your favorite movie?”
Jim: “Five Easy Pieces about chronic underachiever Jack Nicholson.
“When I was a kid in Clifton Heights, a Philadelphia suburb, they were grooming me to be president. When I was in first grade, they were calling me up to answer questions that sixth graders couldn’t answer. They had incredibly high expectations for me and I found a way to spike them.”
Luke: “Who’s they?”
Jim: “The nuns and priests and my parents. I was in Roman Catholic school through twelfth grade, then I studied journalism at Temple University. I probably got a better education at Catholic school than I would’ve at public school but I learned to distrust people in authority telling me what was good. These were the same people who were knocking me around. I doubt that any of them are aware that I write books.
“I remember once bitching about my childhood to my aunt. She brought up a couple of things that put me in check. Maybe I didn’t have it that bad?
“My first mainstream journalistic assignment was a feature for Playboy in 1989. I called up somebody who taunted me in high school and told him to go down to the 7-11 and pick up Playboy, and while he’s jerking off to one of the naked chicks, I hope he accidentally turns the page and sees my picture. Because I’m in Playboy and he’s still in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania. I think he just hung up.
“The day the AP story about sellers of my zine being prosecuted for obscenity, I had 55 messages on my voicemail from all kinds of media people wanting to talk to me about it. I didn’t talk to anybody because it wasn’t me being prosecuted. It was these milquetoast newsstand owners up in Washington. I was entirely ignorant of obscenity law. I’ve got a big mouth. I could’ve said something that seemed fine to me and it could’ve hurt them.
“I told this local journalist Jim Redden (son of a judge) that, and recorded it, and he went in his biweekly paper and said I didn’t care what happened to them, I was only trying to save my own ass, which was diametrically opposite of what I’d told him. We planned to go down there with a gun, but we didn’t bring the gun. We went down just to intimidate him. I finally saw Jim Redden and he’s this hunched-over little George Carlin-lookalike washup. My shoulders slumped. I thought, Jesus Christ, man, you’re getting upset about him?
“When I took my plea bargain, he wrote an article called ‘Goad wimps out.’ As if years in prison were penile inches and if I had taken it to trial and gone for 15, instead of the two that I plea bargained… He mangled a few of the things that I told him. When I had the radio show, it was called Let’s Fight. The premise was that I was going to call up anyone who’d ever said anything stupid about me and fight with them on the air. He declined.
“Nothing that humans do surprises me but the way they tend to cover it up is what repels me.”
In 2003, I edited a website called SetGo and we paid Jim about $150 an article (he wrote several) on the sex industry. Jim was easy to work with. If you made an appointment with Jim, he showed up, or he gave you ample notice if he couldn’t make it. Jim never asked me for anything, not money, not anything. He prized loyalty and he did not reveal confidences.