Ode to Jim Goad

2,460 words

Jim Goad, America’s greatest satirical journalist since H. L. Mencken, is dead.

James Thaddeus Goad was born on June 12, 1961, in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. He died on June 22, 2026, in Albuquerque, New Mexico of long-term health problems. He had just turned 65.

Jim was the youngest of three sons of a working-class Catholic couple. Jim was highly intelligent, with talents not just in writing but also in acting and music. Before he settled on writing, he wanted to be an actor. After high school, Jim moved to New York City to pursue acting. He was accepted to study acting at New York University under Stella Adler. In the end, he opted to study journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia. He graduated with a B.A. in journalism in 1985.

After graduating, Jim relocated to Los Angeles with his then-girlfriend, Debbie Rosalie, to be a journalist. He worked at the Los Angeles Reader. He and Debbie married in 1987. In 1991, he published the first issue of his pioneering “zine” ANSWER Me! Three more issues followed, in 1992, 1993, and 1994.

In 1994, on the strength of ANSWER Me!, Jim signed a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, with an advance of $100,000. He and Debbie moved to Portland, Oregon, where Jim wrote his first book, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, & White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

ANSWER Me! and The Redneck Manifesto were my introductions to Jim’s work in 2000.

ANSWER Me! is basically a compendium of irreverent interviews with people like LSD booster Timothy Leary, pimp Iceberg Slim, Satanist Anton LaVey, murderer Richard Ramirez, racist David Duke, and racist Al Sharpton—as well as essays on unpleasant topics like suicide, serial killers, pedophilia, and rape, all of them illustrated with unsettling photographs, collages, and cartoons.

Needless to say, it was enormously controversial. ANSWER Me! was banned for obscenity and blamed for a White House shooting and four suicides, including Kurt Cobain’s. But the controversy simply increased interest. The last two issues had printings of 13,000, and over the years, ANSWER Me! has been reprinted again and again, in increasingly deluxe editions, as a testament to its status as a transgressive pop-cultural landmark.

Beyond Jim Goad himself, ANSWER Me! was my first encounter with the brilliant cartoons of Nick Bougas (A. Wyatt Mann) as well as such characters as Adam Parfrey, Boyd Rice, and Shaun Partridge.

Along with Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture volumes, ANSWER Me! was my introduction to a pre-internet counter-culture that had emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in zines and alternative publishing houses: transgressive, misanthropic, politically incorrect, inegalitarian, racist, sexist, and far-Right coded.

Today, ANSWER Me! seems like a forerunner of image boards like 4chan and 8chan, as well as the wilder shores of the online Right. At the time, such spaces were necessary to incubate heretical ideas. But today, as inegalitarian ideas are becoming mainstream, a lot of it seems like needless, self-marginalizing baggage.

The Redneck Manifesto is a book on anti-white racism, focusing on how rich and liberal whites have made poor whites into scapegoats for “racism,” which is the catchall explanation for persistent black failure. One of the most subversive features of the book is its discussion of white slavery in the United States.

The Redneck Manifesto doesn’t offer any political solutions to America’s race problem. But it is a call to reject white guilt, and that alone has revolutionary implications. Despite the author’s studied cynicism and constant wise-cracking, The Redneck Manifesto ripples with moral fervor. Goad is scathing in his critique of liberalism and compassionate in his defense of white scapegoats.

When it was first published, Goad’s Manifesto was just as politically incorrect as ANSWER Me! Because white identity politics has grown so much in the last three decades, the Manifesto seems almost tame today. But there will never be a society in which ANSWER Me! will seem tame, and that’s probably a good thing.

I bought my copy of The Redneck Manifesto on July 6, 2000. I breezed through it and liked it so much that I wanted to contact Jim Goad. But when I looked into it, I discovered that he had been sentenced in 1998 to two-and-a-half years in prison in Oregon for beating up his girlfriend, a stripper named Anne “Skye” Ryan.

Jim started dating Skye in 1997 while still married to Debbie. By all accounts, Jim and Debbie were not a good match. She had an IQ in the 80s—which is odd, considering that she was Jewish and her father was an M.D.—and she was highly neurotic. In November of 1997, Debbie took out a restraining order against Jim, claiming that he had physically abused her and threatened to kill her. They divorced in December. However, after Jim was arrested for beating Skye in May of 1998, Debbie withdrew the restraining order, saying that he had changed. She died of ovarian cancer in 2000.

Obviously, there was a dark side to Jim. He described his upbringing as hellish. His father was brutal. His mother was neglectful. He attended a Catholic school run by nuns, whom he described as sadistic. Subjected to bullying at home and school, Jim learned to give as good as he got.

Jim had a sadistic streak of his own. ANSWER Me! is clearly intended to make people uncomfortable. Jim’s humor was also mean. But he never picked on the innocent, and he found such behavior repugnant. Still, he went out of his way to find guilty parties to unload on. There was clearly a lot of anger there.

Jim shared quite a lot about his difficult and failed relationships with women. In some of his relationships, he seemed to be punishing himself. He told me that when he met his third wife, Norma, he didn’t feel that he deserved such a good woman who simply wanted to make him happy. But he decided to stop punishing himself and enjoy his life. I last spoke to Jim a week before he died. “How’s the Missus?” “Just an angel,” he replied.

Jim’s second book, Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2002), was an autobiographical work written while in prison. I hated it. I was angry that such a talented writer, who obviously saw through the reigning lies of our time, was wasting his talent wallowing in self-pity and self-justification.

I wrote a scathing review entitled “Redneck Rousseau: Jim Goad’s Shit Magnet” under the pen name J. P. Nash and sent it to Vanguard News Network. This sums it up: “Shit Magnet is the most repulsive exercise in self-pity and self-justification by a narcissistic, borderline personality since Rousseau’s Confessions, and from a literary standpoint it is almost as brilliant.” I thought Jim was a strange combination of nihilist and narcissist, and the inner freedom of the nihilist was being wasted due to a narcissistic need for public approval.

When I got to know Jim, I realized this was wrong: he was not a nihilist. Yes, he was dismissive of talk about morals because he recognized that most people simply used it for preening or personal gain. But there was a strong moralistic streak in Jim, a strong sense of justice, and a tendency to rake himself over the coals. What I thought was “narcissistic” phoniness was a simple desire for justice.

Jim hated the review and put me on his enemies list. I stopped paying attention to him entirely. I didn’t miss out on much. Just books like Trucker Fags in Denial, with illustrations by Jim Blanchard (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004) and Jim Goad’s Gigantic Book of Sex (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2007).

Sometime in the mid-oughts, Jim moved to the Atlanta area, married his second wife Shannon, and fathered his son, Zane (born in 2008), who sadly is profoundly autistic.

I started following Jim again when he began writing regularly for Taki’s Magazine in April of 2009. I loved his columns. They were a return to the form of The Redneck Manifesto: hilarious and scathing chronicles of liberal, feminist, and rainbow sanctimony as well as anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight hate.

His best work from this period can be found in The New Church Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of “Social Justice” (Stone Mountain, Georgia: Obnoxious Books, 2017), Whiteness: The Original Sin (Obnoxious Books, 2018), The Bomb Inside My Brain (Obnoxious Books, 2019) (see my review here), and Gender Psychosis: Insanity and Sexual Identity (Obnoxious Books, 2020).

I reprinted a few of his Takimag pieces at Counter-Currents. Jim, however, held a grudge for the Shit Magnet review and banned me from commenting at Takimag.

In November of 2019, Jim made a snarky comment on Twitter about my expulsion from Norway. I responded with flattery (sincere flattery) to turn away wrath. Jim sent me a private message: “Magnanimous reply, Greg.” We started chatting, set aside our differences, and, to my great surprise, we became friends.

Jim felt my review of Shit Magnet was unjust and I accepted his very level-headed and lawyerly argument. He did, however, tell me that he thought it was well-written, which meant a lot coming from Jim Goad.

Jim was unsatisfied with Taki’s Magazine. I crunched the numbers, talked to a couple of donors, and made him an offer. He came on board at Counter-Currents in October of 2020 and wrote two columns a week until January of 2025—more than 400 pieces in total.

I gave him a lot of freedom, edited him lightly, and paid him promptly. In return, he gave us some of his best work, meticulously edited and delivered like clockwork. No excuses, no diva tantrums, just pure professionalism. He was a joy to work with.

The first time we met in person was in 2022 on a sweltering day in Atlanta. The OK Cafe was mobbed, so we ended up having lunch in a Jewish deli. There was a twinge of anxiety before we met. After all, Jim had written quite a lot about how . . . difficult he could be. But as soon as we met, I felt at ease. There was zero drama the whole time I knew and worked with Jim.

As a side note: Jim had many online detractors. They loved to play “gotcha” with him, brandishing embarrassing revelations to the world, as if they were unearthing long-hidden secrets for the first time. Every one of these revelations came from Jim himself, in one of his books. They weren’t lying about Jim, but these pompous frauds were definitely lying about themselves by pretending that they were being more honest than Jim himself. .

When Jim joined Counter-Currents, he wanted to be clear that he wasn’t joining a “cause” or “movement.” Not long before, he had backed out of speaking at an American Renaissance conference because he felt their description of his work implied that he was part of a “movement.” Jim was very much the cat who walked alone.

I had no problem with this, because I think that White Nationalism is actually stronger when people who are not “in” our movement stick up for our concerns and our right to a hearing. Jim was satisfied with this answer.

I told him that his scruples about this struck me as “autistic.” It was a throw-away comment, but Jim took it straightforwardly. That too struck me as autistic. Jim and I both thought that the term was overused. But he also believed that he was “on the spectrum.” Jim was afraid that if he joined a “cause,” it would completely consume his life, as Catholicism did when he was in his teens.

Jim and Norma moved to New Mexico in the fall of 2024. He had grown to hate Georgia and wanted a new beginning. But the move proved extremely stressful. Some people move like dogs, who find it an adventure. Others move like cats, who find it sheer terror. Jim was in the cat category.

Jim had health issues. Back in 2008, he had surgery for a brain tumor. Then there were two bouts of prostate cancer. He also had cardiac problems. The move came on the heels of the second round of cancer treatments. Cancer and moving are among the most stressful things in anyone’s life. Having them back-to-back must have been crushing. But Jim soldiered through it. After the move, however, he sounded highly anxious and extremely depressed.

Although he had tried every drug on the street during his misspent youth, the Jim I knew abstained completely from drink and any drugs that could affect his mental state. Thus he was resistant to suggestions to get prescribed benzos for anxiety and SSRIs for his depression. He had what I call, “That ‘can’t do’ attitude,” which I just chalked up to depression talking.

Jim stopped writing in January of 2025. I offered to pay him for reprints of his best work from previous platforms. But after a while he stopped sending them. When I asked why, he told me that there was no more good material. That’s when I knew he was depressed.

I had entertained the idea of Jim putting together some collections of his Counter-Currents essays, but there was no hope of that until he snapped out of what was ailing him.

I missed him. His fans missed him. People constantly asked about him. But we talked less and less. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would dutifully report on his situation, and I felt that this just deepened his depression.

The last time Jim and I spoke was on June 14, after I broke the news that one of his dearest friends was terminally ill. I asked him if he could write an obituary. He couldn’t. He could barely write emails. There was news of his health, though: his cancer had returned.

Jim Goad is one of the most interesting and talented people I have ever known. As with Jonathan Bowden, Leo Yankevich, and Charles Krafft, we must now say goodbye. We will remember his life and work. But we should also remember his death, so that we make the most of the time that remains to us.

I will announce any plans for a memorial service. In the meantime, I wish to invite Jim’s other friends and colleagues to share their recollections at Counter-Currents.

It would be a help to Norma if Jim’s webmaster would get in touch as well.

Jim was preceded in death by his father, Alton Howard Goad; his mother Margaret Mary Goad; his oldest brother, Alton Howard Goad, Jr.—known as Bucky—who was brutally murdered in France in 1969 when Jim was eight; and his first wife Debbie.

Jim is survived by his brother, John Francis Goad, who is 13 years Jim’s senior; his second wife, Shannon; his son, Zane; his third wife, Norma; legions of friends and fans; and of course his body of work, which will only grow in influence and regard as white Americans continue to get uppity.

https://counter-currents.com/2026/07/ode-to-jim-goad/