Hello Jim, it’s your mother here. I didn’t want to write this. And I apologize for sending this to The eXiled, but I didn’t know how else to reach you. Jimmy, please listen to me just this one time. Stop embarrassing yourself. Please, I beg you. Why, a mother asks, did you write a groveling letter to Mark Ames that began, “Unlike Matt Taibbi, you’re a good writer”? Jimmy, you’re more confused today at age 50 than when I used to smack you around at age 5. You’re a talentless meathead and a failed Broadway actor with a chip on your shoulder, and it hurts me to see you flaunt it. You’re too vain, and too thick in the skull, to recognize what a complete ass you’re making of yourself today. Jimmy, you’re 50 years old. The 1990s are over. In 5 years you’ll qualify for senior citizens’ discounts. Please, Jimmy, please stop it. Stop being a masochist and hurting yourself. You aren’t a redneck. You aren’t scaring anyone. You aren’t impressing anyone. Mr. Ames seems like a nice Jewish fellow, why do you have to bother him, the way you pestered me and your father? Of course we hit you. You wouldn’t stop whining all the time. You wrote all about it in your “Rape” magazine. Clearly, I should have beaten you a lot more, Jimmy. I failed to prevent you from becoming a 50-year-old monkey, and for that I am sorry.

Please, Jimmy, stop it. Stop whining. And stop running to that nice Canadian fashionista to defend your honor. This poor Canadian fellow Gavin McInnes is a busy man, with a serious job: he looks at pictures of people’s clothes, and comments on them. That, Jimmy, is what a real redneck does: commenting on people’s clothes. This Canadian fellow Gavin, he is a real redneck, unlike you. When it comes to Canadian fashion criticism, no one takes it to the limits like Gavin McInnes. What do you do? You interrupt his busy day as a fashion critic to rescue you when you can’t defend yourself. Oh how ashamed I am to be your mother! Your father beat you to try to make a man out of you, and what did you do? You begged him for money to go to theater acting school at NYU. That’s why he drank himself to death. You killed your father, Jimmy, and you’re killing him again now.

But here’s what I really want to say to you, Jimmy, my son: Stop groveling. Please, for once in your life, stop groveling to rich Republicans. Try to be a little bit of the psychotic Jim Goad that you used to be. That was interesting. But now, you just grovel to rich Republicans. You grovel to the Koch Brothers and call yourself “libertarian” because they’re rich corporate heirs and they throw money at libertarians. You grovel to your 80-year-old Albanian publisher Taki, because he’s a rich heir, and my son Jimmy Goad grovels to rich heirs. You’re not even ashamed that you edit a magazine whose mascot is a debutante in a tiara holding a martini glass and cigarette holder, whose motto is “Cocktails, Countesses, and Mental Caviar”. I always told you as a child, “Jimmy, some day you’ll grow up and be a 50-year-old redneck who publishes in a magazine whose mascot is a debutante in a tiara, and you’ll do something really stupid like make an ass out of yourself groveling to Mark Ames for his attention. No wonder I don’t love you. I already know what a groveling idiot you’ll be when you’re 50!” Five minutes a day of not groveling to billionaire Republican rightwingers, that’s all I ask. Can you at least try it?

Yes, I know Jimmy, you’re still mad at me. I remember what you wrote about me in your “Rape” issue:

“Little Jimmy. All alone at four or five years old. Shivering on my parents’ numb bed on a Sunday morning when the old man was out drinking and mommy was off to church. I felt a chilly Novocain pit inside my ribs, the sense that I was unloved.”

I can still hear the violins playing when I read those words. Those are First Amendment-barrier-breaking violins, Jimmy. Kleenex, anyone? Oprah, book that man!

Well, since we’re opening up, let’s go back and revisit your childhood, since that’s all you ever do. That and zip-code surfing. Yes, Jimmy, you grew up a poor Confederate redneck in the bayous of Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, a rich all-white suburb of Philadelphia built as a “summer vacation resort for wealthy Philadelphians.” Growing up in the redneck backwoods of Ridley Park, you dreamed of going to NYU to be a theater actor on Broadway. But as you whined over and over in your “Rape” issue, your father didn’t pay for you to attend NYU theater acting school, “even though we could pay for it 10 times over” I suppose I should explain why, Jimmy. You see, it’s true. Like all redneck families, we had plenty of money to pay for the most expensive theater acting program in Manhattan ten times over. And like all redneck boys, you naturally dreamed of studying theater at NYU under Stella Adler, who taught Judy Garland and Melanie Griffith. Here is what you wrote in the Rape issue:

“NYU accepted me to study theater with Stella Adler, one of the world’s best acting teachers. They had enough money to pay the tuition ten times over – but they just didn’t want to bet it on me.”

O, the humanity! Poor Jimmy’s parents wouldn’t waste $150,000 on their son’s Broadway dreams. Say goodbye to that bit-part in Rent that you were destined for, Jimmy Goad. You coulda been the next Judy Garland! It’s the Redneck’s Dilemma all over again: Redneck son wants to study theater at NYU, redneck parents have the money but won’t pay it, redneck son hates parents for life. If that’s not authentic redneck, then this photo certainly is:

If only Stella Adler could see me now, she’d be so proud! Yee-haw!

It’s true, Jimmy. We didn’t want to bet on you. We knew that Temple University was more your speed. And here is one reason why. When you sent your email to Mark Ames trying to hurt him, your “grovel” program kicked in instead:

——Original Message——

From: jg@jimgoad.net

To: ames@exiledonline.com

Subject: Hello, Darlin’

Sent: Feb 22, 2011 3:08 PM Unlike Matt Taibbi, you are a really good writer. But you’re so absolutely wrong about everything, I’m laughing as I type. I would bust you like a grape in a public debate. 404 824 0088 … Call me anytime in my 88 percent black neighborhood, ye champeen of the oppressed.

My poor dim-witted son, it hurts to read this email. But maybe now, reading what you wrote Mr. Ames, you’ll understand why your father and I figured Temple U. was more your speed.

Here, Mr. Ames wrote me a very nice note explaining why your email was so retarded:

“Dear Mrs. Goad, your son sent me an email challenging me to a ‘public debate’? What the hell is he talking about, ‘public debate’? Is that before or after the spelling bee? Mrs. Goad, please tell your retarded redneck son Jim Goad I don’t know how to answer a groveling email like this. I know he’s done so much groveling to the Kochs lately that it’s become an instinctive reaction for your son. If he wants to fuck with me, please tell your dumbshit failed actor of a son he shouldn’t start off his email by telling me that I’m more talented than Matt Taibbi. That’s called groveling–and handing your gun to your opponent. Even the Polish cavalry wasn’t that stupid. Since your son is a special case, here’s some friendly advice: You see, Mrs. Goad, your son should not tell me I’m better than Taibbi if he wants to hurt me. No, if he wants to hurt me, or at least give the impression he’s hurting me, your son should have written that I’m jealous of Matt Taibbi, because he’s more famous than I am. You see? I know that’s tough to figure out, but I’m in a charitable mood here. If your retarded son would take ten minutes out from playing the 50-year-old failed-Broadway-actor-turned-Confederate wigger, and take just ten seconds off from sucking up to the Koch brothers, he might learn something about the art of invective.”

And I said to Mr. Ames, “Thank you. But there’s no point in explaining this to my retarded son Jim Goad.”

So, there’s my letter to you Jimmy. I hope you heed my advice and stop embarrassing me, that’s all.

Love nips,

Jim’s Mom

ps: Mr. Ames asked me to directly relay this message to your fashion-critic handler, the fellow from Canada:

Jim,

Mark Ames here. I’m truly sorry that a 50-year-old theater-trained Confederate such as yourself has to run crying to a Canadian fashionista like Gavin McInnes, the biggest chickenshit who ever called himself a “white power” Confederate that Canada ever produced. Not sure if anyone remembers, but back in 2003, when Gavin was at the peak of his career, the New York Times quoted Gavin playing the “white power” hipster. And like the bad-assed “white power” Confederate Gavin is, the second his hipster stance turned into real controversy, a giant yellow stripe ran up his Canadian back as Gavin squealed “I’m just a hipster poseur! I didn’t mean that white power stuff! I love The Nation magazine just as much as I love Pat Buchanan! I swear I’m just a fashion chickenshit who doesn’t mean a single thing I say! I’m a pussy and a poseur, c’mon you guys!”

Here’s how Gavin portrayed himself to the New York Times:

He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist’s. ”I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of,” he said. ”I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”

In an interview in The New York Press last year, Mr. McInnes’s views came through in the coarse ethnic expressions he used in saying how pleased he was that most Williamsburg hipsters are white. As a result, he became the focus of a letter-writing campaign by a black reader. Vice apologized for Mr. McInnes’s comments.

Welp, someone got upset–someone rich, of course, because suckup posers like Gavin only care if rich people don’t appreciate his act. So at the first whiff of gunpowder, our Canadian Confederate emailed to the public one of the most shameful, embarassing mea culpas in the history of chickenshits: a long groveling letter to Gawker taking back all the edgy white power things he’d said: “No no no! Wait, I lost a client over saying something edgy! Tell everyone I didn’t mean a thing!”

It became irresistible to goad people and corner them into conversations about controversial politics because they were so hysterical and easy to anger. Plus, incendiary political statements garnered endless publicity for us and playing with mainstream media became a fun game. And yes, I wrote an article for The American Conservative about a new trend of conservative hipsters. I did it for a laugh. I did it because I wanted to see what it would be like to flirt with Pat Buchanan (and I agree with some of what the AmCon says, just like I agree with some of what The Nation says). In the AmCon piece I made totally bullshit claims like Terry Richardson was publicly trashing Clinton and Our website was filled with people saying the gay media was making women diet too much. I even invented an art collective called Sofia. Any of these things could have been easily disproven, but everyone from The New York Post to Newsweek ran with them. Shocking really.

Gavin McInnis does the Chickenshit Shuffle: “I will say stuff so left-wing, so Black Power, that it will make your ears burn off.” Ouch, our ears!

You see what a sly little coward Gavin is? First whiff of gun powder, and he’s fleeing for the safety of irony, turning in every name he can think of, blaming the media for not being in on the hipster joke. It’s all their fault, you see! I’m just a fashionista poseur! Don’t take me seriously, please! I’m gonna give you all the Black Power you need, because this is about balance, right? Isn’t that how I save myself? By running to the other side and pretending there as much as I pretend when I’m with the White Power side?

THE EXILED PRESENTS: THE GAVIN MCINNES PLAYBOOK OF “WHITE POWER” DO’S & DON’TS!

DO: Shamelessly chicken out when you generate a single iota of real controversy, send a giant rambling knee-chattering letter to gossip site Gawker disowning everything vaguely dangerous you ever may have said that might be construed the wrong way, and to emphasize that you have no convictions or balls, send a self-debasing photo of yourself in a Speedo with your giant pussy backtracking apology letter, so that everyone will think you really are just a harmless poseur Canadian fashionista fraud, too harmless and middle-class to take your White Power stuff seriously;

DON’T: Talk White Power talk if you’re just a pussy Canadian fashionista without the balls to follow through on what you started.

Gavin McInnis explains why it’s cool to be a Republican: “It’s cool because it’s not cool. So therefore, it’s cool. Unless it’s bad for the career. Then it’s not cool again.”

Contrast a total poseur like Gavin with Jim Goad, who, to his credit, is at least trying to be the real thing: a guy who writes about beating up women and breaking their jaws, before actually beating the shit out of his tiny girlfriend who was half Goad’s age, and going to prison for it. Jim broke little Ann “Sky” Ryan’s eye socket with his fist while she was in his car, and he bit her thumb badly enough for it to count as another charge, before throwing her out of the car in the middle of nowhere at five in the morning. That made all the hipster poseurs “oo” and “ahh” over just how authentic Goad’s redneck act was. Sure, you probably didn’t realize that Rednecks bite their girlfriends’ thumbs, but you must not have listened to your Merle Haggard enough, songs like, “Darlin’, if’n you dont git me a beer/I’m a-gonna bite-bite-bite yer thumb…”

Jim Goad was jailed for breaking this woman’s skull

Now, here’s what Goad wrote about violence against women:

I like to punch women and kick them and shove them up against walls. I like grabbing them by their pretty hair and swinging them into door frames, rubbing their noses in the carpet like they’re puppies, dragging them into the bathroom and half-drowning them in the toilet. Sinks—either bathroom or kitchen sinks—are real good, because you can knock out a whole row of teeth when you slam a woman’s face into one. Watch all the gooey blood dripping on the white porcelain. It’s a real treat.

Yup, that’s it. That’s the difference between Gavin and Goad. That’s what authentic Redneck is, as compared to Gavin’s poseur-redneck. No wonder they’re not embarrassed to call themselves “libertarians.”

Look, you two fools are still working the same old schtick that worked so well in the Clinton Era: flip-flopping conventional cliches and morals, hissing anti-black and anti-Semitic platitudes to imaginary “oo’s” and “ah’s” of your imaginary 90’s dorm audience. Breaking the rules and sticking it to the Establishment by parroting someone else’s older, filthier cliches, over the current cliches. But politics and ideas aren’t the same as shopping for redneck outfits at thrift stores. You’ve become so ridiculous that the great Brit satirist Christopher Morris even created a character based on Gavin named “Nathan Barley,” a shallow London media hipster who earns “cool” credibility by fake-shocking his shallow hipster friends by saying “nigger” in public, and running a hipster fashion website with the edgy name “Trashbat.co.ck.” Not “Streetboners” but “trashbat-dot-cock.” As Nathan Barley says in the show, “Get it? ‘Cock.’ Dot-co, dot-ck. Trashbat-dot-cock, my nigger!” One man’s “Streetboners” website is another man’s “co.ck” as they say in hipsterland. Click here to watch a clip from Chris Morris’ brutal takedown of Gavin McInnes. (It’s perfect, isn’t it, that Gavin is now a Koch-sucking “libertarian.”)

Goad and Goad’s handler, Gavin, never figured that out. And so even though America has changed drastically for the worse since the 1990s, the decade that Goad and Gavin still live in, neither of them know how to adapt. They’re merely calculating their stances like fashion choices, and now they’ve run out of stances and anti-stances and hipster flip-flops of conventional liberal wisdom. It was always formulaic, and a dumb formula at that. We were all a lot dumber in the 1990s because we thought the enemy was blandness—America was still rich and that wealth seemed infinite. We hadn’t been dragged into two lost wars and the total collapse of the financial system yet. So some of us got off on teasing the liberal Ms. Crabtrees, which in hindsight was far too easy, and dove into rank hedonism, because it was fun and because others were inexplicably afraid of going there. It made sense then, when America was rich and annoying liberals seemed to matter in the phony culture wars of that time. Part of the point was to make the readers uncomfortable, to shake them awake. But times have changed: this country is completely fucked thanks to the plutocrats whose shoes Goad and Gavin are now polishing with their tongues. It was inevitable that shallow hipsters would rationalize their way into the Koch brothers’ libertarian arms. Pathetic, but inevitable: someone who thinks “bold” and “daring” equals facile flip-flops inevitably winds up carrying the water for the status quo. Go back to commenting on people’s clothes, or whining about how your parents didn’t love you enough. You’re much better at that.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.

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