I’d like to think that that I’m a good and honorable man. I can’t think of a time in my life where I’ve actually ever set out to hurt someone or treated anyone badly with one possible exception in high school. I’ve never betrayed a friend. I’ve always tried to treat people with respect, decency, and kindness.
Oddly, though, I have been the object over the years of more than my fair share’s worth of slander, libel, hatred, abuse, threats, and yes, betrayal. I’m not entirely sure why that should be, but, alas, it does seem to be an all-too-regular feature of my life. (I may write an essay someday on the nature of betrayal. God knows I’ve had my fair share of Iago’s in my life.)
Is it something about my personality or character than rubs people the wrong way? Is it the fact that I am, or at least was, a ginger? (Gingers really ought to be a protected class whose safety should be guaranteed by hate crime laws!!!) Is it that I have a punchable face? Does it have to do with my moral-political views? Whatever the reason, it seems to be an inescapable feature of my career
For much of my adult life, I have been attacked by the Left. More recently, I have been attacked by the Reactionary Right. Over the course of the last 25 years, I have received hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls, Tweets, DMs, and voice messages threatening my job, my physical safety, and even threatening the wellbeing of my family. I’ve also had personal meetings and phone calls secretly recorded in violation of professional ethics and personal decency, and I’ve had a Zoom call secretly recorded in violation of California law.
Many years ago, after I’d written an op-ed calling for the closing of America’s so-called “ed” schools, I received scores of nasty and threatening emails and snail-mail letters from “ed” school professors around the country, and the Provost of my then university threatened to fire me if I didn’t retract the op-ed. I refused. (Shortly thereafter, the President of the university made her take me out to lunch and apologize to me, which, to her credit, she did. She was fired shortly thereafter.)
I have also received letters sent to my home address threatening to vandalize my house and car. More ominously, I received a handwritten letter from a deranged person saying that he hoped my daughter would “die from a gut-wrenching illness.” Little did he know that my then five-year-old daughter did in fact suffer from a serious congenital stomach ailment that left her in literal gut-wrenching pain for several days every single month for the first five years of her life. Fortunately, the reprobate included his return address on the envelope, which I turned over to the police and they paid the man a visit. (He later called me and apologized.)
More recently, the ever-infantile Bronze Age Pervert has been slandering and defaming me on his podcast. He refers to me on his show as C(hemsex) Bradley Thompson (which my wife and friends think is hilarious), and he has falsely accused me on several occasions of doxxing his followers and even of extortion! One of BAP’s more deranged followers announced on Twitter/X that he was going to launch a campaign to get me fired (I’ve not included screenshots of those Tweets) and to dox my wife and children. See for yourself.
Another BAPster wondered out loud if the BAP Boys shouldn’t come looking for me and “commit acts of violence” against me.
I could go on and on. I have dozens of similar screenshots.
More recently, I have once again stirred up a hornet’s nest of trouble with my two essays on Jonathan Yudelman (“Who Will Defend Jonathan Yudelman?“ and “The Yudelman Affair”). These essays brought out a whole new cast of haters (i.e., the Intifada Left, which is pro-genocide and pro-totalitarian) and a whole new level of hate.
I think the time has come to give the haters what they’ve always wanted, which is a little love and attention. They’ve spent most of their teenage and adult lives either playing video games in their parents’ basement or commenting anonymously on X or in the comments’ section on various blogs, discussion boards, and e-magazines. This they do without any attention, fame, or glory. Most people think of them as internet losers, but I disagree. I think they are people whose true talents have gone unnoticed. They deserve better. They deserve to be noticed.
John Adams once wrote in his Discourses on Davila that the most powerful force in human nature is what he called the “spectemur agendo,” which is the desire to be seen. Imagine going through your whole life and no one recognizes your existence. In what might be the greatest (or only) act of altruism in my life, I have decided to help my haters become rich and famous.
Just like Simon Cowell from America’s Got Talent, I have discovered some great new intellectual talent that just needs a little publicity to get their first break into the big leagues. I’ve therefore decided to use The Redneck Intellectual Substack as a platform to help launch the careers of a few of my more deserving critics.
So, to that end, I am going to share with all of you the high-brow thoughts and statesmanlike rhetoric of some of America’s best and brightest. They deserve to be seen and heard. (I also thought you might like to know what life is like for The Redneck Intellectual.)
Over the course of the last few weeks, I have received a few phone messages and a hundred or so comments on social media denouncing me in various ways. At the very least, they’ve made Mrs. Redneck and some of my bootlegger friends laugh uproariously.
Let me begin by sharing three phone messages that were left on my voicemail recently. (If you’re reading this on your phone, the play button may redirect you to the website version from which you should be able to play the recordings. If that doesn’t work, then you will have to go directly to The Redneck Intellectual Substack.)
Voice Message No. 1:
Voice Message No. 2:
Voice Message No. 3:
And then there were the comments left on my Substack after the publication of my two essays on Jonathan Yudelman. Here’s a sampling from some of my favorites:
Jakob Macitosh: “Who wrote this absolute pile of garbage? . . . Not sure how I found this creepy corner of the web, but there seem to be a ton of backwards ass hillbillies here. Wth?”
Ryan: “Imagine taking the insane manifesto that you wrote alone in your own faeces, and typing it up.”
Lorenz: “You're a joke. You will buy anything when it comes to Jews in ovens and the GASACAUST SLANDER, which has long been known to be allied and Israeli war propaganda to genocide Germans. You have no discernment. Don't expect everyone else to buy it stories about Jews in ovens. This was a staged invasion and just as ridiculous as the fireworks from Iran. It's designed to polarize Americans and get neurotics foreigners, like you, triggered to trigger Americans into a conflict that has zero to do with non-WASP non-Jews. The Founding Fathers would have nothing to do with Israel or you. I'm sure your citizenship will be yanked when anti-Zionists kick Zionist Redcoats, like you, out of the halls of American power and send them back to Red-coat-land.”
The Iron Shiek: “Waiting for the piece defending Harvey Weinstein”
Arjun Singh: “You call yourself philosophy professor and yet you have all the disproven talking points of the Zionist hasbara? Behedded babies in ovens, raping and pillaging? Sheesh!”
June: “Only the very dim & stupid & brain-washed still believe the laughable Big Lie about the beheaded babies & burnings. Absolutely proven to be another sick zionist lie. They have no shame.”
Kal: “Every single word in this article is false and easily proven to be so. I'm not sure what Substack's policy is on hate speech and defamation, but this crosses even the most lenient of lines. What a sad person you must be to write this vitriol.”
Benjamin: “This clown "babies in ovens and woman raped" C. Bradley Thompson have some dignity for the job, you're shameless with no integrity. I see why your article is in the ass crack of Google, it's where the shit comes out from.”
Welcome to my world!
All of this would be amusing but for the fact that it provides a window into the deranged mind of the of the Intifada Left, which is suffering from a severe case ideological psychosis. Anyone who does not believe that 1200+ Israeli’s were murdered on October 7, that Jewish families were not massacred, that babies were not beheaded and put ovens, that Jewish girls were not raped, etc., is not simply deranged but morally wicked.
Let’s be clear about one thing: I will not stop writing and speaking my mind. Because, well, ya know, this is still the United States of America.
So, with that said, bring on the hate. I love it!
I have to say I was surprised by the vituperative comments to your Yudelson pieces…even more surprised by the vituperative reply to MY own ever so mildly critical comment. Do these morons actually follow you? I mean, I am a long-time follower, and our number is growing, but these trolls? I recall an episode from my childhood, which was pleasant enough, when, for some reason I no longer recall, I was being harassed on the playground by a group of other sixth graders. Elmer Bell, a truly scary classmate, who was at least 16 years old, 6 feet tall, and shaving (sometimes), a poster boy for what some in the South would refer to as “poor white trash,” stepped in and took my part, and dispersed my antagonists simply by glaring at them and saying, “Jim says for you to kiss his ass.” I was stunned by this because I was hardly “friends” with Elmer. However, I was raised to treat everyone with a modicum of respect, and Elmer apparently appreciated it more than I ever knew. So, to your antagonists, I say, “Brad says for you to kiss his ass!”
Well, you know what Winston C. said about having enemies: "That means you have stood up for something sometime in your life."