A Giving of Accounts
The Redneck Intellectual at One Year
My name is Brad Thompson and I am, for better or worse, The Redneck Intellectual. Welcome to my world!
It’s been exactly one year since I launched this Substack, and I thought you might appreciate a brief “giving of accounts.” By a “giving of accounts,” I don’t mean the more formal logon didonai (an account of one’s belief) but rather something much simpler: a brief overview of what The Redneck Intellectual has done over the course of the last year and what his plans are for the future.
Why “The Redneck Intellectual”?
Before I do that, though, I would like to address an issue that has come up repeatedly over the course of the last year, and that is my use of the eponymous moniker, The Redneck Intellectual. Many of you have commented on what you consider to be the irony of the name, particularly as it relates to me personally. Intellectual “yes,” some of you have said, but Redneck, “no!”
I’m sorry, but you have it exactly backward. If anything, it should be Redneck “yes” (at least in spirit) and intellectual “no.”
But for the fact that I do spend much of my days thinking and writing, I am most definitely NOT what some call an “intellectual,” which is one of those hoity-toity, 25-cent words that I despise. Truth be told, I would much rather sit around a trailer park campfire drinking Bud Lite with a bunch of good ol’ boys than I would sipping Chardonnay at a cocktail party with English professors at the Harvard faculty lounge. With the former I might actually learn something important about life, but with the latter I would no doubt end the evening begging for a frontal lobotomy. I also know from experience that the former are kinder than the latter.
The Year in Review
Thirteen months ago, I had no plan to start a Substack. In fact, I barely even knew what Substack was. I’d heard about it but didn’t really get what it was or how it worked. Never in a million years did I think that within a year I’d have a Substack and would publish some 24 long-form essay essays, 25 issues of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” and 11 issues of “Dumb & Dumber.”
I started The Redneck Intellectual mostly as a place to store my essay responses (eleven in total) to the critics of my “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” essay, which was first published at The American Mind in May 2020 and then republished here at The Redneck Intellectual on November 6, 2020.
For those of you who have not read the essay, it is a critique of two factions on what I call the reactionary Right: the so-called Catholic TradCons on the one hand and the Bronze Age Pervert and his followers on the other.
The essay caused a firestorm of controversy. The American Mind published—I think—nine or ten essays on their website and then a few more on their Substack (American Mindset) in response to the “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” essay. Some ten or fifteen additional essays were published on other websites. A few of these essays, including one or two critical responses, were serious and thoughtful, and some responses demonstrated that my essay had caused a few respondents to come unbuttoned psychologically. I responded to my critics with eleven essays and thus was born The Redneck Intellectual.
For those of you who missed the controversy, you can find my essays on the reactionary Right compiled here:
1. A Prolegomenon to Any Future Controversies
2. The American Revolution and the Theological-Political Problem
3. The Puritans, the Revolution, and the Common Good
4. The Constitution and the Common Good
5. The American Founding and the Road to Nihilism
6. Virtue and the Moral Foundations of a Free Society
7. Harry V. and Me: On the Truth of America’s Founding Principles
8. Bronze Age Pervert and the Fascist New Frontier
9. German Nihilism, American-Style
Over the course of the year, I’ve also written thirteen additional essays on a wide variety of topics, including essays on my adventures in the middle of an anarcho-communist riot in Santiago, Chile, the relationship between fathers and sons, the hierarchy of sports, beauty and motherhood, the meaning of American independence, the Olympics, the differences between college move-in day and Army induction day, and the creeping totalitarianism in America’s Education Establishment.
Once I realized that there was a growing audience for my writing but also that I could not keep up the pace of publishing one long-form essay per week, I decided to expand the offerings at The Redneck Intellectual to include two easily-composed weekly “blog” features, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and “Dumb and Dumber.” Both are aggregator blogs, which leverage the time I spend every day reading the news. The former is a roundup of political and cultural news and the latter aggregates news stories on K-12 and higher education.
Because American education (kindergarten thru PH.D.) is in a state of rapid collapse, I have been overwhelmed by the number of newspaper and magazine articles that are published on a daily basis chronicling its decline and fall. I have thus far published eleven issues of “Dumb and Dumber” at The Redneck Intellectual since late July, but I have over 50 completed issues floating like cargo ships off the coast of Long Beach, California, waiting to be processed.
On the principle that you should never let good material go to waste, I decided this past September to launch a new website, EdWatchDaily.com, which provides safety valve for all of the education material that I’ve collected and which now serves as a “one-stop resource” for all the news on education that’s fit to print.
The purpose of EdWatchDaily is twofold: first, to chronicle and shine a bright light on the inevitable decline and fall of American education (at all levels); and, second, to inspire Americans to join the #JustWalkAway movement, which seeks to reinvent American education from the ground up. EdWatchDaily is not concerned with “reforming” America’s government school system. To reform is to save and thereby perpetuate, which we oppose because we consider the government school system to be inherently corrupt and government schooling to be inherently immoral. We are—on principle—abolitionists (i.e., we support abolishing the government school system) and separationists (i.e., we support the principle of “Separation of School and State”). In the months ahead, The Redneck Intellectual will publish a series of essays here at the Substack laying out his theory of education.
The Most Popular Essays of the Last Year
Some of you have asked me which essays have been the most popular with readers. That’s hard to measure exactly because I had far fewer subscribers in the first six months of The Redneck Intellectual than I do today. Still, you might be interested to see the top five most viewed essays presented in ascending order.
# 5: Obey the Grand Inquisitor
# 4: College “Move-In Day”—Army Style
# 3: On the Hierarchy of Sports
# 2: Bronze Age Pervert and the Fascist New Frontier
# 1: A Declaration of War
Future Essays
What’s in store for readers this coming year and beyond? Going forward, I hope to publish long-form essays on a variety of topics, such as (in no particular order):
1. Children and the Rights of Parents
2. The Three Stooges of Conservatism
3. The Meaning of Meaning
4. The Nature of Marriage
5. The Four Pillars of a Free Society
6. A Strategy for Winning
7. Patti Smith Does Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”
8. Reading the Book of Nature
9. Muscular Liberalism
10. Socialism and Nihilism
11. Doing Philosophy Without Books (or Philosophers)
12. Pronoun Nihilism
13. The Ethics of Doxxing
14. My Wife is NOT My “Best Friend”
15. America Disarmed
16. Dreams and Happiness
17. On the Separation of School and State
18. Free-Market Education
19. A Specter is Haunting America—the Specter of Weimar
20. On Greatness in Sports
21. Was Nietzsche a Nihilist
22. The Homeschool Revolution is NOW!
23. The Redneck Intellectual Goes Hitchhiking
24. Thompson Derangement Syndrome
25. We’re All Nihilists, Now!
Paid Subscriptions
As you all know, I initiated recently the option of being a paid subscriber to The Redneck Intellectual. I have been both surprised and delighted by the number of people who have found enough value in my Substack to actually pay for it.
To all of my paid subscribers, I say “thank you!” Your support is very much appreciated, and I will be—as promised—treating Mrs. Redneck to a sumptuous Chick-fil-A meal in the very near future, though she now tells me that she prefers Popeyes! If you’re not a paying subscriber, please consider becoming one.
I am very conscious of giving paid subscribers greater value than unpaid subscribers. I’m still trying to figure out how to do that exactly, particularly with the different features offered by Substack to differentiate paid from unpaid subscribers. Going forward, I do hope to be able to offer paid subscribers exclusive features (e.g., five-minute videos on philosophic topics) that unpaid subscribers won’t have access to.
In the end, this has all been one grand experiment that I’m still trying to figure out. I’m having a lot of fun publishing The Redneck Intellectual and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The “Beastie Boys” and I thank you for your support and friendship.
The only thing 'wrong' with The Redneck Intellectual is that there should be millions reading him instead of thousands. Awesome stuff!!!
Keep it going, Brad. I, too, am pretty disgusted with "intellectuals." Maybe we need a new term to describe a genuinely thoughtful person who writes and speaks on fundamental cultural issues. "Rednecks" arise!