Cast Iron Chaos RecentChanges
XMLFacebookTwitter

LoginLogoutRegisterContact the WebmasterPayPal Me

Jack Thompson

One the most persistent moral watchdogs who Knows What Is Right For Your Children, Jack Thompson has been at the forefront of the battle against evil, violence, sex, and other child-molesting forces in entertainment media for nearly thirty years. While he isn't pursuing this obsession in the name of God and Jesus, he's waged his attack with a fervor that can put most religious activists to shame.

He first became a household name in the 1980s, when he became involved in the efforts to ban 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be. He became especially outraged when the rap group recorded a cover of Bruce Springsteen entitled "Banned In The USA," and he spent several years in the 1980s and 1990s warning everyone willing to lend him an ear about the dangers of rap music. (He was fond of handing out copies of his driver's license, with a picture of Batman pasted over his photo, in order to let his perceived enemies know just who they were dealing with.)

However, since the rise of the Internet, Thompson has changed the target of his obsession from rap music to video games. Today, any news article covering a "controversial" video game such as Grand Theft Auto will be guaranteed to include a quote from Thompson, who believes violent video games are "murder simulators" and who has initiated numerous lawsuits against the video game industry to prove his theory that video games cause kids to become heartless murderers. His ongoing crusade backfired in 2008, however, when a Florida judge disbarred him on the grounds that his conduct was unbecoming for a lawyer. In other words, he was too much of a jerk to maintain a license to practice law.

He hasn't given up, however – in late 2009, he sued Facebook for $40 million because Facebook's users were saying mean things about him.

Thompson recently had a tit-for-tat feud with the Web comic Penny Arcade (a comic about video games, of course), which resulted in the comic's readers donating $10,000 to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) with the note "For Jack Tompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't."