It looks like disbarred attorney Jack Thompson has picked up a new gig as a contributor to the conservative website Human Events.
Thompson has already penned a couple of reports for the site, neither of which have related to videogames. But he couldn’t resist taking a shot at gamers and the ESRB yesterday when he revealed the news to his favorite website, GamePolitics. “This new ESRB bandaid just gets more of the camel’s nose into the video game industry’s tent,” he said, referring to the board’s new rating summaries. “Look for a federal law prohibiting sale of mature games to minors in Obama’s first term. It will be wildly popular with parents in both parties, as a recent video game industry poll proves.” He went on to claim that the new approach is “constitutionally bullet proof.”
Human Events is a hard-right magazine and website that features authors including Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly and numerous others. In his biography on the site, Thompson is described as “a writer and former lawyer in Miami who was Janet Reno’s Republican opponent in 1988 for State Attorney. He secured the first broadcast decency fines ever levied by the FCC (1989) and represented Oliver North at the 1992 Time Warner shareholders meeting, persuading TW to pull rapper Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ from store shelves worldwide.” Strangely enough, his permanent disbarment and the blend of unethical behavior, rule-breaking and outright incompetence that led to it aren’t mentioned.
His new role as a pundit will give Thompson an outlet for his game-hating tendencies, and pay him a few bucks in the process, but at this point it’s safe to say that his time as any kind of noteworthy force in the world of videogames is over. His rants on Human Events will be so much preaching to the choir, and while he will no doubt continue to taunt gamers with his continuing crusade against the industry, his “credibility,” to use the term as loosely as possible, is gone.
