2015: Looking Forward

fri_wand [1]856 words

My life is always a whirl of activity, so I use the holidays as opportunities to pause and collect myself. I always spend New Year’s Eve and the following day alone, quietly reflecting on the year behind and the year ahead. It is good to review a year’s worth of accomplishments and failures, learn the lessons that present themselves, make new plans, and then close the door on the past and get on with life.

Like 2013, 2014 was a year of upheaval. My mother spent the first three months of 2014 in a rehabilitation center after a near-fatal car accident. Then I spent nearly a month with her to help her re-acclimate to living at home. After that, I was forced to leave San Francisco in May due to “antifa” harassment. In October, one of my closest friends died suddenly after a brief illness, which has cast a long shadow over the rest of the year.

2014 was also the first year in which I was the sole full-time person at Counter-Currents. I had plenty of help, both paid and volunteer, from IT people, proofreaders, writers, transcribers, indexers, designers, accountants, etc. But despite it all, CC went from two to one full-time workers, and that makes a difference. And no, one person can’t do the work of two. Now I know what single parents must experience.

Despite it all, I accomplished a lot in 2014:

  1. Counter-Currents published a total of 720 posts.
  2. I published 58 articles under my own name (not including newsletters, announcements, reprints, and other insubstantial pieces).
  3. I published 8 Trevor Lynch reviews.
  4. I translated 8 pieces from French and Spanish.
  5. I also published 42 translations of my own pieces into French, German, Czech, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, etc. which were done by CC readers around the globe. Thank you!
  6. I conducted 6 print and audio interviews and published a transcript of an interview from a previous year.
  7. I also gave 3 interviews and participated in 3 panels, all audio.
  8. I gave public talks in Seattle, London, the Bay Area, and Philadelphia. My Seattle talk is here [2], and the London one is here [3].
  9. I released 9 audios of philosophy lectures.
  10. The CC Summer Fundraiser met and exceeded its goal of $40,000. (Click here [4] if you want to get a head start on the 2015 fundraiser.)

Counter-Currents also brought out three print and E-books in 2014:

  1. Greg Johnson, New Right vs. Old Right [5]
  2. Jonathan Bowden, Western Civilization Bites Back [6]
  3. James J. O’Meara, The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, and Culture [7]

Of course we brought out six books in 2013, but I had more help then.

I’d give myself a B+ on last year’s resolutions for Counter-Currents, since the Newsletter [8] was not exactly monthly in 2014. This is what I am going to do in 2015:

  1. Publish more books. We have a large backlog of book projects that I would like to get out in 2015, before we take on new projects.
  2. Train and manage others. To publish more books, I either have to do less in other areas, or I need to confront and overcome one of my limitations, which is my great inability to train other people to work for me and to steadily manage their output. If Counter-Currents is to grow, I have to follow the latter path, and I have already taken some steps in that direction in 2014.
  3. Resume regular podcasting. I don’t really listen to many podcasts, largely because I don’t have time. I can’t listen while writing or editing, for example, because I need to concentrate. But to all those Pod(cast) People out there: I have heard you, I have found a helper, I will train him, and we will try to get in the swing of doing weekly podcasts as soon as possible, consistent with my next goal:
  4. Travel and speak more. Metapolitics is not just ideas about a better society. It is also about creating a community of believers, the core of that new order. To this end, in 2015, I will be getting out and speaking more with the aim of bringing together local groups of Counter-Currents readers and giving them a model for sustaining themselves. I already have meetings scheduled in New York City, Seattle, and Atlanta, and more will follow. I will also be visiting Europe, but that will be more of a listening tour than a speaking one.
  5. Create two new websites. The Counter-Currents website has been having some problems over the last six weeks, all of them related to deferred maintenance. (You know, the kind of thing that eventually leads to picturesque ruins [9].) No, the site was never hacked. Some people who entered counter-currents.com without the “www.” prefix ended up at different pages because of Domain Name System problems, which have been resolved. The site is pretty much fixed. But it was a wake-up call. Counter-Currents is a hybrid between a webzine and a publishing site. Years ago, I planned to split it into two sites with less-cluttered mobile-friendly designs. That will happen this year.

I want to thank our writers, donors, proofreaders, transcribers, and all of our readers for their continued loyalty and support.

Happy New Year!

Greg Johnson
Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.
North American New Right