Happy Birthday to Us!

1,175 words

It was nine years ago today that the Counter-Currents website went online. I can’t count the number of writers, YouTubers, podcasters, websites, and entire movements that have come and gone in our ideological sphere in the last nine years. The attrition is understandable. Deplatforming, demonetization, and demoralization take their toll. But Counter-Currents is still here, and we are not going anywhere.

In Year Nine, we published online 791 articles and reviews and more than 6,000 comments.

In Year Nine, our web traffic averaged around 130,000 unique visitors per month.

From the beginning, our webzine became our most important activity and my primary occupation. Nevertheless, in Year Nine, Counter-Currents published eight books, including our best-selling and most significant and impactful title so far, The White Nationalist Manifesto:

1. Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies
2. Greg Johnson, Toward a New Nationalism
3. Tito Perdue, The Smut Book
4. Greg Johnson, ed., The Alternative Right
5. Buttercup Dew, My Nationalist Pony
6. Greg Johnson, The White Nationalist Manifesto
7. Johnson and Hood, eds., Dark Right: Batman Viewed from the Right
8. Tito Perdue, The Philatelist

In Year Nine I spoke at ten meetings: the Northwest Forum in Seattle, the New York Forum, Erkenbrand in the Netherlands, the Scandza Forum in Copenhagen and Stockholm, the Pan-Europa Conference and Plomin Club in Kyiv, the Blue Awakening conference in Tallinn, and the Ethnofutur conference in Vilnius, and also at a private gathering in Berlin. I also attended the 2019 American Renaissance Conference and independence day marches in three countries. Counter-Currents’ John Morgan also spoke at the 2019 American Renaissance Conference.

In Year Nine, we put 55 podcasts online, including interviews, lectures, and audio versions of essays. I also lost count of the number of interviews, debates, and podcast appearances I put in at such places as The Public Space, Mark Collett’s This Week on the Alt Right, The Afterparty, No White Guilt, Red Ice, Millennial Woes, and others.

I want to thank our writers, readers, subscribers, and generous financial donors for making all this possible.

Year Nine was definitely not a year of progress on all fronts. There were four major setbacks.

1. In February, Amazon.com removed seventeen Counter-Currents titles, including our best-sellers, The White Nationalist Manifesto and Sexual Utopia in Power. All of these titles are still available direct from Counter-Currents. The was an uptick in sympathy orders after the ban, but these have now dropped off. It is too early to say how badly this has hurt us, but there is no question that it has hurt. That’s why they do it to us. In reaction, I have scaled back our publication plans. (Unfortunately, there are no alternative publishers I can recommend.) We are also investigating new ways to market our books. But we need to keep this in perspective. Book publishing has always been a minor aspect of our work. Economically, it has always merely broken even, largely because aside from novels, we are just repackaging and selling works that we have already made available for free.
2. In Year Nine, I spent quite a bit of time and money (including hiring someone) in preparation to start producing Counter-Currents videos and YouTube livestreams. But before any of that could come to fruition, YouTube’s new wave of censorship and demonetization came crashing down. I was never thrilled with this project in the first place, because I hate the medium. I undertook it because I was convinced that it is a good way of promoting our ideas. At this point, however, I am declaring a loss and moving on. The vast cultural wasteland will just have to get along without me.
3. DDOS attacks, search engine censorship, and increasing outright bans by various institutions have been slowly strangling our web traffic, starting last year and increasing in 2019. From what I have learned, similar websites are facing similar pressures. Indeed, some have been hit far worse.
4. In May, we were deplatformed by our credit-card processing company. All of our crucial monthly donations were canceled. Orders came to a halt. We now have several alternatives in place, but we have lost a month’s income, and we crucially need to get our monthly donors back. Please donate today.

Of course, the only reason why the establishment is resorting to censorship and deplatforming is because they take ideas seriously and are tired of losing arguments to us. But, as I argue in my essay “Freedom of Speech,” they can’t take us offline completely, which means that at best they can only slow us down. They can’t really stop us. And when we change enough minds, then we win.

What can you expect from Counter-Currents in Year Ten? More of the same, but better. We will continue to publish high-quality political and metapolitical commentary. We will continue to develop new writers. We will continue to publish books and produce podcasts. I will continue to speak around the world and on the web wherever I am invited. But here are some special projects for Year Ten:

1. I will publish White Identity Politics, a follow-up volume to The White Nationalist Manifesto that restates the case for white identity politics and also responds to the recent spate of academic studies and critiques of National Populism and white identity politics.
2. I will create a 90-minute film that popularizes the ideas of The White Nationalist Manifesto and the forthcoming White Identity Politics volume.
3. I am moving forward with two new Counter-Currents sites which will separate our webzine and bookstore. They will be sleeker and more functional both for readers and shoppers and also for those working behind the scenes.
4. The World in Flames and The Enemy of Europe, the first two volumes of our Centennial Edition of the Works of Francis Parker Yockey, will be published. The third volume, Imperium, will appear in Year Eleven.

Like metapolitical publishers and periodicals on the Left, Counter-Currents simply cannot function without donations from our supporters. Thus each year on our anniversary, Counter-Currents kicks off our annual Summer Fundraiser campaign, which ends on October 31. This year, the goal is $100,000.

Since the beginning of the migrant crisis in 2014, Counter-Currents’ traffic has increased enormously. More of our people are listening than ever before. So we have to get our message to them. I have to get more articles, more podcasts, more videos, more translations, and more books out there. I need to travel more, network more, and bring more people together. But I can’t do it without your help.

2019 is off to a strong start, but we need your help to maintain momentum. Counter-Currents reached almost 1.7 million unique visitors in 2018, but we had only a few more than 400 unique donors keeping the whole thing afloat. Yes, I know, the great thing about the internet is all the free content. But consuming free content means being a free rider on other people’s generosity. This year, one of my resolutions is to convert more free riders to donors and book buyers.

If you want Counter-Currents to thrive, go to our donate page and make a donation today.

Thank you for your loyal readership and support.

Greg Johnson