The Counter-Currents 2020 Fundraiser
Wisterias

2,375 words

My father planted wisterias on the patio of our family’s home when I was nine years old. They refused to grow for a long time — in fact, their insistence on remaining low, depressing vines, drooping ever-downward to the grass, seemed like a personal insult to the handiwork of Mom and Dad. They’ve always been green thumbs, too; our collective efforts even allowed us to cultivate proud stalks of corn in rocky, clay-ridden, rain-soaked Pacific Northwest soil. (I’m still not sure how we did it. If memory serves, black tarps and prayer were involved.) Alas, these wisterias would not budge. Despite all the love and care given to them, they would mope about the base of the awning, looking absolutely sorry for themselves.

My father’s back went bad after a work accident. He couldn’t stoop down to garden the same way he used to. The same thing happened to my mother on account of sciatica.

Then, the wisterias started growing.

They climbed up the wood pillars of the awning quicker than Morrissey turned into a Boomer. Soon, they started flowering, coating the patio with blooms that ranged from pink to purple, depending upon how acidic the soil was that year. The stained wood of the awning was now the home to vines that quite elegantly grew to the top of the structure, gracefully hanging down from horizontal reinforcements. They’re a hit with hummingbirds and humans alike, and a reminder that the natural forms nature takes after are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate with our own simian hands.

My parents were thrilled at this development for two reasons. For one, they were obviously excited that these stubborn plants had finally grown into something beautiful. More importantly, however, they were now under the impression that the trick to gardening in their old age was to simply ignore what they planted. After all, their bad backs prevented them from tending to the wisterias, and it was only when they were neglected that they took off.

My parents, inductive as they are, opted to try out this new gardening strategy with a whole host of remarkable plants, ranging from strange-looking, fuzzy trees to fruits that definitely should have stayed in California (along with the state’s residents). This hands-off approach didn’t yield the kind of results they were hoping for; rather than a repeat of the wisteria miracle, the lovable fools had merely succeeded in dotting their yard with several weird-looking dead things. I suppose that may have some value if you’re an occultist, but my parents don’t share this inclination with me.

My parents have, for the most part, given up on planting anything new. That’s reasonable; they have several trophies under their belt, including Impossible Corn, the wisterias, and other monuments to their phytophilia. They’re also getting older, and have lost an important source of labor; I moved out as soon as such a thing was legally permissible, just shy of a year ago. Mom and Dad are free to rest on their leafy laurels, and rest they do; when the sun shines, I get regular photos of the two collapsed on hammocks, shaded by their ornery wisterias.

The year since I left the roost has been an interesting one. I began writing for Counter-Currents shortly after moving into a dusty one-bedroom apartment, where I was neighbor to Mexicans, meth addicts, and art hoes in New Mexico (or one of those square-shaped states near Texas.) Greg asked me to review the new cover album by Morrissey, and so I did, believing it would be a one-off essay that would allow me to get some of my inner West Coast, record-store-trawling white nationalist’s steam blown off. That was not the case. The reception to the article — broadly negative — inspired me to write even more. The real clincher for me was the accidentally-viral pillory against Rammstein’s self-titled album, which I actually wrote aboard a Spirit Airlines flight to New York. (The lack of legroom meant I had to expend my nervous energy through some other means than Restless Leg Syndrome.) I felt as though I was making a difference — somehow — and wanted to continue. More reviews followed, covering pop to hardcore to drum-n-bass to industrial, before I slowly began to settle into my present niche of neofolk.

I often wish I could go back and tell a 15-year-old me that in just under 4 years, I would be writing for the very publication that I admired most. It would be quite the consolation to a young man who was quickly coming to terms with the hostile world that he lived in, and was becoming disillusioned as a result. Counter-Currents was both a major factor in my changed understanding of the world, and a place of solace for me. I went to college early — 16 — and would endure some of the most mind-numbing, spiritually draining propaganda in my coursework every day. I could turn to the Stormer for comic relief, but I more often turned to Counter-Currents for the stimulation and discussion that was conspicuously absent in my “academic” life.

Counter-Currents has been likened to the University of the Dissident Right. This is by no means an understatement. It was on this site that I was exposed to the foundational principles of ethnonationalism and the arguments one needs to defend that position. It was here I saw the finer threads of culture discussed, debated over, and evaluated — but never deconstructed, as I spent nearly all of my time in college doing to works our people should hold dear. In a world that seemed out to get me — whether through chronic underemployment, street brawls with Negroes twice my age, or tweakers rummaging through my garbage — Counter-Currents seemed out to teach me. This site, and several others beneath this grand umbrella of the Dissident Right, has blossomed into a resource that both affirms the lives of young white people like me at the time they need it most, and challenges them to constantly better themselves in the face of an existential threat.

I use the term blossom because it evokes the same feelings that those of a garden of flowers would, and the process by which we got here is similar to a bed of bulbs, as well. Counter-Currents took a lot of elbow grease to get to this point. For years, the site’s authors and architects labored under relative obscurity, putting in long hours writing, researching, constructing, critiquing, and planning for few, if any, rewards. To be a dissident, especially a dedicated dissident, means to accept some degree of fruitless labor, ostracization, and a malcontentedness that nobody in your daily life can begin to understand nor relate to. The work put into this movement is an awful lot like watering a bunch of lazy wisterias. Countless men spent countless hours working on the philosophical backbone of this cultural renaissance, only to be insulted by a bunch of leaves drooping over the top of a box planter.

Then a miracle happened, and the movement began to grow, and keep growing at rates never seen in any of our lifetimes.

Much like my parent’s wisterias, the work of the Dissident Right has blossomed into a broad vine, one that snakes its way across the fields of social, political, cultural, and philosophical commentary, touching humor, art, and even language along the way. We still contribute to this effort with everything we do now, but just like a flowering vine, we are no longer its sole architects. There is now a comfortable space for us to rest on our own leafy laurels, confident that the networks we have built will disseminate knowledge about our people’s plight and what we must do about it to the ears who need to hear it. We’re seeing these efforts pay off in real time; our only work to do now is metapolitical.

But we must not make the same mistake as my parents did, and assume everything we plant will thrive on its own. My family’s wisterias took years of TLC for them to bloom that one fateful year they were left alone — their later endeavors failed without that same attention.

The time has come for us in the Dissident Right to plant new seeds, and we need the continued dedication, support, and steadfastness of our readers for them to thrive. Much like it is in politicking and gardening, it may be years before we see our efforts making a real impact in the world, but without this devotion, we will never see this impact at all.

Counter-Currents has two goals for this year, both consisting of new projects:

We will overhaul the website itself. Counter-Currents has been online since 2010, and not much has changed under the hood since then. The world of technology moves quickly, and without significant changes made to improve the functionality of the website, we risk being left behind. A new and improved website will mean decreased load times for our readership, the ability to add new features to the site with greater ease, and improved resilience in the face of hostilities, such as the distributed denial-of-service attacks that have plagued both Counter-Currents and its friends over the course of this year. This new and improved website will contain the archives of the whole North American New Right as it always has, but with a renewed focus on the end-user, prevention of code rot, and redundant integrity to ensure the message of our people can be accessed by all.

We will be launching a standalone webshop. Deplatforming by payment processors and online retailers will not be a setback for us. Instead, it will be looked back upon as the impetus we needed to develop our own platform for Dissident Right authors and artists to share their work with their community. Our ultimate goal is to create a network of thinkers and tinkers that cannot be deplatformed, because we are in control of the whole operation. It is this forward-thinking that will guarantee our success in the future, rather than clawing at revenue streams that can be yanked from us at any time.

The state of the Right today is, in no small part, thanks to the efforts of those who truly believed it was capable of making real change. The time has yet again come for us to put our weight behind new efforts, knowing that while we may not see our garden bloom during the years we spend plowing it, our efforts shall begin to bear flowers when we least expect it.

You can support these projects in several different ways.

Entropy

You can send us credit card donations through our Entropy page — just click “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up.

Entropy also provides you with an option to include a short note. You can send us questions about articles, current events, or Greg’s favorite color, and he will answer them in episodes of Counter-Currents Radio and in a new series of “ask me anything” livestreams.

As of right now, Entropy is the only means by which we can accept donations made with a credit card. We are currently in the process of changing that, however; which is why we need your support more than ever to ensure that our plans see success.

Checks and Money Orders

I must confess that I never once put a check in the mail until I started paying rent. The premise seems solid, even to my Internet-addled Zoomer brain. The only way someone can prevent a check or money order from reaching Counter-Currents would be to sift through our mail, which is totally illegal, and could never happen.

If you have retained your checkbook in spite of the tech boom and would like to send us a donation, simply print and complete the Word or PDF donation form and mail it to:

Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd.
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA

If you are printerless, feel free to leave us a handwritten note. We want to be able to thank you.

Cryptocurrency

I, personally, cannot wait until we eschew traditional currencies and pay for everything with verified chunks of data. Unfortunately, that pipe dream is still several years away, but Counter-Currents has always been ahead of the curve. You can easily send us a cryptocurrency donation by following these steps:

• Click here to go to our crypto donation page.
• Click here for a basic primer on how to get started using crypto. However, do not use Coinbase; Coinbase will block transactions to Counter-Currents’ address.

Bank Transfers

If your bank does free money transfers to other banks in the US, please contact Greg Johnson at [email protected]. He’ll sort you.

Bill Payment Services

If you wish to make monthly donations by mail, see if your bank has a bill payment service. Then all you need to do is set up a monthly check to be dispatched by mail to our PO box. This check can be made out to Counter-Currents or to Greg Johnson. After the initial bother of setting it up, you never have to think about it again.

Gift Cards

Gift cards are a useful way to make donations. Gift cards are available with all the major credit cards as well as from major retailers. You can either send gift cards as donations (either electronically or through the mail) or you can use them to make donations. Simply buy a prepaid credit card and click here to use it. If you can find a place that sells gift cards for cash, they are as anonymous as sending cash and much safer.

The Counter-Currents Foundation

Note: Donations to Counter-Currents Publishing are not tax-deductible. We do, however, have a 501c3 tax-exempt educational corporation called The Counter-Currents Foundation. If you want to make a tax-deductible gift, please email me at [email protected]. You can send donations by mail to:

The Counter-Currents Foundation
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA

Remember Us in Your Will

Finally, we would like to broach a very delicate topic: your will. If you are planning your estate, please think about how you can continue helping the cause even after you are gone. The essay “Majority Estate Planning” contains many helpful suggestions.

Remember: Those who fight for the Golden Age live in it today.