Counter-Currents
Franz von Stuck, The Spirit of Victory
1,763 words
Welcome to our new site.
The new site looks similar to the old one, but both inside and outside it is less cluttered and more functional. On the front page, we have preserved the basic blog format, with our featured posts in the main panel, most recent at the top. But we have also added a column on the sidebar that displays the author and title of our 50 most recent posts.
The rationale for this feature is that Counter-Currents puts up around 80 posts a month. People who visit the site daily usually don’t miss a post. But those who come at greater intervals miss out on posts of interest that debut and fall off the main page since their last visit. The new column allows one to take in at a glance everything that has been published in roughly the last two-and-a-half weeks. Like the main page, it is arranged chronologically with the most recent item at the top.
There is also an option for light and dark display modes. Some readers find the dark mode easier on their eyes.
Whenever a new site rolls out, there are always some problems. Please email me at editor@counter-currents.com if you notice anything.
I have chosen this day to unveil the new site for a good reason. One year ago today, I announced that Counter-Currents had lost its last credit card processor. When we tried to find new processors, we were informed that we had been placed on a political blacklist, the MATCH list, administered by MasterCard.
The loss of credit card processing was a severe blow, especially as it fell at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and recession. But Counter-Currents survived and prospered. In fact, in 2020 we brought in slightly more money than in 2019. We lost a lot of supporters who were wedded to the convenience of credit cards. But our most committed supporters pulled together, learned both new and old ways of making payments, and gave more to pick up the slack. We are profoundly grateful.
But credit card deplatforming still managed to hurt us. Yes, our income remained steady. But it remained steady while our traffic was dramatically rising. In February of 2020, we had 154,910 unique visitors. In February of 2021, we had 418,919 unique visitors. Such a dramatic increase in traffic should have meant a similar increase in revenue. It didn’t work out that way partly because new readers may want to help out but don’t follow through because they are wedded to plastic. Thus we need to do more to increase their desire and lower their resistance to donating.
This brings us to another feature of our new site. On Monday, April 12th, Counter-Currents will be extending special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
What will go behind the paywall? The short answer is: stuff you really want to see, including:
- Most of my new articles and reviews
- The reposts of our weekly livestreams
- Selected works by our most popular authors like Jim Goad, Robert Hampton, Spencer Quinn, Collin Cleary, Beau Albrecht, Nicholas Jeelvy, Morris V. de Camp, James O’Meara, Kathryn S., Richard Houck, Margot Metroland, and more.
We generally won’t put things behind the paywall that deal with current events. Instead, we will focus on evergreen material that won’t seem irrelevant after 30 days.
How do you access these privileges?
First, if you have given $120 or more since the beginning of 2020, you will be automatically enrolled for one year. This program is primarily designed to get new people to contribute. We don’t want to ding longtime generous donors for extra money.
Second, because of credit card deplatforming, we can’t take your payment instantly. So we will not institute the paywall feature for one month. That should give you enough time to dust off your checkbook or learn about cryptocurrencies and money transfers.
Third, without credit cards, we cannot do recurring monthly charges for the paywall feature. Furthermore, it would be an administrative nightmare to take monthly payments by check or cryptocurrencies. Thus we simply have to charge you for a single year all at once: $120. That’s less than 33 cents/day.
This is a lot to take in, I know. But you’ve got until April 12th to think about it and prepare, and we will put out weekly reminders.
As an incentive to act now, everyone who joins the paywall between now and Monday, April 12th will receive a free paperback copy of my next book, The Year America Died, which collects together writings — some of them not yet published — from the annus horribilus 2020 about the globalvirus, the race war, the Trumpocalypse, and how white advocates can use them to advance our agenda. The volume also includes some essays from 2018, 2019, and 2021 dealing with related issues. This book will be released on June 1st.
It was our custom at Counter-Currents to launch our annual fundraiser on June 11th, the anniversary of our going online in 2010. Last year, we started on March 10th because it was an emergency. It proved a wise choice, because we needed the extra time to make our goal of $150,000 without a credit card processor. I am now making it our new custom to begin fundraising on March 10th.
This year, our goal is $200,000, up from last year for two reasons. First, we have a lot more readers. Second, last year’s goal was set before we took on Jim Goad as a featured writer. We need the extra money not only to pay his salary but also to take on other “names,” i.e., established professional writers who will bring us new audiences.
All paywall subscriptions will count toward our fundraising goal.
To subscribe to the paywall, we need three things from you: your name, $120, and an email address. Naturally, the most secure address does not contain your real name and is from an encrypted email provider like Protonmail. We will then set you up with an account to which you can log in to comment and access paywalled content. To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment process.
Thank you for your loyal readership and support in this exciting new chapter of our journey.
Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief
How to Donate to Counter-Currents
Counter-Currents, like all advocates of dissident ideas, depends upon the generosity of readers like you to survive and thrive. If you are a past donor, welcome back. If you are contemplating making your first donation, do it in thanks to the past donors that made it possible for you to find Counter-Currents, and pay it forward so others can experience the same delight in discovery.
There are several ways to help out.
1. Credit Cards
In 2019, Counter-Currents was de-platformed from five credit card processors. We applied to a couple of other processors but were turned down. In the process of applying, we discovered that Counter-Currents has been put on the so-called MATCH list, a credit card industry blacklist reserved for vendors with high rates of chargebacks and fraudulent transactions. This is completely inapplicable to Counter-Currents. Thus our placement on this list is simply a lie — a financially damaging lie — that is obviously political in motivation.
Currently the only way we can take credit card donations is through Entropy, a site that takes donations and comments for livestreams. Visit our Entropy page and select “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every weekend.
2. Bank Transfers
It is also possible to support Counter-Currents with bank transfers. Please contact us at orders@counter-currents.com.
3. 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.
4. Cash, Checks and Money Orders
Sometimes the old ways are best. The least “de-platformable” way to send donations to Counter-Currents is to put a check or money order in the mail. 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
Editor@Counter-Currents.com
Thank you, Boomers, for keeping your checkbooks, envelopes, and stamps. There are youngsters reading this site who have never written a check or put a letter in the mail.
5. 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.
6. Crypto-Currencies
In addition to old-fashioned paper donations, those new-fangled crypto-currencies are a good way to circumvent censorious credit card corporations.
- Click here to go to our crypto donation page.
- Click here for a basic primer on how to get started using crypto. Do not, however, use COINBASE. COINBASE will not allow you to send money to Counter-Currents. (Yes, it is that bad.)
7. 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 editor@counter-currents.com. You can send donations by mail to:
The Counter-Currents Foundation
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
8. 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 a better world live in it today.
Thank you again for your loyal readership and generous support.
Greg Johnson
47 comments
My first-reaction thought was “Is it just me or is the reading area even narrower than it already was before? ”
Just checked archives, and while it’s not narrower, it goes further off-center now. Feels very awkward turning my head a few degrees degrees to read. There is plenty of empty space to the left and right, can’t the text be centered with the book sales to the side?
Night mode is very nice and is much appreciated. Recent articles is an improvement over the list of authors (and the comment counter is a nice touch); I never particularly used the author list.
I also like the general “look” of it, I think. Although, flipping back and forth between the current one and the archive example, I note 2 additional things;
1. The book/recent posts sidebar touched the edge of the main article area. The areas both have margins already and this gap is unnecessary, as well as not looking as good.
2. The book/recent posts sidebar moved from left to right; while I have no objective issue with this, it runs contrary to other site design.
I realize this is reading overly negatively; there are a whole bundle of small improvements I’m noticing the more I explore it, and I think (with a little refining) this will be a nice step-up for the site.
Satirical and slightly informative page on site design fundamentals (especially screen-size responsiveness):
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Also, at least in the “awaiting moderation” phase, my comment looks like SHIT. There’s no line returns in there! Please experiment with formatting in comment replies to see what other elements may be affected. It might not affect the end-published comment but it looks awful for me posting it.
“Feels very awkward turning my head a few degrees degrees to read. There is plenty of empty space to the left and right, can’t the text be centered with the book sales to the side?”
I second this
> 1. The book/recent posts sidebar touched the edge of the main article area. The areas both have margins already and this gap is unnecessary, as well as not looking as good.
At first I missed the old site but I am slowly getting used to the new design.
I found I can expand the article I am interested in and. it both covers and obsqures the sidebar. It makes reading in full screen mode on my tablet very satisfactory.
There are doubtless other aspects of the design that will reveal themselves as I further use the site.
Perhaps Greg could also run a parallel old.counter-currents.com site for the traditionalists amongst us.
FOLLOW UP AS OF 3/12/2021:
Nicely done with the quick update on the layout! I have no quibbles with it anymore. Major props to you for being more responsive than most software developers.
Also I just noticed the thing about the paywall. Good lord that is a steep fucking paywall (at ~20 paywall articles a month, thats $0.50 each! And that’s assuming I read all of them, which I don’t). Also, doesn’t this mean you need an account to read the stuff?
Also, isn’t putting the site’s best stuff behind a 30-day paywall going to nuke the relevancy and growth of this site and our ability to share articles on recent events with friends and family? Imagine if I couldn’t share the essays on the Capitol Protest until mid-February!
Dear Robert,
We won’t put most really topical pieces behind the paywall because they won’t age well. Instead, we will put more evergreen content there.
The one exception will be my new articles and reviews. Currently, I plan to put them all behind the paywall. But I am sure I will make some exceptions.
Greg
Understood. Hope it works out.
Nice upgrade!
I’m posting my paywall subscription check for $120 in tomorrow’s mail.
Thanks.
Thanks Richard, I appreciate it.
Greg
Dear Greg Johnson,
I really like the design of the new webzine. It is really cool. It is aesthetically pleasing to look at. There clearly is a lot of effort put in to the information architecture. Did you hire a user experience designer to remodel your webzine?
No we didn’t employ a specialist, but our web designer is quite experienced.
Looks amazing! 100% more useable & readble.
Thanks, but soon it will be 110% percent better.
The website is GREAT! It is visually very clear and is modern and yet classical too with the serif typeface. I love the Night Mode. Excellent job, I think sometimes it takes a (little) while to get used to a new interface, but I think you did a great job with the redesign, the aesthetic is very pleasing. I will make a donation in support of yours and the CC team’s hard work.
Thanks so much. We are taking everyone’s comments and suggestions very seriously.
Re the black background option: Please NEVER eliminate the white background, even if the black one becomes more popular. I cannot read websites with dark backgrounds.
Also, is there any possibility of adding an “edit” feature, used if one, eg, discovers typos when rereading a comment after posting? I wonder if others would appreciate such a feature.
Finally, either I do not understand the new site’s format, or I have discovered a huge ‘bug’ in this design. How do you find all of an author’s past posts? It used to be wonderfully simple. Now I clicked on “Greg Johnson” under “Authors” at the top right, and it only shows posts going back to Dec 2020. I cannot see how to access the next bunch (going backwards chronologically). I did the same with “Ricardo Duchesne”. That list only went back to 2018. Worse, if you click on “Archives” for the month of Oct 2020, you can only access from Oct 31-Oct 29. How does one access all the rest?
Thank you and best of luck.
Oh, and my “preview” did not contain the paragraphs as I had originally written them. Everything I had written was bunched up in one continuous paragraph. Is this an intentional new feature? If so, what’s the purpose?!
I thought the old design was very good; in fact, this was one of my favorite websites in terms of layout as well as content. I thought it was very well done. I don’t see where the current format is an improvement. I find the visibility much less than the previous incarnation. This type face is very washed out, grayish instead of a vivid and clear black. Indeed, on my computer it looks “gray on gray” – gray instead of white background in addition to the grayish font. The readability has been much reduced.
I will see about the edit comments option.
The scrolling back should be fixed today.
Thanks!
I can’t seem to scroll back yet past the first page of an author’s list of articles. But thanks for recognizing that this is a problem. I’m trying gradually to go back and read all the articles that I missed and would have read originally, had I discovered this site a decade ago. Among intellectual nationalists in the English-speaking world, this site is the best, imo. I like AR (loved the print edition and thought it was better than the website) and The Occidental Observer and read them, too, somewhat regularly. Vdare is useful. Old articles by William Pierce and Revilo Oliver are always worth reading. Instauration online (like AR) brings back memories for me personally. But CC is a cut above all of them. It’s only real rival in intellectual quality is The Occidental Quarterly, but they are really two different types of enterprises (even if their goals overlap).
Keep up the good work.
Another issue. Is there a point to having footnotes in red – clickable footnotes? I’m not being sarcastic. I don’t understand CC’s “theory of the footnote”. That footnote feature really hasn’t ever worked properly here. My understanding is that one should be able to click on the footnote marked [1], and then be automatically scrolled down to footnote #1. If footnote #1 also has a red [1] in front of it, then one should be able to click on that in turn and be autoscrolled back to where the first red colored [1] appeared in the main text.
Try doing that with the footnotes in a recent post, and see if that is what happens.
Congrats on the new design. I like it. I found my way here to CC in early 2021 after looking for the post-Taki location of one Jim Goad. What I found was a great site and a few new writers worth reading. And of course, Jim Goad. The comments section is great here too as regrettably, many sites are eliminating this key feature from their lineup in order to please their leftist overlords concerned we might keep pointing out that the election was systematically stolen from President Donald Trump. Oops, sorry ‘bout that.
A good thing is that the comments and replies appear nested on the smart phone view now. That was a weakness of the older version.
Another cool thing would be to have upvotes like on Zman. That would be cool. Let’s see how deep a nesting we can create.
A while ago, at the end of each article, you used to have a row of “other articles you might like” listed from your archive. Would be nice to have that back. It’s a good way to keep old, but still relevant, content alive.
Here’s another interesting site: http://www.culturecritique.com
Yes we are planning to add that feature.
It’s better now to be able to easily scroll through the last 50 posts at once as opposed to the last 10 or whatever it was before.
One thing I’ve noticed though, I can’t click on an author’s profile directly from the main screen, i.e. I can click on yours from this article but I can’t click on e.g. Kathryn S’s profile directly from the sidebar. Any chance you could add this function?
Btw, I check the site at least once every day now, so I’m happy to pay you the $120 – great work!
Looks great!
I like this new design, very much.
Will “agree”/”disagree” enabled for comments? I believe it can facilitate engagement and, roundaboutly, increase traffic (that is, people love to opine, but only a fraction will write a comment; if they can opine with a click, on the other hand: more comments read and more interaction).
I’ve assumed this common feature’s absence was deliberate, but just wanted to make a small case for it.
As always, CC is the gold-standard.
Nice job, Greg. Clean-lined and handsome. Very White!
I have tried to use the Search function, though, and it does not work for me.
What browser are you using?
I use Safari. I tried it out on Brave later on and it worked, so I guess it’s a browser issue.
Came back to show my appreciation with the new site. Can report that search does not work in Firefox 86.0 64 bit. Anyway, it’s a really good idea to replace that google search thing. This is going to be fantastic.
Search works now.
Also, the scroll function on the grayish box (with all the books) is very slow. From my opinion it should be a bit faster.
Money is tight, but this won’t hurt at all. I quit the Taki’s Mag ad free experience, so I can send that money here now. Cole started to badmouth and mock The Ethnostate—if we regard him as a reverse barometer that means means CC is on to something; Goad is here; Ann Coulter will be alright.
Great job on the new site. Nice and clean.
I really hope this works out for you.
I do have every sympathy for those for whom money is tight right now. But for those of us lucky enough to be able to continue working despite Covid, 33 cents per day is a very modest contribution.
The new website is beautiful, great work.
Now I have a reason to start collecting bitcoins.
Presumably, a UK-issued cheque (you spell ‘check’) is invalid in the States.
I’ve used bank transfers when paying for goods from elsewhere in Europe. Is a bank transfer to shunt money to the USA as straightforward – or are there hidden costs? (E.g., Western Union always takes a big rake-off.)
A general note on commenting: I don’t receive notifications if someone responds to one of my posts. Am I missing an obvious fix, or is there a glitch in the system?
I’m going to put the next word – testing – into bold to see if I’ve correctly understood the HTML attribute codes!
Do contributing writers have to pay?
Could counter currents do some article on :
– The attack on fashion (men and womens)
– Lowering of beauty and health standards
– Aesthetics and body building
In general, its good to have a wider variety of content.
It makes it more acceptable to share counter currents links with newbies. It also makes it more acceptable to donate to a website that posts that sort of content.
By the way, this was quite a white pill to see Texas GOP go against the governer and stand for free speech platform GAB.
More proof that local politics are where we should start.
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/texas-gop-stands-with-free-speech-platform-gab-against-greg-abbott-and-rino-vice-chair/
RSS and Dlive icons in the header are not clickable, in contrst to those at the bottom.
A friendly reminder to the editor and webmaster that if one clicks on “Greg Johnson” under AUTHORS at the top left of the screen, it is still only possible to scroll down to Johnson’s posts since Dec 2020. “Ricardo Duchesne” goes back to 2018 only, and so forth. If one clicks on ARCHIVES for January 2021, it only goes from Jan 31 down to Jan 21.
I also second the fellow commenter who called for the return of that excellent past feature at the bottom of new posts which showed the titles of random past articles of interest . That was a wonderful inspiration to back browsing. I enjoyed it immensely, and had been disappointed when one day I realized it had disappeared.
I’m delighted to report that these problems appear to have been fixed. I have done some exploration to confirm this. One can click on Archives and access all the posts for a given month; ditto for the totality of individual contributions under Authors. Thanks to the webmaster for his efforts in this regard.
Off Topic:
Dr. Johnson,
Some time ago, you mentioned a work by William Altman, ‘The German Stranger’; at the time you wrote that you planned to post a review of said work; did I miss it, or did it never appear? Thanks.
I never reviewed it.
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