Counter-Currents
1,233 words
When I first began frequenting Counter-Currents, I was working at a university as a “writing consultant,” which — stripping away the fancy-sounding title — meant that I was a tutor, or “paper doctor,” as I called it. And as a “paper doctor,” my professional diagnosis was usually that the assignments themselves were lousy — dead on arrival.
Sure, many college kids had a hard time structuring a research paper, or coming up with an argumentative thesis. But they were working with some pretty uninspiring raw materials. Who wants to write about Nelson Mandela and his “freedom struggle” against, roughly translated in Wakandawahili, “the baddies” again? Did I immediately out myself as a white nationalist? No, readers. But I did make it a point to encourage students to write on subjects they found interesting, not ones their professors did.
And I have encouraging news and not-so-encouraging news about students. The bad news is that indeed, most of them never thought to stray from the path laid out for them (the few who did were actually foreign students — very wise to the JQ is much of Latin America). They believed that some positions were self-evidently “unconscionable,” and so did not feel the need to investigate topics like anti-diversity, anti-feminism, or anti-liberalism themselves. The good news is that some are open enough. Enough to pause when gently questioned about the orthodoxies they have taken for granted. Baby steps.
Student: “Islam is a religion of peace.”
The Paper Doctor: “Is it, though?”
S: “There’s no such thing as ‘the Japanese people.’ This identity was a social construct devised by right-wing reactionaries after WWII.”
PD: “No.” (Alright, nicer than that.)
I remember when my sporadic visits became a daily fix. After reading a fascinating review on the film Padmaavat, it was then that I realized I had fallen in love. Yes, this was, in many ways, a love story. Sneaking peeks at Counter-Currents during office hours and breaks between student meetings was a coping device. Not only did it give me the strength to get through yet another tutoring session with yet another braindead prompt, but it also gave me the courage and articulated the arguments needed to push back against the most outrageous academic beliefs (which is all of them, really).
Thus armed with the convictions I developed while poring through the archives of C-C (does any other Dissident Right website offer such a deep dive in material?), I assured students that it is OK to think that Western civilization was awesome. It is OK not to care about colored-people problems. It is OK to prefer the Spanish conquistadores to the staggeringly monstrous Aztec Empire. It is OK not to go see the movie that your professor has raved about — 12 Years a Slave — but to watch Interstellar instead. It is OK to be white.
We have a good time here writing and commenting, but these activities are addressing the most serious crisis of our times. Recess is over. We’re at the Olympics now, and we must prepare for and win the test, one with enormous implications. Counter-Currents is, by far, the best Dissident Right webpage that I’ve ever discovered online. And I don’t mean that other sites aren’t doing good work. They are. We don’t need to make ourselves look better by taking swipes at others. That said, Counter-Currents is special. For me, it felt like home. And because the act of finding again, saving, and building our homes is, at bottom, what this whole movement is about — keep the fires burning at this most important home for dissident thought.
Give today, so that we can give back tomorrow.
* * *
This year, Counter-Currents is trying to raise $200,000 to sustain and improve our work. Since our last update, we have had 25 donations totaling $11,994.43. This means we have received a total of 976 donations and a grand total of $135,667.85 since we started our fundraiser on March 10th. Thus we are more than 60% of the way to our goal, with just over two months of the year left. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has helped out so far, but we have more than $64,000 to go before we reach our goal . . . and time is running out. Full details about how to give are below.
(1) E-Checks
If you are in the United States, E-checks are the fastest and most convenient way to send money to Counter-Currents. All you need is your checkbook.
(2) Credit Cards
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.
(3) Bank Transfers
It is also possible to support Counter-Currents with bank transfers. Please contact us at [email protected].
(4) 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.
(5) 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
[email protected]
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.
(6) 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.
(7) 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.)
(8) 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
(9) 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
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19 comments
The problem is the lack of comments. Compare zman’s one man blog for instance. A lot more interesting content here and from many more writers yet not even 1/10th of the comments zman gets.
I think you need additional perks for members. Maybe a weekly call they can join.
I don’t see the lack of comments as a problem, in fact I would rather see more nuanced replies to essays as I learn more. Additionally, (I think) it is more about the number of views obtained/pages visited. Just because an essay only gets a few responses doesn’t mean the message is not getting digested by many thousands of people. I also visit The Unz Review, American Renaissance and The Occidental Observer if I want to read some short replies and glance over what others think to issues.
I think CC is great and I have learnt so much in my short time visiting here. I just wish I had more time (and money !) to read more of the past essays, book reviews etc. Anyway, just my 2 cents worth. Cheers. …
TOO gets a lot of very detailed comments. Some are ranting and bizarre, but many are well-formulated and serious. One thing I’ve noticed, somewhat to my dismay, about CC is that both the quantity and the quality of comments has markedly declined from its early years. I often reread posts from the early years (K.S. is correct that there is marvelous educational material archived here; for the intellectual white preservationist, there is no better site I can think of in that regard). There used to be very long and involved and frequently fascinating internal debates, especially regarding the philosophical first principles of the movement. One would see recurring names repeatedly offering lengthy comments. Few of them do so anymore. Have they died? Or just lost interest (or moved to other sites – and what might those be?)? I have often, since the pandemic started, written detailed (and I hoped thoughtful and sober) responses to various articles and the issues they raised. Seldom have I received what I deem comparably serious replies.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that many of the most intellectually stimulating posts get put behind the paywall. These posts might never generate the greatest volume of comments – but they might be the ones to elicit the most interesting ones. I think they should not go behind the paywall. If the goal of the paywall is to form a stable community of readers (as well as income), it seems that the kinds of posts that predictably seem to be most popular should be the ones to go behind it. (Of course, I don’t really know much about website publishing, so my amateur surmises might be inaccurate.)
Can you link some of the threads and name some of the commentators?
Surely some people have died. Others may just have “rebranded.” Some probably have lost interest either in CC or WN. I doubt any of them became liberal democrats. More likely they just lost interest in the movement altogether, not for intellectual reasons but personal ones. For instance, I know of people who stopped because they did not like particular authors or commentators.
I would like a more active commenting community here. Hence the paywall. I thought that would happen when moderation disappeared for our more committed commenters. I think discussion has picked up a bit, but not as much as I expected, because many people who joined the paywall were longtime lurkers who prefer not to comment at all.
Unz has huge comment threads that are moderated, but they seem to let almost all comments through. I might get 200 + comments on one of my reviews there whereas I get 7 to 10 here. But to be honest, only 7 to 10 of the Unz comments are interesting. Many are dumb or obnoxious, and large numbers are off-topic.
In any case, I appreciate and read your comments here.
Thank you for your reply, and saying you read my comments. I was not engaging in any sort of special pleading (and I hope that’s not how I appeared). I greatly enjoy meandering around the site, stopping to read posts and their comments as the fancy strikes. It just seems to me that a decade ago there was a larger community of commenters, who in turn not only wrote more comments than CC’s visitors today, but much longer ones, too. There are thousands of posts archived here, so it’s difficult to pinpoint examples. Perhaps an empirical analysis would prove my impression incorrect.
Nor was my comment a criticism of CC, either. It’s very impressive to have put together something like CC, and to keep it going year after year on a shoestring budget (I’ve always been impressed with Jared Taylor, too, but I think AR has somewhat greater and more assured access to funds).
It was more of a lament, really, less about CC per se than my fear – I hope incorrect – that the true market for white nationalist intellectuality is very small. I’m a great believer in the genetic underpinnings of true (as opposed to socio-osmotically-derived) ideological preference (I was not raised in any sort of “racist” home, though it was even less “antiracist”. Nevertheless, I instinctively recognized that race differences in behavior were innate, and that the races were neither equal in ability and character, nor fungible. There is no scenario where I would ever have been woke, or even a race liberal.) Thus, the fact that WN hasn’t made more headway here (and especially in Europe) since the advent of the internet, with its unrivaled ability to disseminate verboten information, suggests that our race always possessed a latent evolutionary defect requiring the right external [moral, social, cultural, and ideological] environment to become active and dangerous – a genetic time bomb awaiting its trigger.
I think white preservationists must consider the possibility that not only do most whites not care about racial perpetuity, they cannot be made to (at least as a matter of evidence and deliberation about the future). Only when the consequences of their genetically-driven collective racial folly become individually, physically unavoidable (as in, eg, a prison; or when whites get set upon by a savage mob) do large numbers of modal whites awaken. And by that point, our preservationist problems will themselves no longer be intellectual – scientific-anthropological and ethical – but physical and martial, and we cannot assume that we will then possess the necessary power to prevail (as we still would today) in that kind of struggle.
…
I suppose the record for comments would be the discussion/debate conducted about Covington’s NWF initiative (about 300).
Here are some persons who once commented frequently and at length, but no longer seem to (I’m probably forgetting a lot, too): Chechar, Will Williams, LEW, MOB, Matt Parrott, Trainspotter, Ulf Larsen, White Republican, Gregor, Fourmyle of Ceres (though he had – is it called loggorhea?), Michael O’Meara, Karsten, Sam Davidson, Wandrin, Jaego, Junghans, Petronius, Armor, April Gaede, Mr. Dithers, Stronza, and many other names one doesn’t see much if at all anymore. I also can’t help noticing that you were far more present as a commenter than is the case today.
Parrott went on to found his various trad groups with Heimbach, whom I pegged early on as someone to steer clear of. Chechar has his own blog now. Will Williams is running the National Alliance. MOB comments at National Vanguard, last I heard. Trainspotter was a great commentator. I miss him, but last I know we were on friendly terms. I think White Republican is no longer alive. O’Meara got burned out. Jaego became obnoxious, so I banned him. Petronius is still around. April is still around. Stronza still comments from time to time. Fourmyle may no longer be alive. Not sure about Sam Davidson, Junghans, Amor, and Mr. Dithers. I think I ran LEW off in a somewhat salty exchange. I wish he would come back.
You did not mention Rhondda. I liked her and wish she would come back.
Some people definitely found more congenial platforms to comment on. I am sure some were alienated from CC for one reason or another. For instance, I lost some friends over my essay on revisionism. I made National Socialists and neo-nazis angry when I argued it was self-marginalizing and also factually wrong to argue it is the only authentic form of white identity politics. I lost some people for criticizing aspects of the Alt Right and the manosphere.
When the Alt Right started shifting to White Nationalism 1.0 rhetoric, complete with the “Day of the Rope,” I stopped publishing anything that would get those people excited. I had the naive idea that we can talk objectively about interwar fascist movements and later “neo” incarnations without encouraging historical reenactors and live-action roleplayers. I was wrong about that.
For what it’s worth, I enjoy reading your comments here also, along with Hamburger Today and Kathryn S just off the top of my head. There are a few others I look forward to as well. As Greg mentioned, perhaps there is a large lurking presence who are comfortable to financially support CC but for whatever reason do not comment.
Just speaking for myself, I do not have some of the intellectual background many here do, so I read and research when I find something I wish to know more about. I would rather understand the argument someone is trying to make, and to do so, I will have to spend time doing additional reading to ‘catch up’ so to speak, and that takes time. WN history and politics is of course for all Whites, but it is also can be a rigorous intellectual movement which takes time to understand and develop in the individual. Perhaps that is another reason for the current lack of comments – I don’t know. It certainly is the case in my situation.
Thank you for the encouragement. To grow in knowledge about WN and its underpinnings, you’ve certainly come to the best place. Besides the many articles here, there are some books you must read (copy this list; fwd it to others):
Johnson, The White Nationalist Manifesto;
Taylor, White Identity;
Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority and The Ethnostate;
Francis (ed.) Race and the American Prospect;
Nelson, America Balkanized;
Salter, On Genetic Interests;
Pearson, Heredity and Humanity;
Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behavior;
Murray, Human Diversity;
Levin, Why Race Matters;
MacDonald, The Culture of Critique;
Bolton, The Perversion of Normality (I’ve only read reviews of this one);
Faye, Archaeofuturism.
Many, many others (eg, Yockey, Imperium; Baker, Race; Simpson, Which Way Western Man?; Oliver, America’s Decline; Reed, The Controversy of Zion; Brimelow, Alien Nation; many books by Richard Lynn – and much else) could be recommended. But the above list will get you up to speed, fast.
Thank you for the list, I appreciate it very much. I’m looking forward to ordering Kerry Bolton’s new book when I have the money ( I have gone back to school, so back to a student’s budget). I can’t remember who did the review of it, but it was very compelling.
I don’t know how many people I speak for, but most of the time after reading an article and looking through the comments I usually find one that approximates what I’m thinking. It seems sort of pointless to to write “I agree”.
I agree.
Heh heh
I agree CC is special and lately has been ‘crushing it’. Donated some crypto.
CC is a treasure! Please give.
I agree with several of the statements above.
I appreciate and have always valued comment sections and interactivity. I also read comments–and not just those for my own articles.
The site redesign greatly downgraded the ability to follow and become aware of new comments.
There are only five partial “Recent Comments” showing in the sidebar at the moment, but I never remember to look at them because they’re so far down you have to scroll to see them. Given that they no longer show either commenters’ names, or the articles being commented upon, the brief excerpts give basically no information. In the previous design all of this was on top and easy to follow.
The authors of a piece will be the ones most likely to check at least their own most recent article to see the number of new comments (for a little while, because they’ll remember it), but no one else will. And even that’s doable only briefly.
Today I wrote a long comment about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” an article that is only a few days old (Oct. 26), but it is unlikely anyone, including the author, will see it by this time. Under the old system it would be easily visible and show my name and the article that was being commented upon.
Under that system I was able to follow many comments easily. Now I am able to notice and read only a few.
It’s much harder, too, to find authors’ names because they’re not listed in the sidebar the way they used to be. It took me a while to locate the relevant tag, and you have to be at the very top of the main page to even see it. Once you scroll down just a little the section disappears.
I’m glad we’re having a “reader interaction” discussion here.
I can only speak for myself, but for a while (and before I began writing for C-C), I was simply reading the articles here and not paying much attention to the commentary afterwards. At that point, I’d convinced myself that roving through “the comments section” of any website was like gazing into the proverbial abyss. After writing for C-C, I of course did pay attention to the comments and realized that it’s not like that here at all, and within those reactions there were thoughtful (and some of the most compelling) conversations going on. It was my fault, and it took a while for me to recognize it and start to engage that way.
There are people who, for whatever reason — shyness (partly my problem), the intimidation factor, a discomfort with debate — may not ever comment. But as for encouraging those who would be willing to contribute in that way, maybe having a “best comments” of the week or month post would boost interactivity; maybe a “best comments debate” show on the Writer’s Bloc every once in a while, with a panel of writers and/or commentators who want to participate. This would make more work, I realize, and I think C-C does a good job of encouraging reader participation already, but it’s worth trying to come up with tactics to keep the discussions lively and everyone motivated.
Kathryn S,
Please keep on writing, as and when you have time. It is a real pleasure to read your submissions.
I wish I had more time to comment at CC in depth, but I rarely have the time to sit and organize my thoughts.
I thoroughly enjoy reading the comment section, though. I like to consider and weigh all the ideas that are discussed and debated by the CC community. I appreciate the humor, too.
Thank you for the encouragement, Desert Flower. It’s a joy to read comments and reply to such a community of like-minded people just as it is for me to write articles. I like to imagine who, among the men and women I see throughout the day, might be scrolling through our words and smiling along. I’ll see somebody reading a book about Metternich, Solzhenitsyn, or Tolstoy and wonder, “have you read the cool piece I just read?”
You must still be somewhere in academia, because I assure you, no one anywhere around me will ever be seen reading Metternich or Solzhenitsyn, and it is a rare treat indeed to see someone reading Tolstoy. And, sadly, although I’m nothing special, I am not blue-collar. Real reading (offline) is nearly dead. Wokeness is not helping its revival, either.
I second Desert Flower. Please keep writing.
Still around students and plenty of books, Lord Shang. Real reading, as you say, might indeed be dying. But every other person seems to claim to be an intellectual these days, and they love buying classics. I’ve also noticed that there’s been a wave of pop mythology that’s swept reading culture — a feminist-inspired translation of the Aeneid, the pretty terrible new Stephen Fry series, and such. Still, there are always a few whom I know/see trying something more substantive. I will say that the man I talked to about Solzhenitsyn was middle-aged, not a young student.
Anyway, always good to hear from you!
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