The Counter-Currents 2022 Fundraiser
How I Found Counter-Currents

Nicholas Roerich, Star of the Hero, 1932

946 words

Editor’s Note: This year, Counter-Currents aims to raise $300,000. Last week, a donor offered a $1,500 Earth Day matching grant in honor of the birth of his fourth child. We had an amazing week. We quickly blew past the matching grant, bringing in a total of $25,110.50. That puts our grand total at $82,318.12. We are now more than 27% of the way to our goal, and we only started last month, on March 10th. Thank you to all our generous supporters! Information on how you can help appears below.

Today’s article is the first in a series of personal stories of how our readers and supporters discovered Counter-Currents. If you would like to tell your story, please contact us at [email protected].

I found Counter-Currents thanks to Amazon.com. Allow me to explain. I was raised in a conventionally conservative, Christian, and racially egalitarian home. I developed libertarian sympathies early on (which I hold to this day), and even though it was obvious to me that the members of different racial groups behaved and performed very differently from each other in school, I clung as a matter of principle to an equal-opportunity style of individualism: I’ll judge you by your performance and not your group if you stop discriminating against me via affirmative action. Gradually, reality made further inroads, and I began to recognize the intractability of racial differences and the high costs of so-called diversity, all of which (it seemed) were to be borne exclusively by whites.

At some point, my budding dissident proclivities led me to the work of Jared Taylor and American Renaissance. I had seen copies of Paved with Good Intentions in mainstream bookstores, and I think I had even received solicitations in the mail to subscribe to AmRen when it was still a monthly tabloid. (These could only have resulted from AmRen purchasing the mailing lists of mainstream conservative magazines, something unimaginable today.) I started following Taylor’s essays and videos online, and his calm reasonableness and careful documentation quickly converted me to a self-conscious race realist and white sympathizer.

In 2014 I got around to buying Taylor’s book White Identity, where I bought pretty much all of my books, on Amazon. As I read through the Amazon reader reviews, I noticed a curious pattern: several reviewers of Taylor’s (excellent) book stated that another indispensable pro-white writer was Greg Johnson, author of a book called Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country. My first reaction to this title was a kind of repugnance. I still wanted, at least publicly, to support the individualist compromise. I was increasingly open to the idea that non-whites might not fare well under my individualist terms, and that (à la Taylor) whites were a real group with legitimate interests. But I could not allow myself to admit that a white country would be a nice thing—such a nice thing as to be a worthy object of aspiration alongside truth and justice. I was still at least partially in the grip of what Johnson has rightly described as the strongest taboo today—the taboo against white identity politics. So (as best I can recall) I steered clear of Greg Johnson and Counter-Currents for a couple more years.

But eventually, I would guess in 2016 or 2017, curiosity got the best of me. These were still the halcyon days before widespread online censorship, and Google obligingly led me to Counter-Currents as the place to find Greg Johnson’s work. Much as with Jared Taylor, I found it very hard to argue with any of Greg’s conclusions. I had assumed someone would have to be a slack-jawed, Hollywood-style racist bent on the destruction or oppression of non-whites in order to advocate White Nationalism. I am a little embarrassed to admit that it had not occurred to me that one could be a White Nationalist while also supporting the human rights of non-whites, including their right to their own nations and homelands. I started reading everything I could find by Greg, including Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country—then still readily available on Amazon.

Of course, I quickly discovered that Counter-Currents was home to other consistently good writers—Robert Hampton, Rich Houck, and Travis LeBlanc were among my early favorites. Since then, Counter-Currents has become one of very few sites that I read regularly, and I consider it an indispensable resource for our movement. Many sites and sources are covering politics from a pro-white perspective, but Counter-Currents is the best source for pro-white cultural commentary and reflection—metapolitics, as Greg would put it. I am grateful for the proliferation of individual commentators on alternative tech platforms, but I miss the editorial vetting and polishing provided by more traditional magazines and journals, as well as by Counter-Currents. Web hosting and design aside, it takes a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to transform raw author submissions into a steady stream of high-quality online content.

My parents taught me the importance of charitable giving, and the libertarian in me believes we should pay for the things we use and value rather than free-riding off the labor of others. I value Counter-Currents, and I want Greg and the other important voices of our movement to focus on what they do best—thinking, writing, and speaking—rather than begging for money to pay the bills. So each year since 2018, I have included Counter-Currents in my planned giving. I have a conventional middle-class job; I am not on the frontlines of advocating for our people and our future. But I can support those who are. If you value Counter-Currents and are grateful we have eloquent defenders of a nice white country, you should support them, too.

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