Counter-Currents
The Counter-Currents 2024 Fundraiser
Why the Left Keeps Winning (For Now)
Greg Johnson
1,168 words
The Nation is the flagship magazine of the American Left. It is also the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States.
The Nation was founded on July 6, 1865, on the ashes of the Confederacy. The Nation was the successor to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, which was closed after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Once slavery had been abolished and the Confederacy defeated, The Nation undertook the broader project of reconstructing America on the foundations of the Egalitarian Civil Religion set forth in Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”
For more than 150 years, The Nation has been true to its mission, always pushing politics and culture further to the Left. And the American nation has followed its lead; whether Americans followed enthusiastically or grudgingly, they followed.
What has this to do with Counter-Currents?
The mainstream Right in America wins many battles but continues to lose the overall war with the Left because it has never fundamentally understood the importance of ideas. Yes, conservatives like to quote the title of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. But they don’t have the faintest idea what the book actually says. (At Counter-Currents, we actually read Weaver.)
Moreover, what passes for the ideas of mainstream conservatives — normative anti-racism and pious rot about “all men are created equal” — are indistinguishable from the ideas of the Left, so they are bound to have the same consequences anyway. Conservatives just want to enact radical egalitarianism slowly and legally.
In 1897, Robert Lewis Dabney summed up the uselessness of American conservatism in words that remain true today:
This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle.
If the Right is ever to roll back the Left, if we are ever to halt then reverse America’s accelerating march to perdition, we need to uphold the correct “sturdy principles,” namely the rejection of racial egalitarianism and all of its noxious consequences, including the lie of conservative civic nationalism. Moreover, we need to communicate these true principles far and wide, as persuasively as possible, using every available medium. Finally, we need to persist until our ideas reach the tipping point and can change the course of history.
How long will it take? Nobody knows. But if it takes 150 years, we want Counter-Currents to still be there, still reeling America back from the abyss.
What does it take? Money and commitment. We’ll supply the commitment. We need you to supply the money — which of course implies commitment as well. In its more than 150 years of Left-wing vanguardism, The Nation made a profit only one year. But The Nation persists because people on the Left appreciate the power of ideas. Thus year after year, they donate to keep it fighting.
Counter-Currents is trying to raise $300,000 this year, a tiny fraction of what publications like The Nation raise. Thus far, we have raised $205,870.39, for which we are enormously grateful. Thus we are more than two-thirds of the way there! But please hurry, because the absolute deadline is the end of the year, which is just a bit more than two weeks away.
For years, Counter-Currents had a populist strategy of supporting ourselves with book purchases and small donations from many different individuals. But that changed dramatically due to deplatforming:
In the Fall of 2018, my book The White Nationalist Manifesto was vying with Francis Fukuyama’s Identity — a lame critique of white identity politics — for the top slot in Amazon’s political philosophy and nationalism categories. This frightened the Left, because in a fair debate, they know they can’t win. (My critique of Fukuyama’s book is here, here, and here. Fukuyama still has not responded to The White Nationalist Manifesto.)
In February of 2019, Amazon unrolled a new campaign of censorship against White Nationalist ideas. The first two books they banned were The White Nationalist Manifesto and Jared Taylor’s White Identity. Eventually, all Counter-Currents books were banned, and in a truly Orwellian turn, Amazon did more than stop selling our books; they also deleted many of their product pages, including customer reviews, so it was as if the books had never been published. Barnes and Noble, Amazon’s biggest “competitor,” quickly followed suit. Thus Counter-Currents lost access to 80% of the global book market. Since 2021, Amazon censorship has lightened. But book sales have never recovered, and book publishing has been relegated to the category of things that take 80% of the work to produce 20% of the impact.
Also in 2019, Counter-Currents was blacklisted from the global credit card processing industry. Our enemies correctly calculated that kicking us off PayPal and blacklisting us from credit card processors would eliminate a lot of our less committed supporters, simply by making it inconvenient to donate or buy our products. They were correct.
Counter-Currents has also been systematically censored by major internet search engines. Earlier this year, I discovered that Duck Duck Go, which is the search engine that CC’s own search function uses, will not return results for certain articles at Counter-Currents itself. This is true of most other major search engines as well.
Yet Counter-Currents continues to grow. 2024 was our best year yet in terms of traffic.
All this censorship and deplatforming is, frankly, flattering. The Nation and other publications of the Left have never faced this kind of censorship from the plutocracy, and that speaks volumes. Of course it is also frustrating. But it has only slowed us down a bit. It hasn’t stopped us, and it won’t stop us. We’ve just had to adapt.
We are still a populist journal, but to survive elitist deplatforming, we have had to adopt a more elitist strategy. We need to cultivate larger donations from a smaller number of highly committed and relatively wealthy supporters. One way such individuals can help is by sponsoring matching grants. If you are interested in sponsoring such a grant, please reach out to me at [email protected].
Large or small, all donations are greatly appreciated. Please give what you can. That’s all it takes. If everyone just gave what he could, our movement would be much bigger and more effective. But it is important to do what you can today.
Please visit our Donate page to explore all the available options.
Merry Christmas!
Greg Johnson
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16 comments
You GJ didn’t mention the 600 lbs Lib Leftist elephant pooping in the room:
The Je*s.
The Je*s took over both The Nation and my favorite hard copy magazine of politics and culture in the early 1990s – “The Atlantic Magazine”.
It wasn’t “ideas” that won out, it was ethnic, tribal power plays, same as the J media mafia taking over all Hollywood studios, taking over National Review/the Jonah Goldberg Goldberg Review – where Goldberg, Bill Kristol, David From simply purged any and all White Gentiles (Pat Buchanan, John O’Sullivan, Peter Brimelow, Joe Sobran, Thomas Fleming, John “the Derb” Derbyshire etc) from National Review/Conservative Inc for daring to speak against the many Zionist, Neo Conservative wars, interventions, “fightin’ for Freedom and Democracy against other Axis of Evil, Saddam, Milosovitch, Assad, Putin were all HITLERS)….
.. .
Why did Jews choose to take over news and entertainment media rather than, say, buy up cheap hotels? Because ideas matter to politics.
OK bit in this case , IMO “ the ideas that matter “ are the J ethnic mafia successfully dominating , monopolizing all the American media from Lib Left to Right . It s the same , identical to the Sicilian Italian Mafia dominating organized crime in the ISA from the 1920s – 1980s . IMO the Italian mafia success was about $ and their ethnic group’s power not because if their “ ideas “
again , in my opinion the Neo Con Jews didn t take over National Review and pretty much all of Conservative Inc by the power or validity of their “ ideas” it was simply a Je& ethnic power play sane as with their J Bolshevism . It takes a Stalin to challenge , take over this J ethnic power – not some nice , honest ha Wite guy with better ideas ,
Why do Jews aim for power over the media, while the mafia works on gambing, prostitution, drugs, etc.? Because ideas shape politics, and Jews want political power.
Or Jews? How Jewish is the Mafia?
The island of Sicily had a sizeable Jewish population in late antiquity, as indicated by epitaphs, tomb decorations and other finds that are the widest-ranging from all of Italy besides Rome. (The Economic History of European Jews)
Many Sicilians from the Palermo region in the northwest, the Siracusa region in the southeast, and the province of Agrigento in the southwest descend in part from Sicilian Jews and Sephardic Jews who were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism in the 1490s. There had also been ancient Phoenician settlers in Sicily who were genetically similar to the Israelites. (The Maternal Genetic Lineages of Ashkenazic Jews)
Not cheap hotels Greg. Are you forgetting about the Pritzker family?
“It wasn’t “ideas” that won out, it was ethnic, tribal power plays …”
Racial thinking is correct and it works, and the many “ideas”-based alternatives that are too fine and delicate to touch race are worthless and a waste of time and money.
We should support Counter-Currents whenever we have the money because Counter-Currents is intelligently promoting the one thing that could save us.
We should divert none of our money to weak religious and “cultural” causes that avoid race. That stuff doesn’t work.
It seems that Jews are empowered by viewing themselves as victims. This gives them a feeling of brotherhood with other Jews.
Richard Spencer said in his debate with Rob Noerr that “critical race theory is true! I agree with every word of it! Aryans come down on other peoples in our chariots and conquer and oppress them! That is who we are!”
I believe that this is the view that undermines us. Most Whites see ourselves as perpetrators and not victims. In every film, the main character is a victim, and this is what leads him to make a move against the bad guys. If you don’t see yourself as a victim, you’ll never be inspired to do anything good for your folk, and you’ll instead fall into nihilism, selfish individualism, radical antiwhitism, or a combination of the three.
I remember that what lead me to become White positive was learning about the worldwide mass rapes against White women by antiwhite, non-White men. If I believed that it was the other way around, and that Richard Spencer’s “conquering Aryans” were raping non-White women, I would most likely have become antiwhite.
Good thoughts. I believe there is such a thing as “racial character”, and other groups are highly aware of this political factor. That’s why Jews founded the anti defamation league and blacks the NAACP, to prevent their groups from being associated with negative behaviors, be those true or not.(Leo Frank was found guilty of his crime, yet history records that he was falsely accused with no exonerating evidence eg.) That’s why the media is obsessed with hiding the links between minorities and crime. These pervasive concepts have a myriad of real world consequences too. In court decisions people will tend to see whites as “racist” or oppressor and it will influence their decision, as it undoubtedly did in the George Floyd and Arbury fiascos. In essence, whites have no problem with our group being heinously vilified, while other groups are protective and patriotic of their race’s character. I think there should be a series of essays to crystallize this concept.
I accidentally answered the wrong comment. Here’s the answer that was meant for you:
It seems that Jews are empowered by viewing themselves as victims. This gives them a feeling of brotherhood with other Jews.
Richard Spencer said in his debate with Rob Noerr that “critical race theory is true! I agree with every word of it! Aryans come down on other peoples in our chariots and conquer and oppress them! That is who we are!”
I believe that this is the view that undermines us. Most Whites see ourselves as perpetrators and not victims. In every film, the main character is a victim, and this is what leads him to make a move against the bad guys. If you don’t see yourself as a victim, you’ll never be inspired to do anything good for your folk, and you’ll instead fall into nihilism, selfish individualism, radical antiwhitism, or a combination of the three.
I remember that what lead me to become White positive was learning about the worldwide mass rapes against White women by antiwhite, non-White men. If I believed that it was the other way around, and that Richard Spencer’s “conquering Aryans” were raping non-White women, I would most likely have become antiwhite.
YET “Counter-Currents continues to grow. 2024 was our best year yet in terms of traffic.”
This is so encouraging to hear! I’ll admit, I was one of those guilty of putting off making a C-C donation, because I thought an e-check might be too cumbersome. I imagined I’d have to dig deep to find a cancelled paper ck to get the old routing number. (I don’t really do online banking.) Not so, Daddy-O! Bank routing numbers are public info. So, there’s really no excuse.
You guys rock. You have very talented writers, serving up a great mix of politics, philosophy, & activism, & lots of active dialogue in the comments. All the best to you!
p.s. Greg, what was the topic of your Ph.D.? I was very tempted to earn my bachelor’s in philosophy in the early 90s.
Echecks are super easy. You can look at your check book for the numbers or just go to your bank’s online portal. Thanks so much, and Merry Christmas!
My doctoral dissertation was on Kant.
There is a search engine called Ecosia that some people on this site might find interesting or useful. They don’t seem to censor dissident websites anywhere near as agressively as the mainstream search engines. When I search National Alliance or The Daily Stormer in Ecosia, for example. the first hits are those actual websites rather than SPLC hit-pieces. What’s more, they use their ad revenue to plant trees, so you end up helping the planet as you browse the internet!
“Its impotency is not hard, indeed” roflmao
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