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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