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Let’s say that you have something to contribute to the White Nationalist movement. But you don’t just want to contribute. You want to excel. You want to have an impact. Here are five habits that you should cultivate if you want to be a highly effective nationalist. These recommendations are based upon personal trial and error as well as observing other nationalists.

All of these recommendations boil down to good manners. The movement consists of people working together. But people can work together well or badly. Friction is always possible. Manners are necessary to lubricate social interactions, so the movement can function like a well-oiled machine, as opposed to seizing up, breaking down, smoldering, or bursting into flames.

Be Approachable

Everybody understands immediately that to take part in the movement you must be outgoing. You need to reach out to others. There are two ways to do this: general (putting yourself out there for the whole world to see) and specific (seeking out particular people). The more outgoing you are, the bigger your audience, the bigger your network, the bigger your potential impact.

But it isn’t enough to be outgoing. You also need to be approachable. Approachability has two aspects.

First and foremost, people just need to know how to contact you. I have lost count of the number of important people in and around the movement who are hard to get in touch with. Ideally, you should share the address of your personal website or your business email address wherever people find your work. I have been available through www.counter-currents.com at [email protected] for nearly 15 years now. Millennial Woes is also easily available at https://www.millennialwoes.com/.

You can’t count on direct messages on platforms like X. For one thing, not everyone is on there, and not everyone on there can message you. And what if your account, or the account of a correspondent, gets banned? It is easy for people who build names for themselves on particular platforms to become dependent on that platform for their communications, but at a certain point, you need to provide your own platform, lest all your contacts and correspondence disappear when you are deplatformed.

A second aspect of approachability is more a matter of character or persona. If you are high and mighty, prickly, or condescending, people will be less likely to approach you than if you are unassuming and gracious. Being approachable doesn’t require acting like “just another Bozo.” Nobody would accuse Jared Taylor of not taking himself and his mission seriously, but he is also highly approachable.

Be Responsive

When people reach out to you, new things become possible, but nothing will happen unless you reply.

Frankly, I am astonished that our movement has accomplished as much as it has given how bad people are at basic communication.

I am not one to talk. I give myself a B+ on responsiveness. I am prompt with short replies, i.e., yes, no, maybe. But if people send me 1,200 word missives that require time to read, digest, and formulate a thoughtful response, I am likely to set it aside until I have the leisure, then forget about it, because I am inundated with correspondence and never have the leisure. There’s a lesson here that I need to take to heart as well: if you wish to begin a correspondence, keep your first email very short.

I have noticed that some of the most effective people in the movement are, unsurprisingly, very prompt in their replies. Alain de Benoist and Jared Taylor come immediately to mind. I fear for the future of our cause, though, because the younger the person, generally the worse the correspondent. You can’t plan a picnic much less save the white race if people don’t communicate in a timely manner.

Of course you don’t need to reply to everyone. I generally ignore journalists, obvious kooks and cranks, and the occasional piece of hate mail. (I have received remarkably little hate mail over the years.) Beyond these cases, however, you should say something to everyone who writes, if only to direct them somewhere else.

The main reason to reply is that nothing happens unless you do. The main reason to reply promptly is that if you wait, you are less likely to reply at all.

A secondary reason to reply is that not communicating doesn’t merely fail to augment your current effectiveness, it actually decreases it, because it inevitably makes people wonder about your motives for being uncommunicative, and the most natural explanations are the least flattering: he’s inefficient, disorganized, a snob, doesn’t like me, etc. Also, it just makes people angry. Finally, it invites retaliation. “If it took him two weeks to reply, why should I reply promptly?” If you think this sort of thinking is petty given the gravity of our cause, then what are we to think of your lack of a prompt reply, which set it all in motion?

Give Thanks

More than 15 years ago, I put Kevin Deanna in front of a room full of people. He gave a great talk, but I don’t remember what it was about. What I remember most was how emphatically and sincerely he delivered his first two words: “Thank you.” People were visibly touched. It wasn’t an empty pleasantry. Everybody in that room deserved thanks, for they all had spent time and money to be there, and not for something trivial, but for the most important cause in the universe. They were there for the greater good. They were doing their duty. But we can’t sustain this movement on high purposes and idealism alone. We must build in rewards along the way. And it takes an awfully small soul to begrudge people a simple and sincere thank you. Nothing produces greater benefits at such a small cost.

Thank you, dear reader, for all you do for this cause.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here

Give Praise

Giving thanks is one of the simplest forms of praise. We must never stint on offering sincere praise for genuine virtues and good deeds.

This is a hard lesson to accept, because our movement is so spectacularly burdened by narcissistic egomaniacs ravenous for praise and acclaim. Given the destructiveness of such people, it is easy to see why some wish to extinguish such behavior entirely. But you can’t do it simply by being stingy with praise.

Even the worst narcissists always have some genuine talents that deserve praise, or we would never hear of them in the first place. The problem is that they overestimate their worth. The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive impairment that leads the sufferer to overestimate his intelligence. We need a word for consistently overestimating one’s worth. Fortunately, we do have such words: vanity and pride. There are legitimate forms of pride and even vanity. But they can also be vices, even “sins.” For instance, in Aristotle’s ethics, vanity (chaunotes) refers specifically to the vice of overestimating one’s worth and demanding more honors than one is due. This inevitably leads to conflict, because it is both grotesque and unjust.

But it is also unjust not to praise people for genuine virtues and achievements.

People hunger for justice. They fight to the death for recognition. Moreover, whites—particularly young white men—have grown up watching authorities fawn over non-white mediocrities and failures while ignoring white achievements or even denigrating them as unjust results of unearned “white privilege.” Normal whites are treated like pathological narcissists simply for demanding just recognition of their achievements and virtues. Given that “white guilt” is central to the psychological warfare against our people, White Nationalists should be the last people to be stingy with sincere and deserved praise. Furthermore, there’s something perversely self-defeating about a movement that cannot offer activists money also being stingy with thanks and praise, which cost nothing.

Of course there is a distinction between praise and flattery. Praise is sincere whereas flattery is not. We should guard against flattery, since it is a counterfeit form of praise that devalues the real thing.

Keep Promises

Unless you plan to save the world on your own, you will need to work with others. As soon as you do, you begin to give and receive promises. But nothing will happen unless you and your partners actually keep them.

Based on long experience and observation, nothing is more destructive to a movement career than breaking promises. Movement people are astonishingly tolerant of cranky ideas, personal eccentricities, debilitating vices, and general drama. But if you break promises, word gets around rapidly, your trustworthiness crashes, and opportunities evaporate. Beyond that, nobody will even bother to tell you off. They simply go silent. Why would they level with you if they no longer trust you?

Obviously some promises are more important than others. If you break a promise to pay someone for work, that will not be quickly forgotten, even if the sum is relatively minor. If you promise to appear on a podcast and bow out, that’s far less consequential than backing out of a real-world event, especially one you are speaking at. But the most consequential broken promise is a cancelled conference, because such events involve large expenditures and promises to dozens if not hundreds of people. Moreover, if you break a promise to Peter, which causes him to break promises to Paul and Mary, all the blame will be passed back to you.

Some broken promises are more culpable than others. If you make a promise and never intend to follow through, you are simply a criminal and should be drummed out of the movement. Astonishingly, such criminals often hang around for decades, feeding off the idealism and ignorance of new people.

Most broken promises, however, were meant to be kept. They fall into two categories: those that aren’t your fault and those that are.

When you are forced to break promises because of government persecution, deplatforming, debanking, being turned out of venues, and the like, most people are prepared to forgive you. Such persecution can actually improve rather than harm your reputation.

Nevertheless, you can be blamed if you brought such persecution upon yourself by not practicing good operational security, failing to have backup plans and venues in place, or failing to include liquidated damages clauses in contracts, which both deter cancellations and give you money to refund people’s expenses in case of cancellation.

The faults that cause people to break promises fall into two categories: forgivable and unforgivable.

The most forgivable fault that leads to broken promises is setting unrealistic dates for completing projects. If you are a day late, you have broken your promise and caused stress for yourself and others. I hope this is forgivable, simply because I have done it more times than I can count. But slowly I am getting better. You should never announce projects until they are essentially complete and ready to go.

Another relatively forgivable fault that leads to broken promises is being overly agreeable, which causes people to promise too much. The only way to avoid this problem is simply to learn to say “no.”

Unforgivable faults that cause people to break promises include laziness, disorganization, poor judgment, and poor planning. But none of these faults will cause broken promises unless you also lack self-knowledge. If you know you are lazy, disorganized, etc., you might not be happy with yourself, but at least you won’t make promises that you cannot keep.