machiavellis.
48. Bernstein, “Alt- White.”
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Greg Johnson and
Counter- Currents
Graham Macklin
G R E G J O H N S O N I S editor- in- chief of Counter- Currents, an esoteric and
metapolitical website created in 2010 “as a space for a dialogue in which a
new intellectual movement, a North American New Right, might emerge.”1
Counter- Currents also provides “a critique of liberal modernity in North
America in the light of Traditionalism and the ideas of the European New
Right.”2 Both his website and publishing imprint, which bears the same
name, attest to Johnson’s enduring concern: “metapolitics”— a precursor
to politics, which aims to provide the “correct” ideological foundations
upon which to erect a cultural and intellectual movement in North
America capable of affecting “real” political change that will, ultimately,
underpin the establishment of a white “ethnostate.”
Biographical details are scant, though one can trace an outline
of Johnson’s early intellectual trajectory through various published
interviews. His father was a staunch Democrat and union member.
Born in 1971, Johnson gravitated toward libertarianism in high school,
imbibing the work of Ayn Rand as a college freshman: “I was a bit of
a boy Objectivist . . . for a couple of years because of that,” he recalled.
Interested in philosophy, his reading propelled him beyond Rand to-
ward paleoconservatism and, ultimately, white nationalism. Johnson was
“somewhat pro- Zionist” in his early twenties, and despite admiring the
ideas of Leo Strauss in graduate school, increasingly perceived a “defi-
nite Jewish bias” in neoconservatism, becoming, he recalled, “more
keyed into the Jewish slant on things.” Johnson’s increasingly anti- Jewish
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Greg Johnson and Counter-Currents
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Weltanschauung crystallized after encountering the controversy sur-
rounding Heidegger’s National Socialism. For Johnson, this “really called
forth a lot of rhetorical thuggery . . . on the part of Jewish commentators,
and it just didn’t sit well with me.” Having argued with Jewish graduate
students about this, Johnson subsequently evoked a parallel between his
own anti- Semitic acculturation and that undergone by Hitler. Relating the
passage from Mein Kampf in which the future Führer claims to have spent
hours debating and, he believed, demolishing the arguments of Viennese
Jewish socialists only to see them carry on regardless, impervious to his
logic, Johnson stated: “That’s when I knew this guy [Hitler] was telling the
truth. That was so powerful. I’d seen that with my own eyes.”3
The subsequent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Schwartze
Hefte), in which he recorded his private philosophical musings, later
confirmed to Johnson that Heidegger believed he might shape an intel-
lectually coherent foundation for National Socialism and thereby help it
understand its own “inner truth and greatness” with regards its role in “the
confrontation of historical man with global technological civilization.” For
this reason, Heidegger had an enduring influence upon the New Right
and on Johnson personally.4 Indeed, Johnson claims that “the outline of a
post- totalitarian, postmodernist New Right first emerges in these diaries
of a dissident National Socialist.”5 Heidegger also served as an intellectual
bridge in Johnson’s own development. A favorite Heidegger scholar was
Thomas Sheehan of Stanford, whose work introduced Johnson to Alain de
Benoist and Julius Evola.6
After studying for a philosophy PhD,7 Johnson moved to Atlanta,
Georgia. In late 1999 or early 2000 a chance meeting with Joshua Buckley,
a former skinhead who subsequently edited Tyr 8 (a radical Traditionalist,
neopagan journal devoted to “Myth–
Culture–
Tradition”) proved piv-
otal: “Not just eye- opening, world- opening.” So fortified, Johnson took the
plunge, transitioning from private intellectualizing to political engage-
ment. His first step was attending a lecture given by the British Holocaust
denier David Irving in September 2000.9
Thereafter Johnson immersed himself in radical Right political and
cultural publishing, an activity from which he now makes his living.10 In
late 2000, Johnson began to think about creating a metapolitical journal
to advance white nationalist politics, but he considered this need ful-
filled with the establishment in 2001 by the Charles Martel Society of
The Occidental Quarterly ( TOQ), a white nationalist periodical offering
“Western Perspectives on Man, Culture, and Politics.”11 He became TOQ’s
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editor in 2007, establishing the journal’s online presence, TOQ Online,
together with Michael J. Polignano, who, as a student, had achieved some
notoriety for defending racial genetic difference in Emory Wheel, Emory
University’s student newspaper.12
Having departed acrimoniously from the editorship of TOQ in April
2010,13 Johnson and Polignano cofounded Counter- Currents.14 Despite
the personal rancor accompanying his departure from TOQ, Johnson
acknowledges that his current venture represents a continuation of this
intellectual initiative.15 Johnson originally intended Counter-
Currents
to become a major voice for European New Right thought in North
America, publishing English translations of work by the French New
Right ideologues Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. However, Arktos,
a similar European metapolitical venture founded in November 2009,
beat Counter- Currents to the punch. Their coup forced Johnson to “re-
configure” and “reconceive” his original plans, though he hoped the two
complementary ventures would work together in future to avoid duplica-
tion of effort.16
Work and thought
Johnson holds that the New Right’s opponents constantly deconstruct
its ideals, traditions, and worldviews, and that “we are suffering mightily
from it.” Through metapolitical activism, he hopes to reverse this “con-
tinual intellectual dissection” and to practice “some deconstructing of
[our] own.”17 The Counter- Currents website, the fulcrum of Johnson’s ac-
tivities, provides a platform for a sustained intellectual assault on liberal
social democracy and those values embodied by Christianity and liber-
alism, which are to be replaced by “a new moral hierarchy” (or the return
to a “traditional” one) that “prizes the striving of life for differentiation,
struggle and excellence.”18
To promote this new moral hierarchy, Counter- Currents features an
array of original metapolitical articles, poetry, cultural criticism, reviews,
translations, and interviews with prominent ideologues and activists,
all propagating antiliberal and antiegalitarian ideals. Translations of
Counter- Currents�
� own content, reposted by other groups and websites,
extends the reach even farther. Johnson estimated in 2015 that the web-
site consumed 60 to 70 percent of his time.19 These exertions have
reaped dividends. In one typical month in 2017 (November), Counter-
Currents received 206,887 unique visitors who made 369,476 visits
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and viewed 1,447,593 pages of content.20 Whether such figures indi-
cate that Johnson’s metapolitics is meeting with increased receptivity
is impossible to say, though anecdotally he claims the “movement” is
increasingly attracting younger, smarter, adherents. “I’m just finding
less and less opposition to our sorts of ideas when they’re spoken,” he
states.21
Counter-
Currents also publishes “Books Against Time.” To date,
Johnson has published forty such books, often serving as editor, including
anthologies of his own voluminous metapolitical commentaries on polit-
ical events and issues of the day, most of which originally featured on the
Counter- Currents website: Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (2010, 2016);
Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country (2015); In Defense of Prejudice (2017).
His New Right vs. Old Right (2013) collects a series of important “foun-
dational” essays while You Asked for It (2017) features twelve interviews
on a range of topics, which, in aggregate, make a “compelling case for
White Nationalism.” Johnson also edits North American New Right, a print
journal modeled on Tyr, designed to highlight the “best work” emanating
from this milieu.22
Through Counter- Currents, Johnson endeavors to provide an edu-
cative focus for his readership, believing that in order to inculcate the
correct intellectual foundations, “today’s White Nationalist movement
might work best on the model of a Montessori school, not a Hitler Youth
rally.”23 He has also explored numerous ways to extend Counter- Currents’
countercultural outreach, including an online radio station that enables
listeners to download podcasts of shows (widely disseminated through so-
cial media).24
Johnson intended for Counter- Currents to become a financially self-
supporting node in a wider “integrated network” promoting white na-
tionalist and European New Right ideas, and thereby actively building
the counterculture. PayPal’s digital deplatforming of Counter- Currents
following Heather Heyer’s murder at the Unite the Right demonstra-
tion in Charlottesville in August 2017 jeopardized these efforts, causing
a cash crunch for Counter- Currents, severely disrupting fund- raising
and book sales. Recognizing the extent to which “white advocacy” had
become dependent upon the very system it abhors, Johnson has since
advocated “an integrated electronic ethnostate offering everything from
domain registration to webhosting to DDoS [Distributed Denial of
Service] protection to mailing list management— all controlled by our
movement.”25
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Inspirations
Johnson’s ideological inspirations are undoubtedly myriad. Several de-
serve closer inspection, however. The first embodies almost everything
the European New Right rejected: for example, Savitri Devi, an “eso-
teric Hitlerite” whose view of Nazism was quasi- religious.26 “Probably
you couldn’t really imagine anyone more militant than her,” observed a
fellow ideologue, explaining in part Savitri Devi’s transgressive appeal
to a younger generation of activists.27 Johnson learned of Savitri Devi in
2000, after receiving a copy of her Impeachment of Man (1959), as well as
Nicholas Goodrick- Clarke’s scholarly biography, Hitler’s Priestess. Having
initially regarded her as “one of history’s great eccentrics,” Johnson be-
came increasingly receptive to her ideas: “she made an eccentric out of
me too.” He came to revere Savitri Devi as a “remarkable individual who
has changed my life in countless ways” though by this juncture Johnson
was already broadly sympathetic to National Socialism, Indo- European pa-
ganism, and the Traditionalist cyclical conception of history.28
Using the pen name R. G. Fowler, Johnson created “The Savitri Devi
Archive,” an online portal dedicated to this “Woman against Time,” in
order to make her work more easily accessible.29 Having once aspired to be
her biographer, Johnson settled instead for republishing her key works.30
This enthusiasm for Savitri Devi’s work remains undimmed. Counter-
Currents republished a centennial edition of her devotional poems to
Adolf Hitler titled, tellingly, Forever and Ever (2012) in addition to a new
edition of her seminal book, The Lighting and the Sun (1958), which deified
the deceased Führer as an avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu.31
Johnson’s researches into Savitri Devi’s life led him, in 2000, to
William Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, who had published her
work in National Socialist World in the late 1960s. Although repelled by
Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, which he argues represent an imped-
iment to serious policy formation, Johnson found himself listening to
Pierce’s American Dissident Voices broadcasts, from which he learned
the relevance of applying white nationalist ideas to contemporary poli-
tics, transforming the nature of his own thinking that hitherto had taken
place on a “rather rarefied intellectual plane.” His political analysis also
“particularly benefited” from reading Pierce’s anti- Semitic pamphlet, Who
Rules America? When they met in 2001, Pierce told Johnson that while
abandoning academia had been painful— he had a PhD in physics—
nothing compared to the freedom of speaking the “truth” as he saw it. “If
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Pierce had never said those words, I may never have founded Counter-
Currents,” Johnson states. “In that sense, at least, I am a follower of
William Pierce.”32
A final inspiration was Jonathan Bowden, formerly cultural officer of
the British National Party, whose influence highlights the transnational
nature of the contemporary metapolitical milieu. Johnson met Bowden in
Atlanta in 2009, having invited him to speak at a private gathering for TOQ
writers and supporters. Bowden, whom Johnson describes as “one of the
funniest, most brilliant, and most intellectually stimulating people I have
ever known,”33 supported Counter- Currents from the outset, contributing
thirty- five original articles to its website, plus eight reviews of his own
work under a pen name. Bowden, noted for his oratory, also addressed a
2012 gathering organized by Johnson in San Francisco shortly before his
death. Johnson dedicated the first volume of North American New Right to
his late colleague. Several collections of Bowden’s writings and speeches
followed: Pulp Fascism (2013), effectively a memorial, dealt w
ith the right-
wing themes its author detected in comics, graphic novels, and popular
literature; Western Civilization Bites Back (2014) and Extremists: Studies
in Metapolitics (2017) collected his speeches on a range of metapolitical
themes. For Johnson, Bowden combined “mind” and “fist”— a personifi-
cation of the Nietzschean warrior poet: the “cultured thug.”34
Bowden was also the “master of ceremonies” for the London Forum,
an important transnational hub for metapolitical activists across the
world. Johnson addressed several meetings.35 Seeking to emulate the
success of these meetings, Johnson exported the forum model back
across the Atlantic, establishing the New York Forum and the Northwest
Forum (in Seattle) in 2016, with an Atlanta Forum emerging in 2017, all
predicated upon the idea of “stimulating thought, creativity, networking,
and solidarity.”36
Key issues and key ideas
Johnson styles his politics “New Rightist” because he rejects the methods,
though not the political model, theoretical frameworks, or indeed leaders
of the “old right”: Fascism and National Socialism.37 He fuses this with
the European New Right paradigm, privileging metapolitics and the
struggle for cultural hegemony. Rather than trying to position Counter-
Currents as being “beyond Left and Right” ’ vis- à- vis earlier Third Position
initiatives, Johnson freely concedes that its roots are “objectively on the
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Right, especially when you talk about what was the Right at the time of
the French Revolution,” when elitist, racist, and antiegalitarian ideals were
common currency. Emphasizing these illiberal values as being normative
before 1789 enables Johnson to claim that, in reality, “we just represent the
center, the core values of European civilization.”38
Johnson also highlights Traditionalism as a driving force. Though
Counter-
Currents’ “guiding principles” derive from the French
Traditionalist thinker René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927),
one of the writers who “most influenced” Johnson’s metapolitical outlook
is Julius Evola. Counter- Currents hosts a plethora of Evola’s writings as an
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 35
