Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
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educational introduction for the uninitiated.39
The influence of both thinkers is discernible in Counter- Currents’ mis-
sion statement, which proclaims that “History is cyclical” and, as such,
civilization has descended from the “Golden Age” into a “Dark Age” in
which “decadence reigns and all natural and healthy values are inverted.”
However, within this Dark Age, there are “counter- currents”— remnants
of the past Golden Age “that sustain the world and serve as seeds of the
Golden Age to come.” Living according to the principles of the Golden
Age, in the nadir of its antithesis, is not “futile,” however. “Indeed, those
who do so play an important role in the passage of the Ages,” a process
which Counter- Currents aims to accelerate “by promoting knowledge of
its deficiencies in the light of Tradition.” To this end Counter- Currents
seeks to perpetuate “essential ideas and texts” that will help bring about the
advent of a new Golden Age.40 By keeping alive these “counter- currents”
Johnson seeks to establish a new cultural and intellectual hegemony, one
that he believes radiates from these “eternal” foundations, which will en-
gender “the highest impersonal idealism” and therefore ensure the main-
tenance of core values “over generations of struggle” leading to the (re)
establishment of “a White Republic or Republics in North America.”41
Johnson’s reference to multiple “republics” reflects his belief in
ethnoplurality— that all races and ethnicities, including various white
ethnicities, should have their own homelands. He rejects its antith-
esis: “Grandiose Nationalism”— supranational geopolitical visions that
homogenize all whites into a white imperium. Given the history of em-
pire and colonialism, Johnson dismisses this stance as a “morally retarded
attitude.” He also objects to such ideological confabulations, believing that
they will simply replicate the problems of globalization including a ten-
dency toward political unification, which exacerbates tensions between
“European peoples,” rather than decreasing them, thereby serving to
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undermine “real” ethnonationalism.42 Johnson rejects the nostalgia for
the Confederacy that is common among white nationalists on similar
grounds. Slavery “is just capitalism at its worst” and therefore “I can’t
really pine for the South. If I lived in the South, frankly I would have
been a White populist revolutionary who would be burning down the big
houses.”43
Johnson’s illiberal vision for a white ethnostate hinges on his self-
definition as both an “elitist and a populist,” a position that grants a role
“for certain elements of democracy” within the white polity— an idea of
the mixed constitution derived from Aristotle’s Politics in which aristo-
cratic and democratic elements coexist, counterbalancing one another.
“We need to reinfuse modernity with certain things that are treated as
archaic,” Johnson argues, “and that means identity politics, an aristo-
cratic ethos, a warrior ethos, and things that have been bred out of us
by consumerism and bourgeois modernity.” This fusion of modernity
with archaic values and social forms (within a white ethnostate) appears
influenced by Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune just as much as
by political tracts like Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism.44 This vision of
“Classical Republicanism,” based upon the sacralization of identity and
order, represents the crux of Johnson’s idealized “organic society,” which
he concedes to be “somewhat fascistic.” Racially communitarian, future
organic societies would enshrine the principle of the common good—
the injection of biology into politics— judging all endeavors according
to whether they facilitate the continued transmission of white genes and
culture, “the things that we have created and valued” that, first, must be
restored and then propagated if the white race is to survive in perpetuity.45
This, Johnson argues, is impossible within the present system, because
it is led by a “rotating elite” of “plutocrats” (Republicans) and “pathological
altruists” (Democrats), whose rule leads only to “white extinction,” both
biologically and culturally.46 Democracy itself mitigates against racial sur-
vival since it “shrinks time horizons,” making grand strategies, let alone
civilizational or racial goals, impossible to achieve.47
Though not immune from imagining racially apocalyptic scenarios—
Johnson perceives that unchecked immigration and birth rates will ra-
cially despoil the planet, reducing it to a “blackened cinder in space”48— he
eschews the violent revolutionary strategies of figures like William Pierce,
whose genocidal fantasies hinged upon a racially purgative “Day of the
Rope” as a means of realizing the White Republic. While believing that
a return to segregation and white supremacy would be “improvements,”
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he argues instead that the only viable long- term solution is absolute ra-
cial separation, granting African American citizens their own home-
land in the South. The main problem facing white nationalists, Johnson
argues, emanates from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which
transformed the United States’ racial demography within fifty years. The
resultant diversity, he claims, is in fact “ethnic cleansing.”49 By way of
contrast, the years before 1965, before mass immigration and civil rights,
represents a historical idyll, “when American workers were doing the best,
when America was sending a man to the moon, when our cities were
clean and vibrant in a good way.”50
To restore racial hegemony, the United States must “decolonize” through
a “well- planned, orderly, and humane process of ethnic cleansing.” This
need not necessarily entail violence, Johnson argues, though this is “mor-
ally justified” as an act of racial self- defense.51 The first step to white racial
“rectification” requires the immediate end of nonwhite immigration and the
deportation of illegal residents; restricting access to welfare and education
would ensure others “deport themselves.” Making the case for mass, forced
population transfer, Johnson claims that since globalization forces people
to relocate for jobs, there can be no real objection to uprooting people for a
goal greater “than just the whims of the market and the private interests of
capitalists.” Even if it took another fifty years to return to the status quo ante,
he states the psychological benefit to white Americans, knowing that racial
suicide was to be averted, would be immediate and immeasurable, restoring
optimism, and economic innovation, reversing declining demographic
trends, and returning the white race back to the path of “godhood.”52
This stance explains in part Johnson’s support for Donald Trump. He
argued, prior to Trump’s election, that his candidacy represen
ted “an im-
mense opportunity” for white nationalism because, although Trump’s
views were not coterminous with their own, “we want some of the policies
that he wants.” Trump’s economic protectionist, anti- immigration plat-
form, from building the wall to the “Muslim ban,” represent measures
that, Johnson believes, will slow white demographic decline, “giving us a
few extra decades before we are a minority in our homeland.” ’ Trump is
not the “last chance” for whites “but he is the last chance for the United
States of America,” he argues.53
Johnson dismissed claims of an actual relationship between the Alt
Right and Trump, characterizing this as simply a “one- way man- crush.”54
Sanguine about its success, he observes that although its memes altered
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mainstream political discourse, the Alt Right failed to leverage policy.
Nonetheless, Trump’s victory and its accompanying political polariza-
tion has created a climate conducive to racial salvation: “Henceforth, the
choice will be between nationalism/ populism and globalism/ elitism. . . .
We understand the real significance of Trump’s election, perhaps better
than Trump himself. This is white America’s revolt against demographic
Armageddon.”55
“North American New Right” or
“European New Right”?
Johnson’s preoccupation with “race” marks a key point of departure
from European New Right thought. White “diaspora communities,” he
argues, characterize the United States. These lack the racial homoge-
neity allegedly provided by the “real, living ethnically defined nations
and sub- nations” that comprise Europe. Thus, the North American
New Right had to emphasize another commonality: “biological race.”56
European New Right thinkers, by comparison, consciously rejected
biological racism as “an erroneous doctrine, one rooted in time.”57
Underscoring this difference, de Benoist explained to Jared Taylor’s
American Renaissance:
If I compare you and me, the first difference is that I am aware of
race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the ex-
cessive importance that you do. For me it is a factor, but only one
among others.58
Johnson intimates that this shift was possible only because European
New Right thinkers could fall back upon the concept of a “European”
national identity, an option closed to white nationalists in the United
States. Counter-
Currents, in contrast, gains intellectual succor from
long- standing currents of racist and eugenicist thought, from Madison
Grant and Lothrop Stoddard on. Johnson’s own conceptual frame owes
much to Wilmot Robertson (Humphrey Ireland’s pen name) editor
of Instauration, whose books The Dispossessed Majority (1972) and The
Ethnostate (1992), both sold by Counter- Currents, make an explicit case for
white ethnostates.59 It also highlights that despite imbibing the European
New Right’s antiliberal, elitist, and metapolitical orientation, insofar as
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race is concerned, Johnson’s ideological framework retains its roots in the
old Right, as much as the new.
For many right- wing groups, Islam now represents the chief threat.
For Johnson, however, the Clash of Civilizations narrative is a misnomer
because “we are not fighting for Christendom, which is now more non-
white than white. We are fighting for the white race, regardless of reli-
gion.” Race, not religion, is paramount in his thinking because although
“Islamic barbarism” provides a useful political foil, since “without Islam,
it would be possible for many Europeans to believe that a multiracial, mul-
ticultural society might actually work,” it is not white nationalism’s prin-
cipal enemy.60
Since time immemorial, Johnson argues, the Jews have represented
the real existential threat to white racial survival, a titanic, cosmic,
struggle cleaving the world in two betwixt “the seed of Abraham and
the rest of humanity.” This stance on the “Jewish Question” reflects
a second fundamental point of fracture with European New Right
thought, which publicly eschews anti- Semitism. Johnson views this dis-
tinction as resulting from European theorists being at liberty to discuss
numerous issues, “in effect by proxy, by just being anti- American, to
put it crudely.” Living within the belly of the beast, however— Johnson
construes the United States as “the citadel of Jewish power in the
world”— “we have to name the problem and deal with it explicitly.”61
He regards white nationalism therefore as being, of necessity, “inescap-
ably anti- Semitic.”62 Johnson’s interpretation perhaps leans toward self-
justification here. The European New Right’s opposition to American
neoliberal economic and cultural hegemony is not reducible to a proxy
for his own anti- Semitic position.
For Johnson, the Jewish Question is a metapolitical question. In
seeking to reconfigure the political terrain upon which white racial na-
tionalist arguments are presented, one of Johnson’s primary inspirations
was Irminsul’s Racial Nationalist Library, an online resource founded in
1999 by Irmin Vinson (a pen name). This website, together with Vinson’s
essays for Pierce’s National Vanguard, “played an important role in my
education as a White Nationalist,” he writes.63 Johnson published a collec-
tion of Vinson’s articles arguing that the Holocaust represents “the Jewish
collective memory of World War Two” and “we who are not Jews are in ef-
fect thinking about our past with someone else’s memory, seeing both the
past and its implications for the present through Jewish eyes rather than
through our own.”64
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Vinson’s book fulminates against “Holocaustomania,” arguing that
this represents a “political weapon” used by the Jews to delegitimize and
stigmatize “Eurocentrism and White racial cohesion. . . . Holocaust com-
memoration racializes Jews and deracializes Whites; it strengthens them
and weakens us.”65 Johnson agrees, arguing that Holocaust memorializa-
tion represents emotive extortion. “There will never be another holocaust.
Get it through your heads. . . . I’m so fucking sick of this whining and
emotional blackmail from the most powerful people on the planet,” he
states.66
While considering historical “revisionism” a legitimate activity for
white nationalists, Johnson also regards it as an unnecessary appendage
to their political project. Even if the “standard account” were true, he
argues, “it would still not imply that there was anything wrong with White
Nationalism and the goal of (or [ sic]) breaking Jewish power over our des-
tiny and physically separating whites and Jews.”67 Physical segregation is
Johnson’s ultimate solution to the Jewish Question: to expel all J
ews to
Israel. “We have to stop letting them have it both ways,” he contends,
“basically you need to go to Israel or we’re going to freeze you out of our
society.”68
Following Vinson’s argument that Hitler is “less a model to be
followed than an avalanche of propaganda we must dig ourselves out
from under,”69 Johnson also rejects the strategy of manufacturing an apol-
ogetic “antiracist” stance. In confronting the “burden” of Hitler, Johnson
acknowledges that while Hitler represents “the problem” for white
nationalists, he also represents “the solution” because his actions were “in
self- defense against Jewish aggression— the same Jewish aggression that
we are suffering today in a much intensified form.”
Blaming Hitler is just another form of blaming ourselves for our
ongoing racial decline. It deflects attention from the real culprits—
white traitors and aliens— and replaces righteous anger at our
enemies with demoralizing self- reproach and self- doubt. Anger
motivates action. Self- reproach promotes passivity. So our march to
oblivion continues uninterrupted.70
The battle for cultural hegemony
Counter- Currents also provides Johnson with a platform for cultural
struggle. Western philosophical, theological, literary, and artistic traditions
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are regularly discussed in order to “point in the direction we want to go,”
in contradistinction to the “commercial melting pot” of contemporary
societies. Indeed, for Johnson, the very act of creating culture requires
“negating materialism.”71 Johnson further proselytizes for elitist notions
of “high” culture through studies of right- wing literary modernists, in-
cluding Artists of the Right: Resisting Decadence (2012) and More Artists of
the Right (2017) by Kerry Bolton. “We hope that if we hold these people up
as exemplars we can create a tradition where people might want to imitate
them,” Johnson notes.72 To this end, Johnson seeks to serve as a “culture
creator”— publishing novels by authors like Ward Kendall and Andy Nowiki
and volumes of poetry by Leo Yankevich and Juleigh Howard- Hobson.
Johnson attaches no less importance to leveraging “low” culture, pen-