When the founder of the neo-Nazi Active Club, Robert Rundo, appeared on the Counter-Currents podcast in January 2026, he discussed working to bridge divides in the white supremacist movement. Hosted by David Zsutty and the site’s founder, Greg Johnson, Counter-Currents has been one of America’s premier white nationalist publishing platforms for years.
The three discussed Rundo’s history of white nationalist activism, sharing stories about his life in Queens, New York. He also shared some of the philosophy behind the creation of the Active Clubs, a decentralized movement of autonomous local neo-Nazi groups that push white supremacy alongside strength training and combat sports.
How the far-right movement can organize itself is a subject of particular interest to Johnson.
“What we want is to build a movement that has real-world effects, political effects, cultural effects, and that means that we are going to have to deal with the fact that there are people who have many different systems of ideas and starting points,” Johnson said, admiring the hyper-local organizing model Rundo had created.
For almost two decades, Johnson has used Counter-Currents as part of his ambition to position himself as an intellectual ambassador for the international far right. This has taken him across the world to conferences and meetings to share his perspective on race, political strategy, and organizing.
“We have to deal with that fact, but we have to keep it all going together towards some kind of common goals,” he said to Rundo. “The things that we have in common over and above our theories, I think are things that really need to be cultivated. Common experiences, common lifestyle, common enemies, anything that can bring us together and bridge the gaps between different schools of thought and different factions.”
During the interview, Johnson asked, “How can we build more of a political and cultural movement on common things beyond belonging to the same faction or having the same philosophy?”
Therein lies one of Johnson’s goals since he started Counter-Currents with white nationalist Michael Polignano in 2010. Intended to serve as a culture and intellectual home for the far right, the site hosts hours of interviews, thousands of articles, and sells a small library of racist and fascist books, seeking to unite the often fractured far right.
From Academic to White Nationalist Intellectual
Johnson spent years hiding his appearance and background from the public, typically only revealing that he had a degree in philosophy. His appearances at conferences would be released on video with his face hidden or blurred out. This secrecy dropped after he was caught on video during an undercover investigation by the U.K. antifascist organization “Hope Not Hate.” He has since allowed his face to be recorded and released.
Greg Johnson speaking at the Scandza Forum in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2017. (Source: Bitchute).
Before Counter-Currents, Johnson’s academic career included teaching part-time at Morehouse College, a historically black institution in Georgia, from February 1994 to December 1997. It was also in 1997 that he began a business he dubbed “The Invisible College,” with paid classes that covered a range of topics including philosophy and paranormal activity. The last class was held in 2007, three years before he started Counter-Currents.
Johnson finished his PhD in 2001 at the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America. He is reported to have been a visiting professor at the Swedenborgian House of Studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, during the early 2000s.
His early white nationalist work in the 2000s was published under a number of pen names. These included “The Cat Lady,” Mike Meehan, and Trevor (T.C.) Lynch. These essays reflect many of the topics that Johnson has continued to write about related to the incompatibility of other racial groups with white people, Jewish conspiracy theories, and creating a whites-only ethnostate. Titles of these essays include the “Confessions of a Reluctant Hater” in 2006, which was later used as a title for one of his books, in which Johnson argued as Lynch that hating other races is not a requirement of white nationalism, adding that “I really do hate other races.”
Several of the pseudonymous essays have been claimed by Johnson and appear on Counter-Currents. His writing as Lynch was compiled into a 2025 book titled “The Best of Trevor Lynch.”
When Johnson and white nationalist Michael Polignano began Counter-Currents in 2010, it struck a different tone than many others associated with the white supremacist movement. Articles were more academic and wanton calls for violence were looked down on as counterproductive. He views white nationalist killers like Dylan Roof, who murdered nine people in a South Carolina black church in 2015, as misguided individuals whose white nationalist views could have been directed into more useful channels.
“I read this kid’s manifesto and it was really saddening because he had undergone an intellectual journey that a lot of us had undergone and he had done it in a very isolated way,” he told Rundo in their 2026 interview.
In the aftermath of Roof’s attack, Counter-Currents published a copy of the killer’s manifesto. The editor’s note read that part of the purpose of publishing the manifesto was “to show that Roof’s worldview was not based on ‘ignorance’ or ‘prejudice’ but on verifiable facts.”
Shortly after the 2019 attacks against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead at white supremacist Brenton Tarrant’s hands, Johnson ran a story condemning the killer, but remained sympathetic to the reasoning behind the attack.
“Tarrant’s underlying motive—fear of white race replacement—is not irrational or insane,” Johnson wrote.
The same article adds: “I have no desire to absolve Brenton Tarrant, much less blame his victims. But he would not be a killer, and his victims would not be dead, if New Zealand were not pursuing a policy of multiculturalism and race-replacement, and if Moslems [sic] had not taken a leading role in invading and colonizing European lands, committing heinous acts of terrorism and mass sexual assault.”
As a publisher, Counter-Currents sells original and reprinted editions of books important to modern and historic fascism. These works include modern far-right philosophers and authors like Alain de Benoist, a French white nationalist writer and co-founder of Nouvelle Droite (New Right), a French political movement that rejects concepts like immigration, multiculturalism, minority rights, and liberal democracy. It is part of a broader “New European Right” movement that has been wholly embraced by Johnson. The attempt at rebranding white supremacist narratives as a “new right” is repeatedly seen across the far-right movement, including among other influential organizers and leaders. One of the most notable, the “Identitarian Movement,” publicly advocates for “remigration,” which is the forced deportation en-masse of all non-European migrants (i.e., ethnic cleansing).
Other modern authors appearing on the site include Jonathan Bowden, a British orator and writer who obtained cult status among the far right for his fiery talks at pubs and meetings of the racist British National Party (BNP). Another is Tito Perdue, a writer of far-right fiction who has seen his published works sold by movement publishing houses like Counter-Currents and Arktos.
The site also sells works by historic nationalist and fascist philosophers. These include books by Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola, Greek proponent of the post-Second World War “Esoteric Hitlerist” religious movement (one that elevates Hitler to a deity), Savitri Devi, and influential American Holocaust denier and fascist Francis Parker Yockey.
The original books sold by Counter-Currents, including many written by Johnson, cover a range of topics but center on white identity politics, movement building, the promotion of the European “New Right” philosophy, and historical revisionism around the Holocaust.
Metapolitics and Strategy
At the core of Johnson’s strategy is the idea that culture is upstream from politics. Through Counter-Currents he has endeavored to create an ideological spring of discussion and media dripping in the philosophy of the far right. This exemplifies his approach to metapolitics, a topic he has discussed at length on his website.
“Metapolitics deals with the underlying causes and conditions of political change,” Johnson wrote in a 2023 article. “Metapolitics operates on two levels: intellectual and organizational. Metapolitical ideas include moral systems, religions, collective identities (tribal, national, racial), and assumptions about what is politically possible. Metapolitical organizations propagate metapolitical ideas, bridging the gap between theory and practice.”
Johnson has explored this framing of metapolitics since the site’s founding. His view is that the cultural conditions outside of the political sphere are what ultimately “make politics possible.” He has written thousands of words and taped hours of audio towards this goal. Counter-Currents is one of numerous white nationalist websites that has attempted to supply the “intellectual” backing for white nationalism. Though frequently crude and explicitly hateful, it is a departure from the more antagonistic and outwardly violent writing often founs in the white supremacist movement, instead focusing on building a viable and distinct “acceptable” culture that will eventually influence and inform politics.
In a 2017 article about how readers could support his website, Johnson laid out the purpose of the site.
“The aim of Counter-Currents Publishing and our webzine/print journal North American New Right is to deconstruct the hegemony of anti-white ideas and construct and propagate the alternative, pro-white ideas that are necessary if whites are to regain control of our destiny.”
Johnson has positioned himself as one of a small group of individuals who are working to build an alternative culture of “pro-white” literature and thought. Among those he counts as contemporaries is Jared Taylor, editor and founder of American Renaissance (AmRen), a previous publisher of a print magazine by the same name.
Older than Counter-Currents by decades, AmRen started in 1991 with a similar goal to Johnson’s project, intending to provide an intellectual underpinning for white supremacy. Johnson often speaks highly of Taylor and frequently cites his written and video work in Counter-Currents articles. He has also appeared as a speaker at the annual American Renaissance conference.
If Counter-Currents is meant to serve as an intellectual underpinning, then Johnson’s work outside of the website aims to aid the organizational aspect of the far right. To this end, he is a frequent fixture at conferences and meetings of the American and transnational far right, where he speaks on the same subjects and works to connect the often disparate movement.
What Counter-Currents does provide are frameworks for aspiring white nationalist organizers to build on, including borrowing from Toastmasters, a program that instructs people, usually students, in public speaking.
“If our movement is to attain political power, it is important for as many White Nationalists as possible to become comfortable speaking in public,” Johnson wrote in a January 2023 article explaining how to set up white nationalist meetings and practice defending and advocating for their racist ideology.
Like with his interview with Robert Rundo, Johnson also uses his podcast to network and promote other white supremacist figures he views as valuable to the movement. This includes Peter Brimelow, founder of the since shutdown racist media site VDare; Fróði Midjord, the founder of the Scandza Forum, an annual conference that brought together white nationalist speakers for an invite-only meeting in Northern Europe; Colin Robertson (Millennial Woes), a U.K.-based far-right content creator; and Mark Weber, a long-time American neo-Nazi activist who is currently the director of the Institute of Historical Review, a site primarily dedicated to Holocaust denial.
International Connections and Conferences
Though primarily a producer of media through Counter-Currents’ published work and online magazine, Johnson has cultivated an international network of white nationalist activists, intellectuals, and media personalities. A key factor in this outreach is his frequent speaking appearances at numerous international conferences and meetings where he lectures and promotes a pragmatic unity of the far right.
These events place him alongside other prominent white nationalist thinkers, activists, and movement organizers. One of his most recent appearances was at Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance Conference in November 2025. There are no recordings publicly available of the speech, titled “Our Sacred Honour,” though Counter-Currents published a transcript of the remarks.
In the talk, he argues that “white extinction can be stopped by better political decisions” and praised decisions by the Trump administration for closing the border to “illegal migrants,” its policy of deportations, and “there are now serious discussions about dismantling the Civil Rights regime” as progress.
“Much of the progress we have made in recent years is due simply to the weakening of this absurd moral inhibition on white identity politics,” the transcript said.
This echoes the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, a white supremacist canard claiming there is a deliberate and sophisticated plot to replace white people with people of color. It has inspired terrorism and mass murders around the world, including in the United States.
Counter-Currents also frequently holds meetings and retreats for its “writers, readers, and friends from both Europe and North America.” Few details are published about the events, save for transcripts of speeches or short videos released to Counter-Currents. The retreats appear to be semi-annual, typically occurring in the spring and fall.
The most recent was reported to be held in October 2025 in Texas and organized by Johnson. One attendee, a Counter-Currents contributor, was elated at the progress the white nationalist movement had made during the year.
“The mood of the conference was one of optimism, and I believe this optimism is justified,” Counter-Currents writer Dave Chambers wrote in a post about the event. “Barriers to white identity politics are indeed falling. On social media platforms like X, white nationalist talking points are reaching more people than ever before, and it even appears that racialists are steadily infiltrating the Republican Party and attaining positions of influence.”
From 2017 to 2019 and in 2023, Johnson appeared at the Scandinavian “Scandza Forum,” an annual white nationalist invite-only meeting of prominent writers, thinkers, and organizers like Johnson. Videos released from the meetings show Johnson’s presentations, including the most recent in the Von Stackelberg Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia.
In 2019, the last Scandza Forum before COVID-19 health restrictions, Johnson was arrested and deported from Norway for statements he made about the white supremacist mass murderer Anders Breivik. In 2011, Breivik carried out the worst mass killing in Norway since the Second World War using a car bomb and firearms to murder 77 people. In the wake of the attack, Johnson’s article “Breivik: A Strange New Respect,” condemned the violence, as Johnson said his initial reaction was “largely anger, because I feared that his actions would harm not just Norwegian ethno-nationalism but white nationalism around the world.”
He goes on to claim that reporting on the trial was pulled from the media as “Breivik was making too much sense to too many people” and argues that non-white immigration is a type of “genocide” against ethnic Norwegians. This stance is typical for Johnson, who will condemn far-right terrorism and violence, but paint the motivation of white erasure or the great replacement as understandable.
Support for Trump
Over the past two decades, Greg Johnson has built a publishing platform he intends to serve as an intellectual and cultural infrastructure for the modern far right. While significant mainstream breakthroughs or attention continues to elude him and his writers, Johnson acknowledges the progress he sees for his ideals under the Trump regime.
While still critical of the administration for its closeness with Israel and recent foreign military actions, he has been vocal in support for Trump’s deportation and immigration enforcement policies. In December 2025, Johnson wrote that, “On Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump gave me something to be thankful for” and pointed to social media posts by the president promising “reverse migration” after the tragic killing of one National Guardsmen and the wounding of another in Washington, D.C., by an Afghan national.
Calling it a “metapolitical win,” Johnson delighted that the “idea of ‘remigration’ has now moved from the margins of the White Nationalist movement to the President of the United States.”
This exemplifies the types of victories that Johnson hopes to achieve. It is unlikely he will ever experience any type of acceptance in the academic world he left behind, but he hopes to create the conditions through which the larger movement can find a home in acceptable discourse.
Through his conference appearances, constant networking, interviews, books, articles, Johnson’s white nationalist project extends well beyond his platform at Counter-Currents and is a long-term effort to build an intellectual and cultural underpinning for a politically viable far right.
