Greg Johnson (white nationalist)

Johnson has been secretive about his personal life, and few photos of him have been published.[8][2] He was born in 1971, the son of a Democratic union member. Initially attracted by libertarianism in his high school years, especially the work of Leo Strauss and the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, he began to take an interest in paleoconservatism, then in white nationalism. In his early twenties, Johnson described himself as "somewhat pro-Zionist", but started to perceive a "definite Jewish bias" in neoconservatism, which he says has become "more keyed into the Jewish slant on things."[8] After discovering the controversy surrounding the relation between Martin Heidegger and Nazism, Johnson's anti-Semitic worldview began to crystallize. He argued about this issue with fellow Jewish graduate students, but failed to convince them. In his account of the event, Johnson evokes an analogy with Adolf Hitler's claim in Mein Kampf that he had spent hours trying to convince Jewish socialists in Vienna with no result. "That’s when I knew", Johnson writes, that "this guy [Hitler] was telling the truth. That was so powerful."[9] Johnson received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America, and subsequently taught philosophy at Morehouse College from February 1994 to December 1997.[3][10]

While living in Atlanta, Georgia (in late 1999 or early 2000), Johnson met Joshua Buckley, a former skinhead and the editor of Tyr, a radical Traditionalist journal. In September 2000, Johnson attended a lecture given by British Holocaust denier David Irving.[9] In late 2000, he started to think about founding his own white nationalist journal, but abandoned the idea after the creation of The Occidental Quarterly in 2001.[11] The following year, he joined the faculty of the Pacific School of Religion as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Swedenborgian Studies.[3][1] In 2007 Johnson became the editor of The Occidental Quarterly, establishing its online version in collaboration with Michael J. Polignano.[11]

In April 2010, Johnson left the editorship of The Occidental Quarterly and co-founded Counter-Currents along with Polignano, an organization intended to provide the Northern American public access to the European New Right ideas, with the publication of Nouvelle Droite authors such as Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye.[12]

In 2014, the white supremacist National Policy Institute (NPI) held a conference in Budapest, Hungary, to which the Hungarian government responded by threatening to arrest and deport anyone who attended the conference. Johnson, who had planned to attend, cancelled these plans and asked for a refund of his registration fees. Undeterred by the Hungarian government's threats, NPI founder Richard B. Spencer held the conference anyway, after which he was arrested and banned from Hungary for several years. Johnson subsequently wrote of Spencer that the "final straw" for him "...was Richard’s disastrous mishandling of the Budapest conference. When a foreign government tells you that your conference is banned and that the police will take the necessary steps to make sure it does not take place, you do not vow defiance." He also attacked Spencer's wife Nina Kouprianova, arguing that she was controlling her husband's actions and that she was not a white nationalist.[13][14]

In June 2017, Hope not Hate's Patrik Hermansson went undercover to interview multiple alt-right figures, including Johnson, at the Puget Sound-area white nationalist convention the Northwest Forum, which Johnson organized. When speaking to Hermansson at the convention, Johnson stated that Counter-Currents was seeing a significant rise in traffic, and expressed support for the concept of ethnostates, arguing that Jews should be expelled to Israel.[15][10] Also that year, David Lewis of the Stranger went undercover at another Northwest Forum meeting, where he learned about Johnson's "secret agent" plan. This plan, according to Lewis, calls for Johnson and his fellow white nationalists to pretend to support diversity so "they [can] move into positions of power where they can hire other racists and keep non-whites from getting into the company."[10]

Following the murder of an anti-fascist protestor during the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in August 2017, Counter-Currents was deplatformed from PayPal, which jeopardized the fund-raising activities of the organization.[16]

Johnson supports the creation of ethnicity-specific white ethnostates in which only white people would live.[3] In an introduction to his book New Right vs. Old Right (2014), Johnson defines ethnonationalism as "the idea that every distinct ethnic group should enjoy political sovereignty and an ethnically homogeneous homeland or homelands." According to Johnson, this is opposed by multiculturalism.[17] He has written that "Blacks don’t find white civilization comfortable."[3]

Johnson has claimed that white nationalism is not the same as white supremacy because "...it is not our [white nationalists'] preference to rule over other groups. Although if forced to live under multicultural systems, we are going to take our own side and try to make sure that our values reign supreme."[3][18]

Endorsing the white genocide conspiracy theory, Johnson has written that "The organized Jewish community is the principal enemy — not the sole enemy, but the principal enemy — of every attempt to halt and reverse white extinction. One cannot defeat an enemy one will not name. Therefore, White nationalism is inescapably anti-Semitic."[3]

Reproductive rights and access to birth control are also opposed by Johnson, who wrote "Get rid of all voluntary birth control. ... Voluntary birth control means that people who are far-sighted and responsible restrict their fertility, and people who are impulsive and stupid don't. So you can't leave birth control up to the individual." He made suggestions as to how to encourage women to have children earlier in their lives, in order to ensure that the white race remains viable.[19]

Johnson also calls himself "transphobic", writing that "transsexualism is a ghastly, insane phenomenon in America today, or in the white world today."[3]

Johnson has been influenced by the esoteric proponent of Nazism Savitri Devi after learning about Devi's Impeachment of Man (1959) and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's biography Hitler's Priestess in the early 2000s. Under the pen name R. G. Fowler, he created the "The Savitri Devi Archive" in order to make her work more accessible, and Counter-Currents has republished a centennial edition of her devotional poems to Adolf Hitler along with a new edition of The Lighting and the Sun (1958), which deifies the Führer as an avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu.[20]

American white nationalist William Luther Pierce has also inspired Johnson, in particular his anti-Semitic pamphlet Who Rules America? (although Johnson has rejected The Turner Diaries as an impediment to serious policy formation), as well as Jonathan Bowden, the former cultural officer of the British National Party and a regular contributor to Counter-Currents.[21]

• Macklin, Graham (2019). "Greg Johnson and Counter-Currents". In Sedgwick, Mark (ed.). Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy. Oxford University Press. pp. 204–223. ISBN 978-0-19-087760-6.