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Like all journals of dissident ideas, Counter-Currents depends on the support of our readers. So far this year, we’ve raised $55,211.30 of our $300,000 goal. I want to thank everyone who has donated so far. (Please donate here!)

Our friend Gaddius Maximus recently ran a series of revealing polls on his Telegram channel, Building a Third Force, to which you should subscribe today. (He has 665 subscribers as of this writing. Let’s get that over 1,000.) The upshot of his polls is that most respondents believe, quite accurately, that our ideas have made enormous progress in the last few years. But when he asked the final question, about whether people are more optimistic about our prospects, it was clear that even though most respondents saw great intellectual progress, they were not as sanguine about our actual political prospects. As one commenter put it: We have made a lot of intellectual progress, but society is objectively worse.

I think this might help explain the “movement malaise” people have been commenting about since the beginning of 2022.

Part of that malaise is merely a problem of optics. From the audience, it looks like the movement is shrinking because there are fewer people on stage, which is true. Many have closed up shop. But from the stage, we can see that there are more people in the audience than ever before, and by some indications, half of you have arrived here since 2018. Individual pundits may come and go, but our ideas are here to stay, and their impact is only growing.

But another part of the malaise is simply due to unrealistic expectations. Politics is downstream from culture . . . way downstream. Today’s political events are the products of bad ideas that have been spreading for decades, even centuries. Our enemies have a huge head start. It takes time for a change of public consciousness to produce a change of policy — especially because the people in power will do everything they can to maintain their power in the face of rising opposition. And once we actually start influencing policy, we will encounter both active opposition and institutional inertia. But we know we can turn the world around, because our enemies did it before us, and we can put things right.

We are like the passengers of an ocean liner. We see that the ship is heading full-steam toward an iceberg. But most of the passengers want to have fun, not listen to bad news, and the Captain and crew simply dismiss us as “iceberg haters” who lack faith in their leadership and their wondrous new machine. As the peril grows closer, more people will listen to us. Eventually, some of the crew might listen, too. Maybe the Captain will change course. Maybe the crew will mutiny and change course. Maybe the passengers will storm the bridge and change course. Even when the tide turns in our favor, we will still be hurtling toward disaster. Even when the course is finally changed, it takes a long time to turn a steamship. Even if one cuts the engines, inertia will speed it on toward doom. Even if the course is changed in time, things will continue to get worse — or at least look worse (the iceberg will loom larger) — before they get better.

Right now, we are still at the stage of awakening the passengers and crew. We know that things won’t end well for the people on the bridge. An unsustainable course won’t go on forever. But we don’t yet know if it will end badly for the rest of us. Duty compels us to try to save the whole ship. Prudence dictates that we know where the lifeboats are. Realism tells us that things will get worse before they get better, so we should not give in to fear, because we will only win if we keep fighting. Keep us in the fight by donating today.

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Thank you again for your loyal readership and generous support.

Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief