Two prominent Northwest white nationalists are complaining about recent financial woes.
Shortly before being arrested in Norway en route to a meeting of the Scandza Forum, Seattle-based white nationalist Greg Johnson wrote on November 1 that his Counter-Current’s Publishing had been “deplatformed from two more credit card processors.” Describing it as a “major blow,” Johnson explained that, “We currently have no way of selling books or taking donations by credit card…We are extending our fundraiser, which usually ends on Halloween, to the end of the year in order to make our goal.”
Johnson says the group may be forced to move to crypto-currency or “checks and money orders sent by mail,” though “not a lot of our supporters will make that transition, unfortunately.” In the end, he writes, “if Counter-Currents is going to continue to grow, we must cultivate a smaller circle of high-commitment, high-dollar patrons.”
Johnson also describes that Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct publishing sent him a late October email stating, “we noticed that you submitted content we consider offensive, which is a violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we are terminating your account agreement effective immediately.”
Amazon continues to make money by selling Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto, Toward a New Nationalism, and other books.
Amazon Continues to Sell Greg Johnson’s White Nationalist Manifesto and Other Books
If Counter-Current’s woes demonstrate the utility of deplatforming white nationalists, the Bremerton, Washington-based Northwest Front is facing financial problems for other reasons. In an October 12 episode of Radio Free Northwest (RFN), Northwest Front leader Andreas Donner announced that due to financial shortfalls, “we are no longer guaranteeing any [RFN] output in any particular week.” Donner inidcates that while RFN will not go away entirely, the group is now focusing on “long term infrastructure and growth-readiness projects.”
The group has, however, posted three episodes of RFN since this statement.
Andreas Donner lacks Northwest Front founder Harold Covington’s movement track record and the group’s performance was criticized by other racists in the wake of Covington’s July 2018 death. Donner’s response to the group’s financial problems, however, makes clear that he has inherited Covington’s caustic and self-congratulatory approach to public outreach.
Donner explains that Covington had created the Northwest Pioneers Association “as a way of getting donations out of people who would not otherwise have donated even though they know damn well knew they should have.” Mimicking Covington’s general tone, Donner lashed out, blaming his own followers’ response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump for the downturn in donations:
“It was very easy for the HQ group, and myself in particular, to blame only ourselves for what was going on, but in truth, the slack in support had dropped precipitously prior to Harold’s death. And it looks like it was a massive amount of our supporter base deciding Donald Trump was more important than actually ending white genocide. I will make it quite plain that the entire Northwest Front is rather disappointed in every single one of you that engaged in that decision-making process.”
Donner bemoans that while the Northwest Front’s “effort ought to be self-sustaining…there are only two or three people on a regular basis sending us impressive amounts of money.” He concludes in mini-Covington-style that,
“The Northwest Front has achieved something that virtually no white nationalist organization has ever achieved and that was a successful planned transfer of authority [following Covington’s death], and the fact of the matter is we are owed your loyalty simply for that. Not only do we have the single viable plan to end white genocide, but we were actually serious enough to plan on long term success. Since our efforts towards demonstrating that have been met with, well, a yawn at best, we’re simply going to take care of what we need to take care of, because we are tired of putting on a show for people that can’t be bothered to participate anyway.”
While anti-racists and anti-fascists can be encouraged by these developments, we cannot let up. Greg Johnson maintains a significant set of national and international movement relationships and continues to have an outlet like Amazon peddling his books. And the Northwest Front, while hobbled and unlikely to garner a mass following, preaches the kind of violence that can always result in tragedy.
