Greg Johnson doesn’t look like your average fascist. He dresses neatly, speaks softly using academic language, and performatively denounces the violence committed by the white nationalists whose ideology he helps shape. It’s all key to his schtick as one of America’s most prominent “academic racists.”
Law enforcement officials in Norway aren’t buying it—because they know better.
On Monday, Johnson was detained and then deported upon his arrival in Oslo, where he was planning to put in what had become a regular appearance at the white nationalist Scandza Forum. Norwegian officials told Johnson that he had been detained on national security grounds, in no small part because he had previously written of his “respect” for Anders Behring Breivik, the white nationalist responsible for the most lethal terrorist attack in the country’s history in 2011.
A spokesman for Norway’s domestic security agency told CNN that Johnson was considered “to be a threat, not because of what he could do but because of his hate speech and his previously expressed support for Anders Breivik.”
Johnson complained bitterly on his blog that he had been arrested for “thoughtcrime,” claiming that in reality, he was frequently outspoken against terrorism and violence wielded on behalf of the white nationalist cause: “I have always consistently condemned terrorism. In fact, I do not know of anyone else who has so clearly and unequivocally spoken against Right-wing terrorism as me. … I have never supported Breivik’s crimes. These stories take quotes from my writings out of context, from an article in which I in no way defended Breivik’s crimes.”
Johnson reportedly flew to Portugal to give a speech after being forced to leave Norway.
Dubious claims notwithstanding, Johnson clearly was unable to persuade Norwegian officials, who continue to grapple with the toxic and lethal effects of white nationalist organizing and its resulting terrorism.
In addition to Breivik’s horrifying attack—in which eight people in downtown Oslo were killed by a truck bomb he set off, after which he attacked a youth camp at rural Utoya Island and murdered 77 people, mostly teenagers—the nation has recently reeled from the news of another attempted massacre at a synagogue near Oslo, committed by a teenager who expressly fancied himself yet another in the lineage of sequential mass killers that began with Breivik, including the white nationalist who murdered 51 in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year. A recent rampage by a neo-Nazi couple near Oslo in which three people were injured has not yet been declared a terrorist attack by Norwegian officials.
Johnson’s defense is typically disingenuous. In 2012 he authored a blog post and accompanying podcast titled “Breivik: A Strange New Respect,” in which he reiterated both his personal dislike of Breivik (“I … took a visceral dislike to Breivik, who struck me as a creepy, narcissistic dork”) and his dismay at the violence that Breivik had unleashed—not because he found it repellent, but because he believes it harms the white nationalist cause by giving it a black eye.
However, he went on to say that Breivik’s trial had convinced him to change his mind, having instead come to rationalize the terrorism as an act of “ethnic self-defense,” and that Breivik’s white nationalist arguments on the witness stand were delivered with “dignity” and “made a forceful, intelligent, well-argued case for his views and actions”:
Yet in the end, for all of his crimes and mistakes, I cannot judge Breivik too harshly. He is an awakened white man, and those are all too rare. In spite of his errors, he was acting out of loyalty to our people, and that matters a great deal. Yes, he committed crimes. But he committed them out of love.
He offered up a similar rationalization last year for the horrifying massacre of 11 Jews at the Temple of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh: “Yes, [Robert] Bowers did something evil and stupid,” he wrote. “But Bowers’ underlying motive—fear of white race replacement—is not irrational or insane. It is a healthy reaction to objective facts.”
Johnson edits one of the most widely read white nationalist journals, Counter Currents, which he says fundamentally views white nationalism as not palatable to the mainstream only because “it offends the values of the electorate … our people think our goals are immoral … incoherent and impractical … because our enemies control academia, the school system, publishing, the arts, the news and entertainment media, and they have remade the American mind to their liking. My aim is to change people’s sense of what is politically desirable and right, and their sense of what is politically conceivable and possible.”
However, he makes occasional arguments against violence in the white nationalist cause, which are widely regarded as so much fig-leaf cover for the innately violent content of both the ideology—creation of an all-white American ethnostate and expulsion of Jews and nonwhites—and the rhetoric he uses.
Some prime examples of Johnson’s ugly hate speech can be readily found:
“As for the Jews … At the very least, all their property should be confiscated. At the very least. There are two reasons for this. First, we should consider it reparations. Second, if they were allowed to keep their wealth, they would immediately use it to stir up trouble against us. Just look at what happened when Adolf Hitler, with the typical excess of kindness that was his greatest flaw, allowed the Jews of Germany to emigrate with their fortunes.”
— As T.C. Lynch, “To Cleanse America: Some Practical Proposals,”
Vanguard News Network, 2003.
“Yes, there would be thousands of White race traitors marching and holding candlelight vigils. That's why we have rubber bullets and fire hoses. Yes, Blacks and Mexicans would riot and burn down their neighborhoods and Korean convenience stores. But that's why we have police and the National Guard. What? Do White men no longer know how to crack heads and fire guns? In the end, non-White lawlessness would simply allow us to accelerate their expulsion. “
— As T.C. Lynch, “To Cleanse America: Some Practical Proposals,”
Vanguard News Network, 2003.
The prime example of Johnson’s disingenuousness lies in his actions as the owner/publisher of Counter Currents, which in addition to the site and magazine also publishes a number of white nationalist books and makes them available to his fascist-curious audience. Foremost among these is Siege, the hateful tract by Charles Manson devotee James Mason that has become the Bible of violent white nationalist paramilitary groups such as The Base and Atomwaffen Division, the latter of which has been associated with a wide range of lethally violent acts around the nation.
Johnson reportedly moved to Seattle from California sometime in 2016 (he was outed by local anarchists and subsequently expelled from his gym) and has been operating secretive white nationalist recruitment gatherings known as the Northwest Forum in the region. A reporter for The Stranger managed to sneak into one of these forums in 2017 and provided a rare inside look at their recruitment strategies—which, in Johnson’s case, involves “going undercover” within mainstream workplaces, particularly in the software industry, and keeping one’s racist ideology well hidden, while gradually nudging white co-workers toward their worldview.
Indeed, Johnson can be found making precisely that pitch during an earlier white-nationalist forum held in Europe in a video captured by Hatewatch:
“We need people who are plugged into the system and have a lot to lose,” Johnson wrote in a post explaining the strategy. “But because of these very traits, they cannot afford to be explicit White Nationalists. Not yet, anyway. Nothing would be gained by these people losing their positions in the system by openly avowing White Nationalism in today’s climate.
“So what is to be done? We need to keep building our network until we become strong enough, and the system becomes weak enough, for open struggle to have a chance of success. Until then, most of us will have to remain publicly silent, sharing our views with only small circles of trusted friends.”
The Scandza Forum, whose Oslo event was only one of several such gatherings it has organized this year, has become renowned as a host for racist pseudoscience and crackpot conspiracism. As Hope Not Hate reported earlier, the theme of this event was “Human Biodiversity,” a coded academic term for white nationalist eugenics.