He has said he was libertarian in high school, read Ayn Rand in early college (becoming in his words "a bit of a boy Objectivist"), and afterward considered himself paleoconservative and finally white nationalist.

[4][9] 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.

[4][verification needed] In 2002, he joined the faculty of the Pacific School of Religion as a visiting assistant professor of Philosophy and Swedenborgian Studies.

[8]: 205–206 In April 2010, Johnson left the editorship of The Occidental Quarterly and, with Polignano, co-founded Counter-Currents to publicize European New Right ideas, including Nouvelle Droite authors Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye.

[12][9] David Lewis of the Stranger went undercover at another meeting of the group in August 2017, which 70 to 80 people attended, and described efforts by white nationalists to pretend to support diversity in the technology industry and "move into positions of power where they can hire other racists and keep non-whites from getting into the company.

"[9][2] Following the murder of an anti-fascist protester during the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in August 2017, Counter-Currents was deplatformed from PayPal, which jeopardized its funding.

[8]: 207 On November 2, 2019, Johnson was arrested in Norway before a far-right conference in Oslo, and deported two days later, because of his previous writing about the Norwegian extremist mass murderer Anders Breivik.

Johnson has also said he admired Jonathan Bowden, the former cultural officer of the British National Party and a contributor to Counter-Currents who died in 2012.