An Interview with Imperium Press

A Window into Another Time

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Due to some personal things that have come up this week there is no new Substack article—we will be back next week with a very important article.

So this week we have republished an interview that Mike did back in March 2021, a year after COVID was “launched”, and just after Imperium Press had been banned from a range of social media platforms. This interview is no longer online and the magazine in which it was published no longer exists. It provides a window into a momentous time for radical right-wing politics, a time when the Deep State had just struck back hard at dissident voices. Where so many right-wing thinkers have changed their views substantially over time, it is fascinating to see how much of the folkish worldview is already present in this interview.

Could you tell us a bit more about Imperium Press. When was it formed, and what was the catalyst in building it?

Imperium Press took on its formal existence in February 2018 but was long in coming. The earliest inkling of it was in a book of folktales I started compiling for my children, but with any project my ambition tends to run away with me and what started modestly soon got out of control. This book is now some 300,000 words and will see an official IP release late this year—it’s still dedicated to my kids. But this put the idea of publishing into my head. About the same time, I was getting very serious about my own self-directed course of study, devouring as many books in the history of ideas as I could. I found that while the scholarship of say, Cambridge University Press editions is still good (though declining), their editions of books by reactionary or illiberal thinkers are purposefully framed in ways that sanitize them and foreclose on thinking outside of liberal categories. An example would be Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Vico wrote three editions and each one became more and more pessimistic about the proto-liberal project, and also more and more radical and interesting. The third edition is considered standard. But the Cambridge release is the first edition since it’s the least problematic, with his corsi i ricorsi (cyclical history) the least developed. This is an example of why nobody should be reading contemporary editions of classic texts. And yet almost nobody is talking about this problem. A single volume edition of Kant’s three critiques was published by Wilder Publications in 2008 with a trigger warning. Kant! We decided to step in and do something.

Is this a group-run project - and if so, how did the people involved find each other and establish a working relationship?

It’s a group project now. We found each other in various ways, some online, some IRL, and there is now a core of very talented and very solid people involved. And we need more. The core group has taken shape simply by people volunteering to help with projects and showing themselves to be capable and loyal. Loyalty is the lifeblood of any organization—this is the kernel of Spandrell’s bioleninism thesis—and no less for us. We’re also connected with the Postliberalism project headed by Joel Davis. There is significant overlap between our people and theirs. Joel and I have a new podcast coming soon—ImperiumCast.

Do you have a background in publishing, or is something you’ve taken on and developed over time in response to the political climate?

I had published one book before starting this, an anthology of other people’s work. But that’s it. It has been a long, slow process of making mistakes and learning. People really have no idea how much work goes into putting out a decent edition of a book, even a classic that doesn’t need any copyediting. I could go into detail, but believe me, none of your readers would be interested. Suffice it to say I haven’t got 8 hours sleep in almost two years.

You’re one of the victims of Twitter’s latest purge, Mystery Grove being another. Had you come to expect it, and do you think your growing popularity is one of the reasons behind permanently suspending your account?

It absolutely is one of the reasons. By the time of the ban our Twitter had 6,200 followers and had been gaining dozens a day for months. We were easily on track to top 10K by the end of the year, probably more with the launch of ImperiumCast. Mystery Grove had double our follower count, and while extremely spicy, they avoided third rail issues much more studiously than we did. So, if they were deplatformed, it had nothing to do with violating the Twitter ‘Rules’. There are no Twitter Rules, there are just pretexts for banning people on the wrong side of history. The idea is not unlike Bentham’s panopticon—you create an environment of opaqueness, uncertainty, and caprice that forces people to self-police. And the rationale behind banning us and Mystery Grove was that we were starting to make waves in the broader culture. MG’s edition of Storm of Steel is now the default edition on Amazon. Our edition of Fustel de Coulanges’ Ancient City is too. Every coherent social order is necessarily totalitarian, but liberalism especially so. Because of liberalism’s conceptual incoherence, it can’t simply allow illiberal thought to stay in its lane. Hence you get the paradox of tolerance, which is less a paradox than a tautology: liberalism—the open society—can tolerate everything as long as it is also liberalism. It’s almost like an Oscar Wilde aphorism, but without any of the irony, wit, or self-awareness. So, we were banned, and this came as no surprise. In a sense we were a victim of our own success: because IP grew so quickly, we focused on getting books out rather than cultivating alternative social media presences. After the Twitter ban, we started a Telegram channel which gained 1,000 followers in 24 hours. I think this is testament to the strength of the project.

Do you think that more can be done in establishing strong connections between platforms and journalistic outlets, to make sure the audience base always knows where to find you?

There certainly can, but what that looks like from a technical standpoint I’m not sure. Ultimately what will win the war for our guys is not something technical, but something quite ancient: solidarity. Personal connections and loyalties between actors make any corporate body coherent, stable, and robust, and political movements are no different. Personal loyalty between operatives, media personalities, technicians, and the man in the street will make us far stronger than any blockchain technology ever could. Loyalty is the essential feature of the clan system, a system we will need to cultivate in spirit (perhaps in fact) if we are going to stop losing. This is not to say that we should ignore technics—our clannish forefathers certainly didn’t—only to say that the problem is structural before it is technical. Put more concretely, if 50K Twitter accounts get banned and each of those accounts tells 100 mutuals where to find 100 other mutuals elsewhere, this is a highly antifragile network that can route around banning easily.

You mentioned in a recent post on Telegram that you hope that nationalist tech infrastructure will keep pace with the endless censorship - and now with the introduction of platforms like Odysee, it looks like long term solutions are being discussed and put forward. Do you think these will have a chance of staying afloat, or is the machine going to continue until Nationalist sentiment is essentially outlawed on the internet?

Nationalism is already de jure (if not quite de facto) outlawed under international law because of the Nuremberg trials, the epoch-making event of our time. The outcome of those trials, and the rise of human rights as a legal paradigm, mean that no longer are nation-states the ultimate arbiters of jurisprudence, nor do peoples have any sort of claim on the land of their fathers however long they have been there. And so, we can expect this nationalism ban to extend to the internet, and the only question is whether it will be enforceable. We have a new crop of alt tech that looks much better than the last round—Odysee is as smooth and user-friendly as YouTube, can mirror YT’s content, and is built on the blockchain protocol. But even if such alternatives are willing and able to host nationalist content, it’s still easy to ban them at the point of delivery rather than at the source. This happened in Australia following the Brenton Tarrant killings when ISPs blocked access to 4chan, LiveLeak, BitChute, Archive.is, PirateBay, and other inconvenient websites. Telegram is somewhat insulated from this because it runs on a desktop application, but some alt tech isn’t. There’s a lot of work still to be done to make platforms both stable and beyond the reach of the Deep State.

On the last point - is this why you feel strongly that putting the written word to paper is a useful tool in fighting censorship?

Writing is one of the oldest and deepest forms of human expression. Film, music, video games—each medium has its strengths, but there are things you can do with writing that you just can’t do with other media. Books can shape your life and send you off on a completely different trajectory. With books you can—and especially today, should—establish a mind-meld with someone who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, whose categories of thought are so different to yours that they might as well be from another planet. And liberal categories are so fragile that the simple act of thinking outside of them is often enough to ruin them.

Do you think that having access to publishers such as yourselves gives authors the freedom to be honest in their works, rather than taking it to a traditional publisher who would likely want them to denounce or water down their points?

I suspect that great, unfiltered work would be written no matter what, but it wouldn’t find as wide an audience without prominent dissident publishers. Right now, somewhere on the internet, there is a life-changing essay that you will never find, written by the equal of any professional scholar, on a topic you never thought you needed to know about. The internet has been a blessing and a curse; the curse of the internet is that sheer volume of content drowns out quality. There was a book right as web 2.0 was gaining steam called Cult of the Amateur that dealt with this. Moldbug was a talented writer and no doubt his talent got him noticed, but there are dozens or hundreds of Moldbugs out there that no one will ever find; some don’t want to be found. Publishers, music labels, etc. serve an important purpose: to curate good content, and the most successful of them are the best readers, (or listeners, etc.) who can spot talent and bring it to an audience. Stronger dissident publishers mean a louder megaphone for dissident voices, past, present, and future. Is it any wonder, then, that Twitter banned the publishers?

You host a number of titles already - would it be possible just to ask you a bit about them and what sort of work you’d be looking to publish in the future, in case there are any aspiring authors out there?

Most of our releases are classics, often important work rescued from obscurity. But we have published three books so far by contemporary authors. Nemesis by C. A. Bond is a book on power dynamics, taking the framework of historian Bertrand de Jouvenel and making out of it acid for dissolving liberal narratives about social change. Anthropomorphics by Dennis Bouvard uses the generative anthropology of Eric Gans to explain how we can enter the discursive spaces of those in power and repurpose them to serve pro- rather than anti-social aims. American Extremist by Josh Neal is a psychoanalysis of the American (and by extension, Western) psyche, explains how America is at its very core an engine for the production of extremism, and gives us several useful conceptual tools to reshape political discourse to our ends. They’re each quite different books, but there are some threads that run between them. First, obviously they’re all non-fiction. This probably just reflects our tastes but is not something hard and fast—it’s not like Imperium Press refuses to publish fiction as a rule. Second, they all prove corrosive to liberal narratives in the different ways I’ve outlined. The older works we publish do the same. Whether it’s Iliad, Ancient City, or the new volume of Thomas Carlyle essays, each of these books either offers incisive critique of our modern cultural hellscape or shows us an alternate historical world whose mere existence is an affront to that hellscape—in the case of Ancient City, it does both of these things. Third, and most interesting I think, is that each of these new books takes a thinker associated with liberalism or the left and claims him for our side. This is a subtle and highly subversive move. Taking a thinker like Freud, as Josh Neal does in American Extremist, and turning him into a cultural critic of all things degenerate and anti-social is quite radical. Of course, the poststructuralist left has been doing this for nigh on three generations now—think of Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger. Well, turnabout’s fair play.

As far as what sort of work we’re looking to publish in the future, I can’t really say—I’ll know it when I see it. Something groundbreaking, something interesting, something that turns liberalism back on itself, or that renovates and enlivens the tradition. Liberalism has had it all its own way since at least the English Civil War. That’s the better part of 400 years. The result? Everything is on fire. It’s time. LIBERALISM DELENDA EST. If you agree, if you have something interesting to say, we want to hear it.

We’re seeing a number of small businesses popping up over the last couple of years - Grandma Towler’s Tea as an example - do you think more people should be looking at long term projects like this rather than the endless 2016-era Twitter bickering we’ve grown out of?

Yes, it’s time for action. This is not to say that we don’t need debate—good grief, the religion question has not even been settled among our guys. But you don’t need a fully developed doctrinal statement before setting out to do some good. All that is broken, ugly, resentful, and contaminating will not be crushed until good people are willing to stake their reputations, put their real name to their deeds, get out in the street, and meet these people head on in actual meatspace. Laura Towler has absolutely done the right thing. Andrew Torba has done the right thing. Mark Collett has done the right thing. Above all, we need praxis. The time for words has not ended, but the time for deeds has arrived.

What would you say your overall goal is?

LIBERALISM DELENDA EST

Finally - do you have any whitepills or words of advice to pass on to others who may be thinking about setting up businesses themselves or media enterprises to support this new wave of underground talent?

One thing we’ve been saying from the very start is that nationalists need to build parallel institutions if we want to win. Liberal hegemons will not just let us use their infrastructure to challenge them, nor should they, and we should not expect it. So, in setting up a business, you’re doing something tangible, you’re making a concrete contribution to all that is good, right, and true. Also, you don’t need to be Elon Musk to get cracking. Start from where you are, with what you know. Winning is about doing a lot of small things right over a long time. Maybe your own power is fairly limited right now, but what if you had got started 10 years ago? Start now. We need infrastructure. Not just publishing companies and YouTube commentators, but people who can write code, do private investigation, run security at events. We have guys who are carpenters, brickpavers, insurance adjusters, and they all—especially white-collar guys—need jobs that will not be cancelled because they posted a meme on Facebook. If you can give one person that at some point in your life, you have done something.

All social change is elite vs. elite, and there are elites out there who like us, but we can’t support them, so they don’t publicly support us. I’ll bet Elon Musk is 100% redpilled. He’s a South African refugee. And he’s a powerful man, but if he comes out as a fully fledged nationalist he will be bled to death by the FTC and SEC until he loses everything. We need to be able to make life hell for his (or anyone else’s) enemies, and that means having a deep institutional structure from top to bottom, which means electricians, security contractors, cryptography experts, dissident publishers, and a thousand other organizations. This doesn’t sound like a whitepill because it will take generations to bring about. But the whitepill is this—no longer are we under the illusion of grassroots change. We know what needs to be done: we need to fashion ourselves into a weapon that can be wielded in our own interests, by people with means. All that remains is to do it. Start now.