IM-1776 Magazine
Hard Right literary-political magazine founded 2020; chief editor Mike Granza (Italian; moved to Hungary 2022); pitches itself as concerned with “literary excellence” and culture; first post was a review of Bronze Age Mindset; published Christopher Rufo’s “Manifesto for the Counterrevolution” (January 2024); part of the Hard Right media ecosystem alongside American Greatness, American Mind, Revolver News, and TheBlaze
What It Is
IM-1776 was founded in 2020. It pitches itself as more concerned with literary excellence than politics, claiming to be operating “against liberalism and progress because they cared so much about education and the ‘necessary education for civilization — conversation, friendship, and insight.’” Its September 2020 mission statement: “welcome to the end of modernity.”
The pitch is a pose. Its first ever post was a “sparkling review” of Bronze Age Mindset by Michael Millerman — a Dugin popularizer and Toronto PhD. The magazine publishes extreme Claremont Institute affiliates like Michael Anton, Glenn Ellmers, and Scott Yenor, alongside Hard Right writers. Like Raw Egg Nationalist’s Man’s World magazine, IM-1776 publishes high-end print editions in keeping with the Hard Right’s antimodern aesthetic. Field: “Everything about Man’s World and IM-1776 screams fascism.”
The chief editor is Mike Granza, an Italian who moved to Hungary in 2022.
The “Culture-Not-Politics” Pose
IM-1776 mirrors the classic Hard Right strategy of claiming a purely “cultural” project while advancing totalizing political goals. Field traces this pose to the fascist intellectual tradition: Heidegger’s distinction between “vulgar” and “spiritual” National Socialism; Alain de Benoist’s “metapolitical” Nouvelle Droite; Mircea Eliade’s claim that he was only ever interested in the “cultural and religious dimensions” of Romania’s fascist Legionary Movement. The pose allows Hard Right media to build mainstream adjacency while maintaining deniability about the political implications.
In 2023 the IM-1776 editors announced an effort to fund more writers, insisting: “Transgression for the sake of transgression isn’t our principle. What’s needed is a real vision for a better future with Truth and Beauty at its core.”
The Rufo Manifesto (January 4, 2024)
Christopher Rufo published “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution” in IM-1776 on January 4, 2024 — two days after Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation, which Rufo had orchestrated. The manifesto was a synthesis of Eliade’s fascism, Vermeule and Deneen’s “integration from within,” and Project 2025’s administrative state seizure. Publishing it in IM-1776 — rather than in American Mind or a Claremont venue — illustrates Rufo’s role as a conduit between the mainstream New Right and the Hard Right.
The SACR Connection
IM-1776 editor conducted a December 2022 interview with Charles Haywood — a lawyer and former personal care product manufacturer who turned to far-right blogging and Christian activism after selling his company in 2020. Haywood has close connections to the Claremont Institute and helped found a secret Christian nationalist men’s society in 2020 called the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR). Other SACR leaders included Claremont’s Ryan Williams and Scott Yenor, and Lincoln Fellow venture capitalist Nathan Fischer. This was disclosed in 2024 via public records requests of Yenor’s emails from Boise State University. When Williams and others from this group decided to “resettle across America” in small, “aligned” right-wing enclaves, they received a glossy write-up in The New York Times.
NETTR and the Cordon Sanitaire
The Haywood interview was provoked by an argument between Haywood and Rod Dreher over NETTR — “No Enemies to the Right” — a policy advocating the complete abandonment of the old cordon sanitaire that excluded white nationalists and Neo-Nazis from mainstream conservative platforms. Haywood was a hardened proponent; Dreher found it “unhinged and morally corrupt.”
The dispute was triggered by the discovery that Thomas Achord — principal of a private Christian school in Louisiana and podcasting partner of Stephen Wolfe (author of The Case for Christian Nationalism) — had been operating a pseudonymous account for years, posting anti-Black and misogynist content online. Dreher was aghast; his own children had attended Achord’s school.
Cross-References
- Hard Right — the movement IM-1776 represents
- Christopher Rufo — published his January 2024 manifesto here
- Costin Alamariu — Bronze Age Mindset was IM-1776’s first review
- Michael Anton — publishes there
- Glenn Ellmers — publishes there
- Claremont Institute — major contributor base
- Manosphere — the masculinity-crisis current that overlaps with IM-1776’s aesthetic