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The far right US publisher Passage Press is now part of Foundation Publishing Group and it is connected via a Foundation director, Daniel Lisi, to Network Press, whose only title to date is an “effective accelerationist” manifesto by tech-right venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Another rightwing publisher, science fiction publisher Ark Press, appears connected to Chapter House which Lisi, a literary scenester in Los Angeles, originally co-founded as an independent publisher of poetry, sci-fi and esoterica, but which now presents itself as a homeschooling resource.
The developments illuminate the far right’s efforts to disseminate ideologically charged material as art in the US, and raise questions about its place in the broader culture wars waged by the Trump administration which is carrying out a broad attack on what it sees as liberal culture.
Jordan Carroll is author of the book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, an account of the far right’s recent efforts to advance their cause via genre fiction and the fan cultures surrounding it.
Carroll pointed to “a long tradition on the right of creating counter-institutions whose purpose is to develop a popular culture based on reactionary values in order to counterbalance what they have seen as the corrosive influence of the mainstream media, publishing, and academia”.
Lisi, the publisher and director, spent years as a face in Los Angeles’s diverse and left-leaning literary scene. He has now emerged as a player in a sprawling far-right cultural push, with his role in Foundation, Network, Passage and Ark revealed in company filings, trademarks, open source materials and public records.
In a recently self-published book, Lisi effectively laid out a blueprint that is reflected in Passage’s efforts to mainstream far-right writers by selling their work, offering high-end editions, and convening public events throughout the country.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian it was “another example of the far right moving to directly impact culture, and especially young people, with extremist and anti-democratic beliefs”.
She added: “These efforts represent another front in the culture wars, one that is pushing America further from democracy and equality and closer to autocratic rule.”
The Guardian repeatedly contacted Lisi for comment. He did not respond.
However, hours after the last request, a post from Passage’s X account, framed as announcement, reflected the information in this reporting.
Passage Press
The Guardian previously reported that Passage Press was founded in 2021 by Jonathan Keeperman, at that time a lecturer at the University of California Irvine who had long operated in far-right circles online under the online pseudonym “L0m3z”.
Passage’s authors include Curtis Yarvin, whose antidemocratic ideas have influenced the Trump administration, neo-reactionary Nick Land, and Steve Sailer, who has been described as a “white supremacist” and a “proponent of scientific racism”.
Passage recently announced four new books to its newsletter subscribers whose authors include Taki Theodoracopulos, Charles Cornish-Dale and Paul Gottfried.
Theodoracopulos, heir to a Greek shipping fortune, was handed a 12 month suspended sentence for attempted rape by a Swiss court in 2023. Following the conviction–currently under appeal–he resigned as a columnist from UK conservative magazine The Spectator after 47 years.
During his Spectator run, Theodoracopulos peppered his column anti-Black slurs, described New York’s Puerto Ricans as “fat, squat, ugly, dirty and unbelievably loud”, praised Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party as “good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks”, and in a column on the 1944 D-Day landings wrote of the Wermacht that “my heart goes out to those defenders”.
A column in which Theodoracopulos claimed that “Orientals … have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole” forced an apology from his former editor Boris Johnson, then campaigning to be mayor of London.
Theodoracopulos also founded paleoconservative publications including the American Conservative and Taki’s Magazine; the latter was edited by Richard Spencer, home to white nationalists like John Derbyshire, and was the venue in which Gavin McInnes first announced the formation of the Proud Boys.
Alongside a standard edition, Passage is offering a $295 “patrician edition” The Last Alpha Male, a collection of Theodoracopulos’s writings.
Cornish-Dale is a British “neofascist lifestyle influencer” who operated under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist until he was identified last year by UK anti-racist advocacy group Hope Not Hate.
Gottfried is a paleoconservative academic and the editor in chief of Chronicles Magazine, which the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in 2017 “caters to the more intellectual wing of the white nationalist movement” though Gottfried has disavowed any connection with white nationalism. With Spencer he coined the term “alternative right” in 2008 to describe rightwing critics of then mainstream conservative idea.
As reported in 2024, as “L0m3z”, Keeperman had become a key influencer in far-right circles. Since that reporting, the publisher has continued exerting influence over the New Right, and Keeperman has emerged as something of a movement celebrity.
In January, a Passage-sponsored Coronation Ball celebrating Trump’s inauguration attracted wide coverage. In early May, Keeperman garnered a friendly interview on the podcast of New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat, in which he objected to the “over-feminization of society” and stifling “racial taboos”, at one point referring to Donald Trump as the “great father of the American people”.
Foundation Publishing
Recent business and trademark filings show Passage has moved under the umbrella of Foundation Publishing Group, connecting it to Lisi and other publishing imprints.
US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) records reveal that Foundation Publishing Group applied to register Passage Publishing as a trademark on 3 May 2024, an application that was granted on 4 February.
The application was filed and signed by Lisi, identified in the filing as vice president of Foundation Publishing Group, and it indicated that Passage was no longer an independent entity, but an assumed business name of Foundation Publishing Group.
The filing also implied that Foundation now owns Passage’s catalog: the USPTO requires trade mark applicants to provide a specimen of a trademark in use, and Foundation’s specimen was the cover of Noticing, the Passage-published anthology of Sailer’s often far-right writing.
The Glendale address provided in the application is also associated in California company records with at least three other companies: Not A Cult, Tetra House Publishing Group, and Day Job Capital, all of which count Lisi as an officer.
Passage has appended the same address to recent emails sent to newsletter subscribers. Information from data brokers indicate that it is also Lisi’s home address.
Foundation Publishing Group was first registered in California in September 2021 under Lisi’s name. A July 2024 statement of information lists Lisi, Keeperman, and Matthew Kahn as member-managers, with Keeperman identified as CEO. A subsequent February 2025 statement of information lists only Keeperman as CEO. Then on 2 April, Keeperman filed a request to dissolve the California entity.
Meanwhile, Foundation Publishing Group was registered in Delaware on 12 March, with a branch registered in Oklahoma on 25 March.
An online book distribution platforms indicate that the titles formerly published by Not A Cult are now being distributed by Ingram under the banner of Foundation Publishing Group.
Ark Press
Ark Press, meanwhile, was launched on 14 January, with science fiction writer DJ Butler reproducing a press release in a post to his X account. Butler is a senior editor at Ark according to his personal LinkedIn, X biography and podcast appearances.
The release posted by Butler indicated that the press’s pitch would be to “often-neglected Great American Male Reader”. Also, the imprint would launch “with the acquisition of New York Times best-selling author Larry Correia, who will begin a new contemporary fantasy series scheduled for 2026”.
Like Passage in 2021, Ark launched with a writing competition, directing prospective entrants to a landing page on submission platform Submittable. The URL of the submittable page is chapterhouse.submittable.com, and at the time of reporting the banner – which featured an Ark Press logo – linked through to the Chapter House website.
A 30 January story in science fiction Substack Fandom Pulse quoted Butler as saying that “‘we’re in the same corporate group [as Passage Press]. Ark has separate editorial and management from Passage. We wish those guys well, and we hope they feel benevolently disposed toward us.’”
The Guardian emailed Butler for comment.
Chapter House attracted coverage from Forbes when it was launched in 2022 as a merger between Lisi-founded Not A Cult and Black Ocean, founded by the poet Janaka Stucky.
At that time, the new partners had broad ambitions for the merged entity, telling readers that “Chapter House will also stand up a raft of additional imprints.”
A 2023 snapshot of the Chapter House website reflects the plans and direction that Stucky and Lisi laid out for Forbes; at the time of reporting, however, the same website presented a radically different vision.
Copy on the website reads, “Chapter House offers a new home school curriculum rooted in the richness of the Western tradition: its myths and deeds, its heroes and thinkers, its enduring questions and hard-won insights.”
The Guardian contacted Stucky for comment. He said that the joint venture had been launched with the hope of “streamlining operations and consolidating back office overhead”.
He added: “Last year we amicably agreed to end that partnership. I took Black Ocean with me as I exited Chapter House, and incorporated it as a non-profit at the end of 2024 – which felt more aligned with Black Ocean’s mission and vision.”
Stucky declined to comment on whether Lisi’s new, more political ventures had played any role in his decision.
Correia, the author Ark launched with, was prominent as the founder of the so-called “sad puppies”, an effort to influence voting in science fiction’s Hugo Awards between 2013 and 2017 that in subsequent years became a rightwing anti-diversity campaign .
Carroll told the Guardian that Correia was “a conservative libertarian gun enthusiast” who “presented his work as an antidote to what he saw as the dull, pretentious, left-leaning bias of contemporary genre fiction that was being recognized by the Hugos”.
Although they did not succeed in sweeping the awards, along with the Gamergate campaign happening at the same time, Carroll said that it “demonstrated that small but well-coordinated groups of online reactionaries can be disruptive even to real-world institutions”.
Carroll added: “Ark Press’s web presence contains many signals that it’s intended to be a throwback to a prior era,” pointing out that “there’s a long tradition of far-right speculation that casts space exploration in science fiction and the real world as an expression of white men’s settler-colonial spirit”.
Meet Daniel Lisi
Like Keeperman, Lisi’s foray into far-right publishing represents a significant pivot from a long sojourn in a liberal cultural and professional world.
By Lisi’s own account in A Book About Books, self-published this March, he spent more than a decade in and around Southern California’s literary scene, first working in nonprofits and publishing ventures before moving on to start his own publishing companies.
Lisi claims early stints of employment in literary ventures: an early internship with Long Beach poet, Derrick C Brown; a “media and membership manager” at PEN America’s Los Angeles chapter, which he says ended in 2013; and more recent experience “teach(ing) workshops” and “developing the curriculum” for a publisher’s workshop series run by the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).
The Guardian contacted Brown, PEN and LARB for comment on his history with these organizations.
In a response, LARB disputed his claims about his work with them.
Lisi claims to have spent time “developing the curriculum for the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishers Workshop, a program targeting graduate students that want to begin their careers in book or magazine publishing”, which involved “years of teaching hundreds of students in real time as I’ve built the thing I teach about.”
LARB spokesperson Irene Yoon wrote in an email that Lisi “even gets the name of the program wrong: our program is the LARB Publishing Workshop”.
She said that the program had been running since 2017, Lisi “came as a guest speaker to share about Not a Cult for a 90-minute Zoom session in 2021 & 2022”, and in 2023 “we invited him to help lead our Book Track, a smaller subset of the program for 30 students that met for 4.5 out of some 30 workshop hours a week.”
According to Yoon, Lisi was replaced as course lead in 2024.
In 2016, Lisi co-founded the indie publisher Not A Cult according to company filings and press releases. The filings list LA-based artist Hollis Hart as Lisi’s co-founder, and she was still part of the venture in 2020 according to media reports. On the current about page of Not A Cult’s website, however, only Lisi, Matthew Kahn, and Long Beach based jewelry artist Ian Delucca are named as team members.
The Guardian contacted Delucca for comment.
While the company published a flurry of books in the late teens, the company website and book retailer sites indicate that its output has slowed since 2022, with only one book released in 2024. The Not A Cult social media accounts also appear moribund, with Only one Instagram post in 2024 and no YouTube posts for almost four years.
In A Book About Books, one emphasis in Lisi’s advice to aspiring publishers is to run events, which he says support “the core task of vibemaking”.
At one point he writes: “While capital intensive, there are ways of standing up tours that can have a reasonable target of breaking even with a solid ticketing model,” later adding “curating a space where an audience can have a good time is probably one of the most valuable things on the planet Earth.”
He says that a “throughline” in his history as a publisher is “events – avenues where your readership can engage in a meaningful way is the core spirit of publishing in general.”
In the last year, Passage has maintained a brisk schedule of events including Sailer’s book tour, a debate at Harvard between Curtis Yarvin and Professor Danielle Allen, and a coronation ball at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC for Trump’s inauguration.
A Book about Books also promotes a business model that might be exemplified in another Lisi venture, Network Press, which Lisi claims credit for founding on his personal website.
He points to the capacity for influencers to act as their own distributors in an attention economy where “awareness is driven by two forms of fuel: authority and vibes.”
Later Lisi writes that technologies that make book production and distribution more efficient open up opportunities for adaptations of older vanity press models that would allow “publishers and distributors to prove their value-add to … celebrities, influencers, high net worth individuals, and so on.”
There is no business entity whose name directly corresponds with that of network press, but the network.press domain was registered in December 2023 according to whois records.
Since then, Network has only released one book: the Techno Optimist Manifesto, written by rightwing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andreessen, which has been credited with touching off broader knowledge of the “e accelerationist” movement, which rejects all constraints on capitalism and technological development.
Although the manifesto was first self-published in 2023, Network offers a $495 founders edition with an “anodized and engraved titanium sheet pressed into front and back cover” and “leather wrap on board”.
