Claremont Institute CMC

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see tag clrmnt

see incubator:

SEE 2 BAK

disambiguate inst from CMC from grad school? ever connected?

NOTE NO AUTHORITARIAN TAG HERE mostly pre trump here

bak 1021

see Glantz

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eastman wingnut

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/maga-zealotry-conservative-think-tank/}:}:

For many years, the Claremont Institute was known promoting traditional Goldwater and Reagan conservatism. The right-wing think tank was founded in 1979 by students of the late Harry V. Jaffa, who had been a speechwriter for Sen. Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign. But in recent years, Claremont has taken what critics consider a much more authoritarian turn, wholeheartedly embracing the MAGA ideology of former President Donald Trump and his allies.

Journalist Elisabeth Zerofsky takes a look at Claremont’s influence in an article published by the New York Times on August 3. Claremont aren’t as well-known as the Heritage Foundation or the libertarian CATO Institute — two other think tanks on the right — but Zerofsky emphasizes that it has become increasingly influential.

“The Claremont Institute is not a conventional think tank…. Yet Claremont’s reach is extensive,” Zerofsky explains. “Claremont scholars have collaborated with Ron DeSantis andhelped shape the views of Clarence Thomas, Tom Cotton and the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, and the Institute received the National Humanities Medal from President Trump in 2019. When Trump failed to win reelection, some Claremonters accused Democrats of using the pandemic to unconstitutionally change election laws to benefit themselves.”

Zerofsky notes that Claremont scholars reflect “the tenor of the right” in 2022.

“Students of classical texts, Claremont scholars don’t always subscribe to the decorum once associated with Republican politics,” Zerofsky observes. “Trump’s boorishness is of a piece with what some of them view as the rough-and-tumble nature of political life.”

Claremont isn’t shy about publishing controversial articles in its online publication The American Mind. For example, Claremont senior fellow Glenn Ellmers, in 2021 wrote a highly controversial essay in which he argued that the 80 million Americans who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 were “not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” And Claremont’s Charles R. Kesler has argued that the U.S. is experiencing a cold civil war.

“The view that America’s founding principles are being fatally undermined by progressives seems to be at the root of what Kesler and others at Claremont find so disastrous in the presidency of Joe Biden,” Zerofsky writes. “Kesler does not participate in some of the more bellicose performances of his colleagues and did not attend a recent panel discussion they organized titled ‘The Lies of the Ruling Class.’ He told me that he disagreed with how Ellmers, the Claremont senior fellow, had characterized Biden voters as ‘non-Americans’ and told him so. But he shares in the moral battle they see at the heart of today’s conflict.”

Zerofsky notes that Jaffa, who died in January 2015 at the age of 96, “didn’t live to witness the rise of Donald Trump.” And one of Jaffa’s sons, 70-year-old Philip Jaffa, argues that his father wouldn’t like what Claremont has evolved into.

“He is adamant that the Claremont Institute has turned against his father’s teachings,” Zerofsky reports. “He cited an essay by Christopher Caldwell about Robert E. Lee that The Claremont Review ran last spring, which called Lee the ‘moral force of half the nation.’ Philip noted that this directly contradicted his father’s teachings. ‘I have come to watch the Claremont Institute embody the very things that my father criticized in the conservative movement,’ Philip Jaffa told me when I spoke with him.”

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How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right

They made the intellectual case for Trump. Now they believe the country is in a cultural civil war.

By Elisabeth Zerofsky

Published Aug. 3, 2022

“All weak sisters on the right must be called out,” wrote the editors of The American Mind on Nov. 5, 2020, in the uncertain days after the election. Their editorial, titled “The Fight Is Now,” warned that Democrats were all but declaring themselves the winners “before the votes are counted,” making a mockery of the law and trying to “demoralize half the country,” just as they had for the “last damned century.” But the 2020 election — like the contest for America’s future — was not yet over, they vowed. “The fight has just begun,” The American Mind declared. “This is the moment that decides everything.”

The American Mind is an online magazine of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California that has, in recent years, become increasingly influential in Republican circles. Scholars at Claremont have long subscribed to the belief that the American republic has been dismantled, the Constitution corrupted by left-wing ideas, a viewpoint that is increasingly in step with that of the broader American right. In recent years, the Claremont Institute has also drawn attention for its deliberate provocations, most memorably with the publication in 2016 of “The Flight 93 Election.” The essay took as its guiding metaphor the only plane on 9/11 prevented from hitting its target by passengers who wrested control of the aircraft, arguing that the election that fall presented conservatives with a similar choice: either “you charge the cockpit” (i.e. vote for Donald Trump) “or you die.” In many ways, “Flight 93” was era-defining, abetting a reckoning within the conservative movement and prefiguring the take-no-prisoners style of right-wing politics that would soon hold sway.

Originally published under a pseudonym, “Flight 93” was written by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and a skilled polemicist, schooled, as he has written, in making “public arguments that move politics.” If his essay achieved anything, Anton told me, it was to turn Trump into a legitimate candidate of necessary change. “The initial assumption was: This guy’s a buffoon, a reality-TV star, not even an amateur politician, not a politician at all, there’s nothing serious about any of his ideas or any of his program, therefore no serious person could possibly support him or make an argument on his behalf, ” he said. “And then we did it.” Thomas Klingenstein, the chairman of the board at Claremont, went further, telling me that “if there is within the conservative movement a kind of intellectual justification for Trump, it comes from Claremont.”

The Claremont Institute is not a conventional think tank — comparatively small, its main outlets consist of two politics-and-ideas publications and several fellowship programs, including Publius and Lincoln, that have attracted rising stars on the right. Yet Claremont’s reach is extensive: Claremont scholars have collaborated with Ron DeSantis and helped shape the views of Clarence Thomas, Tom Cotton and the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, and the institute received the National Humanities Medal from President Trump in 2019. When Trump failed to win re-election, some Claremonters accused Democrats of using the pandemic to unconstitutionally change election laws to benefit themselves, and in “The Fight Is Now,” they called for “swarms of lawyers” to push for “transparency in all the Democratic city machines now churning out votes for Biden.” One lawyer who can be said to have taken up the challenge was John Eastman, a senior fellow at the institute for 30 years and the founder and director of Claremont’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

On Jan. 4 and 5, 2021, according to testimony during the Jan. 6 congressional hearings, as Donald Trump argued with his legal team over how much to participate in the march on the Capitol, Eastman, who was serving as outside counsel, debated with Mike Pence’s lawyer about two scenarios he had outlined, in which Pence could, on Jan. 6, reject disputed electoral slates already certified by the states. (Never mind that those slates were not actually disputed.) Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, and other lawyers on the White House staff testified that they dismissed Eastman’s proposals as illegal and unconstitutional. On Jan. 6, as Pence was fleeing the Senate chamber for an underground location in the Capitol complex, Jacob fired off an email to Eastman, writing that after running “down every legal trail placed before me,” he concluded that Eastman’s framework was “essentially entirely made up.” Eastman had called Jacob “small minded” and castigated him for “sticking with minor procedural statutes while the Constitution is being shredded.”

‘We wanted to speak to a younger audience, to try to understand and influence the new right in its varied factions.’

If there is an unmistakable affinity between Eastman’s actions and Anton’s words in “Flight 93” — a sense of contemporary crisis — many scholars at Claremont place limits on the reach of that crisis-thinking. Eastman was working in a private capacity, and the Claremont Institute was not affiliated with his efforts to upend the 2020 election results. All the same, some of the arguments he advances hint at a shared genealogy of belief. Eastman told me that “what ails us in our body politic today — it’s the distortion of the founding principles,” a view that is widely held at Claremont. This explains, in part, Eastman’s actions, but also, increasingly, the tenor of the right.

Students of classical texts, Claremont scholars don’t always subscribe to the decorum once associated with Republican politics. Trump’s boorishness is of a piece with what some of them view as the rough-and-tumble nature of political life. “The philosophers that we tend to study are not deluded about this,” Anton told me. “Aristotle, in the treatise, explains how the actual practice of politics can be bare knuckle in lots and lots of ways.” On an American Mind podcast last year, Anton reflected that what is “too insufficiently remembered is that a lot of what went down in revolutions was rough stuff. We have a picture of dignified men in Independence Hall deliberating and debating. And all that happened, I don’t discount that. But there was a lot of other stuff going on, too.”

In this spirit, The American Mind began, in the months after Trump left office, to talk of “counterrevolution.” Glenn Ellmers, a senior fellow at Claremont, urged readers to “give up on the idea that ‘conservatives’ have anything useful to say,” and called for “all hands on deck as we enter the counterrevolutionary moment,” while asserting that the 80 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden were “not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

In Trump, Claremont saw both an affinity and an opening. “It’s a little bit like the guy who runs and gets in front of the parade,” Tom Merrill, a political theorist at American University who has written about Claremont, said. “Was he leading it? Or is he just somehow channeling it?” Klingenstein told me that when Trump began to run for office in 2015, the board decided “that we were going to become a little more ‘small-p’ political, in addition to the philosophy.” The conservative movement “was less sure of itself,” Klingenstein said, and was in “a period of flux.” He went on: “We thought, We have a real opportunity now to put our philosophy into practice, so to speak. To apply it to the moment.”

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Thomas Klingenstein, the chairman of the board at the Claremont Institute.Credit...Natalie Ivis for The New York Times

The Claremont Institute’s headquarters sit in an office park just outside the town of Claremont, 35 miles east of Los Angeles, in the dusky foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. A Roman-style fountain stands in front of the entrance, and inside, a spiral staircase curls upward beneath an immense chandelier, suggesting a kind of European pastiche pushing back against the California wilderness. Much of the scholarly work at the Claremont Institute stems from the belief that the American founding is the culmination of centuries of Western political thought. But, thanks to a century of liberalism, the principle of self-governance has been replaced with a permanent class of unelected experts: the regulatory bureaucracy otherwise known as the administrative state. Members of Claremont wish to see the right take control of all three branches of government for a generation, dissolve certain federal agencies — break up the C.I.A., get rid of the Department of Education, shrink the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — and also stop, as Anton wrote in “Flight 93,” the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for or experience in liberty.”

When Trump entered the 2016 presidential race, Claremont scholars were primed to see in him something that others did not. “We all believed and had been saying for a while that it almost doesn’t matter what Republican you nominate,” Anton told me. “On all the ways that the regime operates differently than what it’s supposed to, they’re going to agree and keep that going.” John Marini, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a Claremont senior fellow, was one of the colleagues who got Anton thinking about Trump as a corrective to a system run amok. In 2015, Anton recalls, Marini began sending long emails to his colleagues arguing that Trump, in his unscholarly way, might have the potential to force the constitutional order back into its proper limits. In December of that year, William Voegeli, a senior editor of The Claremont Review of Books, the highbrow quarterly journal that has been the public face of the Claremont Institute for the last 22 years, published one of the first “anti-anti-Trump” essays, asserting what would become a guiding argument: “that such a flawed contender could be a front-runner tells us more about what’s wrong with the country than about what’s wrong with his followers.”

“Flight 93” picked up on these arguments. Anton, who later served as deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, believed that Trump had staked out the correct, more nationalist positions on the three issues — immigration, trade and war — that would be critical to the right going forward. But it wasn’t just Trump’s positions that were of interest; it was also his “smashmouth style” that was indispensable. Anton told me that “in many millions of voters’ minds, those highly decorous political types, they saw them as timid and weak and not sufficient to the challenge.”

Charles R. Kesler, a senior fellow who edits The Claremont Review, declined to publish “Flight 93” in the print edition. But it was posted on the review’s website. Rush Limbaugh picked it up and read from it aloud on his radio show, sending readers by the hundreds of thousands to the review’s site, the only time an article caused it to crash.

A younger generation of leadership at Claremont seemed to recognize an online appetite for this style of polemic. A year later, Ryan Williams became president of the Claremont Institute. His predecessor, Michael Pack, left at the start of the Trump administration to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs American-backed media outlets abroad. (Pack promptly dismissed executives of four of those networks, dissolved the boards and replaced many with Trump appointees.) Pack, at the time, was 63. Williams was 35. He hired a cohort of younger staff members, many of them also in their mid-30s, and embarked on a series of new projects, including The American Mind.

“I call it a kind of punk-rock C.R.B.,” Williams said when I met him in mid-February in a wood-paneled conference room at the institute, furnished with dark leather chairs and tableaux of the American founders. Williams is courteous but concise. He wore a tweedy wool jacket. “We wanted to speak to a younger audience, to try to understand and influence the New Right in its varied factions” — encompassing everything from the hard right to national conservatives — “and cultivate that audience for the better,” he added.

Williams also opened a new center in Washington, a first for Claremont, which had always been California-centric, called the Center for the American Way of Life. Just across the lawn from the Capitol, the new office is focused on fighting what its members see as the march of “wokeism” through American institutions. “A great deal of money is funneled into higher ed, and broadly speaking that money is a system of fraud,” Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the new center, told me.” He said that “decent Middle America citizens” pay taxes to support universities that are teaching “young people to despise their country or at least have no duties to it, be indifferent to it.” He went on: “And all of this is being done at the expense of the public. So I think that states need to start defunding higher ed. Giving it less and less money. And that’s something that we’ve had some initial successes with.” In 2021, for example, the center, working with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, wrote reports detailing how “social-justice ideology” had penetrated Idaho’s universities. The Idaho Legislature cut $2.5 million from funding for social-justice programming at public universities and banned public educational institutions from directing “students to personally affirm, adopt or adhere” to tenets associated with critical race theory. (Critics have warned that such laws may violate the First Amendment and could have a chilling effect in classrooms.)

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Ryan Williams, publisher of The Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind.Credit...Balazs Gardi for The New York Times

At American Mind, the online magazine, Williams has taken the traditional Claremont shibboleth of the “ruling class” and joined it to what he sees as the new zeitgeist of “wokeism,” arguing that to “defend America,” they must “defeat multiculturalism,” including what Klingenstein, the chairman of Claremont’s board, calls “woke communism.” In recent decades, Williams told me, the administrative state has been put to use in new ways, i.e. the “expert administration of social justice, for lack of a better term.” A week before we met, he said, a group of Democrats in the House introduced a bill providing for “the establishment of a Cabinet-level Department of Reconciliation charged with eliminating racism and invidious discrimination,” which echoed the ideas of the antiracism scholar Ibram X. Kendi. Williams allowed that such a bill stood no chance of passing. But, he said, “vanguard movements can be 8 or 10 percent of a political movement and yet drive the agenda. Part of our job here has always been to try to see down the road at the threats coming, and especially challenges to constitutionalism as we understand it.”

Claremont, he said, saw itself as championing individual rights, not a never-ending succession of demands for new special classes — based on race, gender identity and sexual orientation — for which the 1964 Civil Rights Act laid the foundation. He cited an argument put forward in “The Age of Entitlement,” a 2020 book by Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at Claremont: “Whatever was meant by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and it had a very noble purpose, which was to overcome and fix the problems of Jim Crow and segregation, it quickly got taken up by the courts and administrative agencies, not in the fulfillment of the promise of the colorblind Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, which is how we read it — equal protection for all regardless of skin color or position.” Instead, he continued, a new “racialized, hierarchical politics” had installed itself “where the formerly oppressed are now given privileges and power and the former oppressors are brought low.”

Claremonters like to refer to a lecture by the storied German American philosopher Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, in which he argued that German intellectuals failed to take seriously and guide a generation of young men who rejected the new social order of interwar Germany, leaving them open to Nazism. When Williams took over at Claremont, he became “very interested in harnessing some of the energy that he saw among young people who were being drawn to the alt-right or to nonmovement forms of rightism,” Matthew Continetti, the author of “The Right,” a new history of American conservatism, who was a Lincoln fellow at Claremont, said. “He began widening the scope of the people that were being admitted to the educational programs and incorporating people like Curtis Yarvin” — a neo-reactionary blogger who has become a guru to the ill-defined “New Right” for his anti-liberal screeds — “into the roster of contributors to The American Mind.” Nate Hochman, a 24-year-old fellow at National Review, told me that the editors of American Mind were “the only ones that were willing to actually reach into the goo of the fever swamp of young right-wing internet circles” and “parse the completely crazy stuff from the understandable, or verging on legitimate stuff, and extend a hand and be like, Come with us instead. No other conservative institution was willing to do that.”

In 2019, Anton, charged with writing an essay for The Claremont Review on the “alt-right,” chose as his subject the work of an anonymous, supposedly Yale-educated theorist going under the name Bronze Age Pervert, whose book, “Bronze Age Mindset,” was popular with young people. In a style that mixed a kind of faux-caveman brutishness and message-board pidgin with classical references, Bronze Age Pervert informed his readers that “you don’t see yourself as you really are” because “spiritually your insides are all wet, and there’s a huge hole through where monstrous powers are [expletive] your brain, letting loose all your life powers of focus.” Channeling a pseudo Nietzschean critique of modernity, Bronze Age Pervert argued that all life-forms naturally yearn to master space and, as Anton summarized, “today all the space is, and has been for some time, ‘owned’ by a degraded elite, reducing the majority of men to ‘bugmen’ and thwarting the innate will of the higher specimens.”

The book, Anton wrote, was significant because it spoke directly “to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent and corrupt elite.” Bronze Age Pervert regarded the founders’ idea of rights, the very bedrock of the American political tradition, as false. This mattered, Anton said, because “all our earnest explanations of the true meaning of equality, how it comports with nature, how it can answer their dissatisfactions, and how it’s been corrupted — none of that has made a dent.” Conservatives didn’t have to agree with any of this, but they did need to acknowledge that “in the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.”

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Credit...Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie

Anton’s essay provoked some fiery reactions on the right, responses that ran in The American Mind. One argued that “rather quite tragically, Michael Anton is the super carrier who brought the virus of the reactionary Right into the bloodstream of the conservative intellectual movement.” Continetti told me that “younger conservatives who are drawn to national conservatism or national populism, The American Mind is what they’re reading and quoting.” At the same time, The Claremont Review and The American Mind were “taking a dual-track approach,” he said. “The most controversial things associated with Claremont don’t appear in the magazine’s pages,” Continetti said, “but it exists in this kind of relationship where Anton will appear in its pages and also write the spicy stuff for the online outlet.”

Hochman, who participated in Claremont’s Publius fellowship last year, told me that “it was attractive to have people who were speaking about the contemporary moment in terms that felt much more familiar to me.” Younger conservatives had the sense, he said, that the kind of activism they’d encountered on liberal campuses was “seeping out into every other institution in American life.” Among conservative institutions, Claremont was alone in “articulating a sense that we are in a kind of cold civil war.” It wasn’t just disagreement over marginal tax rates, Hochman said, but “literally just the things we do together in a shared community — universities, the arts, Hollywood, academic orthodoxy, the media.” Hochman said that many of his peers who read Bronze Age Pervert “ended up reading Anton’s review of it, and then ended up doing Publius.” It’s not that they took Bronze Age Pervert’s philosophy completely seriously, he said, but “why did every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset?’ There was something there that was clearly attractive to young conservative elites.”

If a single figure can be said to serve as the intellectual foundation for the Claremont Institute, it is the conservative political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa. It was Jaffa who crafted the famous couplet for Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Born into a New York Jewish family, Jaffa studied at the New School for Social Research with Leo Strauss. When Strauss arrived in the United States in the late 30s, he found American democracy to be shallow and materialistic, concerned only with economic prosperity and protecting capitalism. With his students, he implemented a regimen of classics, teaching Plato and Aristotle, hoping to awaken in them a reverence for virtue and the nobility of human achievement. One day, while still a graduate student, Jaffa was browsing in a used bookshop in Manhattan when he came across a copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery. Flipping through the series of 1858 exchanges between Abraham Lincoln, then the challenger for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, and Stephen Douglas, the incumbent, Jaffa discovered a 19th-century American rendition of Plato’s dialogue on the nature of justice. “I realized that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus,” Jaffa later wrote. “Not similar to it. Identical.” Douglas took a relativist position: in a free, self-governing society, the majority decides what is right, and citizens should determine for themselves whether slavery should be extended into the new American territories. Lincoln vigorously disagreed, affirming the existence of universal truths, that all men are created equal and that certain moral principles are immutable.

Building on Strauss, Jaffa argued that the Declaration of Independence drew upon both the classical philosophical concept of objective or natural right and the Christian moral teaching of individual equality. America was the confluence of Athens and Jerusalem, the first time in human history that reason and revelation together formed the foundations of a political community. There was a profound contradiction, however, in the persistence of slavery. It was not until Lincoln, the philosopher-statesman and savior of the republic, that America achieved what Jaffa called “the best regime.”

Jaffa’s 1959 book, “Crisis of the House Divided,” is regarded by academics across the political spectrum as both a groundbreaking contribution to Lincoln scholarship and a thoroughly engrossing piece of writing. In the 1960s, he caught the attention of Henry Salvatori, a wealthy California oil surveyor who later became part of Ronald Reagan’s kitchen cabinet. He was recruited to teach at Claremont Graduate School and Claremont Men’s College, which was founded in 1946 for returning G.I.s as part of a consortium of schools that started with Pomona College just down the block. Jaffa was an incandescent figure at Claremont, drawing a small but significant cadre of devoted graduate students, who became known as the “West Coast Straussians.” If the “East Coast Straussians” accepted that the American founding was “low but solid,” as the students themselves liked to say, lacking a driving ideology but enabling the pursuit of the good life, the West Coast faction held to a fervent belief in America as the culmination of Western civilization.

Jaffa was an influential teacher, sometimes called a “pied piper,” but he had a reputation for being cantankerous and pugnacious, even with friends. He was a consistent presence in the pages of the little-magazine ecosystem of the conservative intelligentsia and was especially keen on picking fights with other conservative intellectuals. William F. Buckley Jr. once wrote, “If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him.” In 1988, Jaffa turned 70, which was, at the time, the mandatory retirement age, but he commandeered an area in the basement of the Claremont colleges’ library, where he continued to hold forth, giving informal seminars for the next decade.

A group of Jaffa’s doctoral students, wanting to share their ideas with a wider public, set up a rickety little organization in 1978 called Public Research, Syndicated. From an office building near campus, they wrote opinion essays and mailed them out to local newspapers across the country. The students, Larry Arnn, Peter Schramm, Tom Silver and Chris Flannery, established the Claremont Institute in 1979, and Public Research, Syndicated faded after a few years. (The Claremont Institute is not affiliated with the schools.) It was the end of the Carter administration, after the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and the rise of stagflation. “The reigning authoritative, almost impregnable opinion was that nothing is by nature right or wrong,” Flannery told me. “And we all became persuaded by our studies that that view was radically inadequate. It disabled you from dealing with human affairs as they deserved to be dealt with.” They started the Publius fellowship, which soon developed into a six-week graduate-style summer seminar. Charles Kesler, who read Jaffa’s “Crisis of the House Divided” as a student at Harvard, was among the first Publius fellows, in the summer of 1980.

In the 1970s, Washington think tanks were coming into being as an institutional sector — the Heritage, Cato and Manhattan institutes were all founded around that time. Away from the D.C. establishment, Claremont sought to distinguish itself from the others. “Claremont has always been proud to call itself patriotic,” Ellmers, the Claremont senior fellow, told me. “But it also offers a principled explanation of what that patriotism means, and has to mean, to actually be worthy of our admiration. Why is it good to be an American patriot? What does it mean? What is it about America that’s worth loving? You don’t get that from a lot of the places that churn out policy papers in D.C.”

Claremont was rooted in the plucky outsider, swashbuckling frontier conservatism of California, which shaped its perception of America. Anton grew up in Northern California and has compared the California of his youth to the “golden times” of Rome, describing it as “the greatest middle-class paradise in the history of mankind.” That California, however, was “swept away” in “barely one generation,” Anton wrote in his 2020 book “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return” and “transformed into a left-liberal one-party state.” In the hands of misguided incompetents — “the ruling class” as the late Claremont scholar Angelo M. Codevilla called it — California had become “the most economically unequal and socially divided” state in the country controlled by “oligarchic power concentrated in a handful of industries, above all Big Tech and Big Hollywood.”

One of Claremont’s founders, Peter Schramm, served in Reagan’s Department of Education. In the late 1980s, Clarence Thomas, as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was on the defensive as a Black conservative and looking for people who could help him sharpen his worldview. He hired as his aides the Claremont scholars Ken Masugi and John Marini, who would later be among the first to make the case for Trump. They were theorists who “understood Lincoln,” as Thomas described them. In a period that Thomas was later to recall as one of “great intellectual development,” they spent hours discussing Jaffa’s teachings on natural law and an interpretation of the Constitution, based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas began to cite.

Convinced by Lincoln’s argument that “public sentiment is everything,” Claremont was devoted primarily to shaping opinions. “The most successful thing that the Claremont Institute has done is this educational effort,” Continetti told me. “Trump did fill his administration, maybe not with Claremont personnel, but with Claremont alumni.” People left the fellowship program with a heady narrative of America to contemplate and a cluster of like-minded friends and future colleagues: the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton; the Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer; the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo; the pundit Ben Shapiro; the far-right influencer (and propagator of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory) Jack Posobiec; and Babs Hough, a former staff member for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have all participated in Claremont fellowships. Anton, who now teaches at the Washington branch of Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian school in Michigan, was not the only one to say that it had changed his life.

Rufo, who has led several recent campaigns against critical race theory and school curriculums on “gender ideology,” did a Lincoln fellowship in 2017. He told me that Claremont is a “brotherhood” of the sort that has largely vanished from American life, “all of these places where people, and predominantly men, could get together, talk about important social and political issues, look at and investigate philosophical ideas and then chart a practical way forward.” The experience, he said, “put my life and my politics into sharp focus.” A central insight from Claremont is that “the man of action is someone to be admired. And it’s a kind of virtue to take things from the realm of ideas to the realm of action,” Rufo said. “And what I’ve been able to do is exactly that.”

Kesler, the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, is widely regarded, at 65, as the institute’s éminence grise. Unfailingly congenial, he was walking beside his cat beneath a long white portico in front of his house in Pasadena when I pulled up one morning in February. The house, in a pristinely kept neighborhood, was in the Spanish Revival style. Inside, a similar Old World flourish prevailed: deep regal reds and blues, floral-patterned French-country upholstery, highly stylized rococo furniture. Brimming bookshelves lined the garage.

To an extent, Kesler represents an old guard at Claremont. Most of the other Claremont Institute scholars did their work at Claremont Graduate University, but Kesler was completing his Ph.D. at Harvard when he arrived at Claremont McKenna College (formerly Claremont Men’s College) only at the beginning of his teaching career, in 1983. Growing up in West Virginia in the late 1960s, Kesler used to watch William F. Buckley Jr. on “Firing Line” on PBS. “I became fascinated by Buckley,” Kelser told me. “There was nobody like him, then or now.” He managed to interview Buckley for his high school newspaper, an encounter that led to a lifelong friendship and mentorship. (Buckley wrote his recommendation for Harvard.) Inspired by the kind of influence that Buckley’s National Review wielded in American postwar conservatism, Kesler became the editor of The Claremont Review of Books in 2000, which flourished under his leadership as one of the most reputed cultural and literary publications of the American right, read by intellectuals, think-tank members, Republicans on Capitol Hill and anyone interested in the state of conservative thought. Its pages are filled with meditations on Aristotle and Locke, Jefferson and Hamilton, Huntington and Buckley. “It’s our attempt to reach our fellow Americans directly and to pitch our arguments to them,” Kesler told me, “trying to connect with them on issues urgent and immediate, but also lasting and eternal.”

Through the George W. Bush years, Kesler and others at Claremont voiced their opposition to the Bush consensus on foreign policy. With their beliefs in the historical and cultural processes necessary to bring about self-governance, they were critical of the administration’s contention that it could swiftly set up democracy in Iraq. This was why, in large part, they were equally against Bush’s immigration reforms.

Kesler was especially devoted to theorizing about what he saw as the menace of progressivism. As he wrote in his 2021 book, “Crisis of the Two Constitutions,” the takeover of the country by the “administrative state” marked a fundamental change in the understanding of the purposes of government and was “based on a new view of the nature of man.” The figure who “prepared this revolution” was Woodrow Wilson, who served as president from 1913 to 1921. Though the framers had constructed a government “to display the laws of nature,” Wilson argued that the laws of nature were antithetical to human freedom. Because history is progressive, each new generation might find that the definitions of liberty and happiness, and therefore the appropriate forms of government, would change as well. In Kesler’s reading of Wilson, the Declaration of Independence could “therefore have no teaching concerning the best regime or even ranking legitimate regimes,” putting the country into a chaotic and potentially disastrous tangle of relativism.

Image

Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review, at his home in Pasadena, Calif., in July.Credit...Balazs Gardi for The New York Times

Image

Kesler holding a copy of Albert Jay Nock’s classic study on the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson.Credit...Balazs Gardi for The New York Times

Kesler’s critique dovetailed with a wider Republican antagonism to a liberal administrative state, but Kesler and the others at Claremont went further, seeing this “fourth branch” as overturning the Constitution. Madison, Hamilton, Jay and Jefferson, he contended, would hardly recognize America today.

Despite some reservations about Trump’s character, Kesler saw in him some of the same corrective possibilities and opportunities for influence as others at Claremont did and urged conservatives to support Trump in 2016, predicting that he would win the Republican nomination. He was also hospitable to some of the Trump administration’s positions and initiatives. In May 2019, the Claremont Institute held a 40th-anniversary gala, at which it honored Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, with its statesmanship award for “manning the battlements of Western civilization.” In September 2020, Kesler was appointed to the 1776 Commission, which Trump created after a summer of mass demonstrations following the police killing of George Floyd. Trump named Larry Arnn, a founder of the Claremont Institute, now president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, chairman of the commission. Kesler called the sometimes-violent protests “the 1619 riots,” after the 1619 Project, published in this magazine, a series of articles that sought to reframe the American founding as defined by slavery. The 1776 Commission released a hastily written report, conceived as a response to the 1619 Project, with the aim of enabling “a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States.” It was filled with Claremont ideas.

The view that America’s founding principles are being fatally undermined by progressives seems to be at the root of what Kesler and others at Claremont find so disastrous in the presidency of Joe Biden. Kesler does not participate in some of the more bellicose performances of his colleagues and did not attend a recent panel discussion they organized titled “The Lies of the Ruling Class.” (He told me that he disagreed with how Ellmers, the Claremont senior fellow, had characterized Biden voters as “non-Americans” and told him so.) But he shares in the moral battle they see at the heart of today’s conflict. “In some ways,” he said, “the worst thing about Biden to me is precisely his embrace of the left-wing part of the Democratic Party’s moral critique of America,” Kesler said. “That it’s a racist country, in its DNA, that it has always been basically unjust, that it’s been a kind of petty tyranny, intellectually, morally and spiritually, and it has never really risen above the crassest kind of self-interest, whether along class lines or racial lines or any lines of possible oppression.”

When I met Kesler, it was several months after the public revelation of the memos that John Eastman drafted containing the scenarios he outlined for Mike Pence. The latest issue of The Claremont Review of Books had just come out, featuring an exchange over the memos between Eastman, who defended them, and a Claremont McKenna College professor named Joseph Bessette, who offered a stinging critique. After Jan. 6, Eastman reached an agreement to retire immediately from the professorship he held at Chapman University, in Orange, Calif., but Claremont kept him on. When I asked Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute, about that decision, he told me, “We’re not going to throw him under the bus just because his representation of the president was controversial.” Klingenstein struck a similar note, telling me that Eastman is “one of ours” and a friend, while adding that their support was “not exactly a defense” of his advice to Trump.

Of the debate between Eastman and Bessette, Kesler said: “I thought both of them gave the best version of the case I’d read or thought of from either side. I disagree with John. I think it was a bad idea to give Trump that advice and an even worse idea to speak at the rally.” (Eastman addressed the crowd of Trump supporters at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6.) But the question for the review, he said, was, “What are constitutionalists to think about the advice that was given and what happened on Jan. 6? And I’ve tried to make it crystal clear that constitutionalists should be aghast at what happened on Jan. 6, and there should be no pooh-poohing of it, no snide diminution of it. It was a very open, brazenly wrong thing, without it amounting exactly to a coup, I think that’s going too far. But still, it was a riot, and who knows what would have happened.”

Others at Claremont were more willing to see Eastman and those who marched on the Capitol as acting out of a principled conviction that the election was fatally flawed. Williams told me that he was bothered by the “rampant unconstitutional processes” in which the election was conducted — like the expansion of mail-in balloting — and what he claimed was the “media blackout on any negative stories about Biden.” Anton concurred, citing, in Compact, a new right-wing magazine, what he saw as the lack of enforcement of voter-ID laws and the abrupt cessation of late-night vote counting. (There is no evidence of electoral irregularities sufficient to change the outcome of the election.) “To all of these and many other questions and doubts,” he wrote, “the ruling class has but one response: Shut up, white supremacist. Questions aren’t allowed, investigations won’t happen and explanations won’t be given.”

There was a divide at Claremont over the response to Eastman that reverberated through the wider conservative world. Chris Flannery, one of Claremont’s founders, called Eastman “an American hero.” Continetti stopped contributing to The Claremont Review. For his part, Kesler doesn’t accept Trump’s claims of election fraud. “I’ve always thought that Trump lost,” he said. “Trump won a close election four years ago, he lost a close election, not quite as close but still a fairly close election this time, and you don’t need any vast conspiracy to explain what happened, because what happened was just a normal part of American politics.” If he believed that to be the case, I asked, then wouldn’t running a serious appraisal of Eastman’s legal analysis be opening a Pandora’s box? “No, no, I think it’s shutting the Pandora’s box really,” Kesler replied. “In the sense that, I think, the Pandora’s box was opened already.”

Harry Jaffa died in January 2015, at 96, and didn’t live to witness the rise of Donald Trump. An emotional debate has ensued as to how Jaffa, who continued to write and argue well into his 80s, might have reacted to the events of the last few years. This spring, one of Jaffa’s sons, Philip, who is 70, emailed me. He is adamant that the Claremont Institute has turned against his father’s teachings. He cited an essay by Christopher Caldwell about Robert E. Lee that The Claremont Review ran last spring, which called Lee the “moral force of half the nation.” Philip noted that this directly contradicted his father’s teachings. “I have come to watch the Claremont Institute embody the very things that my father criticized in the conservative movement,” Philip Jaffa told me when I spoke with him.

Some of the most pointed criticisms of Claremont’s recent prominence have come from scholars with similar backgrounds. “I think there’s a story here about the insularity of the conservative world,” says Laura Field, a political philosopher and scholar in residence at American University, who has published several sharp critiques of Claremont over the last year in The Bulwark, a publication started by “Never Trump” conservatives. Claremont has been “pretty much unchallenged by broader academia,” Field told me, as many academics, liberals but also other conservatives, tend to consider political engagement in general, and Claremont’s ideas and public manners in particular, beneath them. In contrast, Claremont scholars “understand the power of a certain kind of approach to politics that’s sensational,” she said. Field pointed me to a recent exception, a small panel discussion in July, in Washington, in which Kesler took part. Kesler defended the upsurge of populism as “pro-constitutional,” and so, he said, “even though it takes an angry form in many cases,” it was difficult to “condemn it simply as an eruption of democratic irrationalism.” Bryan Garsten, a political scientist at Yale, responded that it was very generous to interpret the current populism as “erupting in favor of an older understanding of constitutionalism,” but even if that was partly true, he questioned whether populism could “be expected to generate a new appreciation for constitutionalism” or whether it wouldn’t “do just the reverse.” It is, Garsten said, “a dangerous game to try to ride the tiger.”

Nonetheless, Claremont’s recent successes have made for effective fund-raising. Klingenstein, Claremont’s chairman, who runs a New York investment firm, was, as recently as 2019, Claremont’s largest donor, providing $2.5 million, around half its budget at the time. Claremont’s budget is now around $9 million, and Klingenstein is no longer providing a majority of the funding. “They’re increasingly less reliant on me, and that’s a good thing,” Klingenstein said. (On Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on July 15, he noted that the budget kept going up.) Other big recent donors, according to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, include the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation and the Bradley Foundation, two of the most prominent conservative family foundations in the country.

Many Claremont scholars are still supportive of Trump but have also cultivated relationships with other figures of potential future importance, especially Ron DeSantis, perhaps envisioning a day when Trumpist conservatives find a more dependable and effective leader. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, which has many Claremont graduates on its faculty and a robust presence in Washington, conducted an event with DeSantis last February at which he called DeSantis “one of the most important people living.” According to The Tampa Bay Times, Hillsdale has helped DeSantis with his efforts to reshape the Florida education system, participating in textbook reviews and a reform of the state’s civics-education standards. But Claremonters are not entirely willing to cast Trump aside. “Trump is loved by a lot of Americans,” Kesler told me, “and you’re not going to succeed in repudiating him and hold the party together, hold the movement together, and win.” He said that the future lay “probably with Trumpism, some version of Trump and his agenda, but not necessarily with Trump himself. And that’s because I don’t know that he could win.” The argument in 2016 was, “We’re taking a chance on this guy, we’re taking a flyer,” Kesler said. “And I just don’t think they’re willing to take a second flyer.”

Harry Jaffa used to ask what it was that American conservatism was conserving. The answer was generally ideological — American conservatism was not about preserving a social structure, as in the old European societies, but rather the American idea, a set of principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. What appears unsettled at Claremont is “the foggy question of whether or not a republic is too far gone to be conserved,” William Voegeli, the senior editor, wrote in the spring issue. “Which would be the bigger mistake — to keep fighting to preserve a republic that turns out to be beyond resuscitation or to give up defending one whose vigor might yet be restored?” Voegeli, at 67, comes down on the side of the “central conservative impulse,” which is that “because valuable things are easy to break but hard to replace, every effort should be made to conserve them while they can be conserved.” But he acknowledges that some of his younger colleagues appear ready to “abandon conservatism for counterrevolution,” in order to “re-establish America’s founding principles.” Kesler was sanguine. “We need a kind of revival of the spirit of constitutionalism, which will then have to be fought out, through laws and lawsuits and all the normal daily give and take of politics,” he said. “That’s what I’m in favor of. And it’s moving in the right direction.”

Tom Merrill, of American University, also studied Jaffa’s work and believes there is much in his teachings to appeal to both liberals and conservatives. “I think the country is so divided right now that if you had a Republican candidate who was like, ‘You know, we messed up in a bunch of ways but we’re mostly pretty good,’ I think that there would be a big middle lane, and it would defuse some of this anger.” The American right at present, Merrill argued, was in need of guidance and leadership that could not come from the traditional establishment, which voters had rejected. “There is a movement out there that isn’t the Republican Party, that needs people to speak for and sort of shape the message,” he said. In the past, that had meant movement conservatives cordoning off the undemocratic, un-American elements on the far right. Claremont could have filled that role, he argued, but “the central challenge facing the right is, Can someone take those themes and articulate them in a grown-up way?”

Some at Claremont have expressed a desire to work with liberals, yet their strategy seems to suggest the opposite. When I asked Williams what Claremont’s ideal future would look like, he cited the deconstruction of the administrative state. He told me recently that the June Supreme Court ruling constraining the E.P.A. is “a step in the right direction,” and he would like to see “Congress get back into the act of legislating” instead of delegating rule making to bureaucracy, a “long-term and complicated process involving legislators learning rules that they haven’t used in 30 years.” Prudence, he added, dictated that change should be incremental. “Though I can anticipate your next question, which is, You guys talk like counterrevolutionaries,” Williams said. “One of the goals of the more polemical stuff is to wake up our fellow conservatives.”

Klingenstein took a starker view. “If it’s true that the country is as divided as we think it is, and if the situation is as dire,” he said, “it’s very important for conservatives to understand this. Because if you’re actually in a war, even if it’s a cold war, you behave differently. You’re less inclined to compromise. You’re more aggressive. In war, you don’t negotiate until you’ve won.”

Elisabeth Zerofsky is a contributing writer for the magazine who has reported across Europe. Her last feature was on the rising nationalistic faction on the French far right.

A correction was made on Aug. 8, 2022: An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a U.S. representative. She is Marjorie Taylor Greene, not Green.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 7, 2022, Page 34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: RightMinds. Order

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legal expert George Conway is blasting the Claremont Institute for defending John Eastman (photo, with Giuliani on Jan. 6), the man who wrote the now-infamous "Eastman Memo" which many see as instructions to then-Vice President Mike Pence on how to overturn the 2020 presidential election on January 6.

"Claremont's statement that Eastman did not seek to have Vice President Pence unilaterally determine the validity of electoral votes and overturn the election is a bald-faced, disgraceful lie," says Conway, who successfully argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision, and had been under consideration to be Donald Trump's solicitor general or an assistant attorney general.

Conway was referring to a statement from the Claremont Institute, the pro-Trump conservative think tank where Eastman is employed as a senior fellow. Claremont has embraced right wing extremists, granting fellowships to Fox News' Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro, CRT conspiracist Christopher Rufo, and even Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.

The Washington Post Monday accused Claremont of trying to "whitewash" Eastman's "road map for overturning Trump's loss."

Eastman, who happens to be the chairman of the nearly-defunct anti-LGBTQ group National Organization For Marriage (NOM) and supported Uganda's efforts to jail LGBTQ people for life, was forced to "retire" as a law professor after blowback from speaking at Trump's pre-insurrection rally, ginning up the troops, and falsely claiming Trump had won the election.

In its statement defending Eastman today, Claremont decried "a recent combined disinformation, de-platforming, and ostracism campaign," also known as holding Eastman accountable by using his own words.

Here's Conway's tweet...

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incub kirk, ben shapiro and Mollie Hemingway, Lincoln Fellow 2014

Senior Editor, The Federalist

A longtime journalist, Mollie Hemingway writes about culture, policy, and the political horse race for one of the Right’s hottest new web magazines.

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1021 ah an

When arch-conservative Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming criticizes President Joe Biden's economic policies, it is obvious that she still considers him the loyal opposition — and the feeling is mutual. But there is a school of right-wing thought that doesn't regard Biden or any other Democrat as the loyal opposition. In an article published by The Atlantic on October 1, journalist Emma Green takes a look at far-right MAGA Republicans who fear that the irreconcilable differences of Red America and Blue America may lead to an all-out civil war.

Members of the Claremont Institute, a far-right think tank, have been saying that Republicans and Democrats aren't just members of competing political parties, but are, in effect, living in two separate countries. Describing Claremont as the "intellectual home of America's Trumpist right," Green notes that Claremont President Ryan Williams and his colleagues "believe that America has" become "two fundamentally different countries, not least because of the rise of secularism."

During an interview with Green, Williams claimed, "The Founders were pretty unanimous, with (George) Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people."

Williams, during the interview, didn't say that another civil war is something he looks forward to. But he fears that the United States' political divisions will lead to major violence. The Claremont president told Green, "I worry about such a conflict. The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs."

On March 24, Claremont's website, the American Mind, published a controversial essay by senior follow Glenn Ellmers, — who wrote, "Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term." Ellmers' article was headlined "'Conservatism' Is No Longer Enough" and explained why Claremont rejects traditional conservatism.

Green asked Williams, "What does it mean to declare that more than half of the people residing in the country are not truly American?" — to which he replied, "Glenn was, of course, being provocative and polemical. But if Claremont thinks real Americanism is a belief in the principles of the American founding, we have to acknowledge that a good portion of our fellow citizens don't agree with our principles and conclusions about what politics is for. If we differ on those fundamental things, we're really two Americas."

Williams added, "Even during the Civil War — I think we're more divided now than we were then. As (President Abraham) Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery."

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no lnx

Trump lawyer who planned election overthrow to speak at conference despite objections

POLITICS

by: Lee Hedgepe

Posted: Sep 23, 2021

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — When John Eastman speaks during the American Political Science Association’s annual conference next month, he may want to tread lightly. Political scientists from across the country are condemning Eastman and chiding their own organization for allowing the former Trump lawyer to participate in the discipline’s most important annual meeting.

Just 56% of Americans can name all three branches of government — that’s actually a 15-year high

Eastman made national headlines this week following the publication of a memo he wrote last year that outlined a six-step plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

@APSAtweets do the right thing. By the very least condemn anti-democratic movements and figures and balance said panels with serious academics #JohnEastman #APSA2021 #January6th https://t.co/Ghi27Bi8O2

— Dr. Yotam Ophir (@ophiryotam) September 22, 2021

Eastman is scheduled to participate in two panels at APSA, both run by the Claremont Institute, which lists him as a senior fellow on its website. The “virtual roundtables” are scheduled for Sunday, October 3, and are titled “The 2020 Elections and the State of American Conservatism” and “The Supreme Court’s Current and Future Direction.”

Dr. David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, said Wednesday that Eastman’s plan to overturn the presidential election puts his views well outside the legitimate marketplace of ideas.

“If that was published as a blog post,” Karpf said of the memo, “I would call it laughable trash. Since it was presented to the Vice President of the United States, I would call it treason.” The memo said that then-Vice President Mike Pence should refuse to recognize electors from seven states and declare Trump president.

If Eastman after 1/6 is not a bridge too far then what is; and further, why would I stay as a member in APSA when they let that stand?

— Justin Walsh (@JustinWalsh_) September 21, 2021

“The main thing here,” Eastman wrote, “is that Pence should do this without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court.”

That suggestion, according to Karpf, was beyond the pale. “That’s overthrowing free and fair elections,” he said.

Eastman’s notoriety goes beyond that memo. In 2020, he was widely criticized for an op-ed he wrote that suggested Kamala Harris is not an American citizen. Eastman, who was a law clerk for Clarence Thomas, was also a professor at Chapman University School of Law. He retired from that position after giving a speech at the January 6 “Save America” rally that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

“He’s not a political scientist, but he and the Claremont Institute try to gain legitimacy by having little panels at APSA, where they present those sorts of arguments, or at least don’t have those arguments criticized,” Karpf, who is an APSA member, said. “That’s dangerous for American politics and APSA should not be associated with it.”

APSA giving John "Trump Coup" Eastman a platform to legitimate his views is their dumbest decision since holding a conference in New Orleans in the middle of hurricane season https://t.co/wNLq8A4B1b

— Seva (@SevaUT) September 22, 2021

Karpf said that he believes those who attend the conference should make their views on Eastman and the Claremont institute clear. “Claremont should not be welcome anymore,” he said. “That’s not about the diversity of ideas. That’s about recognizing that there are some ideas that are so far outside of the boundaries of American political discourse that we should be not lending them our platform.”

This is not the first time political scientists have taken issue with APSA. In 2011, scholars opposed John Yoo’s participation in that year’s annual meeting.Yoo was a lawyer for former Pres. George W. Bush, who wrote documents outlining the alleged legality of torture techniques. In their response to members’ objections, APSA’s governing council said that it supported members’ right to protest Yoo’s presence “as we support the right of APSA members to produce panels and speakers on topics they think it important for the association to consider.”

In that letter, APSA clarified that “organizers of the affiliated group panel on which he participated,” not APSA itself, invited Yoo to the meeting.“These groups exist explicitly to bring forward diverse points of view,” the letter continued.

It would be kind of cool if John Eastman got arrested during the APSA panel though.

— Justin Zimmerman (@JZPhilosophy) September 21, 2021

Like Yoo, Eastman is set to participate in a panel organized by an outside group, the Claremont Institute. On its website, Claremont Institute solicits donations of $5,000 to “support” its panels at the annual APSA conference.

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“You may designate a gift at any level to APSA panels,” the Claremont page continues, “where our scholars teach the true principle of government and their application to today’s policies.”

For his part, Karpf has said he supports the diversity of ideas wholeheartedly. “I agree with the stance that we should have a diversity of ideas at the conference. I also would readily acknowledge that there are gray areas where it’s a difficult call,” he said. “But I think every political scientist, who has spent any time in America in the past four years, certainly since January 6, can look at that memo and immediately acknowledge that that is nowhere close to the line. There are difficult cases. And then there is this. This is not a typical case. This is so far beyond the line.”

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-sordid-record-of-john-eastman-the-latest-right-wing-lawyer-on-trumps-legal-team/

this week, President Donald Trump sought to join—in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate—a request made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in an effort to overturn the results of the presidential election by disenfranchising those states’ voters. Many legal observers consider the Texas filing to be, in the words of election law expert Richard Hasen, “utter garbage.” But that hasn’t stopped more than a dozen Republican attorneys general from seeking to join the effort.

The lawyer representing Trump in his request to join the Texas effort is John Eastman, a law professor who has long advanced positions on the far-right fringe of the legal community on issues ranging from immigration to LGBTQ equality to separation of church and state. Eastman appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show this week to talk about the Supreme Court’s “original and exclusive” jurisdiction over disputes between states. He noted that the Court has asked defendant states to respond to Texas’s motion asking for Supreme Court permission to sue the four states. “My gut’s they’re going to take it and look at it on the merits,” he said.

Eastman, a former law clerk for the hard-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, directs the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute, which former Right Wing Watch investigative reporter Jared Holt called “an increasingly white nationalist think tank” in 2019. That year, Claremont made “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Lincoln Fellow....

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Claremont Institute is an American conservative think tank based in Upland, California. The institute was founded in 1979 by four students of Harry V. Jaffa.^[3] The Institute publishes the Claremont Review of Books, as well as other books and publications.

The institute was an early defender of Donald Trump.^[3] After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede while making false claims of fraud, Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman aided Trump in his failed attempts to overturn the election results.^[4]

History

The institute was founded in 1979 by four students of Straussian political theoristHarry V. Jaffa, a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Graduate University, although the Institute has no affiliation with any of the Claremont Colleges.^[3] Under Jaffa and Larry P. Arnn, the institute became a leading Straussian-influenced conservative think tank, publishing on topics such as statesmanship, Lincoln scholarship and modern conservative issues.^[5][non-primary ^source ^needed]

Arnn served as its president from 1985 until 2000, when he became the twelfth president of Hillsdale College.^[6] Michael Pack was president from 2015 to 2017.^[7] Ryan Williams was named president in 2017.^[6]

The Claremont Institute publishes The Claremont Review of Books,^[8] The American Mind,^[9] The American Story Podcast^[10] and Claremont Books.^[11] The Washington, D.C., branch of the Claremont Institute, called the Center for the American Way of Life, opened in February 2021.^[12]

The Claremont Institute provides fellowships.^[13] Fellowships in the past have gone to prominent figures on the right such as Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Mary Kissel.^[14][15][16] The institute caused controversy by granting a fellowship in 2019 to the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.^[17][18][19] National Review columnist Mona Charen wrote that "Claremont stands out for beclowning itself with this embrace of the smarmy underside of American politics."^[17] In 2020, *Slate* magazine called the institute "a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right", citing Posobiec's fellowship and the publication of a 2020 essay by senior fellow John Eastman that questioned Kamala Harris' eligibility for the vice presidency.^[20][21]

Trump advocacy and connections

The institute was an early defender of Donald Trump.^[3] The* *Daily Beast stated Claremont has "arguably has done more than any other group to build a philosophical case for Trump’s brand of conservatism."^[22]

In September 2016 the institute's Claremont Review of Books published Michael Anton's "The Flight 93 Election" editorial. The editorial, written under a pseudonym, compared the prospect of conservatives letting Trump lose to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election with passengers not charging the cockpit of the United Airlines aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda.^[23][24] The article went viral and received widespread coverage across the political spectrum. Rush Limbaugh devoted a day of his radio series to reading the entire essay.^[25] Anton would go on to serve under President Trump as spokesman for the National Security Council, holding the position from 2017 to 2018.^[24]

In 2019, Trump awarded the Claremont Institute with a National Humanities Medal.^[26][27] In June 2020, former Claremont Institute president Michael Pack became head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) under Trump.^[28]

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the institute received between $350,000 and $1 million in federally backed small business loans from Chain Bridge Bank as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. The institute stated this would allow it to retain 29 jobs.^[22][29]

With Trump and his advisors, Eastman made a failed attempt on January 4, 2021, to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and he spoke at Trump's rally on January 6, 2021, before the attack on the Capitol.^[4]

Biden years

In 2021, Claremont senior fellow Glenn Ellmers wrote a controversial essay in Claremont's The American Mind arguing that the United States had been destroyed by internal enemies and that "Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."^{[30][31][32][33]}

Publications

The Claremont Institute publishes the Claremont Review of Books. The CRB is edited by Charles R. Kesler and features regular columns by Martha Bayles and Mark Helprin. The Institute also publishes The American Mind. Claremont Vice President of Education Matt Peterson serves as editor; and James Poulos is executive editor. The publication has featured essays by Newt Gingrich, Sen. Todd Young, Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Jim Banks, and Sen. Tom Cotton.^[34][35][36]

Staff

Douglas Bechler (Senior VP/Chief Development Officer)Ryan Williams (President of the Institute)

Bob Gransden (Chief Financial Officer)
Charles Kesler (Editor of the Claremont Review of Books)
John Eastman (Founding Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence)
Matthew Peterson (Founding Editor of The American Mind, VP of Education)
David Bahr (Senior Director of Communications and Marketing)
Christine Barton (VP of Development)
Arthur Milikh (Executive Director of Center for the American Way of Life)
James Poulos (Executive Editor of The American Mind)^[37]
Seth Barron (Managing Editor of The American Mind)

Reference

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nature 406 2000

https://www.nature.com/articles/35018718

Supporters of the US tobacco industry have failed to silence one of its most prominent academic critics.

An appeals court in California has ruled that Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), can use his position to back the state government's anti-smoking efforts.

In 1997, Californians for Scientific Integrity — a group set up at a Sacramento attorney's office by the industry-sponsored National Smokers Alliance — sued Glantz in an attempt to stop him using his academic position to help the state of California fight smoking.

The group alleged that Glantz's 15 years of campaigning was a misuse of public funds. It also charged that the university's approval of his activities was a violation of the rights of those Californians who did not agree with the anti-smoking cause.

But two weeks ago, a three-judge panel of the Third District Court of Appeals in Sacramento rejected the allegations, reaffirming the right of any faculty member at the University of California to campaign against smoking.

“It makes me very glad to work at a university that takes academic freedom and public interest very seriously and has the courage to stand up to … the tobacco industry,” said Glantz, who is widely known for challenging the industry's claims that it was unaware of the dangers of smoking.

Citing statements on a recruitment flyer, he claims that Californians for Scientific Integrity “was set up for the express purpose of suing the University of California and silencing me”.

“It was clear intimidation,” he adds. “But this shows you can stand up and beat them.”

Mark Perry, a Washington DC-based attorney with the firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher that represents the suing group, did not answer a request for comment. Perry has said separately that no decision has been reached on whether to appeal to the California Supreme Court.

Nor was there a response from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank in California that filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief in support of the group.

Although the decision only addresses the rights of university staff to campaign against smoking, it could be far-reaching. Along with other cases, any faculty member of a Californian public university could use it to affirm his or her right to campaign for any cause endorsed by the state legislature.

Last month, Glantz, who conducts research in UCSF's cardiology division, won the annual Public Service Achievement Award of the lobby group Common Cause for his “tireless and tenacious” efforts against smoking. In the past, pro-smoking groups have attacked him in both California and Washington — accusing him of falsifying a result in a study of the effects of ‘second-hand smoke’, and seeking to cut off his research funds.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Court-rules-professor-can-use-his-job-to-fight-3054189.php

Court rules professor can use his job to fight smoking

By Bob Egelko

Published 4:00 am PDT, Tuesday, July 11, 2000

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The tobacco industry's leading nemesis in California can continue to fight smoking from his perch as a UC professor, says a state appellate court.

An industry-allied group, Californians for Scientific Integrity, sued the University of California in 1998 over Stanton Glantz's use of his university job and resources to push for tougher state action against smoking. The suit contended Glantz's activities were a misuse of tax money.

But the 3rd District Court of Appeal said Glantz's activity was authorized by the Legislature, which has directed the state to "play a leading role in promoting a smoke-free society by the year 2000."

Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC-San Francisco, was a founder and former president of Californians for Nonsmokers' Rights. He has worked for state and local bans on smoking in public buildings and for stronger messages in state-funded anti-smoking ads.

His studies on smoking and health have been disputed by tobacco companies, which have tried to get Congress and the California Legislature to cut off his government funding.The suit by Californians for Scientific Integrityinitially included a challenge to the validity of a study by Glantz that found that prohibitions on smoking in restaurants did not hurt tourism. That claim was later dropped and the group ultimately sought only to halt the alleged misuse of state funds for lobbying.

"They were attempting to intimidate me and the university," Glantz said Monday. "The university stood up to the thugs in cigarette companies again and won again."

Mark A. Perry, a lawyer for the group that sued the university, said no decision has been made on a further appeal. He said he disagreed with the court's conclusion that the general statements in state law about a smoke-free society authorized Glantz to use state funds to promote anti-smoking policies.

Perry denied Glantz's assertion that Californians for Scientific Integrity was a front for the tobacco industry, but said it is partially funded by the National Smokers' Alliance, which draws funding from tobacco companies.

The appellate ruling Thursday upheld a decision by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Joe Gray to dismiss the suit without a trial. The court said California law forbids certain types of state-funded political activities, such as the use of state funds to influence election campaigns, but does not prohibit activity that the Legislature itself has authorized. <

https://books.google.com/books?id=RplatBlLnGUC

Pesticides in the Terrestrial and Aquatic Environments: Second National Research Conference

Front Cover

Diana L. Weigmann

DIANE Publishing, 1994 - 555 pages

0 Reviews

Includes 50 research papers on risk assessment, monitoring, toxicity, waste disposal, environmental regulations, pesticide contamination of drinking water supplies, wastewater sludge, groundwater and surface water, and much more.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pizzagater-jack-posobiec-granted-fellowship-by-increasingly-white-nationalist-think-tank

California-based conservative think tank The Claremont Institute has been working to define and attack multiculturalism as part of a campaign aimed at shaping national rhetoric ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and its top voices have employed nationalist rhetoric and sought untraditional figures to meet its ends.

The Claremont Institute, founded in 1979, is influential within the conservative movement nationally. The organization’s approach to influencing politics is three-fold: it educates conservative influencers, it publishes the Claremont Review of Books, and it files legal briefs and engages in litigation. In May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressed the organization’s 40th Anniversary Gala in California.Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence John Eastman is a figure that conservatives have often turned to when opposing LGBTQ equality and immigration issues.

Claremont Institute provided early support of President Trump’s 2016 candidacy,including its publication of a now-notorious anonymous essay called “The Flight 93 Election,” which described a potential Hillary Clinton presidency as “Russian Roulette with a semi-auto,” and a vote for Trump as a heroic act on a par with the passengers on September 11, 2001, who rushed the cockpit of their hijacked plane. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf described the essay at the time as “flagrant sophistry that should embarrass The Claremont Institute.” But instead of feeling ashamed, it appears the organization has ratcheted up its overt support for Trump, and is seeking to intellectualize white nationalist talking points, akin to what Fox News host Tucker Carlson does.

Today we find another work of sophistry on the front page of The Claremont Institute’s website, an article titled “Defend America—Defeat Multiculturalism.” In the essay, Claremont Institute president Ryan P. Williams writes that “today’smulticulturalist enforcers seek to erase and replace America,” an echo of the “replacement theory” and assertions of “white genocide” put forward by white nationalist and white identitarian groups around the world. (Last year, Right Wing Watch reported on Tucker Carlson’s appropriation of the theory to assert that black South Africans were seeking to steal the land of white farmers.) A note on the Claremont Institute piece states that the essay is a “launching document” for a Claremont Institute effort “in defense of America against the threat of multiculturalism” ahead of the 2020 general election. Williams writes:

If we do not reverse multiculturalism’s advance, it will continue to undermine our country and constitutionalism, destroying the possibility of a common good and a life of civic peace. Indeed, multiculturalism threatens to take down western civilization as whole.

By multiculturalism, we do not mean the mere presence of many cultures, races, or ethnic traditions, which are a fixture of modern American life and can be found across our states, communities, institutions, and private associations. One of America’s—and Americanism’s—great virtues has always been the maintenance of a wide realm of liberty and civic society in which a vibrant mix of cultural heritages and individual excellence could flourish.

America’s most important politico-cultural virtue, though, has been the insistence to its current—and especially potential—citizens that they assimilate to a certain view of justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence and safeguarded by our state and national political institutions, first and foremost the U.S. Constitution. E pluribus unum (“out of many, one”), America’s motto, means that assimilation has always been in our national DNA.

Williams writes that right-wing conservatives and intellectuals in America “have a disordered view of priorities and policies, of ends and means,” which has led many people on the Right to “misinterpret and underappreciate President Trump’s virtues and his significance as a political phenomenon.” Multiculturalists, Williams continues, pose an existential threat to the nation. Williams writes that Claremont Institute will employ rhetorical campaigns “to fuse civic nationalism with the popular, cultural, and historical touchstones of American greatness.” And over the past few months, its commentators have made clear just what exactly they mean by “American greatness.”

In an episode of Claremont’s Institute’s podcast “The American Mind,” James Poulos says that “social justice dogma” seeks “the wholesale repudiation of American justice as we’ve known it since the Founding.” On the podcast, Williams compares social justice efforts to slavery and Communism during the Cold War. Williams says the analogy “isn’t perfect, but I think, thinking of it that way, at a regime level challenge, is the proper way to think about it.” Multiculturalism, Williams says, threatens to destroy America “and could be the downfall of Western civilization as a whole.” On the same episode of the podcast, Tom Klingenstein, Claremont Institute chairman, claims that multiculturalism “aims at the destruction of America and the West.”

Conrad Black, who was pardoned of fraud and obstruction of justice convictions by Trump earlier this year, wrote at Claremont Institute that “waves of desperate people in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America who have tried to swarm into Europe and North America more closely resemble, though they are less organized, the barbarian masses who surged into the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries.”

These sentiments published by the Claremont Institute, reverberate with white nationalist philosophy as it was popularized and mainstreamed with the rise of Trump during the 2016 election. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that fighting multicultural programs has been a common cause of white nationalists and paleo-conservates.

Vox reporter Jane Coaston pointed out that Claremont Institute had selected One America News Network pundit Jack Posobiec, a notorious “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist with past ties to extreme-right figures, as a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Lincoln Fellow for 2019. The institute will host Posobiec for a week-long fellowship in August alongside figures working closely with the White House, Capitol Hill, and State Department. Mona Charen at National Review wrote earlier this month that the selection of fellows, including Posobiec, should embarass The Claremont Institute “for beclowning itself with this embrace of the smarmy underside of American politics.”

Tags: Conrad Black Jack Posobiec James Poulos John Eastman Ryan P. Williams Tom Klingenstein conspiracy theories white nationalism Claremont Institute

https://news.yahoo.com/why-did-rightwing-troll-charles-c-johnson-want-to-meet-with-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-090000636.html

the year 2018 was not an especially auspicious one for Charles C. Johnson, a Holocaust denier whom the Boston Globe has deemed “one of the country's most notorious Internet trolls.”

a Michigan father and son his site had accused of having been responsible for the killing of protester Heather Heyer during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., the year before, despite their having nothing to do with the murder. The murder was actually committed by a white nationalist." data-reactid="23" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In June, Johnson agreed to pay a settlement reported to have been as high as $25,000 to a Michigan father and son his site had accused of having been responsible for the killing of protester Heather Heyer during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., the year before, despite their having nothing to do with the murder. The murder was actually committed by a white nationalist.

That same summer, Freestartr, a site Johnson founded that was used to raise money for Nazis and extremists, shut down. GotNews.com, a font of fake news that he ran, also met its demise.

who had been informally involved with the Trump campaign — remained an influential figure, a kind of right-wing martyr maligned by media and technology elites. Even so, he retained untrammeled access to the highest reaches of the Trump administration." data-reactid="25" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Despite that, Johnson — who had been informally involved with the Trump campaign — remained an influential figure, a kind of right-wing martyr maligned by media and technology elites. Even so, he retained untrammeled access to the highest reaches of the Trump administration.

That much is clear from his surprising exchange with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on June 25, 2018.

“Hi Secretary Ross,” the markedly informal email sent by Johnson that day begins. “Great chatting with you the other day.” Johnson proceeds to say that he would be “speaking before about 30 congressmen on tech issues” in Washington and “would love to meet” with Ross as well.

Ross responded about three hours later, in an email apparently typed from his iPhone. He explained that he had to fly to Wisconsin in order to attend the groundbreaking for a plant opened by Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer. He urged Johnson to schedule a time for them to meet by going through Macie Leach, a senior adviser to the commerce secretary who had overlapped with Johnson at Claremont McKenna College, a small and prestigious California liberal arts university with a reputation for a conservative student body.

“Sounds good,” Johnson replied, copying several Commerce officials, as well as another email account belonging to Ross. The subject line of his email was “Tech discussion with Sec Ross.”

Ross and Johnson did meet that summer, according to a person familiar with the matter, but Johnson’s request for a subsequent meeting in October was turned down.

It is not known what they discussed, but Johnson is a vocal critic of what he views as bias against Republicans and conservatives in the tech and social media world, while the Department of Commerce oversees the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. President Trump has amplified such complaints, raising them recently in a meeting with Twitter founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey.

well known. Three years before, he had been booted off Twitter for threatening to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. His fundraising sites welcomed campaigns by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin." data-reactid="39" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Department of Commerce would not confirm that a meeting between Ross and Johnson took place. Questions remain about why a high-ranking government official would entertain a figure as divisive as Johnson, especially since by late 2018 Johnson’s affiliation with white supremacists and other fringe figures was well known. Three years before, he had been booted off Twitter for threatening to “take out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. His fundraising sites welcomed campaigns by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin.

rejected Johnson’s bid to have his Twitter ban lifted. (Johnson may have found a way around the ban; shortly after an exchange with Johnson, this reporter was followed on Twitter by @charles46532569, an account purporting to belong to “charles johnson.” The account followed, and shared messages from, accounts associated with several right-wing figures. Johnson denied to Yahoo News that the account was his, replying with an emoji of a sunglasses-wearing visage.)" data-reactid="40" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The exchange with Ross came several days after a California superior court rejected Johnson’s bid to have his Twitter ban lifted. (Johnson may have found a way around the ban; shortly after an exchange with Johnson, this reporter was followed on Twitter by @charles46532569, an account purporting to belong to “charles johnson.” The account followed, and shared messages from, accounts associated with several right-wing figures. Johnson denied to Yahoo News that the account was his, replying with an emoji of a sunglasses-wearing visage.)

Johnson headed to Washington amid these defeats, though it’s not known which members of Congress he tried to brief, and on what subject. No evident record of such a meeting exists, but Johnson clearly relished the access he had to the Trump administration and conservative members of Congress.

In 2017, he had posted on Facebook, “10 years ago I came to California with $50. I knew no one. Now the money I made and saved from odd jobs, poker, and risk taking has made me a multimillionaire before I turned 30 and bitcoin has hit $10k. Now I hang out with cabinet members and congressmen. What a country.” It is not clear which cabinet members, or legislators, Johnson was referencing.

“It's concerning that a reputed Holocaust denier is familiar enough with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that he can apparently reach the Secretary via a private email account,” said Charisma Troiano, communications director for Democracy Forward, a progressive group that obtained Ross’s emails through the Freedom of Information Act. “The public deserves to know why.”

Ross’s email address is redacted in the documents reviewed by Yahoo News. However, Democracy Forward had specified in its Freedom of Information request that it sought “all communications sent to or from any nongovernmental email address established, controlled, or used by the Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.” The back-and-forth with Johnson, therefore, had to have been conducted at least in part via an email address affiliated with Ross but not issued by the federal government.

Several high-ranking Trump administration officials have been found to have used private emails for government business." data-reactid="54" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em;">During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump frequently castigated his Democratic competitor, Hillary Clinton, for using a private, off-site email server while serving as secretary of state for President Obama. Several high-ranking Trump administration officials have been found to have used private emails for government business.

In a text-message exchange with Yahoo News, Johnson expressed concern that he would be “falsely” accused “of being a troll or worse,” which made him hesitant to “engage with the #fakenews.”

Johnson later sent a statement denying that he was a Holocaust denier and claiming that he was a supporter of Jewish causes. He also pointed out that one of his lawyers was an Orthodox Jew, presumably as proof that he harbored no anti-Semitic tendencies.

Johnson also depicted himself as a free speech advocate, not a supporter of extremist causes. And he said that he was not the author of the false GotNews.com report about the Charlottesville killing. He said the settlement in the case was for a lower amount than what has been reported elsewhere (that is, $25,000).

who once authored a book on President Calvin Coolidge, would have the standing to discuss with Ross. The Department of Commerce has broad oversight of U.S. trade, though Trump has ceased to seek Ross’s counsel on that issue." data-reactid="58" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em;">Of his exchange with Ross, Johnson would only say it was “a national security matter.” It is not clear what topic pertaining to national security Johnson, who once authored a book on President Calvin Coolidge, would have the standing to discuss with Ross. The Department of Commerce has broad oversight of U.S. trade, though Trump has ceased to seek Ross’s counsel on that issue.

Johnson reached out to Ross again in October 2018, saying he had “something of international import to discuss.” Leach, the senior Commerce adviser, appears to have handled the request, forwarding it from her personal email address to her Department of Commerce one. This time, however, Johnson was not as fortunate as he had been over the summer. “The requested meeting did not occur,” a Commerce spokeswoman said.

Ross remains the commerce secretary, though his credibility has been seriously tarnished by his handling of the Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. He is routinely spoken about as on the verge of losing his job.

Johnson’s current occupation is unclear, though he told Yahoo News he wants to be called an “entrepreneur.” The substance of his present-day entrepreneurial activity is unknown.

https://www.nas.org/articles/will_the_other_claremont_colleges_defend_free_speech

A version of Rachelle Peterson's article originally appeared on Campus Reform. The full article is below.

When Claremont McKenna College announced it would punish seven students who blockaded the entrances to Heather Mac Donald’s speech in April, it did something few colleges have shown the backbone to undertake. It enforced campus policy in defense of free speech. In April President Hiram Chodosh said protesters had engaged in behavior that “violates College policy” and promised they “will be held accountable.” In July, the College suspended five students and placed two on conduct probation.

Claremont McKenna deserves some credit. I recently offered one-and-a-half cheers; to earn all three, Claremont should have prevented the blockade in the first place and kept order during Mac Donald’s talk. But at least the college followed through on President Chodosh’s vows to hold some students accountable.

We should now turn our attention to the other six institutions that, along with Claremont McKenna College, make up the Claremont University Consortium: Pitzer College, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, Keck Graduate Institute, Harvey Mudd College, and Scripps College. One hundred seventy students participated in the protest against Mac Donald. Claremont McKenna identified twelve of the 170 as Claremont McKenna students, of which it punished seven. The other 158 protesters either could not be identified, or were not Claremont McKenna students.

Where did these other speech obstructers come from? According to Claremont McKenna, some are students at the other Claremont consortium colleges. CMC claims to have sent the deans at these colleges “evidence of policy violations” by their students, and asked them “to review this evidence under their own conduct processes.” Claremont McKenna has banned four non-CMC students from visiting campus, on the grounds that they “played significant roles in the blockade.” But it is up to the administrators of the other colleges to take steps to suspend, fine, or otherwise punish students who broke college policy by disrupting Mac Donald’s talk.

Whether the other Claremont colleges follow President Chodosh’s lead in executing punishments will be a serious test of their commitment to free speech. A mob of protesters, many of them students, tore down a fence, swarmed police officers, and formed human chains across entrances out of spite for Mac Donald’s right to speak. Suspected policy-breakers should be given a fair investigation, with an opportunity to present any exculpatory evidence. But breaking college rules should come with consequences—especially when those rules concern a central purpose of higher education, the protection of intellectual freedom.

I asked each of the Claremont Consortium institutions whether they have investigated their students’ behavior during the April blockade. Three have begun reviewing evidence, and one plans to wait until the fall to investigate. Two believe none of their students participated or violated policies.

Here are the responses from each of the Claremont institutions.

Pitzer, Pomona, and Scripps are currently looking at evidence of potential student policy violations.

Pitzer CollegeVice President for Student Affairs Brian Carlisle:“Pitzer is in communication with Claremont McKenna College. We are currently reviewing all information provided.”

Pomona CollegeDean of StudentsMiriam Feldblum, via Marylou Ferry, Vice President, Chief Communications Officer:“We did receive photographs and information from CMC to review, as referred to by CMC in their recent statement, and that is in process of being reviewed with Dean Townes and Dean Waugh, who are the deans who oversee judicial affairs, and advise Judicial Council.

“With regard to our approach, this past spring, we had conversations in our campus Student Affairs Committee (SAC), which is a faculty committee, currently chaired by Prof. Paul Cahill, and SAC oversees the student handbook and can make changes to student judicial council processes and with ASPC student government, that our usual process when there are complaints about general behaviors during a demonstration (such as the use of bull horns in buildings or some disruptive behavior during a demonstration) often involve a dean's warning regarding the demonstration policy, whether to specific students or more generally when we cannot identify specific students, and that future violations could be addressed by the Judicial Council or a Dean's Sanction.

“With regard to an investigation, our general process with regard to claims of policy violations is that Dean Townes and Dean Waugh will determine the need for an investigation, oversee the investigation if appropriate, and then proceed from there, again, as appropriate.”

Scripps College Director of Media and Public Relations Karen Bergh:“Your query to President Lara Tiedens was forwarded to me as per our protocol for such inquiries. The statement you can use for Scripps regarding the student issue at CMC is that ‘we have received information from CMC and are reviewing the matter.’ There is no additional information at this time.”

Harvey Mudd College will review the evidence in the fall, when classes resume.

Harvey Mudd College Communications Officer Timothy L. Hussey:“In regard to your emails to President Klawe and Dean Jacobsen, the chair of our Disciplinary Board will follow up with CMC in the fall, when students return to campus, to discuss any allegations of HMC students violating the Demonstration Policy and any subsequent Honor Code actions.”

Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute believe none of their students participated in the protests against Mac Donald.

Claremont Graduate University President Jacob Adams: “To the best of the university’s knowledge, no Claremont Graduate University (CGU) students were involved in the April 6 protest at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), and CMC has not turned over any evidence that CGU students were involved in the matter.”

Keck Graduate Institute Dean of Student Engagement and Enrollment ServicesSofia Toro:“We have reviewed the information by CMC and did not identify any KGI students.”

This means at least four of the Claremont institutions may have students who violated college policy. Harvey Mudd College President Maria Klawe, Pitzer College President Melvin L. Oliver, Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr, and Scripps College President Lara Tiedens, we’re watching you. Whether you investigate fairly and promptly, enforce order, and punish policy-breakers will show whether you respect free speech.

see earlier art'l

also CMChttp://www.cmc.edu/salvatori/

fake news:

For instance, it enlisted the organization (together with think-tanks like the Reason Foundation, Hoover Institute, Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute) to write op-ed pieces that were planted in newspapers attacking the**Environmental Protection Agency**(EPA) over its determination that**Environmental Tobacco Smoke**(ETS) was a carcinogen and its attempt to regulate Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). (See page 4 of this planning document.**[5]**)

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Claremont_Institute_for_the_Study_of_Statesmanship_and_Political_Philosophy

Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy

From SourceWatch

From the Claremont Institute web pages:[1]

"The mission of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life."The Claremont Institute finds the answers to America's problems in the principles on which our nation was founded. These principles are expressed most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that 'all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…'"To recover the Founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life and maintains a strong defense."The Institute's work is only beginning. Today, our state and federal governments spend vast and increasing sums of public money for less and less good. The public sector continues to grow at the expense of the private. Regulations intrude into every corner of our lives. Schools no longer perform. Police and courts no longer protect. Good businesses are being driven to extinction by excessive and discriminatory controls, and as a result good jobs continue to disappear. Dependence grows and opportunity wanes with each passing year."The Claremont Institute believes that informed citizens can and will make the right choices for America's future. Through its books, policy briefings, conferences and seminars, and now through the new electronic media of the World Wide Web, the Institute engages Americans in an informed discussion of the principles and policies necessary to rebuild our civic institutions."Founded in 1979, the Claremont Institute's work is national in scope, but gives special emphasis to the problems of our country's largest state, where the Institute is based. Institute studies like the the pioneering 1988 book, The Imperial Congress (co-published with the Heritage Foundation), innovative policy proposals such as our 1995 'Contract with California,' our ongoing work on the cultural attacks on the American family, and our decade-long involvement in the critical debates over environmental regulations and property rights law--all have earned the Institute a reputation for sound scholarship and diligence in the service of constitutional government."America's Founders endowed our Republic with sound principles and a framework for governing that is unmatched in the history of mankind. The prosperity and freedom of America can only be made secure if they are guided by a return to these basic principles as our country enters the 21st Century."

Contents[hide]

Funding

The following foundations gave money to the Claremont Institute think tank in 2005: ^{[1]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Claremont_Institute_for_the_Study_of_Statesmanship_and_Political_Philosophy#cite_note-0)

Sarah Scaife Foundation - $325,000
Roe Foundation - $15,000
Armstrong Foundation - $2,500
The Carthage Foundation - $75,000
Philip M. McKenna Foundation - $45,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation - $110,000
Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation - $10,000

Previous years:

Claremont projects

^[2 ^{]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Claremont_Institute_for_the_Study_of_Statesmanship_and_Political_Philosophy#cite_note-1)

Publius Fellowship - an intensive two week summer course in political philosophy and journalism designed for undergraduate seniors, recent graduates, and graduate students who are interested in careers in journalism, academia, or public policy.
Investment Security Program - educates citizens and state legislators about the effects of American capital investments in terrorist-sponsoring states.
Internship Opportunities with the Claremont Institute - Each year, they host a number of college students with summer internships.
Golden State Center - to draw on the Institute's scholarship and research for practical application to the policies of the California.
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership - a group of health professionals familiar with guns and medical research, is the antidote to those who twist science to serve a misguided anti-gun ideology.
Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence - a public interest law firm, in order to further Claremont's mission through strategic litigation.
Ballistic Missile Defense Project - supporting missile defenses.

Former projects:

Americans for Victory Over Terrorism: Right-wing website propagating the "anti-terrorist"/orientalist message. Website's Reading List is primarily drawn up from writings by Bernard Lewis, Martin Kramer, Samuel Huntington, Steven Emerson, Yossef Bodansky, Benjamin Netanyahu…

Personnel

^[3 ^{]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Claremont_Institute_for_the_Study_of_Statesmanship_and_Political_Philosophy#cite_note-2)

Board of Directors

Chairman: Bruce C. Sanborn — President, Upland & Marsh
Vice Chairman: Larry P. Arnn — President, Hillsdale College

Board members

Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. — Fieldstead & Co.
Edward Erler — Prof., California State University San Bernardino
Joel H. Farkas — JF Companies
Christopher Flannery — Prof., Azusa Pacific University
Thomas A. Fuentes — Senior Fellow, The Claremont Institute
James E. Higgins — New Vernon Capital, LLC
Harry V. Jaffa — Prof. Emeritus, Claremont Graduate School
Lawrence Kadish — First Fiscal Fund Co.
Brian T. Kennedy — President, the Claremont Institute
Charles R. Kesler — Prof., Claremont McKenna College
Thomas D. Klingenstein — Cohen, Klingenstein & Marks, Inc.
Edwin C. Laird — President, Coatings Resources Group
Jeffrey B. Lewis — The Claremont Institute
John Marini — Prof., University of Nevada at Reno
Kenneth Petersen — Partner, Tax and Financial Group
Peter W. Schramm — Executive Director, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs
W. Robert Stover —Westaff, Inc
Brian F. Sullivan — Co-Chairman SimonDelivers.com
Thomas G. West — Prof., University of Dallas

Board of Advisors

Roberta Green Ahmanson — Fieldstead & Co.
Richard B. Cammack — President, Cammack and Associates
Henrietta Fankhauser — Livermore, California
Daniel J. Frederick — Wayzata, Minnesota
Michael Maibach
Donald E. Moe — Senior Vice President, The Irvine Company
Gregory R. Palen — President, Palen/Kimball Company
Thomas K. Phillips — Chairman, Phillips International, Inc.
Pat Sajak
Johnny Zamrzla

Claremont Institute Links

The Acton Institute
The American Civil Rights Institute
The American Enterprise Institute
The Ashbrook Center
Center of the American Experiment
Center for Security Policy
Council for International Security
The Discovery Institute
Empower America
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Faith and Reason
Federalist Society
Freedom House
The Heritage Foundation
The Independent Women's Forum
The Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis
Institute for Justice
Institute of the North
Institute of World Politics
Landmark Legal Foundation
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
MissileThreat.com
Pacific Legal Fund (maybe should be Pacific Legal Foundation ???)
Pacific Research Institute
Washington Legal Foundation
Young America's Foundation

Contact

937 West Foothill Boulevard, Suite E

Claremont, CA 91711

Phone: (909) 621-6825 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (909) 621-6825 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Fax: (909) 626-8724

Email: info AT claremont.org

Web: http://www.claremont.org

References

↑ Grants to Claremont Institute, Media Transparency, accessed July 2007.
↑ Projects, Claremont Institute, accessed July 2007.
↑ Board of Directors, Claremont Institute, accessed July 2007.

legistlative orientation conflict w/ TPP

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/11/tea-party-Congress-freshmen-calls

ROSE INST

TRIBAL MGMT

Joseph M. Bessette

Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor Government and Ethics | Government Department, CMC

jbessette@cmc.edu | (909) 607-3989

Dr. Joseph M. Bessette (B.S. Boston College, M.A. and Ph.D. University of Chicago) is a Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College. His areas of expertise include ethics and American democracy, presidency, American politics, crime and criminal justice, and American constitutionalism. His publications include American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship (Cengage/Wadsworth 2013), second edition; The Constitutional Presidency(Johns Hopkins University Press 2009); and The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (University of Chicago 1994).

Eric Helland

William F. Podlich Professor of Economics | Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

eric.helland@cmc.edu | (909) 607-7275

Dr. Eric Helland (B.A. University of Missouri, M.A. and Ph.D. Washington University) is a William F. Podlich Professor of Economics at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Helland’s research primarily focuses on law and economics, microeconomics, business law, contract economics, and health economics. His publications include “Product Liability and Moral Hazard: Evidence from General Aviation” (Journal of Law and Economics 2012), “How Much Should Judges be Paid? An Empirical Study on the Effect of Judicial Pay on the State Appellate Bench” (Stanford Law Review 2012), and “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Website: Disclosure’s Impact on Litigation Behavior” (American Law and Economics Review 2010).

Manfred Keil

Associate Professor| Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

manfred.keil@cmc.edu | (909) 607-3899

Dr. Manfred Keil (Zwischenprüfung, Goethe Universität, M.A. University of Texas, M.S. and Ph.D. London School of Economics) is an Associate Professor at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Keil’s main areas of expertise include banking, comparative economic performance, macroeconomics, and statistics. His publications include “When Does Inflation Hurt Economic Growth? Different Nonlinearities for Different Economies” (Journal of Macroeconomics 2004), “Shrunken Earnings Predictions are Better Predictions” (Applied Financial Economics 2004), and “Uncovered Interest Rate Parity and Exchange Rate Regimes: Lessons from a Sample of East Asian Countries” (National University of Singapore 2008).

Jennifer Merolla

Associate Professor | Department of Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate University

jennifer.merolla@cgu.edu | (909) 621-8695

Dr. Jennifer Merolla (B.A. Boston College, Ph.D. Duke University) is an Associate Professor at Claremont Graduate University. Her research focuses on how the political environment shapes individual attitudes and behavior. Her work includes the study of threat, voting behavior, parties, public opinion, race and ethnic politics, women and politics, and religion and politics. She is co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public (University of Chicago Press 2009). Her work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, Political Research Quarterly, and Women, Politics, and Policy.

John J. Pitney, Jr.

Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics| Government Department, CMC

jpitney@cmc.edu | (909) 607-4224

Dr. John Pitney (B.A. Union College; M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. Yale University) is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Pitney’s research primarily focuses on American and Californian politics, Congress, electoral politics, media politics, public policy, political advertising, and the Obama Administration. His publications include Congress’ Permanent Minority? Republics in the US House (Rowman and Littlefield 1994), The Art of Political Warfare (University of Oklahoma Press 2000), and After Home and Change: The 2012 Elections and American Politics(Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Among other honors, Dr. Pitney is a two time recipient of the Glenn R. Huntoon Teaching Award and received the Presidential Award in 2013.

Joshua Rosett

Curb Family Associate Professor of Business and Law| Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

jrosett@cmc.edu | (909) 607-3625

Dr. Joshua Rosett (B.A. University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. Princeton University) is a Curb Family Associate Professor of Business and Law at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Rosett’s primary area of expertise is accounting. His publications in the field include “Equity Risk and the Labor Stock: The Case of Union Contracts” (Journal of Accounting Research 2001), “What Determines the Variability of Accounting Accruals?” (Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting 2005), “Macroeconomic Variables and the E/P Ratio: Is Inflation Really Positively Associated with the E/P Ratio?” (Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting 2006).

Cameron Shelton,

Assistant Professor| Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

cameron.shelton@cmc.edu | (909) 607-1692

Dr. Cameron Shelton (B.S. and A.B. Stanford University, Ph.D. Stanford Graduate School of Business) is an Assistant Professor at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance. Dr. Shelton’s research primarily focuses on political economy, public choice, and public finance. His publications include “The Size and Composition of Government Spending?” (Journal of Public Economics 2007), “Elections and Political Risk: New Evidence from Political Prediction Markets in Taiwan” (Journal of Public Economics 2011), and “The Vicious Cycle: Fundraising and Perceived Viability in the US Presidential Primaries” (Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2012).

Michael Uhlmann

Director of CGU’s Tribal Administration Program| Department of Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate University

michael.uhlmann@cgu.edu | (909) 621-8210

Dr. Michael Uhlmann (B.A. Yale University, LL.B. University of Virginia Law School, Ph.D. Claremont Graduate School) has been teaching in the Department of Politics and Policy/SPE at Claremont Graduate University since 2002. His courses concentrate on the American Presidency, executive-congressional relations, and the federal judiciary, including the federal administrative process and national security decision-making. He is also an adjunct professor at Claremont McKenna College, teaching a wide variety of courses in the Department of Government. In addition to his regular coursework for the Departing of Politics and Policy, Dr. Uhlmann teaches in, and serves as the Director of CGU’s new Tribal Administration PrograM

Claremont Institute CMC

History

Trump advocacy and connections

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Reference

Court rules professor can use his job to fight smoking

Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy

From SourceWatch

Funding

Claremont projects

Personnel

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Claremont Institute Links

Contact

References

**Joseph M. Bessette**

Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor Government and Ethics | Government Department, CMC

**Eric Helland**

William F. Podlich Professor of Economics | Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

**Manfred Keil**

Associate Professor| Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

**Jennifer Merolla**

Associate Professor | Department of Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate University

**John J. Pitney, Jr.**

Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics| Government Department, CMC

**Joshua Rosett**

Curb Family Associate Professor of Business and Law| Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

**Cameron Shelton**,

Assistant Professor| Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC

**Michael Uhlmann**

Director of CGU’s Tribal Administration Program| Department of Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate University

Attachments

Joseph M. Bessette

Eric Helland

Manfred Keil

Jennifer Merolla

John J. Pitney, Jr.

Joshua Rosett

Cameron Shelton,

Michael Uhlmann