CLAREMONT 3 am mind
9 23
SEE OTHER THREE CCJ LEGAL arm INCLUDES CLERK INCUB
merri ok
see jdv
SEE PJT 2025
SEE EASTMAN
SEE RUFO CRT
SEE RETALIATE
SEE DAF DARK MONEY
SEE MASS DEPORT
SEE MISOGYNY
NATCON
~ birthright citizen eastman
SEE STRAUS LEO
Trump divide among American conservative professors - PMC
...
There are interesting contrasts in clusters of affiliations. The Trumpists tend to cluster around a few think tanks. There are 35 think tanks with 2 or more Trumpists, 19 with 4 or more, and 5 with 8 or more. The clustering tends to occur around ideologically oriented right-wing centers, such as the Claremont Institute (16), the Heritage Foundation (9), the Federalist Society (8), the Heartland Institute (8), the Independent institute (12), the League of the South (5), and the Abbeville Institute (4) (see Table 1) .30
---
an 4 26
A Politico Senior Affairs writer reports that the California Supreme Court has declined to reverse the disbarment of conservative attorney John Eastman, one of the co-conspirators in President Donald Trump‘s plan to overturn the 2020 election.
The decision came weeks after Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland ruled Eastman should be removed. Last year, A California appellate court, charged with reviewing recommendations to discipline lawyers in that state, affirmed the findings of a trial judge and recommended that Eastman 'be disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Eastman's name be stricken from the roll of attorneys.'"
Eastman was one of Trump’s lawyers in 2020, and he played a big part in helping Trump try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, which the former president falsely claims was “stolen” by Joe Biden and Democratic officials. Eastman helped devise a false elector’s scheme involving former Vice President Mike Pence invalidating the 2020 results during a joint session of Congress as it convened to count the electoral votes.
Additionally, Eastman is the attorney behind Trump’s ongoing push to end birthright citizenship in America,
“The idea that birthright citizenship is a false interpretation or recent innovation that warps the intended meaning of the 14th Amendment has been pushed into mainstream Republican circles by the tireless work of John Eastman and the Claremont Institute,” said Bulwark writer Phillip Jaffa last year.
Eastman faced 11 disciplinary charges including violations of California’s business and professions code by making false statements that constitute acts of “moral turpitude, dishonesty and corruption,” the California State Bar wrote in a filing.
Eastman testified in his defense and asked the state Supreme Court to review the Bar’s decision.
The court disagreed with him.
---
---}:
an 12 25
In a newly released 33-page document called "the National Security Strategy of the United States of America," the Trump Administration details its foreign policy objectives — including its views on Europe, which Trump officials claim is in danger of "civilization erasure."
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir analyzes the document in an article published on December 7, attacking the Trump White House's arguments as an "unhinged" and deeply racist blueprint for "making Europe white again."
O'Hehir draws a parallel between the arguments in the National Security Strategy (NSS) document and arguments of the Clairmont Institute, which was once a mainstream conservative think tank but has, in recent years, taken a far-right MAGA turn.
"To be fair, the poison-steeped Claremont Institute pseudo-intellectuals behind the Trump regime might well argue that their NSS is not contradictory in the least, since it can be boiled down to a straightforward message: Tyranny is awesome, but democracy sucks," O'Hehir warns. "OK, it doesn't actually say that, but it's hard to imagine how else to reconcile its Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties in Europe and its high-minded refusal to lecture autocratic regimes in the Middle East and Asia about 'democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.' Understandably enough, it's the unhinged and unconcealed racist panic shoveled out in the Trump NSS that has generated international headlines."
The Salon journalist continues, "Europe, the document warns, is losing its historic cultural identity and faces the 'stark prospect of civilizational erasure.' Exactly what is meant here by 'identity' and 'civilization' is only barely left unsaid, and the Great Replacement rhetoric is not so much borrowed as copied and pasted: It is 'more than plausible,' we are told, that in coming decades, 'certain NATO members will become majority non-European,' and may no longer 'view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way' they used to."
The "point" of the NSS, O'Hehir laments, is to "rip the liberal democracies of the EU a new one for their perceived wokeness."
"If we try to map the NSS claims onto the realm of reality," O'Hehir writes, "they fall apart. But that's hardly the point: It is not, in fact, plausible that any European nation will have a Muslim-majority population, or a mostly nonwhite population, or anything close to that, in the foreseeable future. Second and far more important, what message is being sent when the government of a multiethnic democracy built on three centuries of immigration — roughly 99 percent of the U.S. population has ancestral ties to other continents — makes the official claim that 'immigrants will corrupt the values of the societies they move to,' as The Economist puts it?"
According to O'Hehir, the NSS "is dangerous because no American president, whether good, bad or indifferent, clear back to roughly the days of Andrew Jackson, would have published such blatant racist fiction as an official statement of U.S. foreign policy."
*Andrew O'Hehir's full article for Salon is available at this link.
---
---
MEIDAS 5 MIN VID
55:50
well Trump married to immigrants I mean you know so that there is there is contradiction there of course but
55:55
without the technology that these people are supporting Trump with and providing and getting military contracts and
56:02
government contracts with Trump wouldn't be able to send bounty hunters out with
56:07
software on their phones with their kind of Amazon military costumes and round people up
56:13
yeah there's a role for the the tech industry Um, one of the interesting things that I'd been looking into was um
56:20
there was a project at the Claremont Institute, which is a Trump Allied think tank called the administrative state project. And that the um one of the
56:28
thinkers are on that project uh was co-writing opeds with the CTO of Palunteer. So it was all about thinking
56:36
around it was there there has been a lot of strategy and thinking um around how
56:42
the immigration how technology and tech advanced tech companies like Palunteer
56:48
will further the immigration enforcement push that we're seeing in America. So,
---
GGL 12 25
AI Overview
The user query connects the Claremont Institute's critique of the "administrative state" with the CTO of Palantir,
Shyam Sankar. The Claremont Institute advocates for a reduced federal bureaucracy, while Sankar is a tech executive who has publicly discussed the role of data in government, including defense reform and a recent push for his own service in the U.S. Army. While Sankar's work on government technology intersects with the broader debate on the administrative state, his public statements focus more on practical application of technology rather than the Claremont Institute's specific ideological arguments against federal power.
Claremont Institute and the administrative state
- Ideological goal: The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank that aims to weaken the federal "administrative state"—the vast federal bureaucracy that carries out laws and regulations.
- Specific actions: The institute celebrated the Supreme Court's decision to end "Chevron deference," which they see as a way to curb the power of federal agencies.
- Focus on localism: The institute promotes a vision of strengthening local leadership and reducing the influence of the national government.
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar
- Role at Palantir: Sankar is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Executive Vice President at Palantir Technologies.
- Government work: Palantir develops software for data analysis used by government agencies and military organizations.
- Public statements:
- Sankar recently wrote an essay for The Free Press about his decision to join the U.S. Army.
- He has published a document called "The Defense Reformation," which critiques the U.S. defense system and proposes reforms, comparing the effort to Martin Luther's 95 Theses.
- Perspective on government: In a New York Times interview, he discussed the role of technology and democracy in the context of immigration enforcement, suggesting that the actions of agencies like ICE are a result of the political process where voters have made their choices, which can be a point of "discursive interaction and disagreement".
---
rww
08/18/2025
by
The mass firings and ideological purges of the federal workforce carried out over the past six months are apparently not enough for the right-wing thinkers and activists of the Claremont Institute. Claremont chairman Thomas Klingenstein is promoting a new call for ideological reeducation of the federal workforce by Casey Chalk, a 2024 Lincoln Fellow at Claremont.
Right Wing Watch reported in March that Claremont staffer Chris Ross proposed that President Donald Trump issue an executive order forcing civil servants to take Claremont training programs to “deprogram” them from what Ross claimed was “the cultish anti-Americanism that infects the swamp.”
In a commentaryposted on Klingenstein's website Aug. 15, Chalk said that the Trump purge of programs and policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is not sufficient. Chalk would like to see the right-wing “intellectuals and writers” at Claremont and similar institutions “offer their services to reeducate Washington” and “make the federal workforce into a truly pro-American vision of our Constitution and national identity.”
These would not be simply voluntary:
Promotion criteria could even be tethered to employees’ participation in these activities. If we expect medical professionals, lawyers, and educators to pursue continuing education for licensing, why shouldn’t the federal workforce be expected to do the same regarding the Constitution and the American civilization they are supposed to represent and serve?
As for the vision and values Claremont would like to subject federal workers to, here’s an excerpt from earlier RWW reporting:
Journalists and scholars, including conservatives, have recognized that Claremont has gone off the rails during the Trump era, making common cause with racists, white supremacists, and opponents of democracy.
“What the hell happened to the Claremont Institute?” asked scholar Laura K. Field in a 2021 essay for The Bulwark that explored how “the once-distinguished conservative think tank plunged into Trumpism, illiberalism, and lying about the election.” Field concluded that Claremont “consistently fails to live up to a threshold level of sound judgment and civic responsibility.”
Fields cited an essay by a Claremont senior fellow that asserted, “Most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Referring to people who voted for Joe Biden, he wrote, “It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”
In a 2023 deep dive into the institute’s history, journalist Katherine Stewart called Claremont “the anti-democracy think tank” and “an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism.” She described its leaders as “openly contemptuous of democracy.” Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt told her that Claremont was “becoming like the West Point of American fascism.”
…
Claremont is already deeply embedded in the Trump administration, Ross notes, saying that “many” alumni of Claremont fellowship programs are currently in place. For example, former fellow Russ Vought is busily achieving his goal of putting federal workers “in trauma” as head of the Office of Management. Former fellow Michael Anton, opponent of birthright citizenship and “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” is now serving as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Anton is not exactly devoted to democratic principles. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported that in his 2020 book “The Stakes,” Anton promoted American “Caesarism,” a “form of one-man rule halfway…between monarchy and tyranny” in which “Caesar’s word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law.”
===
AN 8 25
Back in the early 1980s, left-wing R&B singer Gil Scott-Heron (remembered for his incendiary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") was fond of saying that "the New Right is the same old wrong." The term "New Right," in those days, referred to President Ronald Reagan's fragile coalition — a mixture of neocon defense hawks, evangelical Christian fundamentalists, libertarian budget hawks and moderate Reagan Democrats. But in 2025, "New Right" has a radically different connotation and is synonymous with President Donald Trump's far-right MAGA movement.
Journalist Laura Field, author of the book "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right," examines the elements of the 2025 "New Right" in an interview with Vox's Zack Beauchamp published in Q&A form on August 14.
Field describes today's New Right as a coalition, but one that is considerably different from the Reagan coalition of the 1980s.
READ MORE:'That's how this ends': George Conway reveals 'the only way' to stop Trump's 'gangsterism'
"I'm talking about the MAGA New Right, (in contrast) with the Reagan-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is propped up by fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism," Field told Vox. "The New Right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys, says that Trumpism and the New Right is all about economic nationalism — turning against the free market orientation of the establishment — as well as closed, secure borders."
Field added, "So that's the anti-immigration strain and America First foreign policy. I think that there's also just a hardcore social conservatism at the core of a lot of this — at least spiritually."
The Clairemont Institute, a right-wing think tank, was founded in 1979 by the late Harry V. Jaffa, once a speechwriter for Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). Claremont has changed dramatically since then, and its ultra-MAGA leanings are a major departure from the Goldwater and Reagan conservatism it once championed.
Describing the elements of the MAGA New Right, Field told Vox, "I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives. Then, I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, Manosphere-fascist types. Each of these groupings are different. The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American founding. They have this very grandiose vision that's beyond even your ordinary patriotism. It's that this is the best regime of all time. They're also at the very cutting edge of the culture war…. And then, there's the national conservatives."
READ MORE:'Disgusting': MAGA erupts at Democratic governor over 'classless' remark about Trump 'bro'
Field continued, "They're a little more vanilla, with just nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and certainly Christian nationalism. They're a big tent."
The journalist/author stressed that even though the New Right is full of "weirdos," that doesn't mean they haven't achieved power in the Republican Party.
"The knee-jerk reaction to think 'who cares' is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre — weirdos," Field told Vox. "That's why it's alarming to see them wield so much power, to see (Vice President) JD Vance have that clout. I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP."
READ MORE:'Severe pushback': House Republicans fear constituent revolt over divisive new proposal
---
OMFG
GUK
The president of the rightwing Claremont Institute and another senior Claremont official are both closely involved with the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”, and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy.
The revelations emerge from documents gathered in public records requests, including emails between several senior members of SACR: Claremont president Ryan P Williams; its director of state coalitions and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor; and others including former soap manufacturer and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood.
//
Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo has close ties with ‘dissident right’ magazine
:{Read more
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/chris-rufo-im-1776-far-right-desantis)}:
The trove also contains an “internal” SACR “mission statement” with a far more radical edge than the public “vision” now recorded on the organization’s website.
That document speaks of recruiting a “brotherhood” who will “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise”; whose “objectives” include to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime”.
The document does not indicate that such “renewal” will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the US constitution.
Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont – the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 – the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics.
The Guardian contacted Ryan Williams, Claremont’s president, for comment on his involvement in SACR, and on the extent of Claremont’s ties to the organization.
In an email he said: “While the Claremont Institute acted as a fiscal sponsor to help the Society for American Civic Renewal establish itself as an incorporated 501(c)(10), that was the end of any corporate collaboration between the Claremont Institute and SACR.”
He added: “As a founding board member of SACR in my personal capacity, obviously I think that a fraternal order dedicated to civic and cultural renaissance and rooted in community, virtue, and wisdom is a very good thing.”
Williams also confirmed that he continues to serve as a SACR board member.
The Guardian also contacted Scott Yenor and Boise State University for comment.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said of the SACR documents: “Their planned regime is obviously far from a multiracial democracy. The documents appear to be describing a religious autocracy.”
Laura K Field, a writer, political theorist and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a Washington thinktank, said the documents expressed “extreme Christian nationalism” where “a particular kind of Christianity should dominate as an ideal, and that it should dominate permanently”.
Yenor and SACR
Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University and simultaneously the senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute.
His Claremont appointment came in February 2023. Media reports at that time indicated that Yenor would be working closely with the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and DeSantis-aligned legislators; when the job was announced the governor’s wife, Casey Desantis, tweeted: “Thrilled to welcome Scott Yenor from the Claremont Institute to his new home in Tallahassee.”
Reporting in the New York Times last month put Yenor at the center of a network of activists tied to Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits to wage an “anti-DEI crusade” against diversity, equity, and inclusion measures in educational institutions, corporations and public agencies.
Unreported until now is Yenor’s place as an ideological and organizational leader in SACR, and the radical nature of that organization’s aims as understood by he and other core members.
SACR is structured as a 501(c)(10) body under the section of US tax law that provides nonprofit status for organizations “with a fraternal purpose”.
In 2020 the umbrella organization was incorporated in Indiana with Charles Haywood as principal, and the first local lodge was established in Dallas, Texas. Subsequently, three local lodges were established in Idaho: in Boise and Couer d’Alene in 2021, and Moscow in 2022.
Idaho company filings show that Scott Yenor became president and the only listed principal officer of the Boise lodge on 5 August 2023.
Secrecy at SACR
But emails indicate that he had taken a board role in the national organization even earlier than that date.
On 25 January 2023, lawyer Clyde Taylor – now at Wagenmaker Law but until 2019 an associate at the rightwing litigation firm the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty – wrote to Haywood and Skyler Kressin about their trademark application for the SACR logo.
Haywood forwarded the lawyer’s email to Yenor, Claremont president Williams, and Nathanial “Nate” Fischer, copying in Kressin on two addresses including one hosted at SACR’s sacr.us domain.
“We should probably have a board meeting to discuss this, finances, etc,” Haywood wrote in response to Yenor, suggesting Yenor and the others he copied in were members of that body.
Haywood added a suggestion on encrypted messaging services, indicating an imperative of secrecy inside SACR. “I vote we create a new Signal group and have a board meeting. Any takers?” he said. The group was then set up.
The Guardian reported last August that on his website Haywood has repeatedly envisioned serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” which might at some point find itself in conflict with the federal government.
Haywood has also expressed a desire to recruit “shooters” to help defend the “extended, quite sizeable, compound” he occupies on the western fringe of Carmel, Indiana. According to documents lodged with the city of Carmel, the latest construction project on Haywood’s compound is a six-bedroom faux-classical mansion with a central library room that occupies both of the building’s floors.
He has funded SACR through his Howdy Doody Good Times foundation to the tune of at least $50,000, according to 2021 and 2022 tax filings, along with at least $50,000 to the Claremont Institute.
In the same report, the Guardian revealed that Kressin, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, appears to serve a key administrative role in SACR. Idaho and Texas company records show that Kressin incorporated lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dallas; serves as a director of the Coeur d’Alene and Dallas lodges; and was named as the principal officer of the parent organization on its 2020-2021 tax return.
The Guardian reported last September that Fischer, a Claremont Lincoln fellow, was president of SACR’s Dallas lodge and owns a firm that has won hundreds of thousands of dollars in government ammunition contracts. He also owns another firm that helped produce videos in which Claremont chairman Thomas Klingenstein exhorted rightwingers to join in a “cold civil war” against “woke communists”.
The Guardian contacted Nate Fischer, Skyler Kressin and Charles Haywood for comment.
Neither Kressin nor Haywood responded. Fischer did not respond directly, but on Friday morning on X, formerly Twitter, he left a 900-word post offering some material from internal SACR documents, admitting that the Guardian’s reporting had led him to the conclusion that “this is a good time to share more about the organization.
SACR’s mission: ‘dominance’ and ‘authority’ in an ‘new aligned regime’
Another document suggests reasons that SACR’s leadership might want to avoid scrutiny: in internal discussions. “Civic renewal” appears to equate to regime change in America.
The document is one of two Yenor attached to a 27 April 2021 email, sent from his Boise State email address to a personal email address. The email text simply says “print”.
The SACR document contains two versions of the organization’s “mission statement” – one “public” and one “internal” – along with a list of “objectives” for the organization.
Its authenticity as a working document is indicated by the current “vision” articulated on SACR’s website, which currently features what appears to be a reworked version of the “public” mission statement.
The 2021 document envisions “a vigorous civic renewal that will reflect the past while facing the future”, while the website sets out a “new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future”. Each version promises to “reclaim a humane vision of society”.
A harder-edged “internal” mission statement, however, stands in stark contrast to these anodyne public presentations.
It first announces: “Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.”
The document says the organization’s founders are “un-hyphenated Americans, and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.”
It says: “We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance” of their beliefs.
In terms of recruiting, the document says: “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”
Further down, the document specifies five organizational “objectives” that encompass nepotistic business practices, the grooming of new and emerging “elites” within SACR, and, experts say, an apparently insurrectionary political project.
The first objective is to “identify and provide formation for local elites … capable of exercising authority and who are aligned with our goal of complete civic renewal”, and warning that “concrete temporal achievements, not furthering intellectual discussion”.
The second objective is to help those local elites build “fraternal networks which will advance both the members of those networks and our collective goals” including “direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business”.
The third objectives to coordinate across the “fraternal networks” to bring “political awareness” to matters such as “hiring and promotion; award of contracts; internal policies and procedures; and leadership succession”.
A fifth objective is to “collect, curate and document a list of potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime”, who would likely not be founding participants, but “ … men who grow up in the system”.
Asked what an “aligned regime” might look like, Williams, the Claremont Institute’s president, wrote: “It would, more likely than not, be some form of the US constitutional order, but with much higher fidelity to that order before it was corrupted and subverted by modern progressivism.”
Perhaps ominously, a fourth objective is to “defend fraternal networks, our own and allies, against attacks by those opposed to civic renewal, and strongly deter such attacks”, though no details are offered on what form this defense or deterrence might take.
Although the document makes reference to America’s founding, Field, the Niskanen fellow, said that it contradicted its spirit.
“George Washington, Jefferson, [and] Madison all embraced religious pluralism very explicitly, and the constitution reflects that,” she said.
“This is anti-constitutional, and I think many, many faithful Christians would say it’s anti-Christian.”
Beirich, the extremism expert, said the mission statement and objectives were “essentially a stealth plan to replace everything about the current government with a religious autocracy”, with the addition of an effort to “fashion young people behind closed doors for the eventual takeover of the regime, right?”
“They’re going to grow them up as Christian autocrats.”
---
---
The Big Money Behind Chris Rufo’s Right-Wing Agitating - EXPOSEDbyCMD
MAY 2024
*This piece was produced in partnership withImportant Context.
Chris Rufo has been racking up wins lately. Fresh off of tanking the tenure of Harvard’s first Black—and first Black woman—president, Claudine Gay, with a scandal over alleged plagiarism, the far-right activist has set his sights on National Public Radio.
Last month, Rufo dug up tweets from NPR CEO Katherine Maher that she posted before she was a journalist. The tweets revealed that Maher is a liberal Democrat who supported Biden’s campaign and called Donald Trump a racist. The revelations came on the heels of an op-ed by Uri Berliner published by The Free Press, the media company of conservative columnist Bari Weiss, in which the veteran NPR editor claimed that his outlet had “lost America’s trust” through a left-wing slant and an absence of viewpoint diversity. Berliner subsequently resigned from his position.
Rufo has an undeniable knack for stoking right-wing outrage. Depending on who you ask, he is either a conservative wunderkind—a culture warrior taking big swings at the liberal establishment—or a troll working to tear down decades of social progress, including in public education and higher learning. Extremist and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon even called him “an American hero.” Rufo is credited as the architect of the right’s demonization of “critical race theory” and a major contributor to its moral panic over LGBTQ+ inclusivity in public schools. But it’s not just right-wing audiences he plays to.
The professional culture warrior is equally gifted at seeding stories to legacy media outlets like The New York Times, which published a guest essay in July 2023 arguing for the abolition of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs at public universities. The paper ran five front-page pieces on a single day on Gay’s plagiarism scandal. It wasn’t long before The Gray Lady had picked up Rufo’s scoop about Maher as well.
A one-time documentary filmmaker who pivoted right around 2015, Rufo has benefited both financially and professionally from the support of right-wing billionaires and dark money. The media coverage of Rufo and his activities often notes his ties to various right-wing think tanks. However, few outlets have explored the funding behind those organizations to see just who is pulling the strings behind Rufo’s career. But now, an investigation by Important Contextand The Center for Media and Democracy offers some answers.
Through federal tax filings, we were able to identify a handful of right-wing billionaire donors and major right-wing foundations funding Rufo-affiliated groups. However, the original sources of the money behind the organizations are difficult to trace, as much of the cash came through donor-advised funds—third parties that manage money for client donors, distributing it with their input and often anonymously.
In recent years, these operations have become increasingly popular vehicles in American philanthropy, in large part because clients can transfer appreciable assets into their charitable funds without having to pay capital gains taxes that would ordinarily accompany stock sales and similar transactions. Donors have flocked to donor-advised funds to facilitate their funding of far-right and controversial causes such as hate and anti-vaccine groups, likely because donations routed through these funds are attributable only to the funds themselves. In other words, they allow wealthy financiers of unsavory causes to mask their political influence.
In response to our press inquiry asking why big money might support his work, Rufo would only say, “I billionaires.”
American Studio
Rufo is the founder of a nonprofit called American Studio, which he began after dissolving his previous filmmaking venture, the Documentary Foundation, to produce videos for his followers. The foundation had been heavily funded by dark money, as The Intercept reported, and American Studio is no different.
The nonprofit has received significant, untraceable money through donor-advised funds, including mainstream charities associated with major financial institutions. Between July 2021 and June 2023, American Studio received more than $400,000 through Schwab Charitable Fund, a donor-advised fund affiliated with financial services titan Charles Schwab. Meanwhile, from July 2021 and June 2022, the group got $122,000 through Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the nation’s largest grant-making organization, which is affiliated with Fidelity Investments, $18,500 through the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, affiliated with investment giant The Vanguard Group, and $5,000 through the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, a donor-advised fund tied to Morgan Stanley.
American Studio pulled in cash from right-wing donor-advised funds as well. Between 2021 and 2022, American Studio received $370,000 through DonorsTrust, which is a preferred funding conduit for right-wing billionaire families like Koch, Mercer, and DeVos and a major source of funding for Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hate groups. It got an additional $26,000 in 2022 from the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which similarly funds hate.
Not all of the money was anonymous. Private foundations of wealthy individuals also bankrolled American Studio. The Edelman Family Foundation, the private foundation of billionaire hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman, which funds groups like Dennis Prager’s Prager University and the far-right parents’ rights group Parents Defending Education, gave $150,000. Meanwhile, the private foundation of Thomas W. Smith, founder of the hedge fund Prescott Investors and a major financial backer of anti-critical race theory propaganda and climate denial, gave $50,000.
Rufo’s salary from American Studio was over $240,000 in 2022, according to the organization’s latest IRS Form 990.
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a New York-based right-wing think tank founded in 1978 by prolific libertarian activist Antony Fisher and future CIA Director William Casey. Originally known as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies, the institute has long been aligned with and bankrolled by wealthy right-wingers and corporate interests. As journalist Matthew Cunningham-Cook noted, it “has played a critical role in dismantling the social safety net and criminalizing the poor under the guise of promoting ‘welfare reform’ and ‘broken windows’ policing.”
The institute’s leadership includes Wall Street executives like hedge fund billionaire Paul E. Singer, who profiteered off of the 2008 financial crisis and serves as the institute’s chairman. Since 2020, its donors have included right-wing billionaire power brokers Charles Koch and Richard Uihlein, who are known for funding climate denial and attacks on organized labor. Others include Singer, conservative legal activist and Trump “judge whisperer” Leonard Leo, Prescott Investors’ Smith, and billionaire GOP mega donor Bill Oberndorf, who bankrolled the successful recall against progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesapeake Boudin in 2022.
From December 2019 to November 2022, Singer’s private foundation gave $3.8 million. The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation gave $175,000 between 2020 and 2021, and in 2022, Leo’s The 85 Fund gave $450,000.
Other private right-wing foundations gave big money to the institute. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, for example, donated to the tune of $1.6 million between 2020 and 2022. Between 2021 and 2022, the Edelman Family Foundation gave $675,000. The Adolph Coors Foundation, the private foundation of the Coors brewing family, gave $30,000 in 2021.
Like American Studio, the Manhattan Institute took in a substantial amount of money in anonymous donations from donor-advised funds. For example, it received more than $630,000 through Schwab Charitable between July 2019 and June 2023, representing Schwab’s 2020 to 2023 fiscal years. It got more than $1 million through Vanguard Charitable, $1.9 million through Fidelity Charitable, $100,000 through Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, and $77,000 through the Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund from July 2019 to June 2022. The American Endowment Foundation funneled $22,000 to the institute between 2020 and 2021.
The institute received funding through right-wing donor-advised funds as well. It raked in nearly $600,000 from DonorsTrust between 2020 and 2022. Another $30,600 came through the National Christian Charitable Foundation and $70,000 from the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund affiliated with the Bradley Foundation which Mother Jones recently reported represents mostly money from just four large donors.
While the institute did not respond to a request for comment on Rufo’s salary, and the activist was not forthcoming, top senior fellows can earn over $400,000 according to the group’s latest IRS Form 990.
Hillsdale College
Rufo is also a distinguished fellow at the right-wing Hillsdale College. Hillsdale is a small, Christian liberal arts school in Michigan with a separate campus in Washington, D.C. that has become a central player in the world of right-wing politics. Hillsdale is known as an incubator for conservative operatives and for its ties to Donald Trump. For example, following Trump’s criticisms of the The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” Hillsdale released a “1776 Curriculum.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s defeat, for example, The New York Times reported that Hillsdale’s top brass promoted the Big Lie, and got involved in the scheme to keep him in power. The school has also given fellowships to right-wing contrarian doctors like Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya.
Hillsdale has gotten big money from a number of foundations of wealthy right-wingers. For example, from December 2019 to November 2022, the Adolph Coors Foundation gave $662,000. The Charles Koch Foundation gave $116,000 and the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation gave $80,000 from 2020 to 2022. $157,000 from Thomas Smith’s foundation.
The school has also received millions in untraceable funding through mainstream donor-advised funds. Hillsdale got nearly $12.2 million through Schwab Charitable Fund between the fund’s 2020 and 2023 fiscal years, running July 2019 to June 2023. It got $4.4 million through Vanguard Charitable, $9.8 million through Fidelity Charitable, nearly $2 million through Morgan Stanley Charitable Fund, and $10,000 through the Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund between those donor-advised funds’ 2020 and 2022 fiscal years.
DonorsTrust funneled more than $2.6 million and the National Christian Charitable Foundation gave $2.2 million to Hillsdale from 2020 to 2022. The Bradley Impact Fund dished out $44,000 between 2021 and 2022.
Neither Rufo nor Hillsdale responded to our question about payment for the fellowship.
The Heritage Foundation
In 2020, Rufo was a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the country. It has worked to undermine climate science, public health amid the COVID-19 pandemic, organized labor, and voting rights.
The foundation’s donors represent some of the largest corporate and wealthy interests in the country, including names like Koch, Uihlein, Thomas Smith, and the Coors family. They include Leonard Leo’s The 85 Fund and the Bradley Foundation.
Over the years, Heritage has taken millions in untraceable money from donor-advised funds—Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, the Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund, DonorsTrust, the Bradley Impact Fund, and the National Christian Charitable Foundation.
The Claremont Institute
After his stint at Heritage, Rufo was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, another major right-wing think tank which the New York Times has called a “nerve center of the American Right.” Claremont’s vice chairman is Hillsdale College’s president, Larry P. Arnn, who promoted 2020 election denial and worked to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the results. Meanwhile, Claremont scholar John Eastman, who served as part of Donald Trump’s legal team, was a legal architect of the so-called fake elector scheme.
Like Heritage, the institute has been supported by big right-wing donors including Smith. It also receives big money through donor-advised funds.
The Discovery Institute
Rufo similarly had a research fellowship at the Discovery Institute, a Christian right think tank that opposes the theory of evolution. The institute supported Rufo’s work even after his departure, giving his now-defunct Documentary Foundation $225,000 in 2021.
The institute has received money from billionaire Charles Koch’s foundation. However, most of what it took in came through donor-advised funds. Nearly $5.8 million came from DonorsTrust and about $2.5 million from the National Christian Charitable Foundation. Between July 2019 and June 2022, Fidelity Charitable funneled over $760,000 to the institute. From July 2019 to June 2023 Schwab Charitable passed along more than $1 million.
About Walker Bragman
Walker Bragman is a reporter and co-founder of the OptOut Media Foundation
All articles by Walker Bragman
About Alex Kotch
Alex is a former investigative reporter with the Center for Media and Democracy. A campaign finance expert, Alex helped launch money-in-politics website Sludge, and his work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including The American Prospect, The Nation, and Vice.com. As of fall 2022, he was executive director of the OptOut Media Foundation, a nonprofit charity he co-founded that maintains a news aggregation app for independent news and offer other services to assist financially independent media outlets.
---
TNR
Few Americans, if any, had ever heard of John Eastman before the events of January 6, 2021. The legal architect of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election was hardly a high-profile name, even for those steeped in covering American politics. He was, in many ways, an unknown, pulled by the events and the aftermath of January 6 into the riptides of American history.}:
A handful of analysts and investigators tracing the contours of the American far right, however, knew of Eastman’s work long before the events of January 6, and of the kind of churning, burning illiberalism that brought him into Trump’s orbit. One of those was Katherine Stewart, whose new book, Money, Lies, and God, threads the diffuse movements that have congealed into the authoritarianism at the core of Trumpism.
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
By Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Publishing, 352 pp., $29.99
Stewart first intersected with Eastman not in the aftermath of Trump’s failed insurrection but in 2019, when she tracked him to a tony, rarefied conclave in, of all places, Verona, Italy. Eastman was speaking at the annual conference of the World Congress of Families—a far-right, Russian-American organization dedicated to the abolition of abortion and the buttressing of so-called “traditional values”—regaling his audience with tales of “how secularism, liberalism, and gender confusion are destroying everything good in the world.” The speech, as Stewart writes, revealed Eastman to be “a committed ally of the theocrats.” But there was also “some foundation other than biblical literalism,” Stewart sensed, propelling him and cementing the kinds of illiberal alliances crucial to Trump’s reign.
The search for the broader foundations of Eastman’s and his allies’ beliefs is at the center of Money, Lies, and God, the follow-up to Stewart’s critically acclaimed 2020 The Power Worshippers.That book explored the dogmatism at the core of the American religious right, and how such forces drew American evangelicals further and further into the illiberal abyss. It was, at the time, a signal flare of just how willingly such professedly godly groups could embrace a figure like Trump.
Stewart’s newest book is a continuation of that theme. But after the events of January 6, it was clear that the right had changed. This movement—with all the ideological allies, deep-pocketed donors, and misogynists massing around Eastman, joining him in this antidemocratic fight—presents a new face of the American far right. And it is that edifice that Stewart masterfully details in her new book, explaining not only why these pro-Trump forces have already attempted to drive a stake through the heart of American democracy, but how they will try to do so once again.
Part on-the-ground conversations, part sociological analysis, Money, Lies, and Godis a convincing tour of the mutually reinforcing elements of American reaction:
“apostles” of Jesus, atheist billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,” high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of “spirit warriors” who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.
:{:{Trumpism is hardly one thing, even if it is overly reliant on Trump himself. Instead, Stewart uses her deep familiarity with the American far right to chart out what are, by the mid-2020s, the major elements of Trump’s political project, which she describes as the Funders, Power Players, Infantry, Sergeants, and Thinkers. The “Funders” are those within the billionaire class bankrolling the forces below them, using access to effectively bottomless pots of wealth to guide American politics. Some of these names are increasingly familiar, like Leonard Leo, the benefactor who helped steer the Supreme Court picks during Trump’s first term, building out Trumpist allies on the highest court of the land and helping rule in favor of things like all-encompassing presidential immunity, a position once ridiculed when espoused by figures like disgraced Richard Nixon.}:
Leo serves as the chair of CRC Advisors, which, as Stewart writes, “directs over $1 billion in right-wing funding toward reactionary causes.” Nor is Leo alone. There is Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus, who helps bankroll think tanks and media outlets. There are even organizations like Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic group that does not publicize its membership rolls. All of them together have access to, and help direct, a greater pile of money than anything hard-right forces in America have ever known. “The decisive development in the first decades of the 21st century was not the alliance between Team Money and Team God but the simple fact that, thanks to escalating inequality, the big money got a lot bigger,” Stewart notes. “What was new was the number of zeroes in the checks—and the extremism of the thinking guiding the money people.”}:
Elsewhere, the “Power Players” Stewart identifies are those just underneath the “Funders,” helping direct some of the ocean of money flooding pro-Trump, pro-authoritarian movements. These managerial types comprise a “tiny elite” who “amass tremendous personal power by mobilizing others around their agendas.” Many of these are well-established figures, “super-lobbyists” like the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed or Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who act as both organizers and mouthpieces for pro-Trump policies. These, Stewart says, are the “operational masterminds of the antidemocratic movement,” putting the funding into action through sponsoring conferences, conclaves, and publications. They are, in effect, middlemen—a kind of managerial class directing America’s antidemocratic turn.
The “Infantry,” meanwhile, is made up of the rank-and-file Trump voters who lap up the kinds of antidemocratic rhetoric spilling out of everything from conspiratorial social media feeds to, now, the White House itself. These are the militias, the Tea Party turned Trumpers, and the assorted flotsam of Trump supporters who launched an attempted insurrection on January 6—and who were all recently pardoned by Trump. They are those who Stewart writes about meeting in Las Vegas in 2023. Alongside a German documentary crew, Stewart joins a swell of Trump backers at the ReAwaken America Tour, a pro-Trump conference-cum-revival that gathers an audience of QAnon supporters, antivaxxers, racists, and conspiracy theorists. Stewart finds the crowd descending into increasing mania, with speakers not only regurgitating the most malign conspiracies they can find but even calling for “Nuremberg trials” for Trump’s enemies, leaving one of the German team members to ask Stewart, “Are we safe here?” }:}:
For those tracing America’s descent into authoritarianism, some of these faces are well known; figures like Reed and Perkins have both been peddling illiberal policies for years, long predating the rise of Trump, and it’s hardly news that Trump’s base is comprised of conspiratorial racists. In that sense, Stewart’s book is treading familiar ground. But it sets itself apart in describing the two remaining groups—the “Sergeants” and the “Thinkers”—and how these two now buttress not just Trump but modern Christian nationalism itself.}:
The “Sergeants” are primarily pastors and related church officials, many of whom have accelerated their rightward lurch in recent years. These groups have ominous, vaguely militaristic names, including things like the Black Robe Regiment and the Watchmen on the Wall. These are the followers of the vengeful God of the Old Testament, believers in the efficacy of retribution. “There is little room for the old ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’ trope here,” Stewart writes. Instead, they embody a Christian nationalism that “is not a policy program; it is perhaps best understood as a political mindset.” It is a political proclivity that “includes four basic dispositions: catastrophism; a persecution complex; identitarianism; and an authoritarian reflex.” All of it comprises the kind of kindling from which opposition to democracy, and even support for fascism, can emerge.
Many of these “spirit warriors” found their way to the so-called “Jericho March” in Washington on January 5, 2021. A “combination of nationalism, conspiracism, and demon obsession,” according to Stewart, the rally featured a range of pastors trying to outdo one another in their antediluvian rhetoric. One, Greg Bramlage, claimed they were engaged in a “spiritual battle,” while another, Bishop Leon Benjamin, called for followers to “kill” unspecified “demons.” Another pastor, the Reverend Kevin Jessip, described the rally as a “strategic gathering of men in this hour to dispel the Kingdom of Darkness.” Twenty-four hours later, as Stewart notes, many who prayed under these “Sergeants” took up arms and took the fight directly to the Capitol itself—bringing with them a “large wooden cross,” a separate “flag with a cross,” and banners blaring, “Jesus Saves.”
It is the Claremont Institute where the “erstwhile reverence for America’s founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany’s fascist period, into material support” for Trumpism.
It is the final group, the “Thinkers,” that presents arguably Stewart’s most insightful sections. These are the figures like Eastman and his allies who posit themselves as the ideological, intellectual class crafting the contours of Trumpism—and identifying the kinds of legal cover Trump can use to dismantle American democracy. Much of this cohort can trace directly back to the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization where Eastman remains a senior fellow. As Stewart points out, it is the Claremont Institute where the “erstwhile reverence for America’s founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany’s fascist period, into material support” for Trumpism.
The institute’s modus vivendi centers on the “Straussian man in action”—the man who bends history to his own ends, regardless of the consequence and regardless of democratic legitimacy. Stewart writes:
His mission is to save the republic. He must tell a few lies, yet he is nonetheless a noble liar, at least in his own mind. He acts in the political world, where natural right reigns, and not merely in the legal world where lawyers are supposed to toil. Aware of the crooked timber from which humanity is made, he is prepared to break off whatever branches are needed for the bonfire of liberty.
This core Claremont belief leads to the yearning for a so-called “Red Caesar”—a masculine leader untrammeled by anything like democratic oversight or political pushback, grabbing a society by the throat and forcing it back into a world in which men, and especially white men, are once more restored to the top of America’s sociopolitical hierarchy. Indeed, there is an almost obsessive approach at Claremont to restoring supposed masculinity within American society. Stewart traces this belief system at Claremont—where, she says, all of the board members “appear to be male”—to Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., who wrote a 2006 book called Manlinessand “counts as nobility among Claremont’s extended family.” As Mansfield argued, “gender stereotypes are all true”—including, bizarrely, that women would make bad soldiers because “they fear spiders.”
As Stewart details, Mansfield was “far too sophisticated to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries—but in the private sphere, “those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant.” This belief has seeped into Claremont’s bones and manifested itself at Claremont many times over. There is a 2020 alumnus of their Lincoln fellowship named Jack Murphy who once said that “feminists need rape.”* There was another Claremont official who gave a talk titled, “Does Feminism Undermine the Nation?” There is the promotion of work by an author named Coston Alamariu—better known by his nom de plume “Bronze Age Pervert”—who oozes undiluted misogyny and rails against “the gynocracy.” As Alamariu wrote, “It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization”—and the only way forward is to “use Trump as a model of success.”
These Claremont-based “Thinkers” also include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who has contributed to the Claremont publication American Mindand “appeared as an honored guest on Claremont podcasts.” Yarvin’s affections for despotism have been widely reported elsewhere, but it is his historical ignorance that highlights just how shallow the Claremont men’s pretensions at intellectualism truly are. Not only does Yarvin preposterously believe that “European civilization” wasn’t responsible for any genocides before the Holocaust—as if genocides in places like the Africa, North America, or even Ireland and Ukraine never existed—but he further maintains that America now needs to collapse into dictatorship in order to rebuild.
The “men of Claremont frame their not-so-hidden longing for revenge as a series of ruminations about the rise of an American Caesar,” Stewart writes. “And when that ‘Red Caesar’ arrives, he can thank the oligarchs for funding his rise, and he can thank the rank and file of the movement for supporting him in the name of ‘authenticity.’ But he would owe at least as large a debt of gratitude to the unhappy men of Claremont, those spurned would-be members of the intellectual elite … for explaining just who he is, and why he should go ahead and blow the whole place up.”
Taken together, Money, Lies, and God paints not only a devastating picture of the state of American democracy (as if one was needed) but one that also contributes texture and context to understanding the current American political moment. The book convincingly argues that, when it comes to figures like Eastman or Leo or any of the men affiliated with the Claremont Institute, calls for dialogue and civility are futile. “In earlier times this may have been sage advice,” Stewart writes. “Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” American democracy isn’t simply dying. It is, as Stewart observes, being murdered.
Another revelation from the book, however, is not nearly as ominous. Because the movement comprises so many moving parts, there’s no guarantee that such a constellation of forces can last. Trump remains the glue that holds such a coalition together, with each group—the billionaires and the bullies in the pulpits, the keyboard conspiracists and the misogynists trying to put an intellectual sheen on it all—each seeing, and often getting, what they want with him. But once Trump goes, there’s every reason to suspect that such a coalition will splinter, undone by competing claims. Wide cleavages remain on subjects from China to health care to tax cuts, bridged only through Trump’s person and persona.
This is cold comfort for those hoping for a resuscitation of American democracy anytime soon. Trump has spent the first months in his second term sprinting toward a constitutional crisis, cheered on by the allies he’s found along the way—not least the supposed “Thinkers” claiming intellectual leadership of the movement. For figures like Eastman, it’s not an executive run amok that presents a threat to the core of American democracy but, rather, those who would stand in Trump’s way. The Democratic Party, Eastman said in 2023, is “an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world. That’s the stakes.” From his lips to God’s—or at least Trump’s—ears.
---
===
rww
03/04/2025
by
Elon Musk’s lawless rampage through the executive branch, including indiscriminate mass firings, isn’t enough for the folks at the far-right Claremont Institute. Claremont Senior Director of Strategic Innovation Chris Ross floated a proposal last week that President Donald Trump sign an executive order forcing civil servants to take Claremont Institute training courses to “deprogram” employees from what Ross claims is “the cultish anti-Americanism that infects the Swamp.”
Ross argues that the federal workforce needs “a mental reset of what constitutes good and bad behavior, and to know the corresponding rewards and punishments.” This, Ross, says, can be part of a broader “great re-learning that America needs.” Ross has a great deal of confidence in Claremont’s propaganda, arguing that its trainings would “help unify Americans and turn adversaries into friends” by “uniting Americans around a shared understanding of our country’s heritage, principles, and civic duties.”
Anyone who might be tempted to take at face value Ross’s rhetoric about “principles” and “civic duties” should think again. Journalists and scholars, including conservatives, have recognized that Claremont has gone off the rails during the Trump era, making common cause with racists, white supremacists, and opponents of democracy.
“What the hell happened to the Claremont Institute?” asked scholar Laura K. Field in a 2021 essay for The Bulwark that explored how “the once-distinguished conservative think tank plunged into Trumpism, illiberalism, and lying about the election.” Field concluded that Claremont “consistently fails to live up to a threshold level of sound judgment and civic responsibility.”
Fields cited an essay by a Claremont senior fellow that asserted, “Most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Referring to people who voted for Joe Biden, he wrote, “It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”
In a 2023 deep dive into the institute’s history, journalist Katherine Stewart called Claremont “the anti-democracy think tank” and “an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism.” She described its leaders as “openly contemptuous of democracy.” Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt told her that Claremont was “becoming like the West Point of American fascism.”
After the 2020 election, Claremont’s John Eastman energetically promoted lies about voter fraud, was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors to try to overturn the results, and urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to break the law in order to stop Congress from confirming Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Eastman helped rile up the Jan. 6 crowd by repeating those lies and “demanding” that Pence stop Congress from acting that day. Even though his efforts have landed him in legal hot water, he remains unrepentant. In an interview with Claremont chairman Tom Klingenstein, Eastman defended his actions as necessary to save America from a left that was out to destroy it. If Pence had followed his advice, and riots broke out in protest, Eastman said, Trump could have used the military to restore order.
In his proposal for forced “re-education” of federal workers by Claremont, Ross also offered a far less principled rationale, one that would undermine the Trump administration’s supposed interest in “efficiency” but would advance the Project 2025 goal of dismantling internal checks and balances. He suggested that officials could make the mandatory re-education trainings “as long as is optimal” to distract “potentially troublesome legacy employees” from their actual job responsibilities to allow newly hired MAGA loyalists—who would be exempt from the training for a year or more—to “plow ahead without interference.”
Claremont is already deeply embedded in the Trump administration, Ross notes, saying that “many” alumni of Claremont fellowship programs are currently in place. For example, former fellow Russ Vought is busily achieving his goal of putting federal workers “in trauma” as head of the Office of Management. Former fellow Michael Anton, opponent of birthright citizenship and “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” is now serving as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Anton is not exactly devoted to democratic principles. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reported that in his 2020 book “The Stakes,” Anton promoted American “Caesarism,” a “form of one-man rule halfway…between monarchy and tyranny” in which “Caesar’s word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law.”
That sounds very much like a form of “cultish anti-Americanism,” but given how widespread that kind of anti-democratic authoritarianism is in Vice President J.D. Vance’s circles, it’s not likely to be one targeted by Claremont’s proposed deprogramming.
===
AN 1 25
On Monday night, January 20 — his first night back in the White House — President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to end birthright citizenship. And a long list of lawsuits quickly followed, including one from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and attorneys general in 22 different states.
The ACLU and others are arguing that Trump's executive order is blatantly unconstitutional, as birthright citizenship is protected by the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero, in an official statement on the lawsuit, stressed, "Denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is not only unconstitutional — it's also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values. Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is. This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans."
READ MORE:['It’s a free country' — but some White House staffers are facing these new rules: report
In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on January 22, writer Philip Jaffa describes the far-right Claremont Institute as a main influence on Trump and the MAGA movement's war on birthright citizenship.
Claremont, founded in 1979, was once a traditional conservative think tank greatly influenced by the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). But in recent years, it has taken an ultra-MAGA turn and aggressively promoted fringe conspiracy theories.
Jaffa explains, "Let's set aside for a moment the questions of the legality and constitutionality of Trump's action and ask instead: Where did he get this idea? How did eliminating birthright citizenship become a right-wing desideratum? There is no mystery as to where this is coming from. The idea that birthright citizenship is a false interpretation or recent innovation that warps the intended meaning of the 14th Amendment has been pushed into mainstream Republican circles by the tireless work of John Eastman and the Claremont Institute."
In an article published by Claremont's website **The American Thinker on January 22, Eastman — who was a major supporter of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results — promotes the claim that birthright citizenship isn't really protected by the 14th Amendment. Eastman claims that "the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause does not provide automatic citizenship for everyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances."
READ MORE:**Meet the far-right think tank chair spending millions to defeat 'the woke regime'**
But countless legal scholars disagree with Eastman's views on the 14th Amendment.
Jaffa notes that in his American Thinker article, "(Eastman) lists several of the Claremont scholars who have written on birthright citizenship, and says he hopes the 'Claremont Institute's long-standing view' of the issue will soon be vindicated by the Supreme Court.' Just one problem: All the claims from MAGA and the Trumpians that the 14th Amendment was not intended to extend citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants falter when confronted with the obvious truth that the 14th Amendment, upon its adoption, did extend citizenship to a very large number of children of illegal immigrants."
===
MMA
Bounties, self-deportation, and extremist sheriffs: How Project 2025 partners are planning for Trump’s mass deportations
Written by John Knefel
Published 11/21/24
Organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide the incoming Republican presidential administration with policy and staffing recommendations, have responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory by promoting extreme approaches to carrying out his promise to deport upward of 10 million undocumented immigrants.
Right-wing think tanks the Center for Immigration Studies, The Claremont Institute, and the Center for Renewing America have all advanced anti-immigrant policies since Trump’s win. Some of their proposals include offering bounties for information on suspected undocumented people, conscripting far-right so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to serve as immigration enforcers, and attempting to make life so miserable for out-of-status immigrants that they flee the country — referred to euphemistically as “self-deportation.”
Trump has already named the two top officials who will be tasked with carrying out his mass deportation plan, and they both have direct connections to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar,” is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead organizer. He is also credited as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, which proposes drastic cuts to legal immigration in addition to harsh crackdowns on undocumented people. Homan has promised to “to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”
Alongside Homan will be Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policies — who will serve as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser in the new Trump administration. Miller and his conservative advocacy organization, America First Legal, attempted to distance themselves from Project 2025 amid growing backlash to the effort, but their fingerprints are all over it. Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video, a top AFL executive authored a chapter in Mandate, and AFL was on the advisory board until it removed itself following public outcry.
But the likely influence that Project 2025 partners will have on Trump’s looming immigration policy extends far beyond Homan and Miller. Below are some of the coalition’s more extreme proposals.
Center for Immigration Studies pushes bounties, self-deportation
The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the three main branches of the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” The SPLC has designated CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.
On November 13, CIS published a blog under the headline “The Trump Deportation Plan: Easier Done than Said.” The article argues for a stricter version of E-Verify — which uses Social Security data to determine employment eligibility — called G-Verify, which would require employers to electronically submit the eligibility form to the Department of Homeland Security.
The blog acknowledges that these programs “would not capture unauthorized migrants who work ‘off the books’” — a common critique of E-Verify, which critics argue actually pushes immigrant workers into unregulated markets.
That’s where the bounties come in. CIS continues, “However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.”
In another blog — this time for the National Review — CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian revived the idea of “self-deportation,” which is to say coercing undocumented people into leaving the country by making life miserable for them.
“Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money,” Krikorian wrote.
“And it’s also preferable for the illegal aliens themselves, allowing them to return on their own terms,” he continued, “They can settle their affairs, pack up their belongings, and go home for Christmas — and not come back.” After arguing that immigrants leave the country all the time, he suggested that one reason might be that “little Mario came home one day from P.S. 666 insisting on being called Maria.”
Krikorian has been joined in resurrecting this once-radical proposition by Heritage Foundation President — and Project 2025 evangelist — Kevin Roberts, who recently pushed it on The Vince Coglianese Show. While praising his colleague Tom Homan as a fantastic hire, Roberts argued that “such a big part of this is trying to inspire self-deportation.”
As a sign of how far contemporary politics have shifted toward the nativist right, it’s worth remembering that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was roundly excoriated for proposing “self-deportation” as a central plank of his immigration plan during the 2012 presidential race. He was denounced at the time by liberal magazines, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, and conservatives including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and a little magazine called the National Review.
In another blog published following Trump’s win, CIS argued that “the time may have come for President Biden or President-elect Trump to deploy the [Alien Enemies Act] against Iranian nationals residing in the U.S.” Per the author’s own description, invoking the act would allow “the president to summarily detain and remove nationals of enemy nations” — i.e., Iran. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the Alien Enemies Act “is best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”
- ### The Claremont Institute: Conscript right-wing sheriffs for deportations
The Claremont Institute is a MAGA-aligned think tank that publishes the right-wing blog The American Mind. While the conservative authors featured on The American Mind may not necessarily speak for the institution, they offer a clear window into the Trump movement.
On November 8, The American Mind posted a blog headlined “Mr. President, Deputize Your Local Sheriffs.” The piece was written by Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, an SPLC-designated hate group.
“President Trump should look to sheriffs to fill U.S. Marshal roles,” Shideler argued, for the purpose of facilitating “the cross-deputization of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers along the Southern border, which is needed to address prohibitions against state and local officials enforcing federal immigration law.”
“That manpower will be required if Trump is to meet his campaign promise of securing the border and expelling millions of illegal aliens,” he continued.
Shideler further suggested that “conservative organizations” could “identify local law enforcement leaders who support the Trump agenda” — adding that “those who have participated in the Claremont Institute’s Sheriffs Fellowship would be an excellent place to start.”
Jessica Pishko — author of a recent book about sheriffs and right-wing movements — reported on Claremont’s inaugural sheriff fellows program in 2022. She revealed that it “presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those ‘real’ Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”
As Pishko and others have noted, many of Claremont’s honorees adhere to the far-right ideology of the constitutional sheriffs movement, which holds that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.”
- ### Center for Renewing America defends “Operation Wetback”
The Center for Renewing America is a MAGA-aligned think tank founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and top architect of Project 2025.
On November 8, CRA published a white paper titled “Primer: U.S. Deportations — A Longstanding & Normal Process” which attempts to normalize and sanitize an earlier mass deportation undertaking officially known as “Operation Wetback” (though CRA’s authors don’t use that racist slur).
The authors argue that “mass deportations are a normal part of the president’s toolbox.”
“For example, in 1954, the U.S. government conducted a campaign that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons,” they continue.
Left unmentioned is the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the mass deportations. As Dara Lind wrote for Vox when Trump praised the Eisenhower-era mass deportations in 2015, immigrants were “deported en masse: by train, by truck, by plane, and by cargo ship.” She adds that a “congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a ‘penal hell ship’ and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage.”
In one mass raid, 88 people died of “sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat,” according to a definitive account by Mae Ngai.
And as Professors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander argue, Operation Wetback was largely a propaganda campaign that “enforced the idea that American citizens are white.”
Nevertheless, the 1954 operation has become a touchstone for the Trumpist right. As but one example, Stephen Miller recently cited the “Eisenhower model” as justification for the potential deployment of the U.S. military “in a large-scale deportation operation.” CRA’s anodyne description of the 1950s deportations shows how embedded this history has become in the MAGA movement.
- ### Project 2025 embeds itself in Trump 2.0
Trump’s new administration and its partners in the conservative policy ecosystem are laying the groundwork for the most nativist, xenophobic government in decades. From Homan and Miller to the think tanks providing them scaffolding, every sign suggests that the Trump administration will terrorize, surveil, and deport immigrants and their communities in record numbers. And Project 2025 and its partners will almost certainly continue to provide a roadmap for the draconian crackdown.
---
===
mma
Project 2025 partner blog: If Trump wins, “‘revenge’ can also be a good vehicle for public policy”
The Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl called for Trump to “concentrate first and foremost on destroying the people who tried (and failed) to destroy him”
Written by John Knefel
Published 11/04/24 mma
Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at MAGA-aligned think tank The Claremont Institute, argued in a blog published on Friday that if former President Donald Trump wins the presidential election he should fulfill his promises to carry out retribution against his enemies.
The article appeared at The American Mind, a media outlet from The Claremont Institute — one of the more than 100 advisory board members of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide policy and staffing options to the next Republican administration.
Trump should “concentrate first and foremost on destroying the people who tried (and failed) to destroy him,” Carl wrote, adding that “Trump must not be afraid to do at least some of the terrible things that demented liberals have been shrieking that he would do if elected. Fortunately, if this program is carried out strategically, not with anger but with purpose, ‘revenge’ can also be a good vehicle for public policy.”
Since at least March of last year, Trump has threatened that he will use the executive branch to target his declared enemies if he’s reelected. Carl — a former Trump official in the Department of the Interior who called Black Lives Matter “racist” and once cited white nationalist Jared Taylor in an op-ed — wrote that it was incumbent upon Trump to carry out his promises.
A few months ago on X, I mused (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that I was worried that if Trump won, he would concentrate on making good policy rather than ruthlessly crushing his enemies. I say that it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek because of course I would like the administration to develop good policies, policies that several of my colleagues have outlined in their contributions to this symposium. But I was not joking in the sense that if Trump does not concentrate first and foremost on destroying the people who tried (and failed) to destroy him, his presidency is unlikely to be a long-term success.
In other words, Trump must not be afraid to do at least some of the terrible things that demented liberals have been shrieking that he would do if elected. Fortunately, if this program is carried out strategically, not with anger but with purpose, “revenge” can also be a good vehicle for public policy.
…
Meanwhile, at the border, Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas have not just looked the other way, but have actively enabled illegal aliens to invade America. There must be consequences, including prosecutions of people at the highest levels of the Biden-Harris Administration. NGOs must have their funding frozen, and to the extent they have been found to have engaged in corrupt practices, RICO prosecutions of the heads of “resettlement” NGOs should be on the table.
There are many other opportunities to match political retribution with optimal policy. So, yes, as Trump supporter and Silicon Valley Investor David Sacks argues, “The major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) operate on free licenses of public spectrum in exchange for requirements to serve the public interest. They no longer do, and this is an obsolete model anyway. The spectrum should be auctioned off, with the proceeds used to pay down the national debt.” Sacks discusses how this could unleash innovation at scale, and it doubtless would. But it would also send a powerful message to other entities feeding at the public trough under both parties while being fully allied with the most rabidly partisan Democrats.
While promoting his latest book, titled The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, Carl appeared in May on a far-right YouTube show and endorsed the racist “great replacement” theory. Carl also said he’d originally wanted the book’s title to be It’s Okay to Be White, a phrase popular among white supremacists.
===
note mult intertwined conspir eg deep state, media bias...
wishful bromances?
mma
Project 2025 partner blog: “If Kamala Harris does win, it will, as of today, be because of a stolen election”
The Claremont Institute's Brian Kennedy: “Americans can be a very rough lot of people when they want to be. You can rig one election before their eyes, but can you rig two?”
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published 10/28/24
A Project 2025 partner blog published an op-ed titled “What if Harris Gets Away with It?” claiming Vice President Kamala Harris could win the 2024 election only if it is “stolen,” which would turn the United States into “an ungovernable country” that might involve “political disintegration."
In The American Mind, published by Project 2025 partner the Claremont Institute, Claremont senior fellow and board member Brian Kennedy claimed, “Over the past two decades we have been living through a slow-motion Communist revolution,” and the “corruption of our election system” has been “the most devastating."
He continued:
So, if Kamala Harris does win, it will, as of today, be because of a stolen election. Under these circumstances, America will become an ungovernable country. Large groups of Americans will believe their vote no longer counts. We have the experience this summer of Venezuela, where it was clear the opposition party won—so said the Biden Administration—only to have the Maduro regime keep hold of power by affirming the fraudulent results and gutting it out publicly against domestic and world opinion. One imagines the Harris campaign learned a lesson from that.
Kennedy then imagined a violent civil war scenario that might follow:
Americans can be a very rough lot of people when they want to be. You can rig one election before their eyes, but can you rig two? And can you rig the second one so openly and brazenly, and expect that the American people will not push back? How they push back is another matter, but it would serve the interest of America’s enemies to face a nation even more deeply divided than ours already is. Violence is not an option. But a political disintegration of Red America from Blue America is not impossible.
He recommended potential preventative measures to guard against a Harris win, including a “whistleblower program that offers a multi-million dollar reward for real evidence of” election fraud, “either through counterfeit mail-in ballots, fraudulent election day ballots, overseas ballots, or cyberattacks against our electronic voting system.”
He also suggested:
A second tactic could be to create a “Decision Desk 2024” on X both in Spaces and on the “America” video platform. It cannot be left to the legacy broadcast media to announce the winner of the election as if they have some divine authority. The mainstream media, from Fox News to MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS, have devolved into pure propaganda arms of the American Deep State. As such, they have disqualified themselves.
> Elon Musk can build a team of respected journalists and analysts to perform their own calculations and judgments about who won the election. He and his platform have a greater reach both nationally and internationally than the “mainstream” media. Imagine Elon Musk with Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the like examining the results. Not only would they be better trusted, but the democratization of the results by all the users of X would serve the American people better as well.
“Finally,” he wrote, “Americans must prepare themselves and their families for what could be great societal dislocation,” without offering specific recommendations about what that might mean.
A recent Media Matters analysis found significant ties between authors, contributors, and partner organizations involved in Project 2025 and the ongoing right-wing efforts to disenfranchise voters and sow confusion about the 2024 election.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote about this strategy recently:
By way of preparing my own audience: It is possible none of this will ultimately matter. With numerous swing states polling within the margin of error, and the chance of a systemic poll error in play, Trump could very well win legitimately in November.
But if the election returns show that Harris has triumphed, Trump has a backup plan ready to go: He can attempt to subvert the election, as he did in 2020.
While elements of that plan could be different, the broad strokes of declaring victory, presenting himself as the victim of election fraud, filing pretextual lawsuits, and ultimately leaning on Republican officials at the local, state, and federal levels to hand him the presidency remain unchanged.
This strategy rests on Trump being able to convince the Republican base that he won the election. In 2020, he had the support of a vast right-wing media ecosystem that, with few exceptions, had already prepped its audience to disbelieve the results of the election if Trump won. The result was a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol that threatened American democracy.
Since then, the right has purged media figures and Republican politicians who had stood in the way of the plot. And now, in 2024, the same players are again laying the groundwork for a Trumpian subversion effort.
mma 10 24 OMG
Project 2025 partner blog advocates for overturning New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
The Claremont Institute's American Mind: “President Trump should make the case for revisiting the Sullivan ruling a more prominent and recurring part of his public rhetoric”
Written by Madeline Peltz
:{Published 10/25/24
The American Mind, a project of Project 2025 partner The Claremont Institute, published a piece on October 23 advocating for a second Trump administration to seek the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a key decision protecting the First Amendment.
Legal scholars have described the Sullivan decision, which established the “actual malice” standard in libel law, as “one of the Supreme Court’s most significant First Amendment rulings.” As Oyez outlines: “When a statement concerns a public figure, the Court held, it is not enough to show that it is false for the press to be liable for libel. Instead, the target of the statement must show that it was made with knowledge of or reckless disregard for its falsity.”
The Claremont Institute’s Carson Holloway recently argued that “President Trump should seek the reversal of New York Times v. Sullivan,” casting his argument as a continuation of the Dobbs decision that reversed the constitutional right to abortion. Holloway celebrates Trump as singularly responsible for Dobbs, describing it as his “signature accomplishment” in his “already impressive legacy” of the “restoration of self-government.” Continued:
If Trump is elected to a second term, he should build on this legacy by seeking the reversal of another egregious instance of judicial activism that continues to distort the Constitution and our nation’s politics: New York Times v. Sullivan. In this 1964 ruling, the Warren Court imposed a new doctrine of libel and the First Amendment on the nation.
Holloway then lays out a three point plan for how to accomplish this.
First, he suggests, “President Trump should make the case for revisiting the Sullivan ruling a more prominent and recurring part of his public rhetoric.” He has good reason to believe this is viable. In 2016, Trump promised that if he won he would “open up our libel laws” to make it easier to sue the press, singling out The New York Times and The Washington Post. On the Supreme Court, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have both signaled their openness to reconsidering Sullivan.
More recently, Trump has been ramping up his attacks on journalists, advocating for revoking broadcasting licenses and launching other legal attacks. Brendan Carr, a Trump-appointed member of the Federal Communications Commission that oversees broadcasting licenses, could be a key ally in this threat. Carr wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.
Holloway’s next suggestion on stripping the press of legal protections is a given: “President Trump should continue his first-term policy of appointing serious constitutionalists to the Supreme Court and, indeed, to all federal judicial vacancies.”
Finally, Holloway states: “President Trump should direct his Department of Justice to seek the reversal of the actual malice doctrine and restore judicial respect for the original meaning of the First Amendment. This policy should include the regular filing, in appropriate cases, of amicus curiae briefs by the Justice Department urging the courts to revisit this question.”
This argument harmonizes with the vision of a weaponized Department of Justice outlined in Mandate. As Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of former Project 2025 partner America First Legal, wrote in his chapter on the Justice Department, DOJ policy “must always be consistent with the President’s policy agenda and the rule of law.” Project 2025 would gut the federal government’s system of checks and balances through a radical consolidation of executive power.
Project 2025’s emphasis on personnel would also bolster a second Trump administration’s attacks on free speech. Through the initiative, The Heritage Foundation has assembled a prevetted database of Trump loyalists, which it calls a “conservative LinkedIn,” of potential administration hires that have taken loyalty tests to prove they’d be willing to stretch or even violate the law in order to enact his agenda. Project 2025 also advocates for the implementation of a policy known as “Schedule F,” which would remove civil service protections for politically neutral career bureaucrats so they could be fired en masse and replaced with pro-MAGA sycophants. Remaking the federal workforce in this way would allow Trump to more easily exercise control over the Department of Justice and enact a retributional, anti-free speech agenda.
===
an 10 24
Founded by the late Harry V. Jaffa, a former speechwriter for then-Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), back in 1979, the Claremont Institute was once a very mainstream conservative think tank. But in recent years, Claremont has taken a far-right ultra-MAGA turn — repeatedly praising former President Donald Trump, promoting Christian nationalism, and arguing that democracy and traditional conservatism have outlived their usefulness.
In 2021, Claremont's American Mind website published a controversial essay by senior fellow 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." Ellmer's piece was slammed as dangerous and troubling by many Never Trump conservatives, including writers for The Bulwark.
Claremont remains fully committed to Trump and the MAGA agenda. In an article published on October 22, The Guardian's Jason Wilson details Claremont Chairman's Thomas Klingenstein's activities as a GOP megadonor and his efforts to put Trump back in the White House.
READ MORE:[Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools
Klingenstein, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) figures reported by Wilson, has contributed more than $10 million to Republicans in 2024.
"Klingenstein has been one of Claremont's largest donors for decades," Wilson explains. "As the Institute has made its hard-right, pro-Trump drift in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe U.S. politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a 'cold civil war,' and has encouraged right-wingers to join the fight to defeat what he calls 'the woke regime.' His spending puts him at the forefront of a class of donors who are explicitly supporting more extreme and polarizing politics in Trump's Republican Party."
The Guardian reporter adds, "The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans, and has included seven-figure donations to at least four pro-Trump PACs in recent months."
Wilson notes, however, that Klingenstein's donations to the GOP in 2024 may be more than $10 million — as FEC data obtained by The Guardian only reflects donations made as of early July.
READ MORE:[Conservative think tank linked to 'shadowy' group pushing 'extreme Christian nationalism'
"His heightened giving has coincided with Claremont's embrace of Trumpism, which writers — including Laura Field — have argued has transformed it from a respected conservative think tank into a propaganda juggernaut that envisions a radical remaking of the U.S. along far-right lines," Wilson warns. "The Guardian has reported extensively on the Claremont Institute's ties to radical far-right politics. Claremont's president is one of the senior figures there who are members of the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian 'aligned regime.' Claremont has also provided direct funding for SACR." GUK
===
RWW 9 24
*Analysis
Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has spent his short career in politics soaking in and promoting anti-democratic ideas. It is terrifying that he could become vice president to Donald Trump, the oldest presidential nominee in history, who is displaying his own increasingly aggressive dictatorial intentions. Americans’ freedom and our future as a democratic society are at stake.
- Vance’s leap into the U.S. Senate in his first run for elected office was funded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has openly expressed his contempt for democracy. Over the past few years, Vance has aligned himself with different strains of the “illiberal” right, including Christian nationalism, right-wing Catholic integralism, “National Conservatism,” anti-immigrant nativism, and, of course, “America first” Trumpism.
- While these movements and their leaders have different underlying motivations and priorities, they share a willingness—or eagerness—to sacrifice democracy and Americans’ freedom in order to impose “traditional” values and their vision of “order” and an ideal society on all Americans. For some, that vision goes back centuries, well before America’s founding. Some openly call for an American Caesar.
- Vance’s anti-feministand anti-LGBTQ allies “aim to control women’s reproductive choices and individual freedoms concerning gender, sexuality, and identity,” among other things, as journalist Molly Olmstead has noted.
- Like the authors of Project 2025, the policy roadmap for a second Trump term, right-wing factions aligned with Vance have abandoned a libertarian distrust for government power in favor of an intention to use power aggressively to reshape our country. Vance has been clearon this front, saying
when it comes to the exercise of our power.”
VID]
- Vance “comes from an authoritarian, reactionary tradition that explicitly rejects conservatism, liberalism, and democracy,” writes political analyst Matthew Sheffield, formerly a conservative activist. “Trump wants absolute power, and Vance wants him to have it to destroy what he believes to be a decadent and corrupt society.”
* Vance has repeatedly spoken at “National Conservatism” conferences; the movement’s statement of principles declares that “in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”
Vance described his outlook in a far-right podcast appearance in 2022, recounted by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:
Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s banson certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.
Before Vance decided to run for office, he called Trump “reprehensible” and wondered whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” But when Vance became a candidate in the MAGA Republican Party, he flipped so hard that former Trump aide Steve Bannon suggested that Vance could be, as a reporter paraphrased, “St Paul to Trump’s Jesus—the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could.”
J.D. Vance vs. Democracy and Freedom
- Vance has echoed hard-right calls for “regime change” and said it is necessary to “get pretty wild, pretty far our there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Vance expressed a desire to “seize the administrative state for our own purposes” and ignore the Supreme Court if it objects.
- Vance says if he were vice president in 2020, he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence refused to do: Vance would have abused his power, ignored the Constitution, and refused to accept the electors certified by states that Trump was contesting.
* Vance defends the illegal “fake electors” scheme that Trump strategists used to try to override the will of the voters. Vance says Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were addressing a “very legitimate grievance” and says “I can’t help but roll my eyes” at the idea that Trump threatens democracy. “I don’t believe this is about some deep principle,” he says. “This is about power.”
In a
VID]at the National Conservatism conference in 2021, Vance said the movement has to “aggressively attack the universities in this country,” claiming that they “transmit deceit and lies” rather than “knowledge and truth.” Vance has praised Hungary’s dictatorial leader Viktor Orban for his “smart decisions” in seizing control of universities. Trump’s own Agenda 47 calls for seizing the endowments of top universities to fund an anti-wokeness online academy.
- At this year’s National Conservatism conference, Vance said that the American nation is not an idea but “a people with a common history,” and he claimed that immigration has made western societies “poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” a preview of his recent willingness to spread dangerous lies about Haitian immigrants for his own political gain—despite the very clear harm it has brought to the community of Springfield, Ohio.
- While Vance as VP candidate has adopted Trump’s deliberately muddled stance on access to abortion, his own opinion has been that abortion should be banned without exceptions for cases of rape and incest. In 2022 he called for a “federal response” to prevent women living in states where abortion has been banned from traveling to states where abortion remains legal. Last year he signed a letter urging the Justice Department to ban the mailing of abortion medicine, part of Project 2025’s agenda.
- Vance opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which was passed to protect legal recognition for same-sex couple’s marriages if the MAGA Supreme Court justices reverse the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling as religious-right groups are urging them to do. Vance has defended far-right “groomer” smears. He introduced legislation that would ban higher education institutions from teaching about gender-affirming care and ban any federally subsidized insurance plans from covering it.
- Vance is aligned with Christian nationalists who seek to dismantle separation of church and state. Vance is scheduled to join dominionist New Apostolic Reformation figure Lance Wallnau’s “Courage Tour” in Pennsylvania Sept. 28. In 2022, Vance told Christian-right radio host Eric Metaxas that “one of the great evils of modern liberalism is this pretense of neutrality” on religion, claiming that “if you can’t say a prayer before a public school session, then you’re not neutral, you’re explicitly anti-Christian.” Vance said the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can’t talk about Jesus in a public school.”
Birds of a Feather: Vance’s Ideological Connections
Vance has spoken at National Conservatism conferences and events organized by “post-liberal” thinkers—who want to abandon liberal democracy—and advocates for integralism—a sort of right-wing Catholic version of Christian dominionism. At a 2023 conference at Catholic University, Vance identified as “a member of the post-liberal right.” Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism was reportedly assisted by priests connected to Opus Dei, which has invested decades in building political power among and for right-wing Catholics in Washington, D.C.
Journalists and scholars like Laura Field have published quite a few detailed looks into Vance’s ideological allies, many of which are linked to in this post. Here are brief descriptions of just a few of the many far-right and antidemocratic intellectuals and institutions that Vance is associated with:
- Curtis Yarvin is a self-described monarchist and founder of a school of thought called “neoreactionism.” He argues that a visionary leader should seize power and dismantle the current regime. When Vance was describing his plan to fire federal employees and defy the Supreme Court, he acknowledged Yarvin’s influence, saying, “So, there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things.” Vance calls Yarvin a friend; both have benefited from Peter Thiel’s support.
- Patrick Deneen is a Notre Dame professor who has written books about the failure of liberal democracy and the need for “Regime Change,” the title of his latest book. To Deneen and his fellow “post-liberal” Catholic thinkers, “this means replacing the people and institutions that dominate America’s cultural, economic, and political life with a new elite willing to eschew liberal norms in service of supposedly higher ideals,” writes scholar Damon Linker. In other words, Deneen wants to put the power to govern in the hands of a conservative aristocracy. In 2023, Vance attended a speech by Deneen, praised his book, and “wrapped him in an enthusiastic hug,” Politico reported.
- Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard University professor and former Supreme Court clerk who promotes a form of integralism, which he calls “common good Constitutionalism.” He says it “does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” That means the government wielding authority “against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them” and changing laws around “free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters.” Journalist Sarah Jones notes, “integralism imagines a future when the state may punish the baptized for violations of ecclesiastical law”—a frighteningly far cry from the American principle of church-state separation. Vance appeared at a conference with Deneen and Vermuele at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, in 2022.
- Rod Dreheris a blogger, author, and right-wing culture-warrior who in recent years moved further to the right and actually moved to Hungary where he functions as a sort of international p.r. agent for Orban’s authoritarian and Christian nationalist government. Dreher is a friend of Vance; in an article for a Hungarian conservative publication this summer, he compared Vance to a young Orban and said Vance “embodies” Trumpism.
- Yoram Hazonychairs the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was created in 2019 to promote National Conservatism. Vance has regularly spoken at its conferences. Its statement of principles declares, “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” When journalist Katherine Stewart asked about minorities in such a model being stuck with an outsider status, Hazony said, “That simply is reality,” adding that minorities would not get the same treatment as the majority, but “should be grateful for the fact that you’re not persecuted as minorities often have been in history.”
Claremont Instituteis a think tank that ramped up its attacks on multiculturalism in advance of the 2020 election; the New York Times has called it a “nerve center of the American right.” Claremont is home to Michael Anton, who called the 2016 presidential election “the flight 93 election”—referring to the flight hijacked during the 9/11 attacks in which passengers stormed the cockpit. Anton’s book called for a stop to the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for or experience in liberty.” He has suggested that an American Caesar is inevitable.
Claremont was also a center of pro-Trump activity after the 2020 election. Claremont lawyer John Eastman has defended his involvement in Trump’s efforts to stay in power by saying Trump’s presidency was necessary to save America from a left bent on its destruction. Politico reports that “Vance is “closely tied to Claremont circles,
speaking at their events and appearing alongside their scholars.”
Two Futures: Freedom or Fascism?
Long before Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance as his running mate, there was a mountain of evidence that Trump’s election would threaten Americans’ freedom and undermine democracy: Trump’s own threats to jail his political opponents, go after universities and media outlets he doesn’t like, and carry out vast police state operations against immigrants; Project 2025 plans hatched by former Trump officials to give him virtually unchecked power; and the MAGA Supreme Court justices preemptively telling Trump he would not be held accountable for crimes committed as president.
Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance—cheered by “post-liberal” and anti-democratic leaders—is confirmation that the authoritarian threat to freedom and democracy is an urgent issue in this year’s presidential election—and that the threat will continue regardless of the outcome.
Tags: Adrian VermeuleDonald TrumpJ.D. VanceJohn EastmanMichael AntonPatrick DeneenRod DreherAuthoritarianismChristian NationalismElection 2025MAGANational ConservatismClaremont Institute
---
an 9 24
alternet-Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push
Jordan GreenandRaw StorySeptember 23, 2024
During a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., earlier this month — his first since debating Vice President Kamala Harris — former President Donald Trump doubled down on his false claims that Haitians are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Then, he tossed another small Rust Belt community into the national spotlight.
“Likewise, a small 4,000-person town, Charleroi, Pennsylvania,” Trump said. “Have you ever heard of it? Charleroi. What a beautiful name. But it’s not beautiful now. It’s experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.
“So, Pennsylvania: Remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump added.
The sudden burst of attention by Trump and his allies on the borough of Charleroi in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley is yet more evidence that the campaign is leaning into racial scapegoating as an electoral strategy to win critical swing states, even as critics warn the rhetoric could spill into vigilante violence.
ALSO READ: Let's call Springfield what it is: Republican-made terrorism
Trump and his MAGA allies' focus on Charleroi appears to have begun on Sept. 11, when a shadowy nonprofit linked to a former speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign posted an interview with a pro-Trump member of the Charleroi borough council.
The language in the X post by the nonprofit America 2100 is markedly similar to what Trump would say at his campaign rally the following day.
“It isn’t just Springfield; it’s happening everywhere,” the post reads. “In Charleroi, Pennsylvania — a low-income town of just 4,000 — the immigrant population has increased by 2,000% over the past two years. It’s almost all Haitians.”
The America 2100 post was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. re-posted it only 10 minutes later.
Nate Hochman, a senior adviser to America 2100 and the only person publicly identified with the nonprofit, was fired from the DeSantis campaign in June 2023 after reportedly making a video featuring the Sonnenrad — a symbol also known as the Black Sun that is associated with Nazis — and tweeting it from a pro-DeSantis account.
Previously, Hochman had praised Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has denied the Holocaust and made numerous antisemitic statements. Hochman said on a December 2021 Twitter Space chat that Fuentes had “gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure.” He added: “But the fact that you’ve said super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can accomplish in politics.”
Hochman, a former intern at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind magazine and now a contributor at the American Spectator, announced on X on Monday that he was making a road trip to Charleroi “to report on the Haitian immigration crisis.”
Over the course of the week, Hochman posted video after video on the America 2100 X account, featuring interviews with local white residents who were unhappy about their new Haitian neighbors.
In one interview, a white man identified as “Tom” complains that the Haitians “have no interest in our culture” and that they open their own groceries “at the main drag of town.” The X post identifies Tom as “a lifelong native,” although the video shows Tom saying he moved to Charleroi in 2017.
In a video posted on Thursday, a man identified as “Ernie” laments that Charleroi “used to be a nice, middle-of-nowhere blue-collar town.”
“I think they’ve just destroyed the town, and they’ve bought all these properties,” Ernie says. “Okay, you might be able to buy a house cheap, but what kind of people are you gonna get in?”
“Yeah, what kind of neighbors you have?” Hochman says.
“Well, that’s it,” Ernie says. “And right now I’m surrounded by the immigrants.”
Some of the America 2100 X posts echo Great Replacement, a white supremacist conspiracy theory that, taken to an extreme, falsely claims that white people face genocide because of demographic changes.
“One thing that can’t be overstated is the degree to which mass migration wreaks havoc on the social cohesion of the already-existing community,” reads one post from a Sept. 7 thread about Springfield. “Local landlords, for example, have been making a killing. But they’re replacing their fellow citizens — and locals hate them for it.”
The post includes screengrabs from the “Haitian Community in Springfield, Ohio” Facebook page. One commenter replies to a post by a local realtor offering her services to the immigrant community by writing, “Wouldn’t plan on staying too long.”
Another X post by the America 2100 account refers to immigrants as “invaders,” using verbiage that turned up in the manifesto of 21-year-old white supremacists who massacred 23 people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in August 2019.
Hochman could not be reached for comment for this story.
NOW READ: Notorious conspiracy theorist rolled out by RNC to train election overseers in Michigan
Trump himself has repeatedly used the term, including during his recent campaign rally in Tucson.
“Under Kamala Harris, our country is under a thing called invasion,” he said. “Did you ever hear the word invasion? Just like a military. It’s like a military invasion. We’re being conquered and we’re being occupied by a foreign element.”
Swing state strategy of attacking immigrants
While the racist rhetoric against Haitian immigrants in Springfield focused on false claims that they are stealing and eating people’s pet, the attacks in Charleroi have zeroed in on another object of fear in white grievance politics: jobs.
An X post by the Libs of TikTok account run by Chaya Raichik, one of more than a dozen social-media influencers enlisted by the Trump campaign for a “war room” that amplified his attacks on Harris during the recent debate, shared a video on Tuesday that featured a man ruefully describing an arrangement to transport Haitian immigrants by bus to and from a processed food packaging plant in Charleroi.
“Incredible footage revealing an operation in Charleroi, PA where Haitians are being bussed to and from food factories operated by Fourth Street Foods,” the post reads. “Kamala imported 2,000 Haitians into this town of 4,000 people, and now they’re taking American jobs.”
State Sen. Camera Bartolotta, a Republican who represents Charleroi, said in a reply that she had re-posted from the Libs of TikTok account in the past, but the post about her constituents was not true.
“There was no workforce in Charleroi a few years ago when a business owner desperately needed them,” Bartolotta told Raichik. “He advertised and looked for workers for a long time. Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and legal to work in his facility.”
David Barbe, the CEO of Fourth Street Foods, confirmed to KDKA News of Pittsburgh on Wednesday that his immigrant employees haven’t displaced any native-born workers.
“If I had 300 Americans come in today and they wanted to work, we would make room for them,” Barbe told investigative journalist Andy Sheehan.
Contrasting with the claims by the locals interviewed by Hochman suggesting that the Haitian immigrants are bankrupting Charleroi, Borough Manager Joe Manning told Sheehan that the new arrivals have made a net positive contribution to the area economy.
“They come here, they buy property,” Manning said. “They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So, for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”
Some of Trump’s supporters believe that his false claims about Haitian immigrants, far from alienating voters, will instead give him the edge in critical swing states.
Jeremy Carl, a former deputy assistant secretary of the interior and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, praised Trump for bringing up “the cats” during the debate.
“You know, that’s just going to be a winning issue for us because it really is the linchpin of kind of every other crazy thing the left has done particularly on immigration,” Carl said during a podcast appearance on Monday.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who previously served as mayor of Braddock — a borough only 30 miles away from Charleroi — predicted to Raw Story that Pennsylvania voters will ultimately reject Trump’s electoral strategy of demonizing immigrants.
“Blame the immigrants, whether it’s that my dog’s gone — blame the immigrant,” Fetterman said. “That’s very anti-immigration. And now they’re proud of that. They’re not even trying to veil that. And western Pennsylvania has a really long history of immigration, and sometimes people blaming all of the ills on immigrants too. And I strongly reject that. And western Pennsylvania I think will as well, too.”
‘A total explosion of media’: Enter CSPOA
The Trump campaign did not respond to a question from Raw Story about how the candidate became aware of the Haitian immigrant community in Charleroi.
However, during an interview with the Liberty RoundTable podcast, Borough Councilman Larry Celaschi alluded to the America 100 X post published on the eve of Trump’s rally in Tucson.
“I know I did an interview with another news source out there that happened to go viral, and the next thing you know we’re hearing the same language that they had as their headlines was released from President Trump’s own mouth at his rally,” Celaschi said. “Since that time, it’s just been a total explosion of media here in the borough of Charleroi. It’s just overwhelming. I didn’t know that there were that many media sources out there.”
The two men who interviewed Celaschi, along with Borough Mayor Gregg Doerfler, are themselves representative of the far-right media personalities who have gravitated to the drama that Trump generated surrounding Charleroi.
Sam Bushman, the podcast host, is the CEO of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA, an organization that promotes the controversial idea that sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are not legally bound to uphold state and federal laws that they unilaterally deem to be unconstitutional.
As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bushman has a long history of promoting racist ideas and providing a forum for hardcore white nationalists. In July 2023, he interviewed a member of the white supremacist group Identity Dixie. In a Facebook post, the pseudonymous guest known as “Padraig Martin” advised those who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that the next time they should be “prepared to kill them all.” He urged: “Do not leave a single police officer, congressman, judge or any other functionary.”
The other host who interviewed the Charleroi borough mayor and councilman on Tuesday was Richard Mack, the founder of CSPOA and current president of its advisory board.
Ignoring the fact that the Haitians living and working in Charleroi are there under temporary protected status, Mack suggested that an unspecified group of “supposed leaders” should be investigated for “aiding and abetting illegal immigration.” He added, “It might rise to the level of treason.”
Bushman and Mack prodded Doerfler and Celaschi to tell them about crime committed by Haitians.
Pressed for specific examples, Doerfler said, “The people, they’re just afraid to walk the streets, or whatever. I’ve heard a lot of that.”
Doerfler did not return a phone message left by Raw Story.
Celaschi told Bushman and Mack about a business owner who ran into her establishment and dialed 911 after a Haitian immigrant allegedly pursued her, demanding money he believed she owed him.
“To me, your police chief, if there’s illegals in your community, need to take action on the illegal activity, doesn’t he?” Bushman said. “I mean, I’m not here to try to divide your community, but I’m saying, look, if you got illegal people committing illegal acts, are they in jail, or they just allowed to run around free? Where’s your law enforcement locally?”
Doerfler and Celaschi confirmed that the police do arrest people in Charleroi, including Haitians, who break the law.
“The racist intervention of far-right groups like CSPOA in places like Charleroi makes the entire community significantly less safe and makes it more challenging to deal with real issues facing rural America,” Devin Burgart, who monitors the far right as director of the Seattle-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, told Raw Story. “This type of rhetoric puts the Haitian community and Black residents of Charleroi in grave danger, as the bomb threats and violent racist rhetoric leveled at Springfield proved.”
Echoing Trump’s false charge in Tucson last week that “not only is Comrade Kamala allowing illegal immigrants to stampede across our border, but she’s flying them here from other countries,” Bushman asked the two borough leaders if they believe the federal government is complicit in a crime.
“Did the federal government and your state government in some way literally aid and abet illegal activity in America?” Bushman asked.
“Yes, they did aid and abet,” Celaschi responded. “Absolutely. I will stand by your statement 1,000 percent.”
Bushman was exultant.
“And they’re literally saying the federal government has partnered in promoting illegal activity, all the way down to their city,” he said, “to the point of literal virtual mayhem where citizens are in fear in their community.”
---
---
September 18, 2024 4:50 pm
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: New reporting makes Vance’s handling of Springfield story look even worse
According to the city manager in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance knew the truth about Haitian immigrants. The senator and Donald Trump kept lying anyway.
- Angry White Men: Jeremy Carl: The Racist Lie About Haitians Eating Pets Is ‘Gonna Be A Winning Issue For Us’
During an appearance on The Auron MacIntyre Show, Claremont Institute senior fellow Jeremy Carl not only celebrated the spread of these false claims, he predicted that it will be a “winning issue” for the Republican Party.
- Alex Griffing @ Mediaite: ‘Unfounded’: Police Debunk Viral Claim Shared By Elon Musk And Others of Bomb Found Near Trump Rally Site
Quickly debunked claims spread like wildfire on X on Wednesday that explosives were found in a car near the site of former President Donald Trump’s upcoming rally on Long Island, New York.
- Robert McCoy @ The New Republic: GOP Senator Goes Full Racist in Attack on Arab American Witness
Republican Senator John Neely Kennedy accused an Arab American activist of being a member of Hamas, in an incredibly racist tangent during a congressional hearing.
- Maggie Astor @ The New York Times: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Jabs at Harris for Not Having Biological Children
“My kids keep me humble,” Ms. Sanders said at an event with former President Donald J. Trump. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” The remark quickly drew backlash.
- Amanda Marcotte @ Salon: “Get this under control”: Mark Robinson’s anti-birth control tirade spoils Trump’s Project 2025 spin
It’s no surprise that another clip of Robinson being the worst has emerged. This time Robinson is caught on camera in a 2022 church appearance, going on a tirade about how women don’t need birth control because — as he gestures to his crotch for emphasis — they need to “get this under control” instead.
---
ANDREW KLAVAN (HOST): Megyn Kelly reminded me — I was talking to her yesterday on her show. She is absolutely great, by the way. She has such a great show. And she reminded me of this wonderful clip of Drew Barrymore, who now has a talk show, talking to Kamala Harris.
...
KLAVAN: Now, I happen to love Drew Barrymore. When I work out at the gym, she's always on the TV above me, and you don't hear the sound, but you can just see she kind of personifies — she's like all of Hollywood distilled into a single human being. She lives in a completely solipsistic, self-interested fantasy world, and she sells this to the women in her audience.
In fact, over at The American Mind, a really good site, Peachy Keenan has collected all the reports of what a screaming witch Kamala Harris is.
Klavan refers to The American Mind, which is a publication of Project 2025 partner organization the Claremont Institute.
---
===
Some Donald Trump supporters are dismissive of arguments that the former president is a would-be dictator, claiming that Democrats, via "wokeness" and "cancel culture," are the real authoritarians.
But other Trump voters have flat-out said they would welcome a strongman leader, and they aren't offended by Trump's praise of far-right authoritarian leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And members of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that has become increasingly MAGA in recent years, have argued that liberal democracy is failing the United States.
In an article published by The New Republic on July 18, journalist Susan Milligan details reasons some Americans believe that rejecting democracy would be a good idea.
READ MORE:'Made violence his brand': Fascism scholar says threat of 2nd Trump term 'uniquely dangerous'
The "very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth," according to Milligan, is that "a big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader." The journalist notes that 32 percent of Americans favor a military regime or authoritarian leader for the U.S.
"Why would people want to live under an authoritarian's thumb?" Milligan writes. "It's rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security — real or perceived — and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group — especially if it is the 'right' group whose interests will be protected."
Joe Pierre, a health sciences clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco's Weill Institute for Neurosciences, told The New Republic that people who favor authoritarianism believe it will be used against others rather than against them.
Pierre told The New Republic, "For those of us who value representative democracy, the fact that some of our fellow citizens might prefer authoritarianism can be surprising or even unfathomable…. Authoritarianism and a 'strongman' leader who's willing to trample over civil rights can sound like a very appealing solution. In turn, democracy — which tells us that our ideological opposites deserve to be heard or should be given equal voice — can sound like the root of the problem."
Kets de Vries, who teaches business at INSEAD in Paris, had similar insights.
De Vries told The New Republic, "Human beings are actually very primitive. They are looking for a father figure to take care of them. They are willing to be blind to all the defects of Trump. He appeals to their most primitive instincts."
READ MORE: Beware: Trump is Project 2025 — and he cannot escape it
*Read Susan Milligan's full article for The New Republic at this link.
---
---
Project 2025 partner blog: If Trump wins, “unpleasant things will have to be done to hold people to account”
An article at The Claremont Institute echoes Trump's repeated promises of “retribution” against his enemies if he wins in November
WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL
PUBLISHED 06/24/24
A media outlet from conservative think tank the Claremont Institute published a blog on June 21 arguing that if former President Donald Trump wins reelection in November, “unpleasant things will have to be done to hold people to account.”
The article didn’t specify its exact targets — beyond saying that they are the “people who attacked our constitutional republic by refusing to recognize limits on their exercise of power over us” — or the consequences they could face. But the author mentions Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith, as well as prosecutors and judges involved in cases investigating Trump, implying that they could all face retaliation under a second Trump term.
The article — published at The American Mind, one of several publications associated with the Claremont Institute — echoed Trump’s own promises of revenge. “I am your retribution,” Trump told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023, repeating the phrase again later that month.
If Trump is to see his plans through, Claremont will play a major role as one of more than 100 organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025 — a radical right-wing effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to remake the federal government by providing staffing and policy to a second Trump administration.
The Claremont blog is just the latest salvo in pursuit of a key Project 2025 goal: implementing Schedule F, a scheme to remove job protections from tens of thousands of federal workers by reclassifying career staffers as political appointees. That move would allow a Trump administration to purge civil servants from federal agencies and replace them with MAGA activists.
Although the blog’s author doesn’t mention Schedule F explicitly, he makes sweeping claims about “the regime” — a catch-all for any and all anti-Trump forces, with a specific focus on the federal government. “The regime uses its lawless power routinely,” the blog argues in one instance. In another: “The regime has deformed our constitutional order almost beyond recognition.” In yet another case: “If Trump wins, we should expect that some of the worst perpetrators of the regime’s lawlessness will be held to account.” Taken as a whole, they seem to constitute a clear call to gut the federal workforce of employees perceived to be insufficiently dedicated to Trumpism.
Since Trump’s initial “retribution” remarks, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and others in MAGA media have amplified and intensified his threats.
- Last August, Fox News host Jesse Watters celebrated Trump's calls for revenge by telling his viewers: “You better believe it’s open season.”
- During a December interview with MAGA pundit Kash Patel, Bannon said of Trump’s retribution plans: “This is just not rhetoric. We're absolutely dead serious.”
- During an April appearance on Bannon’s show, Article III Project founder Mike Davis threatened to “rain hell on these Biden Democrats” and warned them to “lawyer up”
- In May, Bannon described Trump’s political opponents as “enemies and traitors to this country” and said: “The criminals and traitors around Biden, you should be very worried.”
- Also in May, Bannon said that a Trump Department of Justice would bring charges against lawyers who prosecuted him after his first term.
- On June 17, Bannon touted Project 2025 and pledged: “We are also going to have teams” that can “deconstruct the administrative state” and “go after the criminals and the traitors in the deep state.”
- During a June interview with The Heritage Foundation’s Paul Dans, who directs Project 2025, Bannon suggested purging 8 million federal contractors.
The Claremont Institute closely tied itself to the first Trump campaign and administration, providing would-be intellectual scaffolding to the president’s chaotic time in the White House. Claremont is also home to Trump coup plotter John Eastman, who pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results and was later included as an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to stay in power.
Beyond Eastman, Claremont has been a headquarters for a host of right-wing extremists. In 2019, Claremont awarded a fellowship to Pizzagate conspiracy theory peddler and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec. Other notable fellowship recipients include right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, whose Turning Point USA is a Project 2025 partner with its own extensive ties to extremists; and Pedro Gonzales, who was later exposed for sending antisemitic, racist, and anti-LGBTQ texts in a right-wing group chat.
---
---
mma 6 24
What you need to know about the climate deniers speaking at Turning Point Action's annual convention and their affiliated groups
In addition to the marquee names, the conference’s lineup of right-wing speakers includes a smattering of lesser-known but influential figures
Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER
PUBLISHED 06/14/24
Right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA's political advocacy arm Turning Point Action is hosting a convention this weekend in Detroit, which will feature an array of seasoned climate deniers and conspiracy theorists as speakers.
The People’s Convention will run from June 14 to June 16.
For his part, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a hoax and spread false claims about extreme weather and climate change initiatives. He has said that “climate change [as a] political issue” is “the biggest threat to our civilization” and pushed the Great Reset conspiracy theory to his TPUSA audience. Kirk recently lashed out at another conservative organization, the Young America’s Foundation, for taking issue with the GOP's non-existent climate platform.
The headliner at this weekend’s event is former President Donald Trump, who (in addition to withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and rolling back nearly 100 other environmental protection policies during his term) has repeatedly minimized or denied the threat of climate change, most recently saying that sea level rise would be a good thing because it would create more beachfront property. He has also gone after renewable energy, claiming at one rally last September that “windmills are causing whales to die” and “driving them crazy.”
Other speakers at The People’s Convention — such as Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, and Benny Johnson — have also spread climate denial or made misleading claims about climate change and the policies attempting to address it.
But the conference has some lesser-known speakers — including those who head major right-wing institutions — who have also promoted some outlandish claims about climate change and climate policy.
- ## Aubrey Shines
- Aubrey Shines, a Florida-based minister, falsely claimed in a video posted to his Facebook page that the Democratic National Committee is promoting “climate control,” saying, “They’re going to have to go into third-world countries and make sure abortions are happening on a regular basis.”Shines wrote that the “DNC’s oxymoron agenda all in the name of climate control” is “targeting Blacks in America and Africa.” The rant was in response to comments from then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. In reality, Sanders had replied to a question about climate change and “curb[ing] population growth” by expressing his support for reproductive freedom for women who don’t have it. Facebook, [9/12/19; The Washington Post, 9/5/19]
- In a 2015 interview with right-wing radio host Steve Gruber, Shines said incorrectly that the science that establishes man-made climate change “just isn’t there.” He then claimed that “you have a very diverse scientific community that don’t even adhere to and subscribe to this alleged global warming piece.” WJIM, *The Steve Gruber Show*, [8/27/15]
- Shines also has a show on the far-right network Real America’s Voice, and in March, he joined TPUSA as a member of its advisory council. The announcement that Shines would join the council also praised his show, America Shines, which includes episodes such as “Homosexuals tried to create a fraudulent gay holocaust.” Turning Point USA, [3/14/24; Real America’s Voice, America Shines, 6/14/24]
- ## Rebecca Weber
- Rebecca Weber, the CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, a right-wing member advocacy group, has attacked climate policy. In a February episode of her podcast, Better for America, titled “The Climate Cartel Running the White House”, Weber spins efforts to update energy efficiency standards for some household appliances as Biden’s “war on your home appliances.” She interviews Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) who also falsely claims that the Biden administration “went after” chocolate milk and hot showers. AMAC, *Better for America*, [2/7/24]
- Weber has repeated the debunked claim that the country is no longer energy independent. Speaking with the president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, Weber said her members “recognize that under Donald Trump, that America was energy independent, and it was looking good. … It makes no sense that we have a president today who does not want to really get us back to where we — or improve things.” In 2023, the U.S. produced more crude oil than ever. AMAC, *Better for America*, [2/28/24; Media Matters, 3/7/24]
- AMAC regularly pushes climate change denial on its website. One article claims that “experts say ‘climate change’ is a hoax.” Another amplifies a letter from a group of climate deniers claiming that the “assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuel and requires immediate action” is “unsupported.” The website has also featured an article from Fox contributor Tammy Bruce, who wrote that “Democrats are feverishly whipping up hysteria about global warming in an effort to induce a national panic attack and frighten us into surrendering more of our freedoms” while the world was being plagued by extreme heat during the summer of 2023. AMAC, [8/18/23, 12/29/23, 7/28/23; Media Matters, 8/7/23]
- ## Thomas Klingenstein
- Thomas Klingenstein, the Claremont Institute's chairman and a Republican mega-donor, is a major contributor to Club for Growth Action, a right-wing super PAC that has “dabbled in climate denial,” according to The Guardian. Club for Growth has opposed even the most meager climate policy, such as the package that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put forward in 2020 that included the expansion of a tax credit for carbon capture and storage technologies and the initiation of a global effort to plant 1 trillion trees. Club for Growth was founded by Stephen Moore, a former Trump adviser who publicly pushes climate skepticism and energy misinformation and co-wrote the treasury chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. The Guardian, [8/4/23; Politico News 2/13/20; Media Matters, 2/27/24, 9/15/23; Forbes, 3/11/15; DeSmog, accessed 6/14/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- The Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank, received funding from the Scaife and Bradley foundations, which also fund many other climate denial think tanks. Climate scientist Michael Mann told Observer that Claremont “is a number of these lofty sounding institutions that is essentially a front group for the Koch groups and the Scaife foundations.” Observer, [2/8/19; E&E News, 6/26/20; Rolling Stone, 1/12/22]
- Claremont fellows include climate deniers who have launched bad-faith attacks against climate policy, as well as scientists and activists. Claremont Institute senior fellow Jeremy Carl “accused the environmental movement of a ‘religious fervor’ and said the decision ‘to halt and reverse global warming’ must ‘be considered apart from the research of environmental scientists,’” according to Observer. Former fellow Raheem Kassam is also the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart London and was an adviser to right-wing U.K. politician and climate denier Nigel Farage. Claremont senior fellow Christopher Caldwell complained at length about climate activism delegitimizing climate science and insisted that scientists could not be political activists. “The authority of science wanes in equal measure as the political engagement of the individual scientist deepens,” he wrote. Another Claremont fellow, Joel Kotkin, referenced the idea of climate policies causing a “green Jim Crow.” (In reality, pollution and extreme weather often disproportionately impact communities of color as a result of systemic racism and the legacy of Jim Crow.) The Atlantic, [6/5/17; Observer, 2/8/19; DeSmog, 8/1/19, 6/4/24; The Washington Post, 11/2/21; Claremont Review of Books, accessed 6/13/24; The American Mind, 6/12/24]
---
mma
===
mma 6 24
project 2025 partners use right-wing media to sow distrust in American elections
Several Project 2025 partners were involved in attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory and have already cast doubt on the 2024 election
WRITTEN BY AUDREY MCCABE
PUBLISHED 06/04/24
As Project 2025 maps out its conservative agenda for the next GOP presidential administration, several of its partner organizations have employed figures involved in efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss — and others have already begun sowing distrust in American elections ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Led by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 lays out staffing and policy priorities for Trump’s potential return to the White House. The project has over 100 partners, ranging from extreme anti-LGBTQ groups to prominent conservative think tanks, many of which have employed individuals directly involved in attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including figures who served as Trump’s “fake electors”; urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the electoral count; and pushed disputed legal theories to keep Trump in power. Right-wing media have platformed these individuals, championing their schemes and validating their election lies.
Other partners have turned their sights to the 2024 election, spreading doubts about its legitimacy months before it occurs under the guise of concerns about “election integrity.” Despite lacking evidence of systematic issues across American elections, some of these Project 2025 partner organizations baselessly suggest to their supporters that the 2024 election is being “rigged” as part of “a concerted effort by Democrats,” setting the stage for Trump and his media allies to once again contest the legitimacy of November’s results.
- ## Right-wing media have platformed Project 2025 partner employees who attempted to overturn the 2020 election
- American Family Association
- The American Family Association hosts a daily radio show with Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer who pleaded guilty to a felony charge over her involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Ellis “amplified former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud as part of what she called a legal ‘elite strike force team’” and wrote legal memos for Trump and his counsel containing “widely disputed legal theories” in an attempt to keep him in power. American Family Association, [1/2/23; The New York Times, 10/24/23; Politico, 12/10/21]
Center for Renewing America
- Center for Renewing America’s senior fellow Jeffrey Clark attempted to capitalize on his position in 2020 as a senior Justice Department official to “use federal law enforcement power to undo then-President Donald Trump’s defeat.” Trump’s federal indictment for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results appears to identify Clark as an unindicted co-conspirator, portraying him as a “linchpin of plans to bypass the acting attorney general and use the imprimatur of the Justice Department to spread ‘knowingly false claims of election fraud’ and deceitfully substitute legitimate electors with sham alternates supporting Trump.” The Washington Post, [7/3/23]
- During his tenure at Fox News, prime-time star Tucker Carlson defended Clark after his home was searched as part of the January 6 probe, claiming, “There’s no suggestion he committed any crime of anything, that he did anything wrong.”Bannon has also shown his support for Clark by suggesting that he serve as Trump’s next attorney general and invited him on the show to advocate for deploying the military against protesters. (According to The Washington Post, Clark “is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025.”) Media Matters, [7/1/22, 11/9/23; The Washington Post, 11/5/23]
The Claremont Institute
- The Claremont Institute has emerged as “a driving force in the conservative movement’s crusade to use bogus fraud claims about the 2020 election to rewrite voting laws and remake the election system in time for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election.” Claremont has also promoted stolen election narratives, with its online magazine claiming in a November 5, 2020, editorial titled “The Fight is Now” that Democrats “have all but declared themselves the winners of the 2020 election before the votes are counted,” concluding that “the President and his supporters must publicly rally and protest what any reasonable person would judge looks illegitimate.” Rolling Stone, [1/12/22; The American Mind, 11/5/20]
- Claremont Institute board member John Eastman was one of the chief architects of Trump’s legal efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.While working as one of Trump’s election lawyers, Eastman attempted “to solicit GOP state legislatures to send ‘alternate’ electors to Congress” and pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay certifying the election, drafting a memo for Trump’s legal team that has been described as “a blueprint for a coup.” Politico, [3/27/24; The New York Times, 10/2/21]
- Right-wing media championed Eastman’s fake elector scheme as it unfolded and frequently welcomed him as a guest on shows. Various figures and outlets defended Eastman’s actions again in 2023 and called for retaliation after a California judge “recommended in March that Eastman be disbarred for his election subversion efforts.” Media Matters, [9/21/21, 6/27/23, 3/29/24; CNN, 5/2/24]
Conservative Partnership Institute
- In 2021, CPI hired Cleta Mitchell, “a Trump adviser and election attorney” who “played a central role in the effort to stop the certification of the election in Georgia and beyond.”The Intercept wrote that Mitchell “was one of the principal players on the infamous call in which Trump implored Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find the 11,780 votes he needed to claim victory.” She later “helped the former president covertly send $1 million to finance the farcical Arizona audit in 2021.” The Intercept, [9/13/23]
- Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo gave Mitchell a platform to push election misinformation on her show in the days after the 2020 election.Mitchell questioned the integrity of Dominion Voting Systems’ software and claimed that “we cannot have a situation where people don’t have confidence in the outcome and the tabulation of the votes.” Dominion later won a record $787.5 million settlement from Fox over the network airing “spurious claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential race.” Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Martiromo, [11/10/20; NPR, 4/18/23]
- In April, Bannon hosted Mitchell on War Room to defend against a New York Times report on her efforts targeting voter rolls across the country. Mitchell claimed, “We want a lawful election. If we have a lawful election, we have a chance to win. They want to cheat. We have to stop them.” Bannon replied, “If we have a lawful election, Trump wins in a landslide. They have to steal it, they know that.” Media Matters, [3/5/24]
- CPI also employs former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who galvanized the effort to overturn the results in 2020 using “outlandish election conspiracy theories.”Meadows, now a senior partner at CPI, spent Trump’s final weeks in the White House asking the Justice Department “to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor,” including “a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States.” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that “filling its ranks with people who undermined democracy has been a financial boon to the group. In each of the two years since, it has brought in at least twice as much money as it did in its first four years of its existence combined.” The New York Times, [6/5/21; CREW, 11/17/23]
- In April 2022, unearthed text messages revealed that Meadows was working with several Fox hosts, who were “integral to Trump’s plot to illegally hold onto power after losing the election.” Notably, Bartiromo provided Meadows the questions she’d be asking in advance of an interview with Trump, telling the White House chief of staff that “the public wants to know he will fight this” and people “want to hear a path to victory.” Media Matters, [4/29/22]
Hillsdale College
- Robert E. Norton II, general counsel for conservative Christian Hillsdale College, reportedly hosted a meeting in November 2020 with lawyer Ian Northon and several other individuals involved in Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.The New York Times wrote that “the pre-Thanksgiving gathering at Norton’s house presaged broader efforts to thwart the will of Michigan voters, as well as the entanglement of Hillsdale’s administration in the events leading up to Jan. 6.” Norton and Northon, “a Hillsdale alumnus and private lawyer who did work for the college,” later became “involved in a plan to deploy fake Trump electors in Michigan.” The New York Times, [1/8/24]
- In December 2020, Northon appeared on Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight to push a debunked legal theory and claim that state legislatures should appoint their own slate of pro-Trump electors. Northon claimed that state legislatures “need to send a second slate of electors to make sure that there’s accuracy and integrity in the election.” Fox Business, *Lou Dobbs Tonight*, [12/23/20]
Tea Party Patriots
- Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin “worked extensively on the legal and political effort to reverse Trump’s defeat” and was in communication with Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.As noted by Talking Points Memo, “Martin attended and spoke at Stop The Steal events in the leadup to Jan. 6. She was also billed as a speaker for ‘Stop The Steal’ activist Ali Alexander’s ‘Wild Protest,’ which was set to take place at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” but “that event was cut short amid the chaos.” Additionally, Martin’s “work in the ‘Stop The Steal’ movement helped connect the political, legal, and activist elements of the push to keep Trump in power.” Talking Points Memo, [5/9/24; NBC News, 5/8/24]
- In January, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk hosted Martin on his show to brag about training election-denying activists to “monitor elections.”She appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Roomthe next day and claimed: “When it comes to securing the election, we’re in a much better position right now in 2020 — I mean in 2024 than we were in 2020, way better. In 2022, we trained 20,000 people who went on to be part of the 80,000 people that the RNC placed as poll watchers. That is massive.” Media Matters, [1/30/24]
Turning Point USA
- Two men with “deep ties” to right-wing activist group Turning Point USA were among the 11 indicted in Arizona for their role as “fake electors” in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. One of the fake electors, Tyler Bowyer, previously worked as the national field director and chief operating officer of TPUSA and remains the COO of Turning Point Action, the organization’s 501(c)(4) branch. The other fake elector is state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a TPUSA affiliate and contractor. MSNBC, [4/26/24]
- Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk criticized the indictment on X, writing, “Democrats and their media flacks are attempting to criminalize a concept they themselves invented and have utilized with impunity.” On his show, Kirk also called the indictment “the death of the rule of law” and suggested that the Arizona attorney general’s office targeted Bowyer with a “legal Tomahawk missile” to interfere with the 2024 election. Twitter/X, [4/25/24; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 4/25/24]
- ## Other Project 2025 partners have used their own media platforms to cast doubt on the 2024 election
- AMAC Action
- AMAC Action represents the Association of Mature American Citizens, a group that labels itself “the conservative alternative to the AARP” and publishes articles priming members to believe that the 2024 election will be stolen.The group published an article in March titled “Will The Election Be Rigged?” which claims, “Citizens have reason to be concerned given the significant changes to election practices, including universal mail-in voting, widespread ballot harvesting, and a concerted effort by Democrats to allow illegal aliens to vote in the upcoming election.” Another article titled “Election Fraud Is Real And Needs To Be Fixed Before 2024” claims, “Cheating should not determine the outcome in the highly consequential 2024 national election.” PolitiFact, [12/2/12; AMAC Action, 3/29/24, 11/7/23]
The Heartland Institute
- The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has published election fraud surveys described as “mind-bogglingly ridiculous” by The Washington Post, claimed that one of its most recent polls shows that “nearly 45 million ballots may be fraudulently cast if they are not prevented.” According to Heartland, “28% of all voters say they would engage in at least one kind of illegal voting practice in order to help their preferred candidate–either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump—win the 2024 election.” The Washington Post, [12/12/23; The Heartland Institute, 4/16/24]
The Heritage Foundation
- The Heritage Foundation has planted seeds of doubt about the reliability of the upcoming election.The Project 2025 leader has published articles in the last year titled “Will Elections Finally Be Secure and Honest in 2024?” and “One Illegal Vote Can Change the Outcome of an Election.” The Heritage Foundation, [1/5/24, 7/13/23]
- Despite a lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts refuses to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election.In an interview published this January, Roberts told The New York Times, “Can I say definitively that he won? No.” The New York Times, [1/21/24]
---
==
an 3 24
For many years, the Claremont Institute had a reputation for being a conventional conversative think tank.
Claremont was founded in 1979 by students of the late Harry V. Jaffa, who had been a speechwriter for the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). The Claremont of the 1980s and 1990s was right-of-center but not far-right.
In recent years, however, Claremont has taken a decidedly MAGA turn that many critics, including Never Trump conservatives, have described as radical and extreme.
READ MORE:How MAGA zealotry overtook a conservative think tank: report
The Guardian's Jason Wilson, in an article published on March 11, examines Claremont's ties to the far-right Christian nationalist group, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).
Wilson describes SACR as a "shadowy" group and "an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian 'aligned regime,' and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy."
"The revelations emerge from documents gathered in public records requests, including e-mails between several senior members of SACR: Claremont President Ryan P. Williams; its director of state coalitions and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor; and others, including former soap manufacturer and would-be 'warlord' Charles Haywood," Wilson explains. "The trove also contains an 'internal' SACR 'mission statement'” with a far more radical edge than the public 'vision' now recorded on the organization's website."
The "mission statement," according to Wilson, calls for a "renewed American regime" that will recruit a "brotherhood" and "understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise."
READ MORE:[These MAGA Republicans long for a 'Red Caesar' to 'impose a dictatorship' on America
"The document does not indicate that such 'renewal' will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the U.S. Constitution," Wilson notes. "Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont — the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 — the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics."
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, warns that the "mission statement" raises troubling questions about SACR.
Beirich told The Guardian, "Their planned regime is obviously far from a multiracial democracy. The documents appear to be describing a religious autocracy."
*Read the Guardian's full report at this link.
---
an 12 23
department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith is requesting court records from a lesser-known case in California, and the dates of records requested line up with the dates that former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman took the stand.
Politico reported Thursday that Smith's team is asking for records from the State Bar Court of California pertaining to Eastman's disbarment proceedings. The far-right attorney has been in the Golden State defending his law license, which state bar officials are fighting to have stripped in the wake of Eastman's felony indictment in Fulton County District Court. Smith's team requested transcripts from October 30th, November 2nd and November 3rd. All three days correspond to days when Eastman was called to testify in-person. Bar officials reportedly asked Eastman about his conversations with Trump and other elected officials as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Smith didn't disband his grand jury after it indicted the former president. Because Eastman has been revealed to be "co-conspirator #2" in Trump's indictment, and because Smith's grand jury has gone quiet in recent weeks, Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney wrote that Smith may be planning to indict Eastman as part of his election interference investigation in Washington, DC.
Following Eastman's testimony in California in October and November, a judge made a "preliminary finding" that Eastman violated the ethics of his profession by assisting Trump in his efforts to overturn election results in the courts. In recent weeks, California bar officials have been presenting "aggravating" evidence that would be used in arguments to justify stripping Eastman's ability to practice law, possibly including the speech he delivered to a crowd of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
John Eastman is the author of the so-called "Eastman Memo" that laid out the plan for Trump's legal team to postpone Congress' certification of Electoral College votes, with the help of Vice President Mike Pence. According to the memo, Republican senators would lodge objections to certifying counts in battleground states President Joe Biden narrowly won, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, citing the submission of an alternate slate of electors. At that point, Pence would cite the alternate elector slates as reason to declare those states' results in dispute, thereby declaring Trump to be the winner of the 2020 election. Eastman theorized that Democrats would object to Pence'e declaration, meaning that the final decision would be punted to the House of Representatives.
Eastman's memo then hypothesized that because the US Constitution stipulates that each state's delegation gets one vote in the House of Representatives, Trump would be elected president by the GOP-controlled House. At the time, Republicans had control of 26 state delegations, with Democrats only having control of 24. Eastman then proposed Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to have the military quell protests that would inevitably result from Trump's coup.
In addition to his role as one of Trump's attorneys, Eastman is a major player in the conservative legal world. The former law clerk to Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went on to become the Founding Director of the far-right Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and remains a senior fellow at the influential conservative think tank. He's also the board chair of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes marriage rights for same-sex couples.
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/claremont-institute-2664245651/
an 8 23 no lnx
This 'creepy' men-only group is feeding an 'apocalyptic view of America' to a conservative think tank
Alex Henderson August 22, 2023
Founded in 1979, the Claremont Institute was once a mainstream conservative think tank along the lines of the Heritage Foundation. But in recent years, Claremont has taken an ultra-MAGA turn and become a bastion of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories.
A key figure in Claremont is attorney John C. Eastman, known for promoting a game plan for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
In an article published by The Guardian on August 22, journalist Jason Wilson examines a "secret men-only" group with "financial ties" to Claremont: the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), founded by former industrialist Charles Haywood.
Wilson reports, "SACR's most recent IRS filing names Haywood as the national organization's principal officer… SACR's public-facing presence is confined to a slick one-page website advertising the organization's goal as 'civilizational renaissance' and a society 'with strong leadership committed to family and culture.' The site claims SACR is 'raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens' who will rebuild 'the frontier-conquering spirit of America.'"
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, describes the website's rhetoric as "palingenetic ultra-nationalism," which, Wilson notes, is "a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth."
Haywood, according to Wilson, has been featured on Claremont's podcasts. And Haywood is so far to the right that even Rod Dreher, a former American Conservative columnist, has described him as "seriously bats***t crazy."
Wilson reports, "One idea (Haywood) has repeatedly raised on the website is that he might serve as a'warlord'at the head of an 'armed patronage network' or 'APN,' defined as an 'organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down' in which the warlord's responsibility is 'the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest.'The 'possibilities involving violence' that APNs might face, Haywood writes include 'more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it.'"
READ MORE: Why disbarment could be the least of MAGA lawyer John Eastman’s problems
Haywood openly praised the January 6, 2021 rioters in an article published by The Worthy House on March 21, 2021. Haywood wrote, "The protest was pretty awesome in every way. Its most precise analog in American history…. is the Boston Tea Party.'
https://archive.is/6eSlQ
The Niskanen Center's Laura K. Field believes that Claremont has taken a dangerous turn — including its association with SACR.
Field told The Guardian, "Some of the Claremont Institute's leaders have taken on an apocalyptic view of America and think we're already in a situation where our society is more conflict-ridden than we were before the Civil War."
Field, discussing Claremont's ties to SACR, warned, "What's creepy about the local-level stuff is that this country has a history of local autocracy.… The way they're acting undermines the rule of law."
READ MORE: How a far-right MAGA think tank is feeding Ron DeSantis' 'anti-woke' obsessions: report
The Guardian's full report is available at this link.
lnx
founded in 1979, the Claremont Institute was once a mainstream conservative think tank along the lines of the Heritage Foundation. But in recent years, Claremont has taken an ultra-MAGA turn and become a bastion of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories.
A key figure in Claremont is attorney John C. Eastman, known for promoting a game plan for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
In an article published by The Guardian on August 22, journalist Jason Wilson examines a "secret men-only" group with "financial ties" to Claremont: the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), founded by former industrialist Charles Haywood.
POLL:Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?
Wilson reports, "SACR's most recent IRS filing names Haywood as the national organization's principal officer… SACR's public-facing presence is confined to a slick one-page website advertising the organization's goal as 'civilizational renaissance' and a society 'with strong leadership committed to family and culture.' The site claims SACR is 'raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens' who will rebuild 'the frontier-conquering spirit of America.'"
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, describes the website's rhetoric as "palingenetic ultra-nationalism," which, Wilson notes, is "a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth."
Haywood, according to Wilson, has been featured on Claremont's podcasts. And Haywood is so far to the right that even Rod Dreher, a former American Conservative columnist, has described him as "seriously bats***t crazy."
Wilson reports, "One idea (Haywood) has repeatedly raised on the website is that he might serve as a 'warlord' at the head of an 'armed patronage network' or 'APN,' defined as an 'organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down' in which the warlord's responsibility is 'the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest.' The 'possibilities involving violence' that APNs might face, Haywood writes include 'more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it.'"
Why Trump indictments haven’t triggered another Jan. 6 — and why the worst may be yet to come
Feds to MTG: Tell us more about that anti-Islam, Nazi-adjacent provocateur who used your credit card
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
Coup mastermind John Eastman has his day in the spotlight ›
The dark post-conservative ideas at a right-wing think tank give a foreboding glimpse of Trumpism's future ›
'An American Caesar': How the right wing is embracing dark ideas once considered 'unthinkable' ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
The Conservatives Dreading—And Preparing for—Civil War - The ... ›
How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the ... ›
How the Claremont Institute, home to Trump lawyer John Eastman ... ›
---
ref
https://sacr.us/
8 Aug 2023 20:42:13 UTC
Society for American Civic Renewal
THE VISION
THE MARK
JOINING US
We seek a civilizational renaissance.
THE VISION
We foresee a nation building great projects of civic and cultural renaissance. A society with strong leadership committed to family and culture. A society that nurtures, rather than rejects, virtue. A society that seeks the good and the beautiful, and abjures ideology.
We are raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens, who will reclaim a humane vision of society while rebuilding the frontier-conquering spirit of America. A new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future.
A brotherhood of faith and solidarity.
The past is sealed. The future is open. As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children. Through associations bound by a common vision, we strengthen the ties that bind us together as Americans and free men. The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.
CIVILIZATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT AS A SHARED GOAL
A man is no longer encouraged to fly to the stars, to tame the wilderness, to plant the seeds that his children will inherit. Rather, those who rule today spit on such ambitions; they corrupt the sinews of America. They have alienated men from family, community, and God. We counter and conquer this poison, rebuilding a society where a man can find genuine fulfilment, true to his nature and calling, rejoicing in virtue and vitality.
THE MARK
The mark and its seal evoke the goals of the Society and signify what binds the members of the Society.
CHRISTIANITY
The mark evokes two versions of the Cross used in early Christianity: Saint Peter’s Cross and the Anchor Cross. The former is a symbol of faithful humility; the latter of stability and hope—both within a Trinitarian framework, and rejecting Modernist philosophies and heresies.
AUTHORITY AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
The mark is both sword and shield, the first the traditional symbol of temporal authority, the second a symbol of defense of the weak, the widow and the orphan, and of all those under sustained attack by the powers of the current age.
RENAISSANCE
The mark looks backward, but it also looks forward and upward. A new America, for a new age, informed by the wisdom of the old—the future Renaissance. The goal of the Society is renewal, returning to success, heedless of nostalgia. The mark shows a supported reaching for the sky, demanding of us that we excel in the works of Man, under the eyes of God.
A word on joining the effort.
Membership in the Society, which is organized primarily around local groups overseen by a national superstructure, is by invitation only. If you are interested in learning more, please send an email to membership@sacr.us.
Society for American Civic Renewal
---
guk
US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network
Revealed: Charles Haywood, creator of the Society for American Civic Renewal, has said he might serve as ‘warlord’ at the head of an ‘armed patronage network’
Jason Wilson
@jason_a_w
Tue 22 Aug 2023
The founder and sponsor of a far-right network of secretive, men-only, invitation-only fraternal lodges in the US is a former industrialist who has frequently speculated about his future as a warlord after the collapse of America, a Guardian investigation has found.
Federal and state tax and company filings show that the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) and its creator, Charles Haywood, also have financial ties with the far-right Claremont Institute.
SACR’s most recent IRS filing names Haywood as the national organization’s principal officer. Other filings identify three lodges in Idaho – in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Moscow – and another in Dallas, Texas.
SACR’s public-facing presence is confined to a slick one-page website advertising the organization’s goal as “civilizational renaissance”, and a society “with strong leadership committed to family and culture”.
:{:{}:
}:
The site claims SACR is “raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens” who willrebuild “the frontier-conquering spirit of America”. It condemns “those who rule today”, saying that they “corrupt the sinews of America”, “[alienate] men from family, community, and God” and promising to “counter and conquer this poison”.
It also prominently features SACR’s cross-like insignia or “mark” which it describes variously as symbolizing “sword and shield” and the rejection of “Modernist philosophies and heresies”.
Finally, the site advises that SACR membership “is organized primarily around local groups overseen by a national superstructure” and “is by invitation only”, offering an email address for those “interested in learning more”.
The Guardian emailed the website contact address from a pseudonymous address but received no response.
A ‘stop the steal’ liberty rally in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on 5 January 2021. The Society for American Civic Renewal has three fraternal lodges in Idaho. Photograph: Gregory Johnston/Alamy]
Heidi Beirich is co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism and an expert of the far right. She characterized the rhetoric on the website as “palingenetic ultranationalism”, a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth.
Haywood has become more active and prominent as a blogger and commentator on the far-right podcast circuit since selling his solely owned Indianapolis-based shampoo manufacturing company,Mansfield-King, to a competitor for an undisclosed price in September 2020.
On his personal website, The Worthy House, where he styles himself “Maximum Leader”, Haywood has written that the sale made him “rich beyond the dreams of avarice and looking to cause trouble”. Mansfield-King was reportedly “on track to do $45m in revenue” in the year before its sale.
He has featured on Claremont Institute podcasts like The American Mind and shows run by Claremont Institute staffers and alumni, like the New Founding podcast. He has also written for Claremont’s website, The American Mind.
Indiana company records show that Haywood incorporated SACR as a domestic non-profit in Indiana on 22 July 2020, just ahead of the sale of his company. IRS records show that on SACR was approved as a non-profit fraternal organization – with provision to create subsidiary lodges – under section501(c)(10) of the Internal Revenue code.
The organization’s structure, aims and apparent secrecy are striking in the light of some of the ideas Haywood has promoted in articles on the Worthy House website.
One idea he has repeatedly raised on the website is that he might serve as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” or “APN”, defined as an “organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down” in which the warlord’s responsibility is “the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest”.
The “possibilities involving violence” that APNs might face, Haywood writes include “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it”.
Further on, Haywood writes: “At this moment I preside over what amounts to a extended, quite sizeable, compound, which when complete I like to say, accurately, will be impervious to anything but direct organized military attack”, adding that “it requires a group of men to make it work … what I call ‘shooters’ – say fifteen able-bodied, and adequately trained, men.”
These “shooters”, Haywood explains, “can operate my compound, both defensively and administratively”, meanwhile, “I have the personality, and skills, to lead such a group.”
Pro-Trump protesters in front of the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Pro-Trump protesters in front of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Charles Haywood was one of the first on the right to try to rehabilitate the rioters.Photograph: Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Haywood was one of the first on the right to try to rehabilitate the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Just over two months after that incident, he praised it as an “electoral justice protest”, commenting that “the Protest was pretty awesome in every way. Its most precise analog in American history … is the Boston Tea Party.”
The Guardian requested comment from Haywood via text message and email after attempting to contact him via telephone but received no response.
Laura K Field is a political theorist and a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based thinktank the Niskanen Center who has written and spoken extensively about the “reactionary conservatism” of the Claremont Institute and those in its milieu.
In a telephone conversation, Field said that “some of the Claremont Institute’s leaders have taken on an apocalyptic view of America and think we’re already in a situation where our society is more conflict-ridden than we were before the civil war”.
:{:{}:
}:
Their fears of “unyielding technocratic tyranny” mean that some in Claremont circles have been “dabbling in talk of secession for years”, and “believe they need to use whatever they might need, including paramilitaries”.
Haywood’s ideas have seen him characterized as an extremist even by others on the far right including the former American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who wrote last December that Haywood was “seriously, batshit crazy” and characterized him as writing from a “Midwestern Führerbunker”.
State and federal tax filings, however, indicate that Haywood has succeeded in attracting men to help him build a network in line with his ideas. Although there is no public membership list available, federal and state filings from regional lodges identify their officers along with those who initially incorporated each lodge.
In particular, Skyler Kressin of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, appears to serve a key role in SACR. Idaho and Texas company records show that Kressin incorporated lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dallas; serves as a director of the Coeur d’Alene and Dallas lodges; and was named as the principal officer of the parent organization on its 2020-2021 tax return.
Like other members revealed as officers in the filings, Kressin appears to be an affluent professional working as a tax accountant.
The Guardian emailed a request for comment to Kressin but received no response.
According to tax records Haywood has funded SACR through his Howdy Doody Good Times foundation, for which he and his wife, Alison Murphy, are both listed as directors. In the 2020-2021 tax year the foundation gave $30,000 to SACR, followed by $10,000 the following year, according to its 990 filings.
Further funding for SACR was provided by the Claremont Institute, which gave $26,248 in 2021 in one of only two grants the organization distributed that year, per its own IRS filings.
In another indication of what appears to be a mutually supportive relationship, Haywood’s foundation contributed $50,000 to the Claremont Institute in 2020-2021.
The Guardian emailed a Claremont media spokesperson, David Bahr, inviting comment.
On Haywood’s sponsorship of SACR and his Claremont ties, Field, the political theorist, said: “What’s creepy about the local-level stuff is that this country has a history of local autocracy … the way they’re acting undermines the rule of law.”
---
no lnx
The Claremont Institute: The Anti-Democracy Think Tank
It was once (mostly) traditionally conservative and (sort of) intellectually rigorous. Now it platforms white nationalists and promotes authoritarianism.
Katherine Stewart/August 10, 2023
:{:{}:
}:
Earlier this year, nearly 1,000 supporters of “National Conservatism” gathered at the semicircular auditorium of the Emmanuel Centre, an elegant London meeting hall a couple of blocks south of Westminster Abbey, to hear from a range of scholars, commentators, politicians, and public servants. NatCon conferences, as they are often called, have been held in Italy, Belgium, and Florida and are broadly associated with what is increasingly called the “New Right.” In London, speakers denounced “woke politics,” blamed immigration for the rising cost of housing, and said modern ills could be solved with more religion and more (nonimmigrant) babies. The break room was lined with booths from organizations such as the Viktor Orban–affiliated Danube Institute, the U.K.-based conservative think tank the Bow Group, the Heritage Foundation, and the legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, which is headquartered in Arizona but has expanded to include offices in nearly a half-dozen European cities.
When I attended NatCon London in May, I heard a number of American accents in the crowd, and I was not surprised to see Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, on the lineup. These days, Anton and other key representatives of the Claremont Institute seem to be everywhere: onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC); at the epicenter of Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”; and on speed-dial with GOP allies including Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump.
Most of us are familiar with the theocrats of the religious right and the anti-government extremists, groups that overlap a bit but remain distinct. The Claremont Institute folks aren’t quite either of those things, and yet they’re both and more. In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism.
Extremism of the right-wing variety has always figured on the sidelines of American culture, and it has enjoyed a renaissance with the rise of social media. But Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks butcredentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example.
Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy.
What is their worldview, their mission? It starts, of course, with a redefinition of America’s national identity. Launching into his NatCon speech, titled “Britain’s Grand Strategy for the 21st Century,” Anton hailed Brexit as “Britain standing up for herself against the globalist Borg.” With a sly swipe at U.S. support for Ukraine (“A Russia that has difficulty reaching, much less crossing, the Dnieper does not seem much like a threat to cross the channel,” he said), he was unequivocal in his assessment that “wokeism” is at the heart of the threat to the West.
“It is tempting to want to think of foreign policy in the traditional way, as threats from predatory empires and nation-states. But that is not the threat that we face today, not the main one,” Anton said. “This ideology was not born in our countries” but “has taken root here and in America. It has captured our elites and our institutions. And I am sorry to say we are partly to blame because so far, at any rate, we have failed to stop it.”
There is a story you hear from the podiums at gatherings like NatCon and CPAC, and if you go to enough of them, it will sound as familiar as a classic rock song. It goes something like this: The sum of all our problems—and the greatest threat that the American republic has ever faced—is the rise of the “woke” elite. Cosmopolitan, overeducated, gender-fluid, parasitic, and anti-Christian—the leaders of this progressive cabal worship at the shrine of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices, which they use to elevate undeserving people of color and crush hardworking “real” Americans. They control “the regime,” or so the song tells us: “the administrative state,” the institutions of culture, law enforcement, even the military. Any and all means to annihilate the power of the woke, up to and including political violence and overturning elections, must be seriously considered if we (right-thinking Americans) are to “save our country.”
:{:{}:
}:
It’s not just the NatCon types who are humming this tune; it has permeated other sectors of the American right. In the run-up to the 2023 Road to Majority Policy Conference, an annual gathering of religious right activists, strategists, and politicians that took place in Washington, D.C., in June, seasoned Christian right strategist Ralph Reed sent out a fundraising email asserting, “Woke culture and anti-Christian, anti-American radicals drive our public life further and further from the Light of God’s Word.” From the main stage of the conference, Ron DeSantis railed against the “woke mind virus”; Vivek Ramaswamy took a swipe at the “administrative state”; and Josh Hawley asserted that “woke corporations” and “Marxists in the C-suite” are “pushing relentlessly this Marxist agenda,pushing relentlessly this religion of woke.” At the gala dinner, Trump delivered a rambling attack on his political opponents in the Democratic Party, whom he accused of “trying to impose their blasphemous creed of woke communism.”
Ironically, the folks pushing this rescue-America-from-the-woke narrative don’t look much like the hardworking “real” Americans they purport to speak for. Educated, urbane, politely attired —they look a bit more like the villains of the tale than the people who are supposed to be rising up against the regime. There is something detached from reality in this story about how one part of the upper middle class is going to save the country from the other part. Yet, under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, this conviction has become something close to the official ideology of the third most populous state in the nation. Donald Trump too has shifted his rhetoric to claim ownership of what is, in essence, an ultra-MAGA narrative.
Why has so much of the American conservative movement embraced the story that the principles of equality and the pursuit of a more just society are the greatest threats to Western civilization today? Who or what is responsible for giving these paranoid ideas an intellectual veneer? The Claremont Institute gets you much of the way to an answer.
Founded in 1979 in the city of Claremont, California (but not associated in an official way with any of the five colleges there), the Claremont Institute provided enthusiastic support for Donald Trump in 2016. Individuals associated with Claremont now fund and help run the National Conservativism gatherings;Claremont Institute chairman and funder Thomas D. Klingenstein also funds the Edmund Burke Foundation, which has held those National Conservatism conferences across the globe. Claremont is deeply involved in DeSantis’s effort to remake Florida’s state universities in the model of Hillsdale College—a private, right-wing, conservative Christian academy in Michigan whose president, Larry Arnn, happens to be one of the institute’s founders and former presidents. Claremont honored DeSantis at an annual gala with its 2021 “Statesmanship Award,” and the governor returned the favor by organizing a discussion with a “brain trust” that included figures associated with the Claremont Institute. If either Trump or DeSantis becomes president in 2024, Claremont and its associates are likely to be integral to the “brain trust” of the new administration. Indeed, some of them are certain to become appointees in the administrative state that they wish (or so they say) to destroy.
“What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?”
The saga of the Claremont Institute in the Trump years is readily told as one of moral collapse. Once upon a time, the men of the Claremont Institute (they are almost all men; more on that in a moment) idolized George Washington for his “prudence” and “civility.” From its founding up through the Obama years, the institute was certainly situated on the right, but it was not, or did not seem to be, conspicuous for its extremism. It was probably best known for publishing the Claremont Review of Books, which was sized and laid out to resemble The New York Review of Books, as if to suggest that it was in direct competition with its more established and exalted Manhattan counterpart.
But in 2015–16, the Claremont men threw their support behind the man who descended that golden escalator with a mouthful of hateful rhetoric. In an earlier time, they defended intellectual rigor against the alleged relativism of contemporary academic culture. But now they provide a platform for white nationalists, racist “replacement” theorists, and the Pizzagate man. Nate Hochman, the erstwhile DeSantis staffer who was fired after he reportedly created and distributed a campaign video featuring Nazi imagery in July, is a former Claremont Institute Publius Fellow (2021). ”Most haunting of all—they once hailed the United States as “the best regime in Western civilization.”But in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat in 2020, Claremont board member John Eastman was instrumental in the plot to recruit fake electors and overturn the election—and the men of Claremont rose to his defense. Eastman currently faces potential disbarment in California and appears to be a person of interest in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations. Yet Claremont board member and founder Christopher Flannery has called John Eastman a “hero” and has asked us instead to condemn “the Stalinist machine” (meaning U.S. federal law enforcement) for persecuting him. Eastman was the unidentified (and uncharged) co-conspirator 2 in the August 1 indictment of Trump over his January 6 actions. (Claremont did not respond to emails from The New Republic asking if the institution endorsed Eastman’s behavior on this matter, in addition to some other issues addressed in this piece.)
The Claremont Institute’s seeming embrace of political violence against the government of the United States is not limited to Eastman’s efforts to whip up the mob that gathered at the Ellipse in preparation for the assault on the Capitol, nor can it be excused as mere metaphorical excess in the war of ideas. “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine,The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”
“What the hell happened to the Claremont Institute?” asks Laura K. Field, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Centerand a scholar in residence at American University, in an insightful series in The Bulwark. Daniel W. Drezner has described the institute as“the poster child for the devolution of conservative thought.” Over at National Review, Mona Charen has written that Claremont “stands out for beclowning itself,” and adds that its fellows have “thoroughly jettisoned their devotion to truth and virtue.” In conversation with me, Bill Kristol dismissed the current incarnation of Claremont as “off-putting and depressing and stupid.” Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, was even more direct. Claremont, he told me, “is becoming like the West Point of American fascism. It has collected a creature cantina, like the Star Wars scene, and has nurtured and midwifed the birth of a political ideology” that “leaves most commentators deeply discomforted by calling it by its name.”
:{:{}:
}:
But is it really a story of decline? Or are we simply seeing the true face of the beast, now that it has stepped into the limelight of significant political power? “It’s not like there were no signs of ideological trouble or shortsightedness at the Claremont Institute going back nearly to the start,” Field told me. “The more I read, the less surprised I am.” In Kristol’s view, too, the signs were there. “If you look at the Claremont Review of Books 10 years ago, there were some intelligent articles.” However, Kristol noted, “What I would say is that some of them have fallen into legitimizing violence and really fundamental illiberalism. Not all of them are there.... But because they are so unwilling to call out extremists on their own side, I give them no credit.”
A broad survey of the Claremont Institute’s trajectory since its founding confirms Kristol’s intuition. The pathologies appear to have been present at the creation, too, and they have always seemed to matter more than any specific policy agenda or political personality that the institute supports. But the suggestion that the rise of the kind of disordered thinking that Claremont embodies is something that just happened to America’s conservative movement, as if by accidental impact with some outside force, is far too optimistic. Over the past five decades, wealthy conservatives have conducted a grand experiment in American political discourse by investing heavily in organizations and think tanks that have sought to shift the center of public debate in a direction favorable to their interests and privileges. The Claremont Institute is representative of the many operations that blossomed with this well-financed effort. The unintended consequences of the experiment are now the story. When you pay people to be unreasonable, you attract many unreasonable people. They drown out the reasonable people. And they just want to blow the place up.
The Intellectual Background, Part 1: Jaffa and Strauss
The intellectual origin story of the Claremont Institute begins in the 1970s with a circle of graduate students gathered around Harry Victor Jaffa, a charismatic professor of political philosophy. Jaffa’s story begins about three decades before that, when he experienced in the 1940s the equivalent of a red-pill moment.
Jaffa gratefully attributed this awakening from somnolent acceptance of relativism to his mentor,Leo Strauss, the German-born Jewish political philosopher who later found a home at the University of Chicago before his death in 1973. As a graduate student at Yale, by his own account, Jaffa had lived “within the historicist dogma that we are all prisoners of our own time, and that we had no access to any truth outside of it. Strauss frees one from this prison….” Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s treatises on ethics, and the rest of the works that he studied with Strauss are more than just great, Jaffa realized in his moment of clarity; they are the source of absolute truth, which is far more durable than the compromising relativisms of liberal dogma and reveals something that can be called “natural right.”
The other teaching that Jaffa took from Strauss is that the great philosophers don’t always say what they mean. According to Strauss, philosophers routinely engage in “esoteric” and “exoteric” writing. That is, they disguise their most important teachings in the face of political persecution (with which Strauss, as a German Jew who escaped to the United States, may have had some familiarity) and pass them along to followers in between the lines, as it were. The implication is that philosophical writings are deeply political. They have an external message, aimed at influencing the public in some way. But only their intellectual fellow travelers can decode the internal meaning of the texts.
Jaffa was a complex figure, and not without appeal to progressives. Central to the vision articulated in his seminal work on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Crisis of the House Divided, is the argument that equality is the founding principle of the American republic, and that Lincoln achieved incomparable greatness in wielding this principle against slavery.
Strauss is even harder to pin down, politically speaking. A defining experience for him seems to have been the failure of the Weimar Republic, which he possibly took as a failure of liberalism. The theory of esoteric writing sometimes appears to rest on the premise that human society is incapable of the kind of rational, deliberative government that liberal democracy requires. Only Strauss and his followers can handle the eternal truths vouchsafed to us by the Greeks, it seems to suggest; most ordinary people must be content to live in what Plato called “the cave”—a state of permanent delusion.
Even such a brief review of this Straussian legacy raises some subtle questions. How do we know that absolute truth landed in the texts of Plato and Aristotle and not, say, Lao Tzu? If the real message was intended to be misread, how can we ever know that our self-appointed interpreters have decoded it correctly? The great minds of Claremont, however, do not do subtle. In their work, these tensions stand out as blatant contradictions.
A case in point would be the work of Charles Kesler. The long-time editor of Claremont’s book review, Kesler tends to show up in reporting on the Claremont Institute as its éminence grise, lending a patina of intellectual respectability. You can get a feel for Kesler’s style of Straussian natural rights analysis from his interpretation of the speech that Trump delivered at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021. Where Trump says that former Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican leaders in Congress would be “ashamed of themselves throughout history, throughout eternity” if they failed to overturn the election, Kesler sees proof that Trump believes in “a form of right, based not merely in history but in ‘eternity.’’’ Trump the Platonist—who knew?
Although it is usually unwise to judge a book by its cover, an exception can be made in the case of Kesler’s Crisis of the Two Constitutions (whose title is an homage to Jaffa’s book on the Lincoln-Douglas debates). Between the covers of Kesler’s sequel to Jaffa, readers will find potshots at “the 1619 riots” (Kesler’s label for the George Floyd protests of 2020); extended attacks on “multiculturalism”; analysis of why liberalism “looks increasingly, well, elderly” (hint: Joe Biden); representations of Donald Trump as a “truth-speaker”; and, of course, sweeping and deeply partisan generalizations about American history.
Fortunately, for those who might wish to access the underlying claims in Kesler’s book about American history, it’s all there on the cover. In a custom-drawn cartoon in shades of red and yellow, the U.S. Capitol stands in the distance, majestic and forlorn. Barring the entrance squats a nasty-looking monster with vaguely racialized features. It is labeled “the living Constitution.”
The monster represents the great evil of the world as Kesler appears to understand it. This evil is called variously “historicism,” “nihilism,” and, most despicable of all, “progressivism.” Historicism is the doctrine that we are all “prisoners of our own time,” to borrow Jaffa’s phrase; nihilism is the supposedly consequent view that there are no absolute truths or values; and progressivism is the self-destructive political program that afflicts people who are presumed to have mistakenly fallen for nihilistic historicism. In Kesler’s version of the history, the influence of the German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) accounts for the rise of historicism, a gateway drug to nihilism, while the supposedly arch-progressive Woodrow Wilson is responsible for the creation of the dreaded “administrative state.”
Off to the right on Kesler’s book jacket, a small but heroic knight on horseback flies the flag of the true United States Constitution (“We the People,” it reads). Call him the white knight of Claremont; he tilts his lance in the direction of the beast of progressivism. In fact, in the cartoon, he looks set to storm the Capitol.
The book was finished before January 6, 2021, but came out about a month afterward. The timing was impeccable.
In Kesler’s version of American history, the Progressive Era is when the country’s decline began. Kesler is not alone in peddling a dark narrative of American collapse, though the dates and details can vary. As Laura Field explained to me, “One pattern I’ve noticed is that when they look back … it’s like they think there was some magical moment in history, a blip in time in 1866, 1933, or 1966, or what have you, when there was a perfect equilibrium, and all racial or civil rights problems were solved.” The absurdity of this proposition shows that the “creature cantina” at Claremont, as Steve Schmidt puts it, has little interest in learning from the study of the past. They are driven instead by the hatred of groups or aspects of life in the present that they map onto a fictional narrative involving an imaginary past. This isn’t intellectual history; it is cartoon history, rooted in some kind of reactionary pathology.
The Intellectual Background, Part 2: About Schmitt
One figure from the history who should matter in any assessment of the Claremont Institute, not in the official pantheon but not far below the surface either, is the ultraconservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Unlike Strauss, Schmitt is very easy to place, politically speaking. He was a Nazi and a vicious antisemite: not just a fellow-traveling Nazi, but an influential legal adviser to the regime who promoted book burnings, worked to destroy the careers of Jewish scholars and scientists, and refused to participate in de-Nazification after the war. And yet, he was instrumental in getting Leo Strauss the scholarship that helped him leave Germany in 1932; Strauss thanked Schmitt for providing him with “the most honorable and obliging corroboration” of his scholarly work that he had ever been accorded.
Like Strauss, Schmitt was unhappy with the Weimar Republic, which he perceived as unforgivably weak. He took his unhappiness out on the very idea of liberal democracy. Liberalism, he argued, is a failure because it refuses to acknowledge the distinction between “friend” and “enemy”—a distinction that he took to be the foundation of all politics. What makes humans special and genuinely political, according to Schmitt, is that they are willing to fight one another and die for a higher cause. The other defect of liberalism, according to Schmitt, is that it fails to acknowledge that the sovereign must be he who can act in a “state of exception” or “state of emergency.” That is, a ruler must be able to break all the rules, ostensibly in the name of the common good, or he isn’t much of a ruler at all.
At first glance, Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction might sound like a way of separating citizens from “foreigners.” And indeed Schmitt, in works such as The Concept of the Political, pointed to enemies both foreign and domestic. But the main source of his appeal to contemporary conservatives is the latter. To today’s right, the more important enemies are those citizens (liberals and insufficiently conservative conservatives) who either fail to acknowledge that we have enemies or are supposedly plotting against the country. Trump (who may be presumed innocent of any direct knowledge of Schmitt’s work) explained the gist of the point at the 2022 Road to Majority conference. “The greatest threat facing this country is not our foreign enemies, dangerous as they may be,” he said. “The greatest threat is the internal enemy. And I think you all know who I’m talking about.”
Schmitt’s antisemitism, too, was more complex (if no less despicable) than it first appears. “The Jew,” in his thought, was the paradigm of the secularized, cosmopolitan, educated elite on which liberalism necessarily relies. While the nature of Schmitt’s antisemitism is the subject of some debate, observers note that it did not follow traditional theological patterns but was rooted in his political theory. His antisemitism was thus an expression of his anti-liberalism filtered through the grotesque racial prejudices of his time. Some of his successors would learn how to draw on the same anti-liberalism while dropping the antisemitism in favor of hating on other groups ostensibly playing the same role. “At a time of dizzying and dynamic technical change, instantaneous communication, abolished borders, and global, de-territorialized conflict, Schmitt proves a prescient guide,” Claremont contributor Aaron Zack wrote in his largely favorable review of Schmitt’s 1942 book, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, published in the Claremont Review of Books in January 2017. “It is well worth reading.”
Michael Anton, who warns of the possible rise of a left-wing Caesar.]
This background is helpful in assessing the most infamous essay ever to appear in the Claremont Review of Books—or at any rate the essay universally thought to mark the birth of the new Claremont. Published in September 2016 under the byline Publius Decius Mus and later attributed to Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election” was said to make “the intellectual case” for Trump. The election of Hillary Clinton, Anton asserted, would be the equivalent of a terrorist attack on the United States. If we’re all going to die at the hands of the Al Qaeda–like Democrats, the argument went, we have no choice but to join the alternative.
A Clinton presidency would mean “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda” combined with “vindictive persecution” of conservatives.Yet having established that as a given, Anton directs most of his polemic against the representatives of “Conservatism, Inc.”—that is, those squishy, closet liberals who are too sanguine about a Clinton presidency, and who fail to recognize that Trump is the only alternative and that the only answer is to rush the cockpit.
At the time, Bill Kristol characterized Anton as a minor-league Carl Schmitt, noting on Twitter, “From Carl Schmitt to Michael Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.” In communication with me, Kristol emphasized the connection anew. “If you look at recent issues, it becomes like Carl Schmitt,” he said of the Claremont Review. “They are sending the message that extreme measures are needed to defend against the tyranny of liberal Democrats. They seem to want to blow through all the guardrails and are OK with that.”
The Pathologies of Manliness
:{:{}:
}:
Of Claremont’s 41 fellows and senior fellows, all but three are male, and nearly all appear to be white. All 19 board members appear to be male. Nevertheless, they seem extraordinarily preoccupied with their manliness.
Recently, The American Mind featured an interesting piece on that score from a frequent contributor who calls himself “Raw Egg Nationalist” (REN). REN is the author of a cookbook. He advocates “slonking,” that is, a diet he describes as part of “a physical and political ethic built around the massive consumption of raw egg.” The eggs are said to help with bodybuilding and other manly pursuits. (Remember Rocky Balboa arising before dawn and chugging down raw eggs?) But the benefits don’t end there! It turns out that raw eggs can also counteract “the globalists’ plan for world government.” In Tucker Carlson’s 2022 film, The End of Men, REN joins with other figures in the “manosphere” to link the consumption of animal products with a back-to-the-land nationalism meant to strengthen the traditional moral values of Western males.
:{:{}:
}:
The big problems with the world today, according to REN, include “the agricultural revolution and its consequences” and a “crisis of masculinity.” “We have it drilled into us, this instinctive revulsion for inequality in any form. And actually, I think we need to ask instead whether inequality has its uses,” REN muses. “Maybe men and women shouldn’t work together in the same spaces.” Another big problem would appear to be ugly people, by which REN seems to mean the kinds of people who show up at racial justice events. In an interview with Jack Murphy, who was a Lincoln Fellow at Claremont, REN has this to say about the Black Lives Matter protesters of 2020: “All of these people look the same. I mean, they are hideously ugly, malformed people.” REN’s publisher, as it happens, is Antelope Hill Publishing, otherwise known for its Nazi and white nationalist titles, such as Michael, a novel written by the young—I kid you not—Joseph Goebbels (“Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present a new English edition….”).
REN is far from the only writer with woman problems to score a platform at the Claremont Institute (he’s written frequently for The American Mind). In 2021, a Boise State University political philosophy professor named Scott Yenor went viral—not in a good way—with a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, in which he characterized women with professional aspirations as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” Yenor’s views could hardly have been news to Claremont. Six months previously, the institute had invited him to deliver a keynote on “Feminism and the American Future.” Yenor seized the opportunity to inveigh against women’s pursuit of economic security and a satisfactory sex life. He maligned the “pernicious trajectory of feminism” and argued that it is “fatal to family life and fatal to the country.”
Claremont hired Yenor to be the think tank’s inaugural senior director of state coalitions for its new center in Tallahassee, Florida.From his speeches and writings, it would seem his actual plan looks more like an affirmative action program for reactionary males. “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade,” he said. According to Yenor, state officials should conduct civil rights investigations of academic programs (“especially colleges of nursing and education”) that attract larger numbers of women than men. Ron DeSantis’s wife, Casey, tweeted her support for Yenor’s appointment, saying, “Thrilled to welcome @scottyenor from the Claremont Institute to his new home in Tallahassee.”
As Bill Kristol observes, the fanaticism here is even worse under the surface. “They are not just against the legalization of same-sex marriage,” he said. “They are so extreme they are for permitting gender discrimination in salaries, changing divorce law to what it was 70 years ago, for criminalizing homosexuality. They don’t want to say that because of political reasons, but certainly you don’t get the sense that they feel any compulsion to restrain their extremist rhetoric.”
Setting aside the rabidly misogynistic agenda, the most curious thing about Yenor’s work is just how unserious it is. If you want to make the case that women’s struggle to realize inherent natural rights and secure equality under the law is connected to various social ills in some way, you could look in places for evidence to test that remarkable hypothesis. You might, for example, compare countries with different levels of gender equality, economic outcomes, life expectancy, and health measures. You would surely want to explain the inconvenient fact that some of the places that are least hospitable to women’s rights happen to be those with the worst social and economic outcomes for all people. You might consider that, around the world, the countries that seem to best satisfy Yenor’s urgent desire to keep the genders in their lanes are also among the most repressive, unsafe, nepotistic, economically unstable, and corrupt. You would, at the very least, want to consider alternative explanations for the collapse of marriage rates among working-class Americans and the decline in male health indicators, such as the erosion of working- and middle-class wages and job security, the decline in manufacturing, and the rise of a winner-take-all economy.
But Yenor doesn’t have to do analysis, because Claremont already gave him the answer. The culprit, ever and always, is relativism, historicism, nihilism, progressivism, “wokeism,” and—since it’s all the same thing to them—feminism. So if working-class men are suffering, that can only be because the “woke left” has mounted a merciless assault on—here’s a word Yenor uses a lot—“manliness.”
Manliness. Where exactly did that word enter the conversation? In the Claremont world, manliness is a bit of a dog whistle, and Senator Josh Hawleyhas blown on it hard with his recent book, Manhood. True to Claremont formula, Hawley traces the crisis to our departure from ancient sources. When we were schooled in the classics, we had “moral uprightness”: “Machiavelli called it virtù” (from the Latin vir, meaning “man”); and the Bible has “a mission for men.” You might think that the man who raised his fist on January 6 and then scurried as fast as his legs could take him from the manly men attacking the Capitol would see some complexity in the issue, but Hawley does not. The problem, as ever, is the “priests of wokery,” as he said at the 2023 Road to Majority Conference, who have apparently succeeded in infiltrating the C-suites and learned to dispense their toxic doctrines through the corporate hierarchy.
Hawley, Yenor, and REN, however, are just taking a page from an earlier chapter in Claremont history. The story of manliness at Claremont might be said to begin with Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., the author of the 2006 book Manliness. A fixture of the Harvard University government department for decades, Mansfield counts as nobility among Claremont’s extended family.His father, Harvey Sr., helped Harry Jaffa land a career-making teaching job; Harry introduced Harvey Jr. to Leo Strauss; Harvey Jr. was Charles Kesler’s teacher.
Manliness offers a lightly informed romp through some work in biology and the social sciences on gender and sex, from which we supposedly learn that gender stereotypes are all true. “War is hell but men like it,” and women will never make good soldiers because “they fear spiders.” The patriarchy is just a biological fact of life. “Lacking as women are, comparatively, in aggression and assertiveness, it is no surprise that men have ruled over all societies at almost all times,” Mansfield concludes. And that’s that.
Mansfield is at least twice as subtle as REN; he knows enough to divide manliness into two basic types. The bad type is “nihilistic.” In a neat exercise of philosophical jiujitsu, he argues that the real problem with feminism today is that it tries too hard to be “manly”—but (gotcha!) in the bad, nihilistic way. This is especially true for Mansfield’s bête noire, Simone de Beauvoir. As Diana Schaub elaborates in a retrospective on Mansfield’s book in the Claremont Review, “Manly nihilism was embraced by the woman warrior, Simone de Beauvoir, who refashioned it into radical feminism’s womanly nihilism.” If it sounds like Mansfield is blaming harlot Eve and her uppity sisters for ruining manliness for everyone, that’s because he is.
To Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., our problems started with Simone de Beauvoir.
Mansfield is far too sophisticated—or perhaps too Straussian—to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries. The “‘public sphere,’” he insists, should remain “gender neutral.” But in the “private sphere” (don’t bother looking for any definition of how the spheres are distinguished), those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant. Only by acknowledging that men alone can be properly manly can we retain the “moral moorings” of manliness, as Schaub sees it. Meanwhile, the need for men alone to perform manliness has been pretty much standard practice for non-gender-neutral societies from South Sudan to Taliban Afghanistan.
:{:{}:
}:
In short, Manliness is not the lowbrow male supremacy that bubbles up from the manosphere into the pages of The American Mind. It is the kindly, highbrow version of it. The raw egg fellow and Florida’s new thought leader on anti-woke education don’t represent a break with Claremont’s misogynist past. The novelty is just that REN and Yenor are departing from the Straussian code and saying the quiet part out loud.
Sticking It to the Bugmen
Apart from the “Flight 93” masterwork of intellectual Trumpism, Michael Anton contributed at least one other piece that, in a happier world, would mark a turning point in the history of the Claremont Review of Books. That would be his review of a book titled Bronze Age Mindset, whose author goes by the nameBronze Age Pervert (BAP) and has since been identified as Costin Alamariu, who received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Yale.
BAP writes as if he were some modern-day Zarathustra descended from a mountaintop cyber-collective. “I was roused from my slumber by my frog friends,and I declare to you, with great boldness, that I am here to save you from a great ugliness,” he intones. (The “frog” meme is widely associated with the far-right blogosphere.) If a right-wing Yale Ph.D. student woke up one morning after another dateless night on 4chan and thought he was the second coming of Nietzsche, this is the book he might write.
BAP abhors women. He refers to them as “roasties” (a crude reference to female genitalia), “whores,” and “property.” The “liberation of women,” BAP whines, amounts to an “infection” from which the West “can’t recover without the most terrible convulsions and the most thorough purgative measures.”
He isn’t into gay people either. He thinks they represent “the most profound of social and political problem” (sic) of the modern world.Then again, as he recounts in his book, he managed to ejaculate without touching himself while gazing upon an ancient statue of a Greek boy; so perhaps he is part of the “problem”? For what it’s worth, Alamariu sprinkles his Twitter feed with images of muscled beefcake. Oh, and that Twitter feed is also a collection point for racial hate.
BAP thinks the Bronze Age was just great. This would be the same Bronze Age in which human sacrifice was widely practiced, a great many humans were enslaved to other humans, and more. But none of that bothers BAP, because he identifies with Achilles and the master race—those superior beings who ride herd over their inferiors without apology, without false ideas about human equality, without woke politics. “The free man is a warrior,” he says; “the only right government is military government.” He encourages his followers to join the military, where he seems to think they will be able to organize coups against womanly democracy (or as he, Yenor, and much of the manosphere call it, “the gynocracy”).
So why would Michael Anton want to promote this clinically perfect example of the resentment-addled misogynist? Perhaps it’s because they have in common the same imaginary enemy. Both hate “the left, or what I have termed the Bug-man,” as BAP puts it (Nietzsche’s term was “the last man”). Anton and others at Claremont, as we know, simply call them “the woke.”
The Bugmen, to stay with BAP, are the “pretentious bureaucrats” who harbor “titanic hatred of the well-turned out and beautiful.” They believe in “social justice” and “first-world regimented hygiene” (BAP doesn’t like clean, well-lit streets “made safe for women” because they kill “the mood of the city”). And they are right now operating a “global slave project” for the benefit of the “gynocracy.” To the finely tuned ears of Claremont, that sounds like a description of the Democratic Party.
BAP seems to agree. He tells his followers that a tactical alliance with conventional right-wingers “would get you 99% of what you want.” He urges political leaders who are persuaded by his plan to bring back the Bronze Age to “use Trump as a model of success.” But he is savvy enough to advise those of his followers who go into politics to disavow his work publicly, and even suggests they should attack it. Oddly, the men of Claremont have ignored this sage piece of Straussian advice.
Claremont has a deep bench when it comes to fascist enthusiasts, however, and it may have found a more presentable representative foil than BAP in Curtis Yarvin, a blogger sometimes described as a political theorist. Yarvin is very much on board with the anti-Bugmen agenda, but he spares us most of the male anxiety and faux-Nietzsche rhetoric. Mostly he delivers the message in the self-congratulatory patois of the tech bro: America needs a “reboot.” Napoleon and Lenin are to be admired because each was “a start-up guy.”
Yarvin’s term for those who rule the modern world is “the Cathedral” (though he has been known to slip into talk about “dark elves” and “hobbits,” too). His proposed solution, like BAP’s, is the iron fist. He thinks America needs a king, a dictator with total military power, and he offers tips on how a president might become such a kingly king. The plan: Ignore court rulings and laws you don’t like, and maybe have “taped behind your balls, a non-fungible token (NFT) which controls the nuclear deterrent. Now that’s power.”
Swaggering talk about a super-empowered dictator appears to have tremendous appeal to the men of Claremont. In their pseudoclassics way, naturally, they frame it as the rise of an American Caesar. How glorious! Sometimes, the reveries are tucked inside high-sounding language about “statesmanship.” The “man of action” is Claremont’s favorite character in Aristotle, mainly because, as in the case of Christopher Rufo, the former Claremont fellow behind the anti–critical race theory hysteria, the men of Claremont explicitly aspire to become such figures themselves.
What will the manly dictator do once in power, apart from smashing the Cathedral to bits? Yarvin has little to say on that point. Who cares about the morning after? Like BAP, he practices what Nietzsche called “grand politics.” It’s all about magnificent gestures and look-at-me explosions. Details are for the Bugmen.
Anton’s approach to the Caesar question is particularly revealing and provides an example of what Straussianism has come to mean at Claremont. In his 2020 book, The Stakes, along with his appearances on several podcasts, including a two-hour discussion with Yarvin, he frames the prospective rise of a fascist dictator as prophecy, not policy, and insists that he laments such an eventuality. But then he turns around and declares that we have a choice. On the inevitable slide into a post-constitutional order, we can have a Blue Caesar or a Red Caesar. The Blue version—a combination of “Hillary Clinton and Pol Pot,” according to American Mind contributor Charles Haywood—would, Anton writes, rally “all the power centers and commanding heights of our society” to the cause of the “state-directed persecution” of conservatives. The Red one would at least draw from the part of the population with high “social capital,” which is fit to manage the “necessities” of life—this appears to be Anton’s euphemism for Trump-supporting, non-ruling-class Americans. But such a Red Caesar is unlikely, says Anton, because—woe to us!—conservatives are still too weak and disorganized.
Anton pretends merely to offer predictions grounded in wisdom of the ancients. But his target audience would have little trouble deciphering the hidden message for today. “Me, I like, if not love, the idea of a Red Caesar,” gushes Haywood. Nathan Pinkoski, a Claremont fan writing for First Things, the go-to journal for right-wing theoconservatives, explains Anton’s communications strategy: “In good Straussian fashion, what he teaches is not what he says. With great moderation, he explicitly teaches us how to act prudently within the framework of the republican constitution; with great daring, he implicitly teaches us how to act prudently when the republican constitution is gone.” In other words, Straussianism at Claremont means pushing authoritarian fantasies in not-so-secret code while cosplaying ancient philosophers.
So, who gets to join the secret society of latter-day Greco-Roman authoritarians? A strange fact to remember is that Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. the Bronze Age Pervert, got his Ph.D. from Yale. Curtis Yarvin has degrees from Johns Hopkins, Brown, and the University of California, Berkeley. Anton is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley. Their hero Ron DeSantis has both Harvard and Yale on his C.V. Manly man Josh Hawley is Stanford and Harvard. Yes, Virginia, these very men are themselves the Bugmen. When they talk about sticking it to the administrative state or fantasize about having their dictator-buddy tell all the liberals to suck on it, they seem to be dreaming about revenge on the professors, administrators, and fellow students who were mean to them on their way up.
:{:{}:
}:
It is with that in mind that one can make sense of the strangest aspect of the Claremont pathology: its obsession with elite higher education.
:{:{}:
}:
Adventures in Higher Education: or, Claremont Goes to Florida for Spring Break!
:{:{}:
}:
Only last year, the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida was just an idea on a piece of paper. But it quickly picked up $3 million in state funding, thanks to advocacy from the Council on Public University Reform, a mysterious group whose representative, Joshua Holdenried, previously worked at the Heritage Foundation and has a long history of working with conservative religious causes. The Florida legislature then approved an additional $10 million. According to the Council on Public University Reform’s draft proposal, the center would hold the power to appoint its own staff and educators in classics, history, and the humanities without consulting the existing faculties at the university.
The nonprofit behind the Hamilton operation is headed by a Claremont Review contributor, and the center’s arrival was music to the ears of Claremont’s Florida man, Scott Yenor. A hint about the center’s ideas in civics education may be gleaned from its decision to hire Pinkoski, who took up his position as a visiting faculty fellow at the center around the same time he published a review in First Things of a key text in the white supremacist canon: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints.
Published in France in 1973, Raspail’s novel imagines the horror that unfolds when one million nonwhite immigrants land on French shores. The subhuman invaders, as Raspail describes them, wallow in their own feces and delight in trampling over the misguided liberals who thought to welcome and feed them.The book has long been a favorite among white supremacists, but Hamilton’s man thinks it is a work of “genius” that exposes the—you guessed it—“cancel culture” and “nihilism” that is stabbing the West in the back. The Camp of the Saints is “the most important dystopian novel of the second half of the twentieth century,” he writes. Move over, Handmaid’s Tale!
The Hamilton Center is one of many such centers springing up around the nation. It is also one piece of DeSantis’s plan for higher education in Florida, along with the makeover of New College. Rufo, the anti–critical race theory guru, now serves as a trustee of New College, the small, liberal-friendly state school that the governor hopes to convert into an ideologically right-wing academy. Joining him on the board, as noted above, is Charles Kesler.
Fortunately for us, Rufo has been as transparent about his plan for the nation’s universities as he was for whipping up the fraudulent hysteria on critical race theory. (“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory,’” he explained on Twitter.) In a lecture delivered in the safe space of Hillsdale College, Rufo revealed that America’s universities—all of them, apparently, with the exception of Hillsdale and a handful of allies—are in the hands of the woke and discriminate rampantly against right-wingers. The time has come, said Rufo, to counter this nefarious tendency with a new, parallel university system that would hire the right people and fire the lefties, and teach a pedagogy more in line with his beliefs.
:{:{}:
}:
One person who gets it, by Rufo’s own estimation, is journalist and January 6 conspiracist Darren Beattie, whom Trump appointed to the commission that encourages the preservation of Holocaust sites. Beattie gushes about the results of the program in Florida so far, citing an unsigned piece in Revolver News, a right-wing outlet, that compares the right-wing reconquest of Florida’s university system with Napoleon’s lightning victory over the Austrians in 1805.
Beattie was too far out even for the Trump administration; he was fired after it emerged that he spoke at a conference attended by well-known white supremacists. A listserv for Claremont alumni swiftly accumulated messages of support for Beattie that included some amount of racist and white nationalist commentary, notably from alt-right troll and Holocaust denier Charles Johnson. That prompted some participants holding respectful positions to withdraw from the listserv; eventually, Claremont shut it down. But Johnson himself had been, in fact, a Publius Fellow at Claremont and a contributor to the Claremont Review. And he had scored a flattering foreword to his own book on Calvin Coolidge from none other than his eminence, Charles Kesler.
Charles Kesler blames it all on Hegel—and Woodrow Wilson.
Why is Claremont helping to normalize white supremacist narratives? The political capital to be made from playing to racial grievance in the Trump era is perhaps too obvious to belabor. It is much more interesting to note that the tendency long preceded the Trumpian turn. The men of Claremont routinely complain, as Kesler does in his Crisis of the Two Constitutions, that the contemporary academy has it in for “dead white males.” It is tempting to dismiss such claims as just another grievance narrative from those living white males who feel themselves to be the true victims of discrimination in today’s America. But this would be to overlook the role that such grievances play in consolidating the Claremont position on intellectual history. In the meta-narrative that Claremont absorbed from Strauss and Jaffa, greatness comes from a distinctive civilizational tradition, one that got its start in Athens, then picked up something in Jerusalem to become “the West.”
The Claremonters generally do not, on balance, explicitly identify this tradition with a racial group. Some are savvy enough to include a smattering of people of color in their narratives (Frederick Douglass being a favorite). But their followers likely have little trouble grasping that the whole point of reviving The Camp of the Saints is to conflate the desire to preserve civilization with the fear of other races and peoples. John Eastman’s views on race may be presumed to be benign, but those of the Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on January 6 are not. And yet the Proud Boys’ oath could just as well serve as a Claremont motto: “I am a proud Western chauvinist. I refuse to apologizefor creating the modern world.”
A truly scholarly history would show that what we call “the West” is the work of human interactions spanning the globe. The fabled Greeks drew inspiration from as far afield as India, and many encounters with different cultures shaped history decisively. It is also clear that not every person who has mattered in the process was white or male. But Claremont doesn’t do intellectual history, properly speaking. There is a better name for what it does do, and that is identity politics.
Claremont has had few qualms about pursuing its version of identity politics across the board. Affirmative action is just fine, according to Claremont’s Florida model, as long as it is used to boost the kind of people who make the right sort of noises about the “gynocracy” and demonstrate an interest in white supremacist novels. The administrative state is a good thing—provided you can funnel taxpayer money to ideologically correct centers of learning. Meritocracy is the great American ideal, but only when “merit” is defined as advocating for what your ultrarich patrons already know to be true. Cancel culture is a good thing, too, as long as you are using state power to ban books you don’t like.
To be sure, there are some excellent critiques to be made of diversity programs, and maybe some of these critiques make it through the apocalyptic rhetoric coming out of Claremont. What you won’t hear, however, is any serious consideration that such programs came into being to address real problems in a diverse society with a long history of racial oppression and rank discrimination. That’s because the men of Claremont aren’t here to propose practical policy solutions to the problems facing America. They come to rile up a grievance-addled base and satisfy their own resentments—and to raise enough money to keep the circus on tour.
They Don’t Shoot Administrative States, Do They?
:{:{}:
}:
In his Crisis of the Two Constitutions, Kesler names “the administrative state” as both the ideal of “Progressivism” and the font of all evil. He appears to have borrowed most of the argument, along with the strange fable about Hegel and Woodrow Wilson, from John Marini, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute whose association with the organization goes back to its very beginnings in the 1970s.
The critique of “the administrative state” has a long history and touches on issues of concern in any modern democracy. As noted by Dwight Waldo, the subtle political theorist and onetime federal official who brought the idea to attention in a 1948 book, the administrative apparatus of the modern state has emerged as a new and powerful political function, distinct in important ways from a traditional conception of the legislature and executive. The administrative state often attempts to justify its power through an ideology valorizing scientific efficiency and managerial expertise. Yet, as Waldo points out, government administrators engage in inherently political tasks; they seek negotiated solutions among constituencies, and they ultimately answer to a democratic people through their elected representatives. The sensible critique of the administrative state, then, is a complicated one. The point isn’t to destroy it—surely we’ll want to hold on to the air traffic controllers and food safety inspectors—but to ensure that it remains accountable to the people in a democratic polity.
But the Claremont Institute doesn’t do complicated, and Marini is a case in point. He is a black-and-white kind of thinker, and one can get a sense of where he locates the color line from his analysis of Donald Trump’s candidacy for president in 2016. Marini lauded Trump for his interest in “unifying the country” by “appealing to the common good.” And “Trump has appealed to the rule of law and has attacked bureaucratic rule as the rule of privilege and patronage.” In brief, Trump represented “an existential threat” to the administrative state, according to Marini, and the secret reason why many progressives oppose Trump is that they love nothing more than the smell of bureaucracy in the morning.
In Marini’s narrative, the administrative state is not to be reformed; it is inherently illegitimate. “The tacit premise of the rational state, and the defense of the administrative state,” he claims, “rests upon the assumption that the power of government cannot be limited,” which, in his reading, directly contradicts the wisdom that the Founders supposedly gleaned from Aristotle. Consequently, as his co-author, editor, and fellow Claremonter Ken Masugi writes, “The administrative state is the modern face of tyranny—an issue on which thinkers as diverse as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt apparently agree.” The references are apt indeed. Marini’s critique of the administrative state, and even his identification of Hegel as its evil mastermind, tracks Schmitt’s critique of the liberal (Jewish) order with uncanny precision.
So who, according to Marini, is to blame for the rise of the administrative state in America? Marini’s answer: The “knowledge elites in the bureaucracy” who have manipulated public opinion in a dastardly plot to advance their bureaucratic power. Shorter Marini: The Bugmen did it. So what are we to do about air traffic, food safety, the environment, defense? Who knows. Details. Go ask the Bugmen.
Four years of the Trump presidency afford us some insight now into what the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” to borrow Steve Bannon’s phrasing of the Claremont idea, looks like on the ground: epic levels of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, polarization, and politicization. The best illustration of the tendency, as it happens, comes from the tenure of Claremonter Michael Pack as head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (whose flagship is Voice of America). Pack was president and CEO of Claremont Institute from 2015 to 2017. His reign at Voice of America began late in Trump’s term, lasted seven months, andended two hours after President Biden took office. During those seven months, Pack “inspired multiple formal investigations and rebukes” from various federal and D.C. judges who found that he acted “illegally and even unconstitutionally,” according to NPR reporting. “I don’t think he had a plan other than to just blow the place up,” said Dan Hanlon—a former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff who was himself appointed by Trump to the agency. “We would come in at nine o’clock and stamp out at five o’clock,” Hanlon said. “And we played foosball all day. And we would just sit there, commenting about how absurd this whole thing was.”
:{:{}:
}:
Broadly speaking, the kind of anti-government nihilism that Marini preached and Pack practiced has two natural constituencies. The first consists of those people who generally do not suffer from discrimination and who, unaware of the role of the administrative state in creating and sustaining their privilege, see no place for government in securing their civil rights. The second consists of those economic interests whose activities cause harm (such as pollution or the degradation of communities) or depend on monopoly profits, and who therefore do not wish to be regulated.The Claremont Institute fills its rosters with members from the first group but fills its coffers with representatives of the second. If you want to understand the Claremont Institute phenomenon, the oldest adage of journalism is indispensable: follow the money.
What Money Buys When It Thinks It Is Buying Ideas
Apart from whatever small dollars it wrings from anxious recipients through its mass mailers, the Claremont Institute appears to get the largest chunk of its money from Tom Klingenstein, the New York–based finance executive who serves as its current chairman.
Claremont has other funders, too. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation—all have chipped in. These are among the same groups that top the list in funding climate science denialism; the privatization of public education; the reduction of taxes for the rich, especially of inheritance taxes; and other causes known to warm the hearts of billionaires.
Thomas D. Klingenstein, a main Claremont financial backer.
The direct funding from ultrawealthy interests is really only part of the story of how money has made Claremont. Claremont heroes such as Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and J.D. Vance are to an important extent creatures of the donor class. The money that these political leaders receive from their wealthy friends turns into power for Claremont.
It would be a simple story if the money flowing to Claremont was merely there in pursuit of financial self-interest—and to some extent it is. Many of the donors would love to deconstruct the administrative state, after all, since it stands in the way of many of their privileges and moneymaking activities. So they will put up with the raw eggs, the Bronze Age nuttery, the woman-hating, and all that, as long as it delivers lower taxes and “small government.”
:{:{}:
}:
But what can history tell us about this kind of compromise? What will happen to the moneyed interests if BAP gets his military dictatorship, or if Anton’s Red Caesar steps forth?
:{:{}:
}:
I put the question to Steve Schmidt, and he lit up with enthusiasm. He urged me to read a speech thatHitler gave in 1932 in Dusseldorf to an audience of business executives. Hitler makes an explicit argument against democracy, he said, and “it’s not an unsophisticated argument—it’s what Tucker Carlson said every night on Fox and now on Twitter.” The core of the argument, in its American form, is that “America needs a Caesar.” Why does America need a Caesar? “To protect freedom and liberty—because democracy threatens the privilege of those who ‘built the country,’” Schmidt continued: “All fascist movements require the cooperation and capitulation of conservative movements. The conservative party is the party that is devoured by fascism in any type of right-wing fascist descent.”
The kind of authoritarianism that Claremont is peddling did not happen to the conservative movement by accident. It is the predictable result of the massive investment that conservative money made over the past 50-plus years in polluting American political discourse with its massive complex of ideological factories.
:{:{}:
}:
Having spent a fair amount of time exploring the mind of Claremont in preparation for this piece, I find Schmidt’s analysis extremely convincing. It does, however, leave me with a loose end that I think of as the Klingenstein problem. When we suggest that conservatives are cooperating with and capitulating to authoritarians, we are supposing that they still see the alliance in rational, transactional terms. We implicitly assume that they know that they are making a pact with the devil, and we fault them for a moral failure or perhaps a lack of foresight. But that doesn’t describe Klingenstein at all. He clearly has been drinking the same Kool-Aid that was intended for the working classes. He isn’t capitulating to the forces that promise to destroy the foundations of his own wealth and privilege; he actively wants to become one with them.
The kind of authoritarianism that Claremont is peddling did not happen to the conservative movement by accident. It is the predictable result of the massive investment that conservative money made over the past 50-plus years in polluting American political discourse with its massive complex of ideological factories. When you spend enough to spread unreasonable ideas, you will get an unreasonable society. You might even become a bit of a crank yourself. It goes back to a problem at least as old as Plato. If your power depends on lying to the people, that doesn’t make you noble. It just leaves you with a choice: Accept that you are a fraud, or embrace the lie.
Katherine Stewart @kathsstewart
Katherine Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
Read More: Magazine, September 2023, Feature, Cover Story, Politics, The Soapbox, The Claremont Institute, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Michael Anton, Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, Carl Schmitt, Illiberalism
---