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

[swag]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/magazine/claremont-institute-conservative.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DFDm4ZiOEcDIGS-kHAIqFnbsE-2jOdWJpANqQzReBv0uIaNEtrUASyvJKYmYoIZSUprIb5FkUH46XwZ5Fquzn7cjv-b-5l2Ly0ux_Ba2PvXaGM2SA-cQpl8Y9icVCqxXwCxanaFLVy39Av1P8jVpB8Vi5AMHfRx4TgDht8OdiCbh7OuEJhC6wCB2alzZPL4KkAcQ5SFVvMUHp7hG0_495ZM94WV73te19iIIGtxOVMVRE7aduhFJYzRIPLlrV1sLKrqhSEzcS-wv9eB7y8oSv2GJfzllNClmGrBiYI&smid=url-share

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

By Elisabeth Zerofsky
Aug. 3, 2022

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

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

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

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

. . . much more

[msfiddlestix]

1. Eastman is one of the Institues Leaders..

A bunch of familiar names including current Seantors (Rubi Cotton, etc) associated among others.

Mark Halprin is on the Foreign Relations Council

DU should have a "Spotlight" forum. This is truly worthy Spotlight piece.

[dalton99a]

2. Key figures:

https://www.claremont.org/page/board-of-directors/

https://www.claremont.org/leadership/