“It’s incredibly concerning. They’re desperate to take on the role of leading the charge in terms of providing arguments for the anti-democratic populism of Trump. They really want to do everything they can to keep Republicans in power, even if it means manipulating through bad-faith measures the levers of power,” said Laura K. Field, a political theorist at the Niskanen Center and American University. The extremism rhetoric espoused by some at the institute now also makes some former affiliates cringe. One warned the ongoing attacks on Americans’ trust in elections “could lead to more distrust and division and skepticism about various institutions in the medium-to-long run.”“They’re making the existential conflict true. They’re fueling those flames.”
Eastman didn’t mention that day that he’d crafted a scheme for Pence to do just that, with his now-infamous pair of memos to the vice president. Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school who had once clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Clarence Thomas, claimed it was “fact” that the vice president was the “ultimate arbiter” of the Electoral College count and should reject the votes of a number of states in an attempt to throw the election to Trump. Or, at least, give Republicans in the swing states Trump lost one last chance to nominate alternate slates of electors that could have led to the same final result—and a constitutional crisis. Eastman was a late addition to Trump’s final inner circle of strategists, huddling day after day at the Willard Hotel with Giuliani, former White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon, and others. On Jan. 2, he participated in a call with Trump and Republican state lawmakers to try to convince them to overturn their states’ election results.When they balked, he turned to Pence to buy them time. Pence refused; Eastman complained that the vice president was “an establishment guy” who wanted Trump to fail. According to Eastman, the Jan. 6 riots were instigated by “FBI plants” and the best way forward for the country would be to defeat all the Republican lawmakers who didn’t fight for Trump. Kennedy made a similar claim: On Jan. 7, Kennedy falsely said the rally was “hijacked by ANTIFA.”“It is the very essence of our republican form of government and it has to be done.”
The institute is debuting a new Sheriffs Fellowship in 2021, where officers will study topics including natural law, progressivism, and “the roots of radical leftist ideology.”What’s clear is that the institute’s leaders, and their traditional focus, has changed. Multiple former scholars say that turn happened quickly as Trump locked up the Republican nomination in the spring of 2016. But it got wider notice late that summer when an anonymous author going by the pseudonym “Publius” issued an essay titled “The Flight 93 Election.” “Charge the cockpit or you die,” the essay proclaimed, warning “We are headed off a cliff” due to “a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption” from the left as well as “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.”The Claremont Institute’s recent fellowships have largely gone to a new breed of right-wingers.
Williams, the institute’s president, recently told the Atlantic that “the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people.” And while he said a civil war should be “the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs,” he made clear that a peaceful defeat wasn’t acceptable—while laying out the Claremont Institute’s endgame."The Claremont Institute spent 36 years as a resolutely anti-populist institution, [and] preached rightly that norms and institutions were hard to build and easy to destroy, so to watch them suddenly embrace Trump in May 2016 was like if PETA suddenly published a barbecue cookbook.”
Trump amplified that message, questioning Harris’ citizenship and cited the “very highly qualified” Eastman to back up his point.Others affiliated with the Claremont Institute also had Trump’s ear: The institute’s last president, Michael Pack, is a close ally and collaborator of Bannon’s whom Trump appointed to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Pack spent much of his seven months in office trying to turn Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the agency’s other international news outlets into pro-Trump propaganda operations by firing longtime senior officials at the organizations, pushing pro-Trump administration editorials, bad-mouthing employees to conservative media outlets, and seeking political control over reporters’ coverage. Pack returned to the Claremont Institute as a senior fellow after Trump left office.“Many Claremonsters have the ear of this administration and may help Trump take what he feels in his gut and migrate it to his head.”
Last spring, Tucker Carlson brought on Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Glenn Ellmers to talk about an article where he claimed “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”Ellmers argued in the piece that “the U.S. Constitution no longer works,” called his foes “citizen-aliens” and “non-American Americans,” and compared those that don’t agree with him to a “zombie or a human rodent.”And he neatly summed up the role that many at the Claremont Institute seem to see for themselves going forward.“Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.”
“Paradoxically, the organization that has been uniquely devoted to understanding and teaching the principles of the American founding now sees with special clarity why ‘conserving’ that legacy is a dead end,” he wrote. “Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.”And Eastman, Kennedy, Anton, Klingenstein, Williams, and the rest of the Claremont Institute seem ready to wage that fight. This piece has been updated to clarify that former Claremont Institute fellow Charles Johnson has separated from group.