Don’t blame Trump. It’s been a cesspool for a very long time
This piece on the Claremont Institute exposes so much of the rot at the heart of the right’s intellectual institutions:
Early in 2016, as Donald Trump’s march toward the Republican presidential nomination gathered the air of inevitability, alumni of a conservative think tank nestled hereat the base of Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains received an email with a tough question: Was it time for supporters of the Claremont Institute to help make Trump president?
“I’d sooner cut off my arm with a rusty spoon!” replied Nathan Harden, an editor at RealClearEducation, an offshoot of the political site RealClearPolitics, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.
Others were interested,however. “I’m graduating this May and would very much like to get involved,” wrote Darren Beattie, a philosophy graduate student who would later work in Trump’s White House, until he was fired in 2018, after revelations that he had attended a conference with white nationalists. Harden declined to comment. Beattie did not respond to requests for comment.
The next four years would revolutionize the role of the Claremont Institute and a handful of other intellectual institutions that preach an America-first, originalist ideology. The institute — along with its journal, the Claremont Review of Books, as well as related journals such as American Greatness, andallied organizations, including Michigan’s Hillsdale College — gained influence during Trump’s tenure, funneling ideas and personnel to the administration despite Trump’s lifelong suspicion of academics and other experts.
Claremont blossomed under Trumpjust as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute had during the presidency of RonaldReagan, adding a Washington office and expanding its recruitment of conservative activists and sheriffs to study its ideas.
But now, as the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6,2021, assault on the Capitol reaches its zenith, the role played by one of Claremont’s leaders, John Eastman, has divided its followers and raised some ofthe same questions posed in that 2016 email: How far should scholars go to put their ideas into action?
Eastman, once a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was a mainstay of the institute from its earliest days and an architect of its approach to the Constitution. He argued, against centuries of legal precedent, that Kamala D. Harris was ineligible to serve as vice president because her parents weren’t American citizens when she was born in California. Then, in the final months of 2020, he burst into the national consciousness as he helped leadTrump’s drive to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He wrote confidential memos urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject officialelectoral vote totals and went on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s show to build support for his widely discredited theory. And, on Jan. 6, he rallied Trump supporters at the Ellipse before a mob stormed the Capitol.
As dozens of courts rejected Eastman’s arguments, he fell from grace in many quarters. At Chapman University, where he was a professor and former dean of the law school, more than 140 faculty members signed a letter demanding he be disciplined. The university quickly announced his resignation.
But the Claremont Institute, where he sits on the board of directors, stood by Eastman, keeping him on as head of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a position forwhich he was paid $120,000 in 2020, tax records show. An institute statement condemned “widespread lies peddled by malicious domestic political opponents” and decried a “blackout on the Claremont Institute or on John.”
To some who have gone through institute programs, its trajectory is less surprising. Several former Claremont fellows said Eastman’s legal strategy drew on doctrine that for many years has been at the heart of the institute’s politics.
“How on Earth does Eastman get to this point of being ready to jettison the Constitution?” said one former fellow, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating friends at the institute. “It’s by pushing deeper into this idea of natural rights, which justify any means necessary to preserve the republic. … That’s how Claremont goes from this quirky intellectual outfit to one of the main intellectual architects of trying to overthrow the republic.”
Charles Kesler — a senior fellow at the institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, which is located nearby but is not related to the think tank — said the institute is split between some “who continue to believe that the election was stolen and some who have denied that from the beginning.”
Many of the institute’s leaders remain close with Eastman, but Kesler said: “I’m persuaded that John was wrong in the advice he gave Trump. … Whether his actions will hurt us or not, I’m not sure. It’s awkward and it raises some questions.”
Eastman did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesman for the institute’s president, Ryan P. Williams, declined to make him available for an interview and asked for written questions. Those yielded no response. There was no answer when a reporter knocked on the door of Williams’s home in Claremont. At the institute’s headquarters, a two-story unit with gold-colored chandeliers at the back of a drab office building in nearby Upland, a receptionist said Williams was away.
Later, as The Post prepared to publish this story, Williams, 40, who has risen through the institute’s ranks since graduating from Hillsdale College in 2004, sent an emailed statement that read, in part: “We’re proud of what we do at the Claremont Institute; for over 40 years, our scholarship and teaching have had a positive and substantive effect on the nation’s political discourse. … That said, the Claremont Institute is not interested in participating in the fiction that the Washington Post is a legitimate media outlet, or that its chronically discredited journalists are dispassionate fact-finders intent on bringing their readers objective news.”
Ralph Rossum, who supervised Eastman’s PhD work at Claremont Graduate University, which is unaffiliated with the institute,said Eastman’s notion that Pence could overturn the election result left him “extraordinarily disappointed.”
“His reputation is in tatters, and the institute is badly damaged,” Rossum said.
It’s not just him, it’s the whole damned place. They were rolling around in the muck long before Trump came around.In 2003, the Institute gave Rush Limbaugh their “Statesmanship Award.” Here is a little piece of the speech the racist creep gave at the “Churchill Dinner” where he accepted a bust of old Winnie himself:
How many of you yesterday happened to see any pictures at all of the opening ceremonies of the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor? (Laughter) How many hands do I see? Okay. I don’t see too many hands and I’m not surprised. Let me tell you, I watched it. Not because I wanted to. I watched it for you. I watched it, my friends, because it’s my business to do this. The Clinton library opening ceremonies epitomized, if you will, exactly where the left in this country is today. First, where was it? It was in a red state. They hate red states. In fact, the media in this country, the — what I call them, the liberal spin machine — I don’t like to use the word “mainstream press” anymore. The liberal spin machine was there. They were all excited. But they’re thinking about sending foreign correspondents to the red states to find out what people — and to the red counties of California — to find out what Americans are really like.
That’s the intellectual caliber of the Claremont Institute in a nutshell. That anyone ever gave them any respectability is on them. Don’t blame Eastman.