The Claremont Institute: Protecting the American Way of Life

Dick Young

UPDATE 7.29.24: In response to a recent piece on the Claremont Institute by Ruth Graham in The New York Times, Claremont senior fellow Jeremy Carl writes in The American Conservative:

One advantage of working at the Claremont Institute, which the New York Times recently called “a nerve center of the American right,” is that you get a lot of real-time feedback when you are winning. Of course, not all of that feedback is necessarily pleasant. The left is many things, but it’s not stupid when it comes to realpolitik. If you’re causing real damage to their team, they’ll come after you.

That’s why we’ve been the subject of extended profiles (some more negative than others) in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Atlantic, and other major left-wing publications in just the last couple of years. Not bad for a think-tank whose annual budget is equal to the cost of a few of the missiles that America lobs ineffectually at Houthi tribesmen in Yemen.

Now the Times is back with a front-page above-the-fold Sunday piece calling us “the nexus” that is responsible for the “playbook and thinking” of anti-DEI forces on the right.

Guilty as charged.

The Times article perhaps isn’t a full-on hit piece, although it does a fair bit of bottom-feeding on sarcastic and humorous internal Claremont emails. Yet to be strictly fair, it does occasionally seem to be interested in why we actually take the positions that we do rather than simply screaming “Nazi” at us for not having our thoughts fully vetted by the New York Times editorial board. Yet the only scandal uncovered is that so many right-wing donors are giving to ineffective organizations or losing political candidates, rather than to groups like Claremont that actually move the ball—and the narrative—forward.

Indeed, there is less to the Times report than meets the eye. Principally, they seem scandalized that we are against DEI and America’s current racialist regime. I am not a disinterested observer of this of course. My forthcoming book The Unprotected Class (available for pre-order now and being published in April) is entirely devoted to the rise of anti-white discrimination and racism in America. This rise in racism has been enabled by our DEI and affirmative action regime, and is fundamentally anchored in metastasizing civil rights law and, perhaps even more importantly, subsequent rulings from the unaccountable administrative state.

The Times article was largely pieced together from public records requests, enabled by the fact that some Claremont scholars also have public university affiliations. One could scarcely imagine a similar unprovoked fishing expedition done by the New York Times against a left-wing organization.

The notion that “flippant banter” as my friend David Azerrad appropriately called it—joking remarks that were dashed off in a few seconds for friends and colleagues– somehow represents Claremont’s secret “real” views is comical. Much of the conversation is gallows humor, understandable given the completely marginalized state of conservatives from establishment institutions. The idea that these comments, rather than the ideas Claremont scholars express in books and articles that we painstakingly write and research for weeks, months, and even years, represent our “real” views is a rather ungenerous assessment.

None of my emails popped up in the Times article, but no doubt if you selectively published my (or most other people’s) private correspondence at various times over the thirty or so years I’ve been emailing friends, one could construct a monstrous, and wholly inaccurate, parody of me and my views. Journalism by innuendo is an unsavory way to conduct business.

Read much more from Carl here.

Originally posted August 16, 2022.

Are you familiar with the Claremont Institute? Ryan Williams, President of the Claremont Institute, explains that the Institute is making real accomplishments in its efforts to protect the American way of life. He writes:

The Claremont Institute is providing strong intellectual leadership for the new Right and is chalking up real accomplishments in its work to preserve constitutionalism and the American way of life. And people across the political spectrum are taking note.

Ryan Williams, President

The Claremont Institute.

Claremont’s Mission & Overview page describes the Institute as follows:

The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.

Overview

To return to limited government, conservatives must return to the principles of the American Founding. The Claremont Institute provides the missing argument in the battle to win public sentiment by teaching and promoting the philosophical reasoning that is the foundation of limited government and the statesmanship required to bring that reasoning into practice.

Who We Are

We are a think tank that teaches, writes, and litigates. Since our founding in 1979, our strategy has been to teach the principles of the American Founding to the future thinkers and statesmen of America. Those principles include the foundational doctrines of natural rights and natural law found in the Declaration of Independence; the ingenious political science of the Constitution; and the popular constitutionalism or reverence necessary for the maintenance of free government.

What We Do

Rather than concentrate on policy like many other think tanks, the Claremont Institute teaches the principles and ideas that shape policy over time to the few that will go on to positions of leadership in media, politics, law, speechwriting, and academia.

We teach. We educate the best and most promising young writers, lawyers, activists, academics, entrepreneurs, and public servants through our Publius, Lincoln, John Marshall and Speechwriters Fellowship programs, and engage this next generation of conservative leaders in a life-long study of the true principles of government and their application to today’s policies.

We write. We engage policy at the level of ideas in the Claremont Review of Books, our flagship quarterly publication, which aims to reawaken in American politics a statesmanship and citizenship worthy of its noblest political traditions.

We litigate. We promote the application of first principles in the Courts and amongst legal practitioners through our Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, which files legal briefs advancing the jurisprudence of the Constitution and the Founding, and engages in strategic constitutional litigation.