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.
