The mass firings and ideological purges of the federal workforce carried out over the past six months are apparently not enough for the right-wing thinkers and activists of the Claremont Institute. Claremont chairman Thomas Klingenstein is promoting a new call for ideological reeducation of the federal workforce by Casey Chalk, a 2024 Lincoln Fellow at Claremont.
Right Wing Watch reported in March that Claremont staffer Chris Ross proposed that President Donald Trump issue an executive order forcing civil servants to take Claremont training programs to “deprogram” them from what Ross claimed was “the cultish anti-Americanism that infects the swamp.”
In a commentary posted on Klingenstein's website Aug. 15, Chalk said that the Trump purge of programs and policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is not sufficient. Chalk would like to see the right-wing “intellectuals and writers” at Claremont and similar institutions “offer their services to reeducate Washington” and “make the federal workforce into a truly pro-American vision of our Constitution and national identity.”
These would not be simply voluntary:
Promotion criteria could even be tethered to employees’ participation in these activities. If we expect medical professionals, lawyers, and educators to pursue continuing education for licensing, why shouldn’t the federal workforce be expected to do the same regarding the Constitution and the American civilization they are supposed to represent and serve?
As for the vision and values Claremont would like to subject federal workers to, here’s an excerpt from earlier RWW reporting:
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.”
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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.”
