The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.
Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures are leaving California to find ideologically friendlier environments. Ryan P. Williams, the president of the think tank, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.
His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a key role in getting conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The organization’s vice president for operations and administration has also moved there. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a smaller office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May and said he expected to shrink the California headquarters in Claremont.
“Many of us share the feeling that Christendom is being exposed,” said Skyler Krasin, 38, who is friendly with Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California for Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in 2020. “We need to stay engaged, we need to build.”
As Mr. Trump barrels through his third presidential campaign, his supporters buoyed by last week’s debate, many young activists and thinkers raised under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western culture as they see it. His ambitions paint a picture of the country he wants Mr. Trump to return to the White House — one governed by his version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee more classical architecture and an aesthetic landscape to match A revived conservative art movement and men in traditional costumes.
His vision includes strong local leadership and a withered national “administrative state,” prompting him to celebrate last week when the Supreme Court effectively ended the “Chevron deference,” which weakened thousands of federal regulations on the environment, worker protections, and more. can make and beyond.
Fed up with what they see as an increasingly hostile and chaotic secular culture, many are moving from conservative to what they see as more welcoming states and territories, fighting for American society.castles“
Some see themselves as complicit and advocate for a “great sort”, a social reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas. (And some, including Mr. Crassin, are chasing the cheaper costs of living together and the safer neighborhoods that fuel many of the common moves.)
The year Mr. Crassin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions that some hoped would revitalize American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized personal meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group currently has about 10 lodges in various states of development, with memberships ranging from seven to several dozen people.
The group’s goals, according to the leaders, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential recruits and hires for a unified future regime” — by which they mean a second Trump presidency, but also a future they clearly describe and sometimes envision. Apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming social breakdown that will require an armed, right-thinking citizenry to restore order.
The group’s ties to Claremont give it access to influence in the future Trump administration: Mr. Anton served on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, and Claremont’s board member, John Eastman, advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 election campaign. He faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia over plans to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost the race.
His rhetoric seems elaborate to the point of obscurity. “As the great men of the West have bequeathed their works to us, so we must leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website declares. “For this the works erected by our hands shall last long after we are buried.”
His output, so far, seems more modest. Mr. Krasin’s home chapter hosted a menswear expert who encouraged members to wear “classic American style” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” Men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other’s business.
Critics of the circle say they represent a sanitized version of some of the darker elements of the right, including cultural homogenization to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.
“This idea of organizing discontent at the local level and creating a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half a century will push the Republican Party further and further to the right, and mobilize voters in disaffected parts of the country,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. said, who has written critically about the mob. “It is the highest version of the militia movement.”
In its first two years, leaders said, SACR received significant funding from Charles Haywood, a former business owner in Indiana. Mr Heywood enjoys being a provocateur online. He called the riots on January 6, 2021 “electoral justice protests” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints”.
Posting on Platform X last month, he wrote that foreign-born citizens should be deported for crimes including “working for left-wing causes”. Other leaders credit the revelation of the group’s founding documents to Mr. Heywood, who declined to comment.
Society members are young, mostly white-collar (and mostly white), and often wealthy. Some have left elite institutions to start their own firms and invest in conservative-leaning ventures.
Josh Abbotoy, executive director of the American Reformer, a Dallas-based journal that serves as an unofficial in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.
Mr. Abbottoy is betting more broadly on the revival of the rural South, as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future developments in which neighborhoods share conservative social values and enjoy, he suggested, a kind of ambient Christian culture.
“I personally would happily pay high HOA fees to live in a neighborhood where I have to drive by an architecturally significant church every day, and I can hear the church bells,” he said.
Oberfell v. The Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally, was a watershed moment for Mr. Abbott and other conservatives in their understanding of how quickly the ground can slip from under their feet. It’s a decision that signaled the beginning of an era that conservative Christian writer Aaron Wren — who has spoken out on the events of the fraternal society — calls the “negative world,” an influential concept. Describes culture in which “being identified as a Christian is a social negative, especially in the elite sectors of society.”
Mr. Abbotoy was raised in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go “out into the world” and influence secular institutions, including corporations and universities. But that approach, which defined the last few generations of mainstream evangelicalism, seems increasingly untenable to those in his circle.
Mr. Abbotoy, who graduated from Harvard Law School, left a job at a large infrastructure company in 2021 to work for Nate Fisher, a Dallas venture capitalist and prolific networker whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG.” The Bureaucratization of American Business Culture. Mr. Fisher is President of the Dallas Chapter of SACR.
Andrew Beck, a brand consultant for conservative politicians and organizations including SACR and Claremont, moved from Staten Island to the suburbs north of Dallas in 2020 with his wife and their six current children, their parents, and their five siblings and their families. About 30 family members now live in the same area as they did in New York.
“Something is shifting that is tectonic,” said Mr. Beck, who wrote a widely shared essay on “.The Re-Christianization of AmericaFor Claremont’s online magazine The American Mind. “It’s not so much to carve out some fortress where you can live in a cocoon, it’s to be a part of a place that you can truly call home.”
Members must be male, belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church, a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants, but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members must also describe themselves as “unhyphenated Americans”, referring to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech Requesting full integration of immigrants.
The group’s interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming a cultural and political identity, with theological differences coming to the fore and Christianity serving as a common expression of rebellion against modernity. A significant minority of members, including Mr. Krasin, are Catholic. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists, and Charismatics.
In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown of Idaho, the streets are clean and people unlock their doors. His family lives in a house they can afford, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and shelves line the walls with hymnals and classic novels.
“A lot of people in our generation long for roots,” he said. “And they were brought up in an era where that wasn’t really valued very much.”
On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and sweeping views of the crystalline lake below. Later at their home, Lauren Crassin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea on deliciously matching china, quietly switching cups with her so she had “less feminine,” she said with a smile.
Starting in Idaho, Mr. Krasin later said, was part of a long-term project that he did not anticipate its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even begin to build a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”
