This conservative think tank is 'going to war' to help Trump undermine America's elections

According to a deep dive by Vice, a once-staid and mainstream conservative think tank in California has undergone a radical transformation since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that is alarming former members and critics alike.

Founded in 1979 by Claremont McKenna College professor Harry Jaffa, the Claremont Institute, along with its off-shoot, the Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence has taken the lead in pushing Trump's insistence that election results can't be trusted with Vice's Cameron Joseph writing, "Claremont Institute leaders' actions leading up to, during, and after Jan. 6 are the culmination of five years of increasingly alarmist rhetoric."

Case in point: the wholehearted support the leaders of the institute have given to John Eastman, head of the legal wing, who authored the controversial "coup memo" Trump attempted to use to convince former vice president Mike Pence to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

While Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams has boasted, "The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization," one expert stated their latest efforts should alarm everyone.

According to Laura K. Field, a political theorist at the Niskanen Center and American University, "It's incredibly concerning. They're desperate to take on the role of leading the charge in terms of providing arguments for the anti-democratic populism of Trump. They really want to do everything they can to keep Republicans in power, even if it means manipulating through bad-faith measures the levers of power."

"Some former Claremont Institute allies are aghast at what they see as a departure from Jaffa's vision and a shift toward authoritarianism and demagoguery," Joseph wrote.

"One former Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow told VICE News that watching the staid academic institute, which they'd once so admired, suddenly morph into an organization bent on defending Trumpism and fanning the flames of civilizational alarmism at the expense of all else "was like 'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,'" Joseph wrote adding that the former associate complained, "The Claremont Institute spent 36 years as a resolutely anti-populist institution, [and] preached rightly that norms and institutions were hard to build and easy to destroy, so to watch them suddenly embrace Trump in May 2016 was like if PETA suddenly published a barbecue cookbook."

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