Conservative blogger Erick Erickson published an essay last week on Substack, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off a Cliff,” maligning the Claremont Institute, one of our donors, and a few of our fellows and alumni.

Claremont Institute senior fellow Steve Hayward published the first in a promised series (“Is Conservatism in Crisis?”) on his Political Questions Substack, criticizing the tone, rhetorical tactics, and substance of Erickson’s essay. As Hayward shows, Erickson relies on guilt-by-association smears and innuendo that let the juxtaposition do the arguing.

It’s clear that Erickson wants merely to cherry-pick the document to stoke outrage with his readers.

Many of his citations come from untrustworthy and hostile sources, like the Guardian, which has published numerous hit pieces against Claremont. Erickson’s essay is a mile-wide, inch-deep bit of motivated reasoning.

At the top of his essay, a headnote by Erickson explains that he “worked on this for weeks.” We could have cleared up a lot of Erickson’s errors during those weeks had he followed the standard journalistic practice of reaching out to any of the parties or organizations he named for comment. He did not.

By his own account, Erickson let AI find the sources for his claims: “I wrote the piece and Claude found the links relevant to my claims. When Claude thought I was making weak claims or arguments, it challenged me to improve and clarify my writing and claims to match information in provided linked [sic].” That may explain why so many of his sources come from hostile outlets.

As a result, some friends of Claremont who are not close students of the internecine social media wars on the right are confused. I write to offer some clarity. The short version: Claremont’s mission remains, as it was when we were founded in 1979, “to restore the principles of the American founding to their rightful, preeminent place in our national life.”

The core of that work remains what Harry Jaffa called “the scholarship of the politics of freedom.” Many of our critics mistake the application of that scholarship to present circumstances for abandoning our principles.

Answering every insinuation in Erickson’s essay would be tedious; correcting the most serious is not. Consider four of his claims: about a donor, about a fraternal organization, about an essay in the American Mind, and about Nick Fuentes.

Erickson’s first target is Charles Haywood, a retired industrialist and philanthropist who runs the Worthy House website, where he routinely reviews, in spirited fashion, books on all manner of topics. Readers of Haywood know that he has a dim view of the prospects for the medium-term survival of the current American regime. He has constructed his city in speech, what he hopes will be a successor regime, in his “Foundationalist Manifesto.”

Erickson regards Haywood’s "Manifesto" as too statist. He wants us to gasp with him at Haywood’s deprecation of democracy. What Haywood favors, however, would not have been foreign to thinkers and statesmen from the American founding up through the turn of the 20th century: a republicanism with aristocratic elements, like elections and representatives rather than direct popular involvement in decision-making.

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Erickson objects that Haywood assigns to the central government “unlimited means,” but fails to include the rest of the sentence, which reads in full, “In pursuit of its limited ends, it will have unlimited means.” Claremont has always thought that the political philosophy of the founding, properly understood, should guide our constitutional analysis and reform. Haywood’s assessment is not the same as Claremont’s position, and reasonable people can dispute it.

But it’s clear that Erickson wants merely to cherry-pick the document to stoke outrage with his readers.

This outrage is a setup to suggest that because Haywood donates low six figures annually to Claremont and has an honorific “advisory” title common in the think tank philanthropic world, Claremont’s mission is now being subverted in favor of Haywood’s foundationalism.

No donor sets our agenda, and Haywood has never tried. He supports institutions on the right for the work they’re doing, in line with their own missions, to recover constitutionalism and defend the American way of life.

Erickson’s second target is closer to home: me. He indicts my involvement in the founding of a Christian fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal, and in so doing makes a serious charge that demands correction. One of SACR’s founding documents, writes Erickson, “describes the members as ‘un-hyphenated Americans.’ ... The hyphen is there to screen for lineage, and it tells you the racial mindset of the organization.” This is false. The membership requirement for “unhyphenated Americans” is a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1915 call for immigrants to assimilate and embrace American citizenship without qualification. SACR welcomes trinitarian Christian men of any race or ethnicity.

Fittingly, Roosevelt gave that speech to the Knights of Columbus, itself a Christian fraternal order. Few things are more American than Christian fraternal organizations, which have been around since our country’s founding.

The founding board of SACR in 2020 agreed with the theme of Yuval Levin’s book "A Time to Build." We thought a decentralized fraternal organization for values-aligned men would be a useful institution in an ideologically divided and institutionally corrupt America. It has been gratifying to see lodges founded in several states, centered on friendship, shared love of country, and the many benefits such networks provide for local collaboration and mutual aid.

Erickson’s charge against the American Mind is more serious still. He claims that “Claremont’s American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must now be willing to commit violence of their own.” The essay in question, Hillsdale College professor Kevin Slack’s 2023 article “The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right,” does no such thing. The passage Erickson appears to be describing reads:

Many conservatives have now become convinced that, unless they are willing to allow their churches to be desecrated, their sacred services canceled, their property and liberty taken away, and their children indoctrinated or chemically castrated, they must be willing to engage in violence of their own.

Slack ends with a warning, not a call to arms:

Finally, the use of actual violence, which underlies the enforcement of all laws, including the natural law, has quickly become part of our machinations. And while I sympathize with any defense of natural right, I also fear it. Our first civil war was between states, but this new terrible war would be city against country, neighbor against neighbor, in the aisles of grocery stores, restaurants, and churches. I would not choose to live in this world, but America is fast becoming no country for old men. I still hope that we can appeal to genuine nationalism, celebrating America’s principles and its remarkable achievements, rejecting a false patriotism and tribalism.

In other words, Slack is describing what many conservatives have come to believe, not arguing that they are right. Erickson turns a description into a prescription.

Erickson throws Nick Fuentes and his “groypers” into the mix for good measure in the final third of the piece. He is careful to state that he doesn’t think anyone named so far is “coordinating with Fuentes.” (Quite right! I suspect Fuentes would object to any coordination with Claremont, as he has said publicly that we are untrustworthy because our chairman is Jewish.) But Erickson’s presentation is meant to leave the reader with the impression that this constellation of projects, writings, tweets, and people represents different flanks of a movement to overthrow the American Constitution.

While Erickson’s essay was making the rounds, I was on my way to Mount Vernon with Claremont colleagues to celebrate Constitution Day and honor Charles Kesler with the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding.

The evening featured short speeches from our Washington fellow Matthew Peterson, praising George Washington’s magnanimity and prudence; from our Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, Glenn Ellmers, on the meaning of the Declaration at 250 after a century of progressivism; and from me, on the significant scholarly, editorial, and teaching achievements across Kesler’s five decades (and counting) of work.

It was an evening celebrating the work of the Claremont Institute and its scholars, surrounded by the Claremont family of alumni, supporters, and friends. That work, not the caricature in Erickson’s essay, is what Claremont is about.

We look forward to a good-faith debate with serious and honest interlocutors — let iron sharpen iron. The stakes are nothing less than the fate of America and the West.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.