Chuck Darwin<p>If one is investigating how the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Claremont" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Claremont</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Institute" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Institute</span></a>, the California-based think tank, came to be such a hotbed of Trumpists and Trumpism<br>—think about such notorious Claremont fellows as <a href="https://c.im/tags/Michael" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Michael</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Anton</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/John" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>John</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Eastman" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Eastman</span></a>, and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Victor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Victor</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Davis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Davis</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hanson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hanson</span></a> , on whom Claremont bestowed its annual statesmanship award<br>—following the money is a useful strategy.</p><p>One major source of Claremont’s money is <a href="https://c.im/tags/Tom" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Tom</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Klingenstein" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Klingenstein</span></a>, chairman of the institute’s board of directors and its biggest individual funder. <br>Klingenstein is a partner in the Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which manages a portfolio worth around $2.5 billion, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission filing. <br>IRS figures compiled by the Guardian show that Klingenstein has donated more than $19 million to the Claremont Institute since 2005, with a $2.97 million donation in 2021, his most generous contribution to date.</p><p>Klingenstein is also one of the Claremont Institute’s intellectual impresarios, having put out a multipart presentation in 2021 about America’s 🔸“cold civil war” 🔸and 🔹“the existential threat of the woke regime.” 🔹</p><p>It is just as reasonable, measured, and temperate as you’d imagine.</p><p>Then, in 2022, Klingenstein delivered an encomium titled ♦️Trump’s Virtues.♦️</p><p>He was arguing—two years before the presidential primaries, mind you—that the best candidate whom the Republican party could put forward would be Donald Trump.</p><p>Trump, Klingenstein said,<br>"was born for the current crisis: the life and death struggle against the totalitarian enemy I call “woke communism.” </p><p>The “woke comms” clench the Democratic party by the scruff of its neck. They tell us lies and silence those who challenge the lies. <br>Like most totalitarian regimes, they have a scape goat [sic] (white males).</p><p>Trump, he continued, “is a manly man.” <br>(I swear I am not making this up.) </p><p>“In present times, when manhood is being stripped of its masculinity, traditional manhood, even when flawed, has much appeal.” </p><p>And so on and so forth, in a gusher of praise, some of it veering into the homoerotic, some into the sadistic: <br>Trump, that pillar of manliness, “smoked rats out of their hiding places” and “ripped apart people he thought were weak.” (What the hell?)<br><a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-virtues-and-other-fairy-tales" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">thebulwark.com/p/trumps-virtue</span><span class="invisible">s-and-other-fairy-tales</span></a></p>