What is an Aussie fearmonger doing at the Claremont Institute, home of Trump’s insurrection?

The Claremont Institute is simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and dangerous institutions in the US. It’s the heart of the upper-class manosphere and a “racist fever swamp”. This week, I have been revelling in journalist Katherine Stewart’s expert skewering of the pretensions of the hysterics who have made that Atlas Network junktank into a freak show. You can imagine I was not best pleased to be alerted on Bluesky that Australian Jordan Knight has been made a Publius Fellow at the bin fire.

Sporting a new look, more 1930s Berlin than his old floppy fringe, Knight appears in a roster of right-wing clowns boosted as Claremont’s 2025 fellows.

Knight is a former One Nation staffer who set up the solo operation “Migration Watch”. There, he used his pretty boy looks to sell fearmongering about immigration. Media Watch flayed him, not to mention the media figures happy to use his distortions of fact.

The right-wing ecosystem loves him. His columns get regular play in Australia’s extremist version of the ultra-conservative The Spectator. Sky News now has him as part of the team, and his bio there boasts his Publius Fellow standing.

And how did this Australian fomenter of fear and hatred come to be attached to one of the Atlas Network’s biggest name partners? Probably through his fellow “director” at the groupuscule, the National Conservatism Institute of Australia. You met Dan Ryan on these pages in November with his sketchy cast of podcast guests. In an aside during one of those conversations with an Aussie Atlas Network lifer in the US, Samuel Gregg, Ryan evokes the networking the body exists to enable amongst junktankers.

One of the Atlas Network’s roles is finding “conservative” college students and hothousing them in the lushly-funded right-wing conservatory. The Mannkal Economic Research Foundation in Perth sends an annual batch to Atlas junktanks around the world. In 2018, billionaire-defender Cian Hussey was sent by Mannkal to the Atlas node founded by Maggie Thatcher herself. That prepared him to work for Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and her Institute of Public Affairs. Atlas-linked Steve Baxter has “twenty Aussie kids” at the Atlas-linked CPAC conference in Dallas this week. So why should you be more concerned about connecting Jordan Knight with the Claremont Institute?

Claremont, as the West Coast Straussian node of the Atlas Network was always a little weird, and the warnings were there for those who paid attention: German Jewish refugee Leo Strauss was indebted to and drew upon the thinking of the dedicated Nazi and antisemite Carl Schmitt. In Katherine Stewart’s interview with the founder’s elderly son Philip Jaffa, he expresses his deceased father Harry’s anguish at the hijacking of the institute by his former protégés. 

For Stewart’s 2025 book, Steve Schmidt, former Republican strategist, described Claremont as “becoming like the West Point of American fascism. It has collected a creature cantina, like the Star Wars scene, and has nurtured and midwifed” American fascism.

From the Atlas Network partner the Ethics and Public Policy Center, conservative Mona Charen savaged Claremont for its list of 2019 Lincoln fellows: “Claremont stands out for beclowning itself with this embrace of the smarmy underside of American politics”. She reserved particular scorn for the inclusion of toxic conspiracist Jack Posobiec. Of him she said: “In short, Posobiec is the id of Trumpism, bottom-feeding among conspiracists, kooks, and shameless liars.”

Posobiec was enthusiastically supported by JD Vance in his 2024 Unhumans: the secret history of communist revolutions and how to crush them. In that work, any progressive is an Unhuman communist who must be crushed.

The faux-intellectuals of the Claremont Institute have decided that modern society is an existential crisis and that “woke” tyranny looms. Clutching manly pearls, they hyperventilate about how women have destroyed Western Civilisation with our damned bureaucratic state. Any moment now, apparently, us woke villains are going to Vinyasa out of our hipster enclaves in the cities and pilates “conservatives” into concentration camps full of reformer beds. Or something.

For the record, this is the fascistic projection known as “Accusation in a Mirror”. Genocidal groups have used the propaganda strategy of falsely accusing a chosen enemy as about to enact the crimes that they themselves intend to commit. The Trump administration is the faction actually attempting to build an archipelago of gulags.

Make no mistake: these are Trump’s men. Claremont’s leaders are proud of their John Eastman as the legal mind orchestrating Trump’s insurrection.

The risible nature of the accusations should just make us pity these fragile chaps who see a society where other identities than “conservative” white men have a turn at the microphone – and nearly faint in terror. Their insecurity is such that this apparently means we’re out to brutalise (or euthanise) them. Our laughter must be truly crushing to their egos to foster this level of hysteria.

But the hysteria is not abstract:

Stewart features one extended book extract published in Claremont’s journal. Professor (!) Kevin Slack argued: “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd…Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”

One of the Institute’s affiliates, Charles Haywood, likes to imagine himself a warlord and predicts that the imminent woke tyrant will be “a combination of Hillary and Pol Pot”. He is seminal to an extremist fraternal order with which Claremont is closely linked. Instead of a Blue Caesar, they want an authoritarian Red Caesar.

Professor (!) Scott Yenor who drew up the logistics of that extremist fraternal order remains a “Washington Fellow” at Claremont as well as a director of a unit at the Heritage Foundation. That appointment was greeted with outrage. He also orchestrated the Action Idaho group that led to violent attacks on LGBTQIA events.

Yenor’s utter disdain for women is reflected in Heritage’s recent plan to strip women of rights.

It is likely that Ryan boosted his fellow “director” into the Claremont circle to tighten Australia’s connection to the NatCon space for Ryan’s vanity project, the National Conservatism Institute of Australia. Ryan is disdainful of Australia’s current effete connection to the national conservative offshoot, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. He calls it the “wine and cheeseboard Right”. Ryan, incidentally, also publishes his essays with the theocratic Church and State organisation. Claremont is deeply connected to NatCon.

Australia already receives constant national conservative messaging through News Corp.

Coercively patriarchal and heterosexual, it demands leadership of white men and domesticated breeding from their wives. (Exceptions made for the elite women of the movement.)

Mass deportation is a common refrain. 

It demands God back in government: religio-ethnostate movements reinforce each other’s theocratic projects. It is Christofascism throughout the West’s nations. Jewish supremacy for Israel. A Hindutva India.

It is Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Nigel Farage. At Claremont, as Stewart conveys, Knight will join “a small, privileged boys’ club that pushes fascist fantasies in not-so-secret code while cosplaying visionary philosophers”. He will connect the Australian far right to even more toxic and well-funded Americans dedicated to overthrowing our democratic projects.