The Claremont Institute has been based in Southern California since it was founded in the late 1970s. Located in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the institute has become a major intellectual hub for the pro-Trump right.
But some of Claremont's key figures have been leaving California, without much fanfare, for more ideologically friendly environments: Ryan P. Williams, the think tank's president, moved to a suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.
Claremont's colleague and friend Michael Anton, a California native who played a key role in persuading conservative intellectuals to vote for Trump in 2016, moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute's vice president for operations and administration also moved there, and other staff members have followed suit. Williams said in May that he plans to open a smaller office elsewhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and downsize Claremont's California headquarters.
“There's a sense shared by a lot of us that Christendom is falling apart,” said Skylar Kresin, 38, who is close to the Claremont church's leaders and shares many of their concerns. She left Southern California in 2020 for Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. “We need to get involved and we need to build.”
As Trump presses ahead with his third presidential campaign and his supporters galvanized by last week's debates, many of the young activists and thinkers who have emerged under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it's a movement to reclaim what they see as the values ​​of Western civilization. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want if Trump returns to the White House: one based on what they see as Christian values, with big families and few immigrants. They foresee a matching aesthetic landscape, featuring more classical architecture, a resurgent conservative arts movement and men in traditional suits.
Their vision includes stronger local leadership and a decline in the national “administrative state,” and last week they celebrated the Supreme Court's effective end to “Chevron deference,” a decision that could lead to the weakening of thousands of federal regulations on the environment, worker protections and more.
Fed up with an increasingly hostile and chaotic secular culture, many are migrating to states and regions they perceive as more welcoming, fighting to protect American society from conservative “strongholds.”
Some see them as participants in and advocates of the “Great Sort,” a social reorganization in which conservatives and liberals naturally split into homogenous communities and neighborhoods (and some, including Kresin, are simultaneously pursuing the lower cost of living and safer neighborhoods that drive many common moves).
The year Kresin moved to Idaho, he and Williams participated in informal discussions in Claremont about the need for new institutions in a rejuvenated American society. The idea, one leader said, was for a “community of fraternity” that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only, men's only social group for Christians. The group now has about 10 chapters in various stages of development, with memberships ranging from seven to several dozen.
The group's goals, leaders say, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential appointees and hires for future administrations.” That means a second Trump term, but also a future described in far-reaching, sometimes apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming societal breakdown that will require armed, right-thinking citizens to restore order.
The group's ties to the Claremont Colleges give it the ability to influence a future Trump administration: Anton served on Trump's National Security Council, and Claremont Colleges trustee John Eastman advised Trump's 2020 campaign. Eastman faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia for plotting to keep Trump in power after his election loss.
Their rhetoric sounds vaguely bombastic: “Just as great Western figures left their legacy to us, so we must leave a legacy to our children,” the group's website proclaims. “The works we undertake to this end will remain long after we are buried.”
So far, their success has been modest: Kresin's local chapter has brought in a men's fashion expert to encourage members to dress in “classic American style” and has held screenings and discussions of the 2003 naval adventure “Master and Commander.” Members socialize outside of meetings and do business with one another.
Critics of the group say it offers a neatly wrapped presentation of some of the right's darkest elements, including a cultural homogeneity that amounts to racism and a tolerance for using violence to achieve political ends.
“The idea is to organize local discontent, build networks that will continue to move the Republican Party further and further to the right over the next decade, 30 years, maybe half a century, and mobilize disaffected local voters, mostly men,” said Damon Rinker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania who has written critical articles about the group. “It's a high-minded version of the militia movement.”
During its first two years, SACR's leaders say it received significant funding from former Indiana business owner Charles Haywood, who seems to enjoy being an online provocateur: He called the Jan. 6, 2021, riot an “election justice protest” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints.”
Last month, he posted on Platform X that foreign-born citizens should be deported for crimes such as “working for left-wing causes.” Other leaders have blamed Heywood for the apocalyptic tone of the group's founding documents, but he declined to comment.
The association's members are young, mostly white-collar and mostly affluent, some of whom have left elite institutions to start their own companies and invest in conservative startups.
Josh Abbottoy, executive director of American Reformer, a Dallas-based magazine that serves as the movement's unofficial in-house publication, is moving this week with his wife and four children to a small town outside Nashville. Through his new professional networks, he's been raising money to develop a conservative haven between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, and he's also buying hundreds of acres of land in the two regions. He expects about 50 families, including people who work from home for tech and other companies, to move to the Tennessee town (which he declined to name) next year.
Mr. Abbottoy is betting big on a broader revitalization of the rural South, as white-collar flexibility clashes with conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future development, in which neighborhoods share conservative social values ​​and enjoy a kind of ambient Christian culture.
“Personally, I would be happy to pay higher maintenance fees to live in an area where I could drive past an architecturally significant church every day and hear the church bells ring,” he said.
The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, marked a watershed moment for Abbott and other conservatives in understanding how quickly the ground was shifting beneath their feet. The decision marked the beginning of what conservative Christian author Aaron Wrenn, who spoke at the fraternity's event, called a “negativity world,” an influential concept describing a culture in which “being known as a Christian is a social negative, especially among the elite of society.”
Abbotty grew up in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go “out into the world” and influence secular institutions like corporations and universities, but this approach that has defined the past few generations of mainstream evangelicalism is finding increasingly unacceptable to those around him.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Abbottoy left a major infrastructure company in 2021 to work for Dallas venture capitalist and networker Nate Fisher, whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.” Fisher is president of SACR's Dallas chapter.
Andrew Beck, a brand consultant to conservative politicians and groups including SACR and Claremont, moved from Staten Island to the northern Dallas suburbs with his wife, now six children, his parents and five siblings and their families in 2020. Just like when they were in New York, nearly 30 family members now live in the same neighborhood.
“Something is shifting,” said Beck, who penned a widely shared essay on the “re-Christianization of America” ​​for the online Claremont magazine American Mind. “It's not about having a home base where you can live in a cocoon, but it's about being part of a place that you really call home.”
Members must be male and belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church — a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants but excludes members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and call themselves “unhyphenated Americans,” a reference to a speech by Theodore Roosevelt that urged the complete assimilation of immigrants.
The group's interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity has become increasingly entrenched as a cultural and political identity, pushing aside theological differences and serving as a general expression of rebellion against modernity. A sizable minority of members, including Kresin, are Catholic. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists and Charismatics.
In Kresin's new home state of Idaho, the streets are clean and people don't lock their doors. His family lives in an affordable home with a white picket fence and space for a trampoline in the yard. An upright piano sits in the corner of their cozy living room, and hymn books and classic novels line the shelves along the walls.
“A lot of our generation really longs to be rooted,” he says, “and they grew up in a time when that wasn't really valued.”
One weekday morning this spring, he stepped out his front door for a brisk stroll up to Tubbs Hill, a path lined with wildflowers and with a spectacular view of the crystal-clear lake below. Later, at his house, Lauren Kressin, pregnant with the couple's eighth child, served him peach tea in tasteful, colored china and gently switched his cup so that he would drink from the “less feminine” one, she recalled, smiling.
The Idaho restart is part of a project so long that the end is still in sight, Cressin said later. “The old English landed barons planted oak trees that took 400 years to mature,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if we don't start building a family culture, we're doomed to fail.”