Several stories have emerged about the Claremont Institute-supported mystery fraternal group with the non-threatening name, Society for American Civic Renewal. Jason Wilson at The Guardian has reported on tax records and research about the secretive male-only “lodges” in an increasingly extensive story that has reached into connections with Republican Party candidate Ron DeSantis and other Florida legislators.
The real focus should be on the Claremont Institute, a think tank with deep reaches into political and religious leadership. Documents obtained revealed a solidly Christian autocratic agenda: “The trove also contains an “internal” SACR “mission statement” with a far more radical edge than the public “vision” now recorded on the organization’s website.
That document speaks of recruiting a “brotherhood” who will “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise”; whose “objectives” include to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime”.
The document does not indicate that such “renewal” will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the US constitution.
Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont – the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 – the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics.”
Notwithstanding the nuttery behind SACR’s wanna-be “warlord”, Charles Haywood, a wealthy shampoo salesman who sold his company and is now putting his money behind creating a private army of white Christian supremacists, the mission behind the so-called civic renewal suggests potential conflict and violence. The public mission statement is very different from the internal one.
Snip: “It first announces: “Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.”
The document says the organization’s founders are “un-hyphenated Americans, and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.”
It says: “We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance” of their beliefs.
In terms of recruiting, the document says: “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”
Then it goes into a vague plan about securing support from elites, making appointments, building “fraternal networks”, and “Perhaps ominously, a fourth objective is to “defend fraternal networks, our own and allies, against attacks by those opposed to civic renewal, and strongly deter such attacks”, though no details are offered on what form this defense or deterrence might take.”
The word “regime” is referred to multiple times. The agenda seems to mesh perfectly with Republican support of Trump as a puppet of this regime, as they have made it clear that even for one day, launching a dictatorship for God, would be the renewal they are gunning for.