The Claremont Institute, a fascist think tank based in California, gave Trump lawyer John Eastman a job after he was kicked off the faculty of a fourth-rate law school because of his actions leading up to the Capitol riot. (Eastman sought to move heaven and earth — and Mike Pence — to overthrow the 2020 election; for details, go here.)
This blog previously wrote about Eastman’s absurd arguments that Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, is not a U.S. citizen here. And while I’m not sure I wrote about it on this blog, Claremont’s president has declared “the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people” and another of his employees, Glenn Ellmers, penned a controversial essay declaring, “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” (Read about that here.)
In another words, if you’re not a fascist freak like them, you’re not an “American.” (It turns out I did write about it on this blog, here; rest assured, not much Trumpian seditionists do gets past me.)
Now that revelations about the seditious conduct of people around Trump are spilling out into the open, Eastman’s new employer is attempting to defend an indefensible memo that Eastman wrote which has come to be known as the “coup memo,” which is more or less descriptive of its contents.
Claremont is now complaining that the Coup Memo has “been maliciously misrepresented and distorted by major media outlets.” (Read story here.) “Contrary to almost universally false news accounts,” they said, “John did not ask the Vice President … to ‘overturn’ the election or to decide the validity of electoral votes.” Which, technically, is true; he merely wanted Pence to refuse to certify the election, then let House Republicans do the real dirty work.
Claremont also alluded to “sufficient illegal conduct to have altered the results” of the election, which dozens of Republican judges and even the Arizona GOP’s sham “audit” failed to find any evidence of, because it didn’t happen.
But the real joke is this: They’re complaining of “censorship” by the Federalist Society, another rightwing group. Eastman obviously hasn’t been censored; the disclosure, not suppression, of his views and antics is what’s causing all the commotion. But Claremont apparently thinks criticism is censorship, and is calling the criticism of Eastman from their fellow conservatives “a dangerous escalation in the censorship now threatening American democracy.”
There’s no fight like a family fight. In this case, they deserve each other.
Update (10/24/21): In response to the criticism, Eastman asserts he’s a “white knight” who saved democracy by talking Trump down from “more aggressive” positions. Read story here.
Image: John Eastman has won many awards, including some he didn’t ask for, such as this one. (For details on how he won, go here.)