Racist rats recur

Writing in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern denounces the cesspool of pseudo-intellectual racism from which the latest birther lies about Senator Kamala Harris' citizenship derive.

Why, then, do outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post keep publishing articles that promote this lie? A coterie of racists based at the Claremont Institute hope that if they repeat it enough, they can leave the door open for a mass expatriation of second-generation Americans, most of them minorities. Indeed, there are few if any supporters of this falsehood who lack connections to the Claremont Institute. [John] Eastman is a senior fellow at Claremont and the founding director of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Josh Hammer, the Newsweek editor who commissioned the piece, is a former fellow at the institute. Michael Anton, who manipulated the text of a quote from the Senate debate over the 14th Amendment in a Washington Post op-ed to make this lie seem more credible, is a senior fellow there. (Anton may be best known as the author of “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review of Books, which condemned “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners.”) Claremont “scholar” Edward J. Erler wrote a book arguing that the American-born children of Mexican immigrants have no right to U.S. citizenship, giving the idea greater exposure.

The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of David Duke and his Nazi-loving fellow travelers.

The Claremont Institute has been at its dirty work for a long time. According to the L.A. Times, it was the breeding ground in 1996 for Prop. 209, California's ban on considering race in state college admissions and state contracting.

The measure began as an exercise by two academics, Glynn Custred and Tom Wood, encouraged by the conservative Claremont Institute think tank.

As a consequence of their ballot measure, the state has been unable to assure that Californians of all races and genders have equal opportunity. 

Presumably these con men will be active again, making up lies, during the fall campaign to pass Prop. 16 which repeal their handiwork.