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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan

Apropos of nothing, I took a couple of Constitutional law classes in Claremont. I even got A's on them. Leo Flynn, I thought, was an excellent con law professor.

That's nice, but that's not where she was.

The Claremont Institute, which shares no official affiliation with the consortium of seven interconnected schools that make up Claremont Colleges but which lists a number of Claremont McKenna College faculty as fellows or scholars, works on a number of projects, including hawkish advocacy for ballistic missile defense programs. But its most feverish passion seems to be opposition to gay rights, evident in the Institute's advocacy against gay teachers or Boy Scout leaders and in support of "reparative" gay conversion therapy. The Institute, which publishes the right-wing Claremont Review of Books, was founded in 1979 by students of Harry Jaffa, a philosophy professor who studied under neocon patriarch Leo Strauss and the author of Barry Goldwater's famous call for "extremism in defense of liberty." The institute praises extremism in its own right, this year bestowing its Statesmanship Award on Dick Cheney. O'Donnell's fellow Tea Partier, Sharron Angle, claims that in 2004 she was awarded its Ronald Reagan Freedom Medallion.

But like many right-wing institutions investing in conservatism's future, the institute focuses on new faces in the movement, offering two fellowships for young conservative leaders, including the Lincoln Fellowship O'Donnell was awarded in 2002. Participant lists for the fellowship are a catalogue of Congressional staffers, state Republican party operatives and conservative pundits in the making, including Andrew Breitbart, who went on from his fellowship to accuse former USDA appointee Shirley Sherrod of racism against whites this summer, and National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez. One past participant, Brian Lee, a former staffer for the staunchly anti-choice Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, called the institute a premier "training ground for a lifetime campaign in the trenches of political warfare." Another, 2009 fellow Jon Fleischman of FlashReport.com, compared the fellowship to "taking the ‘red pill' " of The Matrix. The Institute itself says it is targeting "rising stars of the conservative movement … to teach them how to be ‘able and orthodox teachers.'"

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