The Claremont Institute Feed Items

The approach of Thanksgiving invites us to turn our minds to the relationship between religion and the American regime. We now encounter controversy where we once found consensus. With the rise of modern secularism, many Americans now believe that religion should play no role in the nation’s public life, while many other Americans continue to hold to the traditional view that it should.

These divisions were illustrated strikingly in the homestretch of the presidential campaign. Speaking in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris was interrupted by hecklers who called out, “Jesus is Lord.” Harris responded by saying, “You guys are at the wrong rally.” A few days later, in the same state, and apparently in response to this exchange, someone cried out, “Jesus is king!” during a speech by J.D. Vance—and Vance replied, “That’s right. Jesus is king.”

In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, social media has been flooded with videos of apartment- or vehicle-bound neurotics screaming, banging pots and pans in sheer disbelief, packing their belongings, or generally convulsing as if Kristallnacht were upon us. The American public has been introduced to the 4B movement, in which liberal women appropriate a South Korean sex strike because justice.

To be sure, social media is at best a caricature of real life. Only the most dramatic individuals will shave their heads for “reproductive rights” (read: for likes), but most people do not express themselves in quite such a hyperbolic register. That said, in this case the memes are imitating real life. Not every ex-Kamala voter is experiencing a full-scale breakdown. But judging based on my own clinical observations as a practicing therapist, I think it may well be true that a significant number of young American leftists are going through a collective mental health crisis.

I speak from some experience, having spent multiple hours per day over the past few weeks hearing from clients about the damage inflicted upon their psyches “by the Trump win.” This is their account of things. My own opinion, however, is that someone has subjected these kids to psychic trauma. But it wasn’t Donald Trump.

First Things

In the waning days of the 2024 campaign, Team Harris made a truly devious effort to revive their flagging poll numbers. Their two-part pitch to the electorate went like this: 1) Men should vote Democrat so their daughters can get abortions, and 2) women should vote Democrat, then lie to their conservative husbands about it.

Part one focused its appeal on the vanishingly small percentage of abortions performed in response to rape. This argument probably appeals to some men. Most Americans are pro-choice in that they don’t much care if their neighbor gets an abortion. And when it comes to their own families, they’d rather have the option than not. Better to keep abortion legal for any reason at all than for my wife or daughter to “need” an abortion and not be able to get one.

In extreme cases, the argument goes, getting your daughter an abortion is an act of fatherly protection. When Charlie Kirk spoke out against rape exceptions, the anonymous X personality known as RadFem Hitler responded with characteristic vitriol. “No genuinely masculine man would ever allow his 10 year old daughter to give birth to her rapist’s baby,” she wrote. “Something is deeply CUCKED within you if you would allow a child molester to pass on his genes at the expense of your own progeny.”

For much of their political history, particularly since the Enlightenment, Jews have identified with the progressive Left. Israel itself, although funded by oligarchs, was launched largely as a socialist experiment, epitomized in the kibbutzim.

Today the political Left has betrayed that loyalty, becoming prime movers against Israel and Jews on the ground. In America, as many as 19 Democratic senators voted with Bernie Sanders to block America from sending several types of weaponry to Israel. Even though most still identify as Democrats, many American Jews are finding that their former “safe spaces”—leftist parties, big cities, universities, the media—have morphed into places where anti-Semitic incidents regularly occur, even though they often are vigorously downplayed. 

Modern political movements have not infrequently laid claim to being based in science, from immigration restriction and eugenics (in the U.S. after WWI), to antisemitism and race ideology (in Hitler’s Germany), to Communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin). Each of these falsely invoked a scientific consensus that convinced highly educated citizens, who were nonetheless ignorant of science, to set aside the anxieties associated with their ignorance. Since all scientists supposedly agreed, there was no need for them to understand the science. 

Of course, this version of “the science” is the opposite of science itself. Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority. However, the success that science achieves has earned it a measure of authority in the public’s mind. This is what politicians frequently envy and exploit.
 
The climate panic fits into this same pattern and, as in all the preceding cases, science is in fact irrelevant. At best, it is a distraction which has led many of us to focus on the numerous misrepresentations of science entailed in what was purely a political movement.
 

From the start of the climate panic, very prominent scientists opposed the claim that increasing CO₂ was a significant danger to climate due to man’s industrial emissions. A select group of these are listed below:

William Nierenberg: Director of America’s foremost oceanographic research institute, Scripps Oceanographic Institute of the University of California, San Diego. The Institute is located at La Jolla. Nierenberg was also a member of the National Academy, and he chaired the massive 1983 NRC (National Research Council of the National Academy) report on climate. He died in 2000.

Frederick Seitz: Often regarded as one of the fathers of condensed phase physics, he was a professor at the University of Illinois, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and President of Rockefeller University. He died in 2008.

Jerome Namias: Professor of Meteorology at Scripps and former head of NOAA’s long-range forecasting. Namias was also a member of the National Academy. He died in 1997.

Robert Jastrow: First chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Upon his retirement, the bulk of the institute was moved back to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. However, a rump group headed by James Hansen successfully fought to remain in New York. Jastrow continued as Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College. He died in 2008.