On September 16th, 2026, conservative radio host Erick Erickson published an investigation into Charles Haywood, the Society for American Civic Renewal, Claremont, American Reformer, New Founding, American Moment, and the network of donors and organizers bringing a whole new set of authoritarian ideas to the conservative right.
The backlash the article received could only be described as biblical.
I have spent two years in the trenches examining the phenomenon gripping American conservatism after President Trump’s 2024 victory, so I expected the reaction Erickson’s article received. In fact, I got the same reaction when I wrote The Long Game in March of 2026.
American conservatives still do not understand the convulsions tearing through the right, and this weekend on social media once again solidified this point. Many still think they can engage in a debate of ideas, but the other side is not interested in debate. The other side is engaged in a demolition project. Now, the project has many points of entry, and the people who enter on the second floor may not understand what is happening on the top floor, but that doesn’t change the project.
This is an existential battle over the ideological and theological DNA of the Republican Party’s base. A counterrevolution has been running through the Republican Party for two years, but the convergence point can be traced all the way back to 2019.
The counterrevolution has many factions. On the surface, there is Tucker and Candace, the more bombastic section of the demolition crew. Then there are the intellectual integralist thought leaders, such as Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. There are foreign-policy think tanks that convert Obama-style foreign policy into conservative-coded vocabulary, like the Quincy Institute. There is a Catholic integralist infrastructure and a corresponding Protestant one.
So pervasive is this hostile takeover that it has many factions that may or may not agree. There is no conspiracy, but there most certainly is a convergence. Though, if you point that out, you will immediately be labeled a neocon, a liberal, or an establishment hack, and those represent the kindest criticisms you will face.
The first mask came off in March of 2026, when the Catholic side of postliberalism was exposed at a large scale. The second mask came off this weekend, when Erickson traced the Protestant side of the postliberal project. The convergence is postliberalism, and while many in this arena like to dabble in what I call Nazism-lite, their danger actually lies in their love of all things authoritarian and the one thing they all seem to have in common: a desire to shred the Constitution.
One of the most telling responses to the Erickson article came from William Wolfe, the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. Ignore the wholly unserious argument that this was “AI slop” and focus on one particular tactic used by Wolfe, because it really highlights what it means to be considered “woke right.”
Wolfe declared that anyone who dared to defend Erickson would be ostracized by real “Christian conservatives” and insinuated that a factual exposure of extremism was actual violence. This article will go into some of the important factual takeaways about the network at the center of Erickson’s article, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how important this response is to the overall heart of the problem.
The woke right derives its name from its love affair with leftist debate tactics. They do not engage with any of the factual claims asserted against members of their friend group. Instead, they redefine the debate publicly so they can run a long and vicious struggle session against anyone who dares to stand up to them.
They use all the woke left’s tricks during this struggle session. They redefine the terms of engagement, proceed with ad hominem attacks, threaten social extinction, and then make sure to insinuate that the person who reported on fact-based examples of extremism within the Republican ranks is actually responsible for any hypothetical violence that will ensue.
Their viciousness is directly proportionate to their guilt because the postliberal project can only survive if they trick conservatives into redefining what it means to be a conservative. So they circle the wagons around lies, gaslighting, and generally moronic authoritarian ideas. They do not defend the ideas. Instead, they attack the messenger.
The result is that regular conservatives are lost in a sea of online battles where the winner is decided by foreign bots, fake ratios, and a culture that rewards the meanest, most abrasive response instead of the one rooted in actual truth.
The rest of this article will lay out factual claims that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in 2019, a hostile takeover of the conservative movement was initiated by people of different ideological beliefs. Some may dabble in a love of fascism, others dabble in the ideas of esoteric Russian pseudo-philosopher Alexander Dugin, and some even dabble in their love of feudalism and monarchy.
Where they all converge is the Constitution.
They must prove to conservatives that the Constitution is a product of secular liberalism, that individual rights are a product of Christian Zionists, and that America is a blood-and-soil nation that must be governed according to man’s vague notions of the common good, untethered from the idea of covenant.
Why?
Well, because America is a covenantal constitutional republic.
Classical liberalism was not the only thing that influenced the Founders. They want to make Christian conservatives believe America is secular, not Christian enough, and in need of authoritarians who will restore Christendom in America.
They are, of course, as delusional as they are childish.
America was founded on Political Protestantism™, the political doctrine that translates biblical covenant, individual conscience, limited temporal authority, and divided jurisdiction into a cohesive framework of constitutional government.
And for those who mistakenly attribute the separation of church and state to secularism, let me assure you: it is the political implementation of one of Christ’s most important commands.
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” — Matthew 22:21 (KJV)
The future of the Christian conservative movement stands at a crossroads. For the entirety of this country’s existence, God has sat on the throne above government, but the new iteration of “conservatives” seeks to put government in that place.
Will enough conservatives move past their tribalism and stand up to stop them? That remains to be seen, but either way, real conservatives should care about facts, and the facts undeniably point to an infiltration of the American right.
The Birth of Postliberalism
The postliberal project did not suddenly appear after Trump’s second victory. Its intellectual foundations had been developing for years, but 2018 was an important turning point. That year, Patrick Deneen released Why Liberalism Failed and Yoram Hazony released The Virtue of Nationalism. The books were very different, but they shared an important premise: the problems plaguing America were not simply the result of progressivism gone wild. The problem went deeper. Liberalism itself had failed.
That distinction matters because constitutional conservatives had traditionally argued that government had become too large and powerful and needed to be restrained. The emerging postliberal right offered a different answer. Instead of dismantling that power, why not keep it and use it for different ends?
Tucker Carlson brought a version of that argument into mainstream conservative politics on January 2, 2019. In a monologue later published by Fox News under the headline “Mitt Romney Supports the Status Quo. But for Everyone Else, It’s Infuriating,” Tucker denounced a “ruling class of mercenaries” and rejected free-market capitalism as an end in itself. The economy, he argued, should be organized around strong families rather than shareholder returns.
Claremont immediately embraced the argument. Michael Anton responded in The American Mind with an essay appropriately titled “Tucker’s Right.”
A few months later, Sohrab Ahmari took the argument much further.
On May 29, he published “Against David French-ism” in First Things, a Catholic publication highly sympathetic to integralist ideas. The ostensible target was Never Trumper David French, but whatever you think about French is almost entirely beside the point. French was useful because he gave Ahmari a recognizable enemy through which he could introduce ideas the MAGA movement had never actually embraced.
Ahmari declared that there would be no return to the pre-Trump conservative consensus. He correctly identified many of the grievances animating MAGA and then redirected them toward a postliberal solution. Conservatives, he argued, should fight the culture war with the goal of “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” and creating “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” Civility and decency were merely “secondary values.”
But the target was much larger than David French.
Ahmari went after free speech, due process, religious liberty, pluralism, originalism, and limits on state power. By calling constitutional conservatism “French-ism,” he collapsed two entirely different arguments into one: opposition to French’s anti-Trump politics and opposition to the constitutional restraints French happened to defend.
It was an effective sleight of hand. Trump’s coalition wanted strict border enforcement, economic nationalism, deregulation, tax cuts, originalist judges, religious liberty, and an America First foreign policy. It had also spent years railing against the administrative state and the left’s abuse of government power.
Ahmari’s answer was not to restrain that power. It was to take it.
Two months later, many of these intellectual strands came together at the first National Conservatism Conference in Washington. The conference’s own description said organizers intended to establish an “institutional base,” develop “substantial ideas,” and create an “extensive support network.”
And that is exactly what happened.
Tucker Carlson delivered the keynote, “Big Business Hates Your Family.” Deneen and Hazony supplied intellectual arguments against liberalism. Peter Thiel brought access to donors. JD Vance represented a path into electoral politics. Oren Cass was developing policy infrastructure. Michael Anton, Ryan Williams, and Arthur Milikh connected the project to Claremont.
Not everyone in that room believed the same things. That is important, because the story of postliberalism is not the story of a secret group of people sitting around a table agreeing to a common plan.
It is the story of convergence.
At roughly the same time, another insurgency was developing on the ethnonationalist right. Nick Fuentes openly encouraged his followers to infiltrate conservative institutions. The resulting “Groyper Wars” targeted Turning Point USA events, where coordinated groups confronted speakers with questions designed to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse on the right.
The two movements were not synonymous, and National Conservatism initially tried to keep its distance. But the boundaries became increasingly porous. Rod Dreher would later estimate that roughly 30 percent of Washington staffers had some degree of infatuation with the Groypers.
Then the intellectual attack moved to the Constitution itself.
In March 2020, Adrian Vermeule published “Beyond Originalism” in The Atlantic.
“Originalism has now outlived its utility,” he announced.
In its place, Vermeule proposed common-good constitutionalism, an approach far more comfortable with authority, hierarchy, moral legislation, presidential power, and an empowered administrative state. He rejected the premise that constitutional theory should principally concern itself with maximizing individual autonomy or minimizing abuses of government power. Law, he wrote, “may act in a parental capacity, including against subjects’ own perceptions of their interests.”
This was almost the inverse of what Republican voters had been promised for decades. Conservatives were told that the purpose of originalist judges was to restore the Constitution’s original meaning and restrain government officials who exceeded it. Vermeule wanted the state empowered to pursue substantive moral ends, even against the wishes of the people supposedly benefiting from them.
And while these arguments were being fought out publicly, something more concrete was beginning to take shape behind the scenes.
Internal records later obtained by The Guardian show that the Claremont Institute fiscally sponsored the Society for American Civic Renewal and donated $26,248 to it in 2020. Claremont president Ryan Williams served on SACR’s board. Charles Haywood’s Howdy Doody Good Times Foundation also donated to SACR—at least $50,000 according to its 2021 and 2022 tax filings—and gave Claremont at least another $50,000.
Publicly, SACR presented itself as an organization dedicated to civic and cultural renewal.
Privately, the documents tell a different story.
According to materials reported by The Guardian, SACR sought men who understood “authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” The organization planned to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime.” Internal plans contemplated preferential treatment for members, coordinated employment and contracting, leadership succession, and the cultivation of future public officials.
None of that appeared in the public-facing description.
A second set of reported vetting materials showed prospective members being evaluated on their views of Christian nationalism, Donald Trump, household authority, and the roles of husbands and wives.
The important point is not simply that a private organization had strong political beliefs. Plenty do. It is the discrepancy between what SACR publicly claimed to be building and what its own internal documents said it was building, particularly while the organization was cultivating economic relationships and assembling names for potential future government positions.
That discrepancy becomes harder to dismiss when placed next to what Claremont itself was publishing.
In 2021, The American Mind published “A New Conservatism Must Emerge,” describing American politics as a “regime-level struggle.” The competing regimes, its authors argued, could not coexist. “Hostile institutions” needed to be weakened, “recoverable institutions” reclaimed, and replacements built.
At almost exactly the same time, an organization Claremont sponsored was privately recruiting men and discussing personnel for a “renewed American regime.”
And then there was Charles Haywood.
via Revere Signal
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