Ryan Williams
President of the Claremont Institute since approximately 2017; architect of the institute’s New Right pivot; publisher of The American Mind; “a kind of punk-rock CRB”
Who He Is
Ryan Williams became president of the Claremont Institute at approximately age 35, succeeding Michael Pack (who left to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media under Trump). Williams was the youngest president in the institute’s history, and he used the position to execute a deliberate generational and strategic shift.
He is a Claremont-trained scholar himself — part of the fellowship ecosystem he now runs — and was selected with a specific mandate: reach the New Right’s younger, more internet-native audiences while maintaining the institute’s scholarly credibility.
The American Mind Pivot
Williams’s most consequential institutional decision was founding and expanding The American Mind, the Claremont Institute’s online publication, as a complement to the more academic Claremont Review of Books. He described it as “a kind of punk-rock CRB” — edgier, faster, more polemical, aimed at “a younger audience” that includes the hard-right internet.
The dual-track strategy, as described by journalist Matthew Continetti: the CRB maintains intellectual respectability while The American Mind publishes “spicy stuff” — figures like Anton who also write “more controversial things” for the online outlet. The two publications gave Claremont a way to simultaneously claim scholarly seriousness and reach the fever swamp.
The American Mind published:
- The Fight is Now (November 4, 2020) — Claremont’s intervention in the stolen-election narrative
- Raw Egg Nationalist’s “The Decline Is Real” (2022) — connecting Claremont to the Hard Right manosphere
Reaching into the Fever Swamp
Williams’s explicit mandate, per journalist Matthew Continetti, was to become “very interested in harnessing some of the energy that he saw among young people who were being drawn to the alt-right or to nonmovement forms of rightism.” He incorporated Curtis Yarvin into the American Mind’s contributor roster and admitted figures from the Hard Right-adjacent internet into the Publius and Lincoln fellowship pipelines.
Nate Hochman, a then-24-year-old National Review fellow and Publius alum, praised this: the American Mind editors were “the only ones that were willing to actually reach into the goo of the fever swamp of young right-wing internet circles” and extend a hand. The institute positioned itself as the institutional ladder from the fringe to the mainstream.
On the Administrative State
Williams’s official intellectual agenda combined the traditional Claremont critique of the administrative state with a new “anti-woke” overlay. His goal: see the right “take control of all three branches of government for a generation,” dissolve certain federal agencies (CIA, Department of Education, shrink the EEOC), and stop what Anton called “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners.”
When Zerofsky challenged him on whether this sounded “counterrevolutionary,” Williams said: “One of the goals of the more polemical stuff is to wake up our fellow conservatives” — deflecting the charge while implicitly conceding it.
The Center for the American Way of Life
Williams opened Claremont’s first Washington D.C. office — the Center for the American Way of Life — run by Arthur Milikh. The center focused on fighting “wokeism” through institutions, with particular emphasis on defunding university programs with “social-justice ideology.” It collaborated with the Idaho Freedom Foundation to produce reports that led the Idaho legislature to cut $2.5 million from social-justice programming at public universities.
Cross-References
- Claremont Institute — the institution he leads
- Thomas Klingenstein — the board chair who empowered him
- The Fight is Now — the most consequential American Mind publication under his tenure
- Curtis Yarvin — brought into the American Mind orbit under Williams
- Hard Right — the “fever swamp” Williams sought to channel into Claremont’s pipeline
- Longmarcherism — the anti-woke institutional agenda Williams operationalized