The conservative writer and radio host Erick Erickson has long spoken out against what he sees to be the growth of dangerous and illiberal ideas on the American right, ideas that undermine the very values at the heart of conservatism. This week, he published a deep dive into how proponents of these extreme views are funded. We believe it’s an important piece of journalism, one that shines a light on shadowy behind-the-scenes players trying to build a new Republican Party in their image. We invite you to read this lightly edited and condensed version of Erick’s piece. —The Editors
A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even have some standing with the vice president of the United States.
Some of them believe America is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths.
It begins with shampoo.
Charles Haywood made his fortune manufacturing shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair-care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out bile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker.”
In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” “Women will not be permitted to choose career over family.” “Men will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.” Those are his own words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.
Elsewhere, Haywood has speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network,” a model he says he drew from the groups of white settler farmers formed in southern African countries and colonies while black Africans were fighting for majority rule. Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he wrote that his already favorable impression of the man who oversaw at least 50,000 executions had become positively glowing.
He is not alone in that fixation. In 2024, MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec and the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec authored a book called Unhumans: Socialist Revolution—Tactics for Patriots to Survive a Communist Uprising, which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. The book was endorsed by Vice President J.D. Vance, who said it “show[s] us what to do to fight back” against communists.
Josh Abbotoy, the co-founder of the Christian nationalist group American Reformer who is now building a Christian nationalist community in Tennessee, has also written that America is going to need a “Protestant Franco.” This is not a coincidence, but an attempt to shift the Overton window toward state power and brutality.
A crank with a blog is a crank with a blog. The problem is that Charles Haywood is not on the outside of the conservative movement. He has used his wealth to get inside it and reshape institutions that are building the future of the right, all with the aim of destroying our constitutional republic and repurposing it to enforce the aims of the far right.
Haywood’s personal foundation has given the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank, $390,500 since 2022, according to the conservative policy analyst Jason Hart. Hart also found that, according to Claremont’s most recent annual report, Haywood sits on the publication committee of Claremont’s The American Mind, one of four men who do. Claremont let Haywood’s fraternal order get itself incorporated under Claremont’s own nonprofit status. That order is the Society for American Civic Renewal, and Claremont’s president, Ryan Williams, confirmed he serves on that group’s board.
Claremont’s Scott Yenor has been one of the group’s organizational leaders. Jason Hart reports the chief marketing officer of The Blaze is also a member. So is Nate Fischer, the chief executive of the venture capital firm New Founding and a prominent “national conservative” who also helps lead American Reformer, a group whose stated purpose is to “recapture” existing Christian institutions.
Membership records obtained by Talking Points Memo show the Society for American Civic Renewal is open only to heterosexual, Christian men. In March 2024, getting ahead of a reporter he expected to write about the group, Fischer published its internal mission statement himself. That document describes the members as “un-hyphenated Americans” who hold a Christianity unblurred by modernist philosophy, and it says they intend to make that inheritance permanently dominant in American political and social life.
Its stated objectives are explicit: preferential treatment for members in business; coordinated action on “hiring,” “contracts,” and “leadership succession”; and a standing list of men ready to be hired by the government once a friendly regime exists. The religious qualifications are a stand-alone clause in the document.
And there is, of course, a racial component to all this. Haywood himself has repeatedly used a slur for Indians on social media, according to screenshots posted by Hart, and has argued that the Allies, not the Nazis, were the genuinely barbaric power in World War II. He has also praised Darryl Cooper, the revisionist World War II writer who argues that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the villain of World War II. When a critic pointed out Haywood’s casual use of an ethnic slur, a senior aide to the chairman of Claremont’s board bragged that nobody cares.
Much of the right waves off groups like the far-right Patriot Front—the masked and uniformed outfit whose leader, Thomas Rousseau, marched at Charlottesville, Virginia—as a federal setup or a Democratic attempt to make conservatives look bad. Haywood, meanwhile, shared a video of Rousseau delivering an Independence Day speech in July and told his followers, “This speech is very good. And this guy is very impressive.”
Haywood’s partner in the Rufo debate was Fischer, who has acknowledged his own membership in Haywood’s order. Haywood also donates to Fischer’s American Reformer organization, which in turn financially backs the Center for Baptist Leadership, run by William Wolfe. Wolfe calls himself a Christian nationalist and says his project is replacing the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention with men further to the right.
Back in 2023, Christian writer Jake Meador of Mere Orthodoxy documented the business relationship Fischer and Abbotoy had with the writer then known only as Raw Egg Nationalist. Raw Egg Nationalist has a magazine that runs pornography alongside fiction about murdering one’s girlfriend, and his books’ and his magazine’s annuals are published by Antelope Hill, a white nationalist publisher with ties to neo-Nazis. My Christian denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, has barred American Reformer from its annual meetings, and it was right to do so.
These are not separate movements with a coincidental overlap. They are a small group of men, funded by a smaller group of donors, working through think tanks, a venture fund, and denominational conventions, with people at The Blaze amplifying their views.
Nearly all of their thinking traces back to one man: Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist who presided over the Association of National Socialist German Jurists and edited the Third Reich’s newspaper for lawyers. Unlike the German intellectuals who later pleaded ignorance, Schmitt never repudiated Nazism. He taught that politics consists in the sorting of men into friends and enemies, and the enemy is defined by the genuine possibility of killing him.
Christians have an obvious objection to this: Christ commanded us to love our enemies. But Schmitt erroneously argued that Jesus separated private adversaries from public adversaries, and we were to love the private adversary, not the public one. In other words, the command to love your enemies does not apply to politics. Haywood has embraced Schmitt’s perversion of Scripture. In his own treatment of Schmitt, he conceded he could find nothing from the early church fathers about our duties toward public enemies, and decided the silence existed because the distinction was too obvious to need stating. In reality, as numerous Christian writers have noted, Schmitt, in a fit of eisegesis, twisted Scripture to support his argument.
Haywood built on Schmitt’s work anyway. And Haywood’s reasoning has spread outward to infect all sorts of Christian and conservative individuals and entities.
American Reformer has published the argument that Christians can no longer answer politics by quoting “love your enemies” and must instead set out to defeat those enemies. Claremont’s The American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must be willing to commit violence of their own. The Christian nationalist writer Andrew Isker, who has partnered on projects with Abbotoy and Fischer, wrote a book teaching that Christians must learn to hate the world. Together, these men have created a permission structure for cruelty that their faith was supposed to forbid.
Haywood’s NETTR formulation has crept out of his writings and into the ordinary operations of the right. This past weekend, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner—an important statewide position—posted a photograph of University of Texas students of Indian ethnicity who were celebrating a comeback win against Ohio State. French’s caption: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
Those kids assimilated exactly the way the critics of immigration always demanded that immigrants assimilate. They put on their school colors and Stetsons and went to the game. One of them, born in Texas to an American father and an Indian mother, told a local television station that the post misrepresented what was in fact an ethnically mixed crowd.
French did not retreat an inch. In the hours after outgoing Republican Texas senator John Cornyn objected, he doubled down and called Cornyn a RINO. Jack Posobiec—whose book, again, the vice president blurbed—turned his fire on the Republicans who criticized French’s statement and announced that the party now knew who its undercover enemies were. Posobiec was not a stranger riding to the rescue. When French chaired the Tarrant County Republican Party, it hosted Posobiec as a guest. The right-wing pundit Benny Johnson likewise leaped to French’s defense. The NETTR gang of the right, poisoned by Haywood’s arguments, rallied to Bo French and attacked any and all on the right who called him out.
Running alongside all of this, from a different direction and with different money, is Nick Fuentes, the internet pundit and leader of the racist and antismetic “Groyper” movement. He has never been coy about his ambitions. “There’s Groypers everywhere,” he told his audience. “There’s Groypers in the administration. There’s Groypers at Turning Point USA. There’s Groypers at Fox News, at Daily Wire.” He has instructed his followers to infiltrate the Republican Party and Turning Point and change them from the inside, and he has boasted that his people are working their way into the highest ranks of leadership. In 2023 he wrote that his “White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist” views, once radioactive, were now pounding on the door of the mainstream.
I do not think Haywood, his compatriots, and Fuentes are coordinating. I think something worse is true. These are two separate projects, with separate donors and separate audiences, converging on the same destination, and the institutions of the right are absorbing both without resistance. One works by throwing money around to shape boards, publication committees, and institutions. The other works by radicalizing 19-year-olds on livestreams and then placing them in field offices. They arrive at the same place, which is a country where your ancestry determines your standing, and the state decides what your family is for.
A shampoo fortune has bought off conservative and Christian advocacy groups. But it has not bought us all.
Dreher, who had been his friend and an early champion of Vance’s memoir, went to vice president last fall and urged him to draw a firmer line against the Groypers and antisemitism. As a result, Dreher says Vance cut him off, although Dreher says they’ve since mended their relationship. Haywood’s foundation is also a recurring funder of American Moment, the staffing pipeline founded in 2021 with Vance’s support, which places young conservatives in presidential administration jobs. Vance has identified himself with the “postliberal” right and told an audience at Catholic University in 2023 that “There is no meaningful distinction between the public and private sector in the United States of America.” He seems to view that as a sad reality, but instead of reducing government’s sway over private life, he wants conservatives to wield it.
Conservatives spent 60 years arguing that the family and the local community, not the state, should decide what a good and moral life looks like. The postliberal right now rejects that idea, saying that the government should be empowered to define and enforce its idea of what a good life is. Haywood has written down what the second position requires, and funded the intellectual enforcers to bully and silence dissent on the right. These men and their ambitions require a state with unlimited means that can seize a man’s property for thinking the wrong thoughts about his own country.
This is ultimately a spiritual problem, not a political one. Inside the church, Satan spreads racism and ethno-nationalism, and he does it by telling frightened men that their blood is their birthright. The groups Haywood funds and their related entities are supporting this malignancy. And far too few leaders on the right have been willing to condemn them.
Scripture says that on the last day God will separate the sheep from the goats. In the here and now, some of the goats have empowered themselves to separate neighbor from neighbor, Christian from Christian, and people from their own families, all to advance a perverted utopia where they can rule in their own image.
They are as weird and malcontented as the AI freaks and their effective altruism. A shampoo fortune has bought off conservative and Christian advocacy groups. That money has purchased compliance, invitations, acceptance, advancement, and a great deal of acquiescence and silence from many conservatives. But it has not bought us all.
