Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.
The spending spree dwarfs the total $666,000 Klingenstein spent between 1992 and 2016, and in the last election cycle put Klingenstein in the top 40 contributors to national Republican candidates and committees.
In turn the spending has allowed him to connect with a long-standing network of conservative mega-donors centered on the billionaire-founded Club for Growth, which advocates for the reduction of government.
Klingenstein and the Claremont Institute push a harder-edged rightwing politics, and he appeared in a series of videos released in 2022 where he argued that American conservatives are in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”, and that “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, big tech… together with the government function as a totalitarian regime”.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Klingenstein’s pivot may indicate an effort to “pull of Republican outfits and donors towards more extreme positions”.
While the Claremont Institute has been called “the nerve center of the American Right” for its intellectual leadership and formation of hard right activists, Klingenstein appears to have a new appetite for directly impacting electoral politics.
The Guardian attempted to contact Klingenstein for comment, including by contacting lawyers for his private foundation, but was unsuccessful in getting a response.
Klingenstein is a partner in Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which administers a portfolio worth more than $2.3bn, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.
Klingenstein’s grandfather was a successful investor, and other members of his family pursue more conventional avenues for their philanthropy, but beginning in the Donald Trump era, Klingenstein has increasingly used his resources to pursue a hard-edged version of rightwing politics.
Klingenstein’s characterization of the political divide as a cold civil war – spelled out in a series of glossy YouTube videos – has been previously reported, as have some of his activities as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, a Claremont, California-based thinktank.
That organization charted a radical, pro-Trump course from 2016, culminating in Senior Fellow John Eastman advising Trump in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and delivering a fiery speech to the crowd of protesters in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.
But newly available filings reveal how he has advanced these ideas in electoral and cultural battles.
IRS filings show that Klingenstein has bankrolled Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits from a private foundation for decades. But Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance records show that Klingenstein’s political contributions prior to 2020 were modest and intermittent.
More recently, however, he appears to have joined a network of big-money donors centered on the Club for Growth and an associated Pac, Club for Growth Action.
A $2.5m donation in January made Klingenstein the fourth largest contributor to the Club for Growth Action Pac, by bringing his total contributions to the PAC to $7m since 2020.
The Guardian previously reported that the Club for Growth Pac’s biggest donors are conservative billionaires Richard Uihlein, Jeff Yass, and that the Pac was one of the largest supporters of Republican candidates who wanted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The most recent FEC data indicates that this is still the case, with Yass’s contributions totaling over $51m and Uihlein’s at over $77m. Another conservative mega donor, Virginia James, has contributed almost $14.5m to the Pac. Klingenstein has now joined them as one of Club for Growth Pac’s foremost funders.
Beirich said of the apparent collaboration between Klingenstein and these Club for Growth’s network of megadonors that “the Club for Growth has always prioritized taxes and economic issues and and dabbled in climate denial, but it’s interesting to see Maga types mixing with them”.
She added that “it might be an attempt to bring the Club for Growth into the Maga universe”.
There are indications that Klingenstein has succeeded in interesting Club for Growth donors in projects for which he is the principal funder.
The American Leadership Pac was registered in September 2022, and by mid-October it had received $1.5m in two tranches from Klingenstein, $500,000 from Richard Uihlein, $250,000 from William Koch, and another $250,000 from Koch’s petroleum company, Oxbow Carbon LLC.
Last January, Klingenstein poured another $500,000 to the Pac, bringing his total to $2m.
The Pac spent some $1.8m in the lead-up to the 2022 mid-term elections, mostly on text messages in support of a slate of Republicans and attacking their Democratic opponents nationwide, mostly in close districts around the country.
In 2020 Klingenstein contributed $500,000 to the American Principles Project Pac, which was the largest single contribution by an individual to that committee in its decade-long history, although Sean Fieler, described by watchdog group Right Wing Watch as an “anti-LGBTQ megafunder” has donated over $1.7m to the Pac in 13 donations since 2013.
Other individual donors include Robert Mercer, the rightwing hedge fund manager who achieved prominence after 2016 for his funding of both the Trump campaign and Breitbart News.
While the likes of Mercer, Uihlein and Yass let their donations do the talking, and largely eschew public commentary, Klingenstein has sought prominence as a culture warrior and far-right thought leader.
Another Pac where he is the leading donor sought not to promote election candidates, but Klingenstein’s own apocalyptic vision of a “cold civil war” in America.
In 2021 and 2022, Klingenstein contributed $500,000 to Firebrand Pac. The committee spent almost all of that by the end of 2022, with its main output being five YouTube videos starring Klingenstein, in which he claims that a “a cold civil war… is not a time for too much stability, compromise, or for imputing good motives to the enemy”.
Klingenstein’s role as the Claremont Institute’s board chairman and principal donor have been widely reported, but while he told the New York Times last year that Claremont had become “increasingly less reliant on me” for funding, figures released since indicate that he has significantly increased his level of financial support.
IRS filings from one of his private foundations, the Thomas D Klingenstein Fund, indicate that he has given more than $19m to the Claremont Institute since 2005, with the most recent publicly available filing showing a $2.97m donation in 2021, his highest to date, and almost half a million dollars more than the $2.5m figure the Times reported for 2019.
Klingenstein’s foundation also funds Claremont Institute offshoots like the American Strategy Group, whose website claims it is “dedicated to understanding the existential threats to the United States and western civilization presented by the Islamic world, Russia, China, and the loss of America’s founding principles”.
That organization is headed by Brian T Kennedy, a former president of the Claremont Institute, who told an audience at Hillsdale College in April that he had appeared in front of a “grand jury in Washington DC” because “I was one of thirty people subpoenaed from Trumpworld” in the justice department’s ongoing pursuit of those responsible for the events of January 6 2021.
Klingenstein’s foundation has also consistently funded the National Association of Scholars, and giving just over $100,000 in 2021 per its IRS filing. That organization is a rightwing nonprofit “that seeks to reform higher education” according to its website, and Klingenstein is a board member. He used the organization’s website to spell out an early version of his vision of “cold civil war” in 2021.
There are indications, both in spending records and Klingenstein’s public commentary, that he believes rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to be best placed to prosecute his side of the “war”.
In an interview with conservative broadcaster Steve Deace in 2022, posted to Klingenstein’s personal YouTube channel, Klingenstein said that “DeSantis understands that we’re in a war, and that’s the most important thing”.
“If you don’t understand we’re in a war, almost nothing else matters,” he added.
