The Claremont Independent (The CI) describes itself on its website as “a national thought leader and a powerful voice on behalf of those too few or too quiet to defend their own right to speak and be heard.”
The publication is unaffiliated with any of the 5Cs and reports primarily on campus news, with an emphasis on in-depth investigative pieces and op-eds that tend to lean conservative. They currently only publish online and list their physical address as a post office box in Claremont.
The CI recently came into national focus after The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a letter to Pomona College demanding student disciplinary records related to alleged “occurrences of antisemitism” on campus to be turned over by April 10, 2025.
The letter, sent on March 27, 2025, cites The CI six times. It specifically references their coverage of the May 2024 student encampment, protests at Pomona President Gabrielle Starr’s house and the April 2024 arrests of students at Alexander Hall. On their website, The CI now boasts that their news coverage “has even reached the halls of the U.S. Congress.”
On April 7, 2025, The CI published an article titled “5 Hours in Carnegie Hall – A Full Account of the Oct. 7 Takeover,” authored by Emilio Bankier PO ’27. The article includes names of professors and dozens of identifying photos of students at the protest.
Given their national spotlight, this article seeks to dive deeper into The CI as an organization. Where did they originate? As the only student-run newspaper based at the 5Cs that receives funding entirely from private donors, where does their funding come from? And what role do they play in the political landscape on campus and beyond?
Origins
The current CI was founded in 1996 by two Claremont McKenna College students, John Nelson CM ’98 and Ashwin Navin CM ’99. Both Navin and Christopher Skinnell CM ’99, who together served as the paper’s inaugural editors-in-chief, currently sit on the Board of Governors of CMC’s Rose Institute.
The CI began as a revitalization of a previous “Claremont Independent,” a Pomona College-based newspaper started by several conservative Pomona students in 1989. In their first issue, published in November 1996, the editors of The CI write that the earlier Claremont Independent disappeared when their donors “grew disenchanted with [Pomona]” as it “became less diverse” and turned into a “homogenous left-wing freak festival.”
According to Kendall White PO ’27, current editor-in-chief of The CI, the paper as it exists today began in 1996, and has little relation to the older Pomona-run publication.
Before leading The CI, Navin had previously published an opinion in The Collage, a weekly 5C paper, detailing his experience at a Pat Buchanan rally. Navin bemoaned the close-mindedness of his liberal peers, writing, “Not one of them could cite evidence of their claims, and tragically, not one of them was thinking for themselves.” He would go on to co-found The CI a few months later.
In their founding issue, The CI’s editors cite disagreement with The Collage as a key impetus for starting their own publication, referencing the paper’s “half-truths and liberal lies.”
This first issue also served as a special elections issue, especially focusing on the divisive California Civil Rights Initiative — a proposition that effectively ended affirmative action in California — and the 5C campus protests against it, which reportedly became violent. Since their founding, The CI has provided space for conservative thought in the midst of campus-wide protest and unrest.
While The CI no longer markets itself as an explicitly conservative publication, they still emphasize themselves as a space for controversial, or unpopular, opinions.
Their website states that “college campuses have become increasingly hostile to reasoned debate and the discussion of unpopular views,” but that with the help of donations “we can keep fighting back.”
Funding
The original “Claremont Independent” was founded after receiving a grant from The Institute of Educational Affairs (IEA) as part of their Collegiate Network, a conservative “counterintelligensia” project started by Bill Simon and Irving Kristol in 1978. Simon was the former U.S. Secretary of Treasury to Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Kristol has been credited with the founding of “neoconservativism.”
The Collegiate Network served to promote “Western values” and “free-market” philosophy on college campuses by funding dozens of right-wing university publications, including The Harvard Salient, The Dartmouth Review and The Stanford Review.
While the IEA was dissolved in 1990, administration of their Collegiate Network passed to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) in 1995, a year before The CI was restarted. A nonprofit dedicated to promoting conservatism on college campuses, the ISI currently funds over 70 student publications through the Network — including The CI.
Today there is minimal readily available information on who funds “The Claremont Independent” or how much funding the publication receives, beyond the fact that they receive no money from the Claremont Colleges. In the “About” section of their website The CI states, “we are grateful for the generous support of private foundations and individuals who make our hard-hitting journalism possible.”
The CI operates a 501c3 organization, Friends of the Claremont Independent, which reports annual gross receipts under $50,000, and therefore files 990-N returns, which do not include donor lists.
According to White, The CI receives donations primarily from 5C alumni and from two institutions: the ISI and The Fund For American Studies (TFAS).
“The Independent receives most of its donations from private donors, who are usually alumni of the colleges,” White said. “We also have two institutional donors that contribute small grants to The CI: The Fund for American Studies and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.”
Like the ISI, TFAS is a think tank founded to push patriotic and conservative agendas in the classroom. On their website, TFAS states that they were established in response to “the counterculture and many youth movements of the 1960s,” which “rejected the American political tradition.” They now seek to instill “ideas of individual liberty, personal responsibility and economic freedom” in new generations.
In 2023, TFAS founded The Center for Excellence in Journalism (CEJ). Similar to the Collegiate Network — and headed by a former director of the Network, Ryan Wolfe — the CEJ targets student journalism. The initiative provides grants and support to select campus publications, and early-career opportunities to “conservative- and libertarian-minded journalists.”
On Oct. 24, the CEJ featured The CI’s article “Anonymous Statement Defends Disruption of Hillel Oct. 7 Memorial at Pomona College” via their LinkedIn.
The ISI’s Collegiate Network is part of their overall mission to bring conservatism into higher education. On their website, they state that “our nation’s civic life should be grounded in the full heritage of Western civilization.” The ISI was also listed on the Advisory Board of Project 2025 and boasts alumni such as Peter Thiel, Samuel Alito and Ed Feulner, founder of the Heritage Institute.
Project 2025 is the policy proposal authored by the Heritage Institute, one of the most prominent far-right think tanks in Washington, which gave the Trump Administration a pathway to a Christian Nationalist vision of America, championing rollbacks on minority rights and unprecedented consolidation of political power into the hands of the president.
As of early August, the Project 2025 agenda was halfway completed. The project represents the consolidation of the most powerful conservative voices in America today, and directly connects the Trump Administration to The CI’s sponsors.
The final piece of information on who funds The CI that exists online is a 2014 990 form, reporting around $32,000 in net assets. That 990 form also lists Anthony Fucaloro and Christopher Nadon among the organization’s officers, directors and key employees. Fucaloro and Nadon were both CMC professors at the time, though Nadon left the college this year. Fucaloro and Nadon also both boast past articles in the “Claremont Review of Books,” a publication of the Claremont Institute, which is another Project 2025 Advisory Board member.
White said that “The CI occasionally consults with faculty members for advice and guidance,” but that Nadon and Fucaloro are both no longer officially associated with the publication.
Broader Political Context
The CI is sponsored by the same forces that are targeting the activism of students and professors across America today. It is one branch of a broader network of student newspapers set up to advance a conservative agenda on campuses.
Roger Ream, the president of TFAS, spoke in an interview this year about the motivations behind the organization’s funding of student publications.
“These newspapers accomplish two objectives,” Ream said. “They provide a training ground for conservative students interested in careers in journalism, and they inform students about what is happening on campus, which was particularly important after Oct. 7, 2023, when many of the official newspapers were not covering things on campus like they should have.”
Other members of ISI’s Collegiate Network beyond The CI have also covered pro-Palestine protests in ways that reveal participant identities. “The Harvard Salient” published identifying photos of their Spring 2024 student encampment, and “The Stanford Review” did the same when covering a “Free Palestine” campus rally.
Prior to “5 Hours in Carnegie Hall,” The CI itself had already covered the Carnegie Hall story 11 times in the six months following occupation. During that same time period, they published 24 additional stories, meaning that the Carnegie Hall occupation alone had already made up 31.4 percent of the Independent’s reporting from Oct. 7, 2024 up until April 6, 2025.
The level of scrutiny on this one event feeds neatly into wider national narratives of campus antisemitism — narratives which materialize as federal and administrative repression of student pro-Palestine action. Constant stories about supposedly out-of-control universities serve to justify government overreach into spheres of higher education.
Pomona received their letter from Congress in the context of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech across college campuses. This repression has included threatening the residential status of students and scholars suspected of being involved in pro-Palestinian activism, and revoking international students’ visas.
Just two days before the letter was sent, for example, Rumeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University and Turkish national, was kidnapped by ICE agents in retaliation for an op-ed she wrote in a school newspaper criticizing Tufts’ administration’s response to a pro-Palestine student protest.
Months later, the pressure on universities, students and professors continues. On Sept. 4, for example, 160 UC Berkeley students and professors were notified that the university had given their personal information over to the Trump Administration as part of their cooperation with a federal investigation into alleged campus antisemitism.
Although they have distanced themselves from their more reactionary and blatantly conservative roots, The CI remains part of a nationwide project of student journalism meant to sow conservatism on college campuses and support the repression of student activism.
Comment from The Claremont Independent:
“Donors, whether individual or institutional, do not have any influence over the Claremont Independent’s news coverage or editorial positions.”
“The request for comment which was provided to the Claremont Independent by TSL was overly broad. We cannot offer substantive comment on the CI’s ‘history’ or ‘coverage of Palestine activism’ without being told what specific elements of those two things we are being asked to respond to. That we only had 24 hours to provide comment on such sweeping themes is a further source of frustration, particularly as TSL has been working on this article for over two months.”
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