Nevada Senate hopeful Sam Brown stays silent on far-right donor

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sam Brown doesn’t distance himself from the radical plans detailed in Project 2025 and has refused to answer questions from the Sun about the extreme measures in the 920-page far-right policy guide, which broadly seeks to reshape America under Republican leadership in the White House.

Brown and his handlers wouldn’t agree to an interview about his relationship with Thomas Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing California think tank that also serves as a top partner organization responsible for Project 2025.

We reached out to the Brown campaign multiple times over the past two weeks.

Brown’s silence doesn’t disguise his ties with Klingenstein, who since the beginning of 2023 has donated nearly $5.5 million to pro-Brown groups in a critical race against U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., that could determine majority control in the Senate.

Nearly $4.5 million of Klingenstein’s contributions went to Club for Growth Action, a conservative super political action committee that is running a multimillion-dollar ad buy against Rosen. Another $1 million went to the Sentinel Action Fund, whose advertising urges Rosen, along with three other Democratic senators, to “retire with Biden.”

“Sam Brown’s trying to hide,” Rosen told the Sun. “He can’t commit to anything because we know what he really believes, and that’s not what Nevadans want.”

The financial backing is just the beginning.

In a video published to his YouTube channel in July, Klingenstein gives his support to Brown, emphasizing that the two men have a common enemy in “woke radicals.” He speaks for the candidate, saying Brown “hates how they are attacking America, its institutions and values.”

The video has nearly 2 million views.

Critics of Project 2025 say it’s an effort to install a white Christian nationalist theocracy in the United States, is marbled with racist policies and brimming with conspiracy theories with violent undertones. It would give the president more power than any other president in history, including calling for the replacement of thousands of nonpartisan federal civil service workers with political appointees loyal to the president. Such a move would render everything from the basic administration of government services to the reliability of reported statistics by the government into a political process.

Defenders of the extensive plans — ostensibly designed as a roadmap for a second presidency by Donald Trump — acknowledge that it’s an effort to restructure America, but they say it’s necessary to defend the nation from a perceived “woke” left-wing agenda and from immigrants.

It additionally questions the validity of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed fraud in his defeat to President Joe Biden.

Those claims have been proven false in every one of many dozens of court challenges in Nevada and across the nation. Indeed, no court has found any credible evidence of such fraud presented by Trump and his backers. In Nevada, the Republican secretary of state at the time assured the public the election was free and fair and untainted by meaningful fraud.

Additionally, Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” calls on the next Republican administration to outlaw abortion drugs, eliminate the Department of Education, overhaul the FBI and remove all references to gender-affirming care from federal programs.

Project 2025 was produced by more than 100 former Trump administration officials. Trump now says Project 2025 was not related to his campaign despite earlier citing it as a blueprint for his presidency should he win.

“It’s an agenda nobody asked for. It’s an agenda that serves nobody except the richest and the most extreme amongst us,” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz said last week at the Democratic National Convention. “Trust me on this, when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”

The plan specifically mentions Nevada in calling for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, which is about 90 miles from Las Vegas in Nye County. Brown in 2022 said having a nuclear waste repository here would have been an “incredible opportunity for revenue” but has since retracted the position.

Brown’s plans for education also align with the extreme measures spelled out in Project 2025 in that he wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. “It all starts with returning control to the local level, empowering parents and teachers — not D.C. bureaucrats, unions or activists — to make the best decisions for students,” Brown’s campaign website says. The Department of Education has no control of the nation’s school curricula or nearly any education policies; those powers already reside with state and local school boards.

Project 2025 also plans to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and move those duties to the White House to advance “the next president’s conservative agenda.” Critics say this amounts to creating a privately controlled police force for the president, free to do his bidding, and removes bipartisan congressional oversight that currently exists for the Department of Homeland Security.

Klingenstein’s representative didn’t respond to an interview request from the Sun.

Klingenstein, in the video, says Brown knows white children are being “taught they are oppressors,” mentioning that a mother had told the candidate that she didn’t want her child “on the back burner.”

Klingenstein says the country is in a cultural “Cold Civil War” against “woke” ideology. The tech industry, educational institutions and corporate media are aligned with the Democratic Party to create a totalitarian regime, he claims.

“Given Brown’s far-right record putting MAGA politics ahead of Nevadans, it’s no surprise that his Senate campaign is being bankrolled by the same extremists who are behind this dangerous right-wing project,” a spokesperson for the Nevada Democratic Party wrote in a statement to the Sun.

Even with the support, Brown is running from behind Rosen. At the end of June, Rosen’s campaign had $25 million to his $6 million. The Democratic incumbent was 14 points ahead in recent polling of Nevada voters.

Ending his video on Brown, Klingenstein looks ahead, saying that people like Brown, Trump and “an army of spirited, patriotic men and women” give him hope for the future.

“These woke radicals kick and spit on America’s past,” he says during the video. “They hate the Sam Browns. Their ideology is Utopian in its vision, tyrannical in its execution and bloody in its result. They aim to destroy America.”