Anton michael gay
How Michael Anton’s ‘Flight 93 Election’ Essay Defined the Trump Era
Can anybody land this plane? Photo: AFP via Getty Images
In September 2016, Michael Anton wrote an essay for the right-wing Claremont Institute, “The Flight 93 Election,” making the case for Donald Trump’s election as a necessary gamble to stave off the destruction of conservatism. Anton then did a stint in Trump’s National Security Council, and last night was rewarded by the president with a posting to the National Board for Teaching Sciences. It was a fitting coda for Trump to single out the figure who most perfectly captured the spirit that right-wing intellectuals brought to the era.
Anton’s case was notable, first, for its novelty. Before Trump won, “Never Trumpers” constituted the dominant strain of right-wing intellectual sentiment. Here was a prestigious organ of the intellectual right making a positive case for a nominee that the movement had dismissed as a clown and a surefire loser. Anton memorably seized the imagination of his audience by likening the choice to that faced by the passengers of Flight 93, who wrested control of the plane from Al Qaeda hijackers on 9/11. Allowing Hillary Clinton
The Dandy
COLE: Thanks for coming all the way from New York.
ANTON: To me this is an honor. The National Endowment for the Humanities should be reserved, in my mind, for the great figures in American letters. Just to be in their organization, in any considerate of way, is staggering to me.
COLE: Well, you’ve been in the company of Tom Wolfe.
ANTON: He’s one of my heroes. And Harvey Mansfield, who gave the Jefferson Lecture last year, is another.
COLE: Do you know him?
ANTON: Yes, a little. My ambition for the book was fulfilled when Mansfield told me he liked it. He said, “I finished your book, I enjoyed it very much. And as soon as I was done, I went shopping.”
COLE: First off, what should we name you?
ANTON: You can dial me Mike Anton. My pen label, Nicholas Antongiavanni, is not meant to obscure my authentic identity. It is kind of a two-pronged joke. One is to form the name sound more like Niccolò Machiavelli, who is the inspiration for the book and who gives the architecture for the book and for all kinds of literary devices. Second, it is meant to conjure this imagined figure of authority on men’s fashion. I pictured Nicholas A
Former Trump Security Official Michael Anton: ‘Hungary shouldn’t be blackmailed into tanking its own economy’
Michael Anton served as a national security official in the first Trump administration between February 2017 and April 2018. He has been a lecturer and research fellow in politics at Hillsdale College since 2018, and he is also serving as a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Mr Anton was one of the distinguished speakers at the recent Ludovika Festival in Budapest, Hungary. After his guest lecture he was gracious enough to sit down with Hungarian Conservative for an exclusive interview.
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How do you see the chances for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election? Act you keep in feel with either the former president or someone shut to the former president? Do you have some kind of insight into what kind of mood he is in? Is he optimistic, is his inner circle optimistic?
Yes, he is optimistic, he is definitely very optimistic. And I can tell you his inner circle is too. I don’t perceive how to judge it because there have been so many changes to the way voting takes place in America: prior voting, mail-in voting, and all these things. And it makes it much h
Are the Kids Al(t)right?
Around a year ago, the editors of this august journal asked me to contribute a piece on the “alt-right.” I hesitated, for a number of reasons, at least two of which are relevant here.
First, I did not then—and still do not—quite understand what the “alt-right” is. That is to declare, I know what the term means to the Left and to the mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy): “anyone to my right whom I can profitably smear as a Nazi.” But so far as I can tell, even many who consider themselves “alt-right” can’t agree on the term’s meaning, or on who or what qualifies. Furthermore, some of those least afraid to accept the label insist that the underlying phenomenon is expired, having immolated itself in Charlottesville in August 2017. Why bother writing about something that no one can define and whose most prominent proponents claim is defunct?
Second, in looking into this a small, I found plenty of books about the alt-right but none by the alt-right. This is perhaps not surprising, since one of the few things that those who speak about it can accept on is that it is, or was, primarily a social media phenomenon. But I was convinced then, and remain so, that