The 2016 “Flight 93” essay: Michael Anton vindicated

 

Yesterday’s blog linked to William A Jacobson’s “pep talk” for conservatives.  Today, the executive editor of The Federalist, Joy Pullmann, looks back on what Michael Anton was predicting in 2016, and why we all need those pep talks.  Here’s an extract – towards the end of her column:

Biden’s Destruction Of America Vindicates
Mike Anton’s 2016 ‘Flight 93’ Essay

. . Anton was also right that Trump’s top issues — border security, international trade, and endless foreign wars — were broadly popular and could form the basis of a national renewal. The Biden administration’s gross and dangerous mismanagement of all these issues has vindicated this analysis as well. We’re just two years into Biden’s divisive, lawless, scorched-earth reign, and one already wonders if there will be anything left of our country after two more.

On the flip side, Trump’s platform and four years in office transformed and united the Republican Party. The only people who haven’t figured that out are the people who misread the nation and their own constituents and refused to man up and admit it, forfeiting their credibility to lead. Their cowardice and softness have revealed themselves as more dangerous than Trump’s rudeness and intimidation, and voters are over it.

Riding the center of the maelstrom, Trump’s presidency did change the political winds, in ways Anton couldn’t predict. For one, Trump cracked the right’s tolerance for political correctness, a major victory. We are now free to say, yes, we do want our border secured, and to call that racist is simply unserious and callous to all the women and children trafficked and raped by the cartels. We can say that anti-white racism is also racism, and it’s the right that maintains the strictest zero-tolerance policy on racism.

Trump’s moderate appeal and bull-in-the-China-shop bashing of the racist stigma barrier set the GOP toward becoming a truly multiracial working-class and middle-class coalition party. The amplified media propaganda machine and woke incest between big business and government has prompted a deep and wide backlash, alienating normies from the Democrat Party. In this, Trump’s presidency helped people awaken to their true political foes and allies, clarifying what time we are in and who is a talk-only grifter and who’s a legit freedom fighter.

Anton also couldn’t account for Covid opening so many people’s eyes — except many among self-appointed conservative “leadership,” who acquiesced instead of fighting for actual constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly, free speech, and not being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”! They left resisting the communists to ordinary citizens, such as the few Democrat lawyers who still believe in civil rights, apolitical doctors who formed impressive new messaging and policy coalitions, and mom bloggers with kids banned from school.

We don’t need the right’s Monday morning armchair quarterbacks to do anything but get out of the way as Ben Sasse did. . . .

Read Ms. Pullman’s full column here.  It’s one to bookmark.

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Just out today: Against the New World Order

 

Book release Via Instapundit:

Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order  [Hardcover – October 18, 2022];  ed. Michael Walsh

Contributors include Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, the late Angelo M. Codevilla, Conrad Black, Michael Anton, and David Goldman.

Take that, Klaus Schwab.  Our household is ordering it on Kindle.  You can take a look at Mr Walsh's Introduction online at Amazon here.

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Michael Anton on some “former friends”

 

It’s a long weekend read.  At American Greatness, Michael Anton takes a deep dive into the personal dynamics of political disagreement:   

The Dishonest and Dishonorable Disagreements
of Former Friends

Most of us, at some point or another, fall out with friends. It’s a painful and, perhaps, inevitable part of life. It’s especially disquieting when former friends turn on you suddenly and publicly, devoid of any goodwill, charity, or benefit of the doubt that one might think were warranted by years of amity. All this, however disagreeable, is at least “normal” in the sense that it has been going on forever—though it massively intensified in the Trump Derangement Era.  . . .

Mr Anton’s concluding thoughts are not encouraging.

Opinion is the element or medium of society. These people, and many others like them, work to constrain opinion in order to rule society, to mark off what can and cannot be said or thought. Their education should have taught them that this is a disaster for human freedom. The books they claim to love make this point forcefully. 

But more prosaically, they are incapable of any honest disagreement. It will be their way or the highway, and woe unto him who dissents. These are the same people who speak of unity and democracy, but their unity is Xerxes’ unity of the lash, and their “democracy” is them getting their way on every issue while telling you how evil you are for disagreeing. 

Just as I find it astonishing to be accused of anti-Americanism by longtime denigrators of America, I find it even more astonishing to be accused of divisiveness by people who casually throw around the term “Nazi.” Is the cause an utter lack of self-awareness? When I encounter genuine surprise that their hate is not reciprocated with love, I am tempted to think so. 

Or is it deliberate, intended to provoke, so that those provoked can be more effectively identified and crushed? This explanation also fits the observable facts. 

When even former friends of decades standing can’t civilly disagree, where are we as a country? Where are we heading? 

Nowhere good.

The full article is here.  I posted this for the same reason I’ve been linking to some of Dr Robert Malone’s columns:  you are not alone.

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They Can’t Let Him Back In

 

Michael Anton at CompactMag zeroes in on why we have to endure the January 6 Committee show trials and Liz Cheney’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. For me, Anton points out the obvious when he writes:

Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.

Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.

. . .

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

. . .

People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.” How are we supposed to have “democracy” when the policies and candidates my side wants and votes for are anathema and can’t be allowed? How are we supposed to live together with the constant demonization from one side against the other blaring 24/7 from the ruling class’s every propaganda organ? Why would we want to?

. . .

The full article is here.  On a personal note, liberal colleagues of mine bemoan the “divisiveness” in today’s society.  How could it be otherwise?  When liberals want to convert our country to some brand of socialism, how is that compatible with our Founders’ constitutional republic?

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Conservatives: beware of Conservatism, Inc.

 

Ned Ryun at American Greatness cites Michael Anton’s Caveat Emptor for conservatives:

[Michael] Anton says, 

Now I’ll name names. If you’re at National Review, AEI or Heritage Foundation, your job is to pretend to oppose but really support; your whole business model as staff and management collapses if you don’t do that. It’s an open question why the donors donate to these places. I actually believe they’re deceiving their donors for the most part; that is I’d like to believe most donors to Conservatism, Inc. (NRO, AEI, Heritage) are writing checks because they believe these guys are fighting bad leftists, socialists, Communists, America-haters, critical race theory. They’re standing athwart yelling ‘Stop!’ They really think this. They don’t think, ‘I’m writing this check so that Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnoru, Jonah Goldberg and other fat useless grifters can have six-figure jobs to do nothing but sell out my country and pretend that they’re saving it.’ I don’t think they’re doing that, but to be completely clear, that’s what they’re doing.

There’s a lot to unpack just in that one 60-second statement, but Anton is absolutely correct: The overwhelming majority of “conservative” donors, knowingly or unknowingly, are getting played by Conservatism, Inc., which is really about 90 percent of the so-called “conservative” think tanks in D.C. but, quite frankly, it happens even in the smaller ones across the country.

. . .

If, as Anton says, donors think they’re funding these entities to actually fight the leftists, the question should be very simple: proof please of your work. Strongly worded statements and white papers don’t count, for the record. Show us the action items. . . .

If you contribute to conservative organizations or individuals, make sure the recipient(s) really is/are conservative.  Full article is here. 

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Michael Anton on “The Coming Coup”

 

Michael Anton is the author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. He was interviewed on Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox.  He was a great guest, so I looked up his essay on American Mind, “The Coming Coup?”, which starts off:

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The full essay is here. 

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