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michael anton
Trump Pick for State Dept Post 'Espoused White Nationalist and Islamophobic Views'
In a 2016 anti-immigrant essay, Michael Anton wrote that "the burden is forced on Americans to prove that Muhammed is a terrorist or Jose is a criminal, and if we can't, we must let them in."
Dec 23, 2024
Further fueling fears of what the incoming Trump administration will mean for immigrants and people of color, a watchdog group on Monday highlighted various essays by Michael Anton, who is slated to take on a key role at the U.S. Department of State.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced earlier this month that Anton would become director of policy planning at the State Department. Trump said that he previously "served me loyally and effectively" as a National Security Council spokesperson during the Republican's first term and "spent the last eight years explaining what an America First foreign policy truly means."
In a Monday publication first reported on by USA Today, the watchdog Accountable.US detailed how "Anton has espoused white
nationalistic and Islamophobic views and has written numerous conspiracy theory-laden articles about Democratic 'coup' attempts and supposed widespread voter fraud."
The group spotlighted "Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism," a nearly 6,000-word essay that Anton published under the Latin pseudonym Publius Decius Mus at The Unz Review on March 10, 2016, eight months before Trump was elected to his first term. Anton's use of the pen name was first revealed in early 2017 by The Weekly Standard, a now-defunct neoconservative magazine.
In the 2016 essay, Anton wrote that "Trump's two slogans—'Make America Great Again' and 'Take Our Country Back'—point to the heart of Trumpism: 'America First,'" and "the Constitution and the social compact it enshrines are for us—the American people—and not for foreigners, immigrants (except those we choose to welcome), or anyone else."
Anton praised Trump for "his willingness—eagerness—gleefulness!—to mock the ridiculous lies we've been incessantly force-fed for the past 15 years (at least)," writing in part:
"Diversity" is not "our strength"; it's a source of weakness, tension, and disunion. America is not a "nation of immigrants"; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants, and later still not to, and who may justly open or close our doors solely at our own discretion, without deference to forced pieties. Immigration today is not "good for the economy"; it undercuts American wages, costs Americans jobs, and reduces Americans' standard of living. Islam is not a "religion of peace"; it's a militant faith that exalts conversion by the sword and inspires thousands to acts of terror—and millions more to support and sympathize with terror.
As Common Dreams has reported since Trump's latest White House victory last month, numerous analyses have warned that the Republican's promised mass deportations will not only have devastating impacts on people but be "catastrophic" for the economy.
Anton's essays have repeatedly referenced the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In March 2016, he suggested that it was "insane" to allow Muslims to immigrate after that, writing: "Yes, of course, not all Muslims are terrorists, blah, blah, blah, etc. Even so, what good has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people? If we truly needed more labor—a claim that is manifestly false—what made it necessary to import any of that labor from the Muslim world?"
"From a region and a faith that is at best ambivalent about the societies that welcome them and at worst murderously hostile? This question has, until now, been ruled wholly out of bounds—illegitimate even to raise," he continued. "Immigration to the United States—by Muslims or anyone else—is presented as a civil right for foreigners: the burden is forced on Americans to prove that Muhammed is a terrorist or Jose is a criminal, and if we can't, we must let them in. Trump alone among major political figures has stood up to say this is nonsense."
Another infamous essay noted by Accountable.US cites 9/11: Using the same pen name, Anton wrote "The Flight 93 Election," published by the Claremont Review of Books on September 5, 2016, referencing the United Airlines flight that ended with a plane crash in Pennsylvania, after passengers fought the hijackers.
"2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die," Anton argued, taking aim at Trump's Democratic challenger that year. "If you don't try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances."
Accountable.US also pointed to a pair of essays from 2020 and 2021 in which Anton accused Democrats of plotting a coup, peddled voter fraud conspiracy theories, and—in one of them—downplayed the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Both of those publications appeared with Anton's real name.
After his time in the first Trump administration, Anton went on to work as a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College. Previously, he was a speechwriter for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.
Anton did not respond to USA Today's request for comment, but Trump transition spokesperson Dan Holler framed him as an asset to Trump's nominee for secretary of state—Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the son of Cuban immigrants—in a statement to the newspaper.
"President Trump and Sen. Rubio are building out an all-star team to deliver on the America First agenda the country demanded," Holler said. "As director of policy planning, Michael Anton will play an important role in implementing an America First foreign policy."
Meanwhile, Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk on Monday released a statement putting pressure on Rubio—who would typically select the candidate for that post, which does not require Senate confirmation, according to USA Today.
"Michael Anton hid behind a pseudonym to spread hate and deride diversity as a source of American weakness. But he'd surely wear his extremism on his sleeve if appointed to a top State Department post," said Carrk. "Anton's rhetoric against people he deems culturally undesirable may be music to the ears of President-elect Trump, father of the kids-in-cages policy who threatens to end birthright citizenship. But is Marco Rubio willing to stand by Anton's extremist views if he's confirmed secretary of state?"
The president-elect's other selections who have sparked alarm on the immigration front include Stephen Miller—an architect of the family separation policy from Trump's first term—for deputy chief of staff for policy and Tom Homan as "border czar."
Trump has also chosen anti-immigrant, dog-killing Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard—who has a history of being "extremely sympathetic" to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Russian President Vladimir Putin—for director of national intelligence.
Both of those roles generally require Senate confirmation, as does the defense secretary. Trump's pick to lead the Pentagon is "Fox & Friends" co-host Pete Hegseth, a "lobbyist for war criminals" who, in his own words, "was deemed an extremist" because of his Jerusalem Cross tattoo, which led to him not joining his National Guard unit for President Joe Biden's inauguration.
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There Is a Great Replacement Going On--But It's Not What You've Been Told
Rising death rates in red America is an underreported story with deep ideological roots.
Dec 21, 2022
Very likely, the reader is wearily familiar with one of the memes that American right wingers endlessly repeat. It's called the Great Replacement: the claim that shadowy but apparently omnipotent elites are deliberately replacing the old stock (meaning white) American population with Third World foreigners.
I have argued before that Republicans have become a death cult, and one can see evidence in the diatribes of conservatism's faux-intellectual wing.
The notion had its beginnings decades ago in the mental swamps of Southern segregationist policticians and continued in various iterations through white supremicist groups. Trump's election and the phrase's popularization by professional jackasses like Tucker Carlson made it into another of the Republican base's innumerable slogans.
The idea is bunk, and is easily understood as one more of the many myths designed to play into right wingers' persecution complex. But it is possible also to understand it as a kind of folk psychological projection of something that is indeed happening in the strongly Republican regions of the country inhabited by what Sarah Palin called "real Americans." It's not so much the Great Replacement as the Great Die-off. And Republicans are both its chief promoters and its main victims.
The phenomenon first received attention in 2015 from a paper by Anne Case and Nobel Prize laureate Angus Deaton. They detailed first, the stagnation, and then the absolute decline in life expectancy among non-Hispanic white populations, particularly in white rural areas of the country. They charted a significant rise in "deaths of despair" like suicide or drugs (particularly synthetic opioids) among the white working class.
This phenomenon cannot be explained by economic disadvantages in rural areas as compared to cities. Black and Hispanic populations also experience economic disparities, but their rates of midlife mortality are still declining significantly, while those of whites with no college education are rising.
Much has been written about the demographic collapse of Russia. In 2021, Russia experienced a population loss of nearly one million, following many years of decrease after a decline that started in the 1980s. Its population is now smaller than Bangladesh and its per capita income lower than the Maldives. Male life expectancy is also below that of Bangladesh. In 2022, with combat deaths, economic sanctions, and the exodus of at least 900,000 people, most of them young and educated, the demographic decline may have accelerated into free-fall.
Russia's case is considered singular in the developed world. Yet swathes of America are beginning to replicate it. Owsley County, KY, has a life expectancy similar to that of Russia; from 1980 to 2014, county's cancer death rate increased by 45.6 percent, the largest increase in the country. In 2020, Donald Trump received 88 percent of the Owsley County vote. This correlation between early death and Republican voting may be one of the biggest stories of the decade
With the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, the longevity disparity increased between regions in the United States, a gap that again can be explained by political leanings. Statistical research has consistently shown higher COVID death rates in Republican jurisdictions than in Democratic ones. The gap increased after the rollout of COVID vaccines. A study by Lancet Regional Health-Americas found that the more conservative the voting records of congresspersons and state legislators, the higher the age-adjusted COVID mortality of the district, even after compensating for race, education, income, and vaccination rates.
This partisan difference in death rates also applies to traffic deaths. Some of this might be explained by the fact that Republican areas tend to be rural, which means higher speeds on two-lane roads, worse engineering of those roads, and longer trips from the accident scene to the emergency room. But a sociologist who studies the attitudes of red-state conservatives suggests an additional factor: ". . . a kind of cowboy mentality, a kind of deregulatory, anything goes culture" existing in these places may result in carelessness. The gap in seatbelt use would tend to support this hypothesis.
If we recall the Republican-generated uproar over Michelle Obama's campaign to encourage schoolchildren to eat healthy food, it might be expected that spinach and KFC would be totems of the culture wars. Sure enough, there is a correlation between political leaning and obesity, a condition strongly associated with early death. There is also a striking correlation between areas that supported Donald Trump and the presence of fast-food chain restaurants.
Could it be that poorer areas cannot sustain more expensive restaurants with healthier fare? Possibly, but their ubiquity in red states may also be connected with the fact that it is overwhelmingly red states that have passed laws prohibiting civil suits against fast-food franchises over obesity. One doesn't have to be a Republican to think one's dietary preferences are largely a matter of personal responsibility that generally precludes third-party liability. Nevertheless, it is one more case, like firearms, of Republican politicians immunizing an industry (and potential donors) from lawsuits. How many of us would get a queasy feeling if auto manufacturers were similarly immunized from legal recourse?
This year, Scientific American summarized the result of all these factors: a striking differential in overall death rates in Republican versus Democratic counties, a gap which has been widening for 20 years and which shows no sign of leveling out. The article suggests that policy choices are a factor.
It is easy enough to rationalize the disparity by pointing to external factors, such as poorer quality and less available health care in rural communities where Republicans are more likely to live, along with less developed infrastructure (such as roads) in general. But here, too, conditions may be the result of decades of political choices made by Republican residents in electing state and local officials.
During the pandemic, Florida governor Ron DeSantis prohibited localities from implementing masking and social distancing ordnances. The fact that DeSantis was overwhelmingly reelected demonstrates that a majority approved of his policy, and the resulting additional deaths were "worth it," (whatever "it" is").
Social scientists are likely to shy away from drawing admonitory conclusions about behaviors that link to partisan values. But there would seem to be enough evidence to infer that the blue-red gap in the death rate is determined mostly by political attitudes, not external economic factors.
If someone is conditioned by Fox News or an angry voice on AM radio to disbelieve the public health measures for COVID, he is more likely to die of COVID. If someone makes "personal freedom" such an obsession as to defy common-sense safety precautions, he is more likely to drive without a seat belt or engage in risky behaviors hinting at the redneck joke beginning, "hold my beer and watch this." If he repeatedly elects politicians who demonize government, he shouldn't expect to get treated at a fully-equipped rural hospital.
Possibly there is also a more indirect, but deeper explanation for the white Republican die-off. If they are fed a steady diet of fear, rage, resentment, and loss, this may condition a fatalistic mental state that has real-world consequences. The Great Die-off is at bottom self-sacrifice to an angry pagan idol that can never be propitiated.
I have argued before that Republicans have become a death cult, and one can see evidence in the diatribes of conservatism's faux-intellectual wing. In 2016, right-wing operative Michael Anton, writing under the pretentious pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, wrote The Flight 93 Election, a hysterical likening of a low-turnout presidential contest between a toxic bully and a lecturing scold to Armageddon, in which true conservatives were the doomed passengers of a hijacked plane rushing the cockpit.
During the COVID pandemic, First Things, a website which seeks and invariably finds theological justification for its crank political views, published a piece in a similarly apocalyptic vein. R.R. Reno, its editor, wrote "Say No to Death's Dominion." Contrary to the title, he argues that death should be embraced, and that those who save lives through medical science are in league with Satan.
This echoes the theology of the Religious Right, which has turned its back on science, progress, and humanitarianism because the Rapture may come at any time. It is but a short step from viewing life as a vale of tears to calling modern medicine junk science and mandatory seat belt use an oppression by Safety Nazis. Given that evangelicals are the largest segment of the Republican base, it is hardly surprising that Republican areas should suffer from higher rates of preventable death.
Paranoid crackpots have been scribbling since the dawn of written language; why should they be so influential now, to the point where they are dragging down American life expectancy? Post-World War II American conservatism always had an apocalyptic, doomsaying strain; one need only think of Whittaker Chambers or James Burnham, whose works were replete with cataclysms and existential catastrophes. Even William F. Buckley, Jr., the putative founder of modern conservatism and a supposedly sunnier, more optimistic philosophy, said that the mission of conservatism was to "stand athwart history yelling stop." But to do so also means yelling "stop" to science, enlightenment, and the amelioration of human suffering.
What has changed is that the American conservative ecosystem, once a counterculture that people could ignore for days at a time, has been suitably dumbed down, amplified, and infused with the ill-gotten loot of sinister billionaires to the point where it has become a Media-Entertainment Complex fully on par with Hollywood and the mainstream media. Crackpots who were once howling in the wilderness are now the savants of this propaganda empire. The Turner Diaries is now far more influential than it was when it was written in 1978.
Consistent with this development, the Republican Party has evolved into an anti-party. Its agenda largely consists of stunts, trolling, performative cruelty, and gaslighting. Such legislation as it bothers with is mostly designed to negate laws already on the books; its amendments are poison pills intended to doom substantive legislation.
The GOP has become a religious-ideological mashup embodying the worst features of post-World War II conservatism and Religious Right knownothingism. As for the religious part, many religions emphasize "transcendence," the existence of a purer, better world than the merely material one we temporarily inhabit. Buckley was fond of using the word in hammering home conservatism's spiritual superiority.
But what we see in the Republican Party, and in the results it has wrought in places where it is entrenched, is not transcendence, but its philosophical cousin: nihilism. It is advocating needless death, either to own the libs or find salvation, and its followers are embracing it, just as they embrace political violence, in a kind of slow-motion Jonestown. If political parties were labeled with consumer information in the manner the Food and Drug Administration mandates that cigarettes be labeled, the GOP would be branded with bold letters: "WARNING: THIS PRODUCT WILL KILL YOU."
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The Attacks on Birthright Citizenship Are Just the Beginning
Beneath the bluster, the attacks are a rallying cry for voter suppression and will in all likelihood accelerate as the 2020 presidential race begins in earnest
Nov 05, 2018
If you think the attacks on birthright citizenship led by our ignoramus-in-chief are just a midterm issue, think again. Beneath the bluster, the attacks are a rallying cry for voter suppression and will in all likelihood accelerate as the 2020 presidential race begins in earnest.
The attacks, moreover, are nothing new. They did not originate with Donald Trump.
Dissatisfaction with the principle that anyone born on American soil is automatically a citizen is as old as the 14th Amendment itself, in which the principle is inscribed. In calling for an end to birthright citizenship during the stretch run to the midterm elections, Trump is both reviving a campaign pledge he had made during his successful run for president and resuscitating the deep nativist currents of our political culture that had subsided--but never died--in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.
Trump began his assault on birthright citizenship at an Aug. 19, 2015, town meeting in Derry, N.H., when he told a crowd of ardent supporters that "many of the great scholars say that anchor babies [the derogatory term for the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the U.S.] are not covered" by the 14th Amendment. "We're going to have to find out" by means of a court challenge, he said. The only difference between then and now is that Trump currently proposes to end birthright citizenship by executive order.
To understand the attacks and the fringe scholarship that undergirds them, it's necessary to recall the origins of the 14th Amendment, and in particular, the first sentence of the initial section of the amendment--known as the "citizenship clause"--that reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
Like the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, and the 15th, which guaranteed the right to vote, the 14thAmendment was adopted to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which invalidated the Missouri Compromise and held that African-Americans, whether enslaved or freed, could never be U.S. citizens.
Together, the three amendments effectively returned the U.S. to the English common law practice of jus solis (the "law of the soil'')--the idea that all those born within the geographic boundaries of a nation are citizens at birth. More than 30 countries today recognize the doctrine, including the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Both sides in the current birthright debate agree the 14th Amendment's central purpose was to confer citizenship upon newly emancipated slaves. They also agree the amendment's citizenship clause excludes children born to foreign diplomats and children born to enemy forces engaged in the hostile occupation of U.S. territory. They agree further the citizenship clause, as originally drafted, excluded Native American children because they owed their allegiance to tribal nations that had their own reservations. (Native Americans were finally granted citizenship with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.)
However, when it comes to the offspring of the undocumented, the two sides disagree sharply over the meaning and purpose of the citizenship clause's language limiting citizenship to people "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. Those who align with Trump maintain the clause pertains only to those who declare unswerving allegiance to America and no other sovereign nation. Those who believe the president is wrong maintain that the disputed language means citizenship is accorded to all persons (except the children of diplomats and occupying enemy forces) born or naturalized in the U.S. who are subject to the authority of American law.
The scholars to whom Trump has referred to bolster his birthright attacks are a distinct minority, but they include some prominent names in conservative legal circles. They include law professors Peter Schuck of Yale and John Eastman of Chapman University, as well as 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, all of whom have been writing on the subject for years. More recently, they have been joined by former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Anton, who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in July, and Andrew McCarthy, a National Review contributing editor, who pleaded his case in an essay last week.
Styling themselves as "originalists" faithful to the intended meaning of the citizenship clause, the outliers base much of their argument on the Senate debate on the clause, which was held on May 30, 1866, and was reported in the Congressional Globe, the precursor of today's Congressional Record. The conclusion the outliers draw from the debate, however, is anything but faithful to the Senate's 1866 deliberations, taken as a whole.
The citizenship clause was introduced in the Senate by Jacob Howard of Michigan as an add-on to the initial draft of the 14th Amendment. In his introductory remarks, Howard noted the clause would not apply to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers but would "include every other class of person."
It is true, as the outliers argue, that the Senate in 1866 did not have modern-day undocumented aliens in mind when they debated the clause, as the nation did not pass its first immigration law until the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It is also true some senators expressed dissatisfaction with Howard's understanding of the clause.
Nonetheless, as 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James C. Ho noted in a 2006 essay titled "Defining 'American' ":
This understanding was universally adopted by other Senators. Howard's colleagues vigorously debated the wisdom of his amendment--indeed, some opposed it precisely because they opposed extending birthright citizenship to the children of aliens of different races. But no Senator disputed the meaning of the amendment with respect to alien children."
Ho is a lifelong Republican, who once served as the solicitor general of Texas. He was, ironically, appointed to the 5th Circuit by Trump this past January.
The Supreme Court has endorsed Howard's reading of the citizenship clause in at least four decisions: United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), dealing with the readmission into the country of a Chinese man whom the government sought to exclude because he had been born in the U.S. to resident alien parents; Plyer v. Doe (1982), concerning the right of undocumented children to attend public schools; INS v. Rios-Pineda (1985), a deportation proceeding; and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), in which the court's plurality opinion noted that a Guantanamo Bay inmate held as an "enemy combatant" was still a citizen because he was born in Louisiana.
Despite the clear and unambiguous judicial history supporting birthright citizenship, the outliers remain undeterred. In 1991, former House Republican Elton Gallegly introduced a bill that sought to establish that only children born to legal residents could be accorded citizenship. Although the legislation never made it out of committee, The Guardian has reported that similar measures have been introduced in each succeeding session of Congress. As a congressman, Vice President Mike Pence was a sponsor of an anti-birthright law proposed in 2009.
Shamefully, over the years, even some Democrats have hopped on the anti-birthright bandwagon. In 1993, for example, then-Nevada Sen. Harry Reid introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993, which would have nullified the citizenship clause.
"If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn't enough, how about offering a reward to be an illegal immigrant. No sane country would do that, right?" Reid, a Democrat, asked his colleagues during a floor speech on Sept. 20, 1993. "Guess again," he continued. "If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides--and that's a lot of services."
Reid's bill failed to pass.
Even if all the current executive, congressional and legal attacks on birthright citizenship run aground as they should, given the plain text of the 14th Amendment, the attacks will continue, and for good reason: In the hands of Trump, the attacks are a sound organizing tactic. They "rile up the crazies" in Trump's base and help secure fealty to his leadership in much the same way as his calls to "open up the nation's libel laws" and his castigation of the media as "fake news" arouse his supporters.
The actual number of "anchor babies" born in the U.S. is uncertain. According to the Pew Research Center, however, "about 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized-immigrant parents in 2014, or about 7 percent of the 4 million births in the U.S. that year." In Trump's universe, they will all grow up to vote Democratic. Hence, the need to suppress their voting rights or dilute their voting power, if not entirely, then piecemeal by lesser means, such as restrictive voter ID laws and political gerrymandering.
And though the odds are long, it's always possible the Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative justices affiliated with the Federalist Society, could one day disregard past precedent and overturn birthright citizenship altogether for undocumented newborns. Such an about-face would deliver a mother lode of future voter suppression, and from the Trumpian perspective, truly make America "great"--read white--again.
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