Michael Anton: The Philosopher King of Claremont Institute, a Project 2025 Advisor (original) (raw)

Article updated on December 20th

The nomination of Michael Anton, a Project 2025 contributor and the Jack Roth Senior Fellow in American Politics at the Claremont Institute and Lecturer and Research Fellow at Hillsdale College (both Project 2025 advisors), as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department**,** signals a significant shift in conservative foreign policy planning, particularly through his connection to the Claremont Institute and to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Anton, a former Trump administration official and proponent of “Red Caesarism” — a term he popularized in his 2020 book The Stakes as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny” in which “Caesar’s word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law” — joins a cadre of hardline nominees including Russell Vought at OMB, and Tom Homan as border czar. As the head of the State Department’s influential internal think tank, Anton — whose nomination does not require confirmation — will be positioned to fundamentally reshape American foreign policy, bringing his nationalist ideology and anti-globalist stance to an office historically responsible for grand strategy. His writings reveal a rejection of post-war international institutions and traditional alliances, along with extremist views on immigration, Islam, and constitutional interpretation. While Anton claims minimal involvement with Project 2025 and Claremont Institute has denied deep institutional support of Project 2025, Anton’s philosophical alignment with its objectives and the Heritage Foundation’s goals suggest a coordinated effort to transform federal governance along authoritarian lines, particularly in foreign policy and institutional structure.

In His Own Words

“At least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their ‘opposition’ may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 ‘genders,’ elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, ‘Islamophobia,’ and Black Lives Matter.”

— Michael Anton writing as Publius Decius Mus in “The Flight 93 Election.”

“What actually happens today is a total, consuming obsession with ‘diversity’ defined solely by skin color (and to a lesser extent national origin) coupled with an even more consuming obsession with ideology.”

— Michael Anton posting as “Manton” about affirmative action to a men’s style forum, one of 40,000 comments he made on styleforum.net.

“The homogenous ones have higher trust levels, greater levels of cross-family cooperation, more public spiritedness, higher levels of volunteering, charity donations, etc.”

— Michael Anton in the men’s fashion forum commenting on the superiority of homogenous societies.

“One of the paradoxes — there are so many — of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six-figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on.”

— Michael Anton positing that progressive policies spell doom for the United States.

“The idea that the framers intended to extend citizenship to anyone whose parents snuck across our border is absurd and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nineteenth-century American mind.”

— Michael Anton, on ending birthright citizenship, August 1, 2024, The American Mind.

“The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population.”

— Michael Anton on immigration in his 2016 essay The Flight 93 Election.

The Road to Authoritarianism

Michael Anton’s nomination as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department in the second Trump administration marks the ascendance of authoritarian ideology within mainstream conservative thought.

As a contributor to, and supporter of, Project 2025, Anton’s appointment positions a self-proclaimed advocate of “Red Caesarism” — where autocracy is seen as the only redemption for democracy should “woke” society prevail — alongside other hardline nominees.

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Anton started out as a rather conventional conservative. After earning his M.A. in political science from Claremont Graduate University, he served as a speechwriter and press secretary for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, followed by communications roles at Citigroup and BlackRock.

Ever the provocateur, Anton was also writing pseudonymous philosophical, cultural and political screeds that began to get noticed among conservative circles and would lead him to his first stint in Trump’s White House.

Decius Unchained: Anton’s Extremist Views

Writing under the pen name Publius Decius Mus after the Roman consul who sacrificed himself in battle, Anton expressed a comprehensive anti-immigration and anti-Muslim ideology that would later influence Trump administration policy. “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,” he wrote in his March 2016 essay “Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism.” Anton posing as Mus characterized immigration as a source of societal weakness and division. He argued that contemporary immigration “undercuts American wages, costs Americans jobs, and reduces Americans’ standard of living.”

Anton’s writings on Islam were particularly extreme. He declared Islam to be fundamentally “incompatible with the modern West,” arguing that orthodox Islam’s alleged rejection of the separation of church and state made it irreconcilable with Western values. While acknowledging that “not all Muslims are terrorists,” he questioned what benefit Muslim immigration had brought to the United States. He defended Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, though suggesting it could be modified to allow business travelers from places like Dubai. After the September 11th attacks, Anton wrote that only “an insane society” would have increased Muslim immigration, asking rhetorically, “Why? And can we stop now?”

His stance on diversity is equally stark. In his essays, he dismissed diversity as “a source of weakness, tension and disunion” rather than strength and critiques “inanities like 32 ‘genders,’ elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, ‘Islamophobia,’ and Black Lives Matter.”

He characterizes immigration policy as an existential threat to American values, arguing that when Western nations welcome Muslims “en masse into our countries, they change us — and not for the better.”

These views, initially published on fringe websites, would later find their way into mainstream policy discussions during the Trump administration, where Anton served as a senior national security official.

His 2017-2018 tenure as Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the National Security Council under Donald Trump provided direct experience with institutional resistance that would later inform Project 2025’s strategies and his own philosophy on using government to destroy government, an action plan for 2025.

Anton and the Project 2025 Network

The Heritage Foundation’s apparent influence in the appointment process, including Project 2025 contributors, for the new Trump administration, outlined in a report that offers suggestions on how to circumvent the traditional Senate confirmation procedures, reflects an unprecedented level of preparation for authoritarian governance. The fumbling at the beginning of the first Trump administration has been replaced with carefully laid plans and vetted personnel where loyalty to Trump is imperative. At least 15 of those Trump has nominated for positions in his White House, including Anton as one of the contributors to Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership, have ties to Project 2025.

Anton’s nomination comes with deep institutional support from Project 2025’s allied think tanks. At the Claremont Institute, whose research on gender theory was cited on page 348 _o_f the Mandate for Leadership, he serves as a senior fellow and, as Claremont has claimed, helped develop the ideological framework for nationalist foreign policy as a “scholar, a patriot, and true defender of America’s founding principles.”

His concurrent role at conservative Hillsdale College’s Washington program connects him to Project 2025’s personnel pipeline and training programs.

Both institutions have become crucial nodes in Project 2025’s intellectual infrastructure, providing policy blueprints and potential appointees for a second Trump term.

Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, returning to OMB where he worked during Trump’s first term, previously orchestrated Schedule F, an executive order designed to reclassify up to 50,000 federal employees as at-will workers so they could be easily fired. The plan to bring back Schedule F calls for the immediate termination of career officials across 25 federal agencies within the first 180 days. The plan specifically targets the Justice Department’s civil rights division, EPA enforcement staff, State Department foreign service officers, and career intelligence analysts.

Project 2025’s personnel database includes detailed profiles of over 4,000 potential appointees, categorized by loyalty metrics and ideological alignment. Their vetting process explicitly prioritizes candidates who embrace “America First” foreign policy and reject the administrative state.

As conductors of this authoritarian symphony, Anton and his colleagues are intent on working in concert to implement the Project 2025 agenda immediately upon taking office.

Plumbing the State Department’s Internal Think Tank

The Director of Policy Planning role would position Anton at the helm of the State Department’s influential internal think tank, an office created by George Kennan in 1947 that has historically shaped America’s grand international strategy. From this perch, the director oversees long-term foreign policy planning, advises the Secretary of State directly, and coordinates policy across regional and functional bureaus.

The Policy Planning Staff’s historical role in developing concepts like containment and democratic enlargement could be transformed under Anton’s leadership.

Historically, the office’s staff of career foreign service officers and subject matter experts provides independent strategic analysis and challenges conventional diplomatic thinking.

With the implementation of Schedule F many of these expert and experienced workers will be replaced with Trump loyalists who may not have any other qualification for the position than fealty to Christian Nationalist ideas, as revealed through vetting questions on a variety of Project 2025 issues.

His writings suggest plans to reorient the office toward dismantling post-war international institutions and developing strategies for American disengagement from traditional alliances such as the World Economic Council. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership playbook identifies the office as a key leverage point for implementing nationalist foreign policy and purging “globalist” career staff.

Full of Schmitt: Critics Equate Anton With Nazi-Era Legal Theory

Anton’s pseudonymous “Flight 93” editorial argued that conservatives faced a stark choice in 2016: either support Trump (metaphorically “charging the cockpit”) or accept a Clinton victory, which Anton viewed as catastrophic. The piece drew a controversial parallel between this electoral decision and the actions of Flight 93 passengers during 9/11, who confronted the hijackers rather than accepting their fate.

When Anton’s identity as the author of the “Flight 93” essay was revealed in 2017, William Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism and a prominent Never Trump conservative, drew a provocative comparison between Anton and Carl Schmitt, tweeting “From Carl Schmitt to Mike Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.” This comparison to the Nazi Party’s leading legal theorist of the 1930s sparked significant debate about the intellectual foundations of Anton’s worldview among journalists and scholars.

Other conservative commentators were even less kind. An outraged Ben Shapiro wrote in The Daily Wire that Anton’s arguments were not much more than a lengthy “diarrheic mess of jabbering drivel by a faux-intellectual substituting classical references for wisdom,” and “incoherent, mind-numbing horseshit.”

Foreign Policy Revolution

As potential Director of Policy Planning, Anton would be positioned to fundamentally reshape American foreign policy. His writings reveal a comprehensive rejection of post-World War II international organizations such as the World Economic Forum, which he considers a threat populated by a “cabal of bankers, techies, corporate executives, politicians, senior bureaucrats, academics, and pundits” bent on denigrating the “Western way of life.” Anton has argued for the U.S. to abandon support for Taiwan should the Chinese decide to invade, and reconsider American military presence globally.

In lockstep with Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership he advocates ending support for Ukraine and generally denouncing “global oligarchy” as “a voluntary alliance of neoliberal elites across nations to work together in their own interests.”

Anton attempts to reframe constitutional interpretation toward authoritarian ends. His 2018 challenge to birthright citizenship exemplifies this approach, arguing for a radical reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause based on selective historical reading.

His deliberately controversial essay, published in the Washington Post, was designed to solidify Anton as extremism’s resident philosopher. It’s a role Anton, who has well-publicized obsessions with Machiavelli, tailored suits and all things French, has intentionally cast himself in, the conservative movement’s quirky, pedantic, extremist uncle.

Implications for American Democracy

The elevation of Anton to a key foreign policy role suggests Project 2025’s vision will indeed become operational policy in the second Trump administration. His integration of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, anti-Muslim/immigrant rhetoric, constitutional revisionism, and authoritarian governance proposals represents a desire to weaken American democracy and, at the least, cause serious injury to America’s standing on the international stage.

The Heritage Foundation’s detailed implementation plans provide practical mechanics for this transformation. Although Anton claims that he had “very little to do with Project 2025,” their ideas appear symbiotic in scope and goals.

The comprehensive nature of Project 2025’s plans encompasses every aspect of federal governance, from personnel policies to enforcement priorities to international agreements. The latter is where Anton and his authoritarian philosophy come in, effectively bringing the Mandate for Leadership to life, primed for the arrival of his fantastical “Red Caesar.”

Article Updated on December 20th

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