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

Anti-Constitution insurrectionists have seized the American cockpit, and they must be stopped even if that requires electing a polarized Donald Trump, wrote social critic Michael Anton in 2016 under a pseudonym.

“The Flight 93 Election” set off an internet storm. The late, great Rush Limbaugh read almost all of it to his audience of Republican base voters soon after it came out, giving them assurance that not everyone on the right hated their candidate after an ugly primary battle in which no less than National Review published a cover essay collection titled “Against Trump.”

Anton was as reviled as he predicted in the essay. But now, six years later, Trump’s four years of governance and the Biden administration’s willfully malicious reign has vindicated the overall accuracy of Anton’s analysis.

Anton said the U.S. administrative state’s gradual replacement of constitutional self-government has metastasized into a national emergency, an argument American conservatives have been developing for more than 100 years. The essay justified a vote for Trump based on his platform against open borders, endless foreign war, and trading our economic advantages to China.

It was these, Anton argued, that really triggered the opposition to Trump, not his public moral failings, since people who divorce their spouses, commit adultery, say mean things about their own political team, publicly glory in fetishes that involve sexual violence, proposition much younger sexual partners, and destroy their own families are funded through “conservative” institutions and celebrated by “conservative” politicians. They are accepted in public discourse and “vaunted institutions” even though such behaviors drive America’s decline.

Yes, America Is in as Much Trouble as We Say

It was the extent of America’s decay that Anton was rhetorically tarred and feathered for noticing. The ruling class has destroyed our culture, economy, traditions, norms, and law, he observed. He argued that we are in a political crisis metaphorically comparable to the situation the Flight 93 passengers faced as they flew toward our capital city.

Standard operating procedures such as cooperating on a “bipartisan basis” and foolishly assuming the communist left acts in good faith have not arrested America’s descent, he argued. More courageous actions were required; ones that recognized we’re facing a cultural and political emergency.

Trump was a wild card, Anton noted, but every other Republican candidate had no idea what time it is, so we’ll have to play the wild and see what happens. The alternative was certain political suicide.

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: 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.

He was right. Nothing backs that truth so much as the Biden presidency.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases