Michael Anton is of Italian and Lebanese descent. He grew up in Loomis, California, received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Davis, and took advanced degrees from St. John's College and Claremont Graduate University. Anton wrote The Suit, a men's fashion book that parodies Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, under the pseudonym "Nicholas Antongiavanni".
Views
In a March 2016 essay written under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Anton said, while defending the "America First" slogan, that the America First Committee which had opposed the U.S. engaging in World War II had been "unfairly maligned"; he also argued that Islam "is a militant faith", and that "only an insane society" would take in Muslim immigrants after the 9/11 attacks. His pseudonymous September 2016 editorial "The Flight 93 Election" compared the prospect of conservatives letting Hillary Clinton win with passengers not charging the cockpit of the United Airlines aircraft hijacked by Al-Qaeda. In the essay, Anton criticized conservatives who were skeptical of Trump. Anton also decried the "ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners," and called for "no more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures." In Anton's 2019 book After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose, Anton argued that Trump constituted "the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation." Trump praised the book. According to Carlos Lozada, book critic for The Washington Post, Anton's book primarily reprints text from his 2016 editorial, but with a newly added rumination of how dangerous the American left is. Lozada wrote, "Anton spends virtually no time detailing or defending particular policies of the Trump administration; all that matters is the enemy. For Anton, Hillary Clinton is no longer the chief nemesis—the entire left is, along with sellout conservatives and any other forces countering the president. They contribute to a 'spiritual sickness' and 'existential despair' pervading not just the United States but all the West ... Apparently, Flight 93 did not end with the 2016 vote; we are forever on the plane, endlessly in danger, no matter who has seized the controls." Anton is also known as a critic of birthright citizenship in the United States, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not mandate jus soli citizenship, and that the Amendment's use of the provision "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" excludes children born of illegal aliens.
Books
After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose,
Selected publications
The suit: a Machiavellian approach to men's style. New York: Collins, 2006,
