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President Trump has appointed my old pal Michael Anton to be director of policy planning at the State Department—the senior post made most famous by George Kennan back in the 1940s, but which has also seen luminaries such as Francis Fukuyama, Kiron Skinner, and Peter Berkowitz in the post.

The position comes with a staff of about 25, including the speechwriters for Secretary of State designee Marco Rubio. I expect Michael will make great use of this opportunity. There will be no trace of the kind of conventional foreign policy we had under what I like to call “the petty Bushoisie.” If nothing else, Michael has a superior grasp of Machiavelli that should terrify the foggy minds at Foggy Bottom, and as for the “striped pants” set in the foreign service, well, you’ve met your match as Michael will also bring sartorial superiority.

Needless to say, the left is apoplectic about Anton’s appointment, and the flak being thrown up shows the Anton appointment is clearly over the target. The Guardian produced a hysterical article about the sinister influence of Curtis Yarvin, who is indeed an eccentric thinker with ideas that go beyond “heterodox” (I’ve heard him profess a preference for old fashioned, European-style monarchy of the pre-World War I variety), but on some questions he seems very astute to me, such as his understanding of FDR.

Along the way, however, The Guardian offers several paragraphs of digression into Anton,. because Anton committed the sin of doing a few podcast dialogues with Yarvin, and guilt by association, don’t you know:

Anton and Yarvin’s May 2021 conversation was recorded for the podcast of the American Mind, a publication of the powerful rightwing Claremont Institute, where Anton is a senior fellow, and whose growing influence during the Trump era has seen it described as the “nerve center of the American right”. . .

In Up from Conservatism, a 2023 anthology of essays edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh, Anton wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.

Anton continued the discussion in sections headed “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.

His and Yarvin’s conversation was ostensibly about his 2020 book, The Stakes. That book was controversial even on the right for its prolonged consideration of autocratic “Caesarism” as a means of resolving American decadence.

Read the whole thing if you like, but I note that The Guardian does not link to the actual podcast in question, perhaps because people might listen to them. I did, and found the content doesn’t match up very closely to The Guardian‘s take. Your mileage may vary.

But if you really want to see a media hit job in action, you have to take in USA Today. If you thought USA Today was a “news” paper, guess again. Their long feature on Anton initially went by this headline:

You don’t really need to read much beyond the headline to see where this is going, do you?

One detail in the article jumped out at me:

Anton was a National Security Council spokesman in the first Trump administration and had been a speechwriter for Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

True, but why did USA Today‘s writer Sarah Wire leave out that Michael had also been a speechwriter for California Governor Pete Wilson, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice? This isn’t hard: Murdoch and Giuliani are red meat hate figures for the left; Wilson and Rice, not so much. (Incidentally, Michael was a speechwriter for Giuliani when Rudy was mayor of New York City; the USA Today copy seems to suggest it was for Rudy the “former Trump lawyer” years later.)

But the most important detail of the story is buried in the middle, and isn’t as much about Anton as it is USA Today‘s capacities:

The essay was brought to USA TODAY by Accountable.us, a left-leaning government watchdog group.

“The essay” that USA Today means here is Michael’s famous 2016 CRB online article “The Flight 93 Election.” Was it actually unknown to USA Today‘s writers and editors such that they had to rely on an activist group to show it to them? Do they not know how to use an internet search engine? And just how much of USA Today‘s article was handed to them on a platter by Accountable.us? I often accuse mainstream media reporters of being mere stenographers for the left, but in this case it appears to be literally true. (True, Michael wrote the essay originally under a pseudonym because he was still working on Wall Street at the time in a senior position that prohibited him from writing publicly under his own name, but his authorship of “Flight 93” has been known for years now.)

P.S. After some pushback from Claremont, USA Today changed the headline:

And as for the subhed (“. . . has criticized racial diversity, Muslims, and immigration”), is this criticism or praise for Anton? I can’t tell. Sounds pretty good to me.