Welcome everyone to the American Mind. I'm your host Ryan Williams, president of the

Clermont Review books and the American Mind. Most of you at this point

of course are quite used to us doing a weekly editors and publishers roundtable

podcast where we talk about the news ideas politics and all the rest but we're

also reviving the monthly interview that I started this podcast with back in

2019 so here is the first one.

In this month's interview I join Claremont friend and senior fellow Michael Anton to talk

to him about his book The Stakes, America at the point of no return.

We pulled this audio from a video recording we did while we were down at our Lincoln Fellowship

in Newport Beach.

I hope you enjoy it. I thought I'd start with this question that's on

everyone's mind. You famously wrote the Flight 93 election in September of 2016

right before the election under a pseudonym,

Pubius, Decius Moose, or just Decius, as it was known,

a famous figure from Roman history. There's actually three of them but right we can

we don't have to go there at the time famous for exactly the same thing so at the time

you're in the the private sector and we were worried about your job it turns out but justifiably so and but you were soon

Soon outed and then you joined the Trump administration but that that essay argued that really that election in 16 was existential and at the time people said it was

histrionic I think you've been fully vindicated and yet people still say it's histrionic.

And what I've noticed though is that more people on the left

are saying that about this from their angle,

that if Trump wins again, it's flight 93 for the Democratic Party which I think is

...