On September 5, 2016, long before Donald Trump’s shocking election victory—before the Comey letter, before the Billy Bush tape—a lengthy essay was published with minimal fanfare on the Claremont Review of Books’ Web site. Few outside of the solemn world of high conservatism knew of its existence. The majority of political reporters glossed over it. But to the readers of the Review—the right-wing thought leaders, the talk-show hosts, the more erudite Republicans on Capitol Hill—it landed as cacophonously as a jetliner crashing into a Pennsylvania field. The article was written under the nom de plume Publius Decius Mus, but it was notable less for the anonymity of its author than its terrifying thesis. “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” it began. Decius continued: “A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

That opening paragraph descended into an apocalyptic argument for why Trump, a man who gleefully opposed decades of Republican doctrine, needed to be president. In short, only he could prevent the inexorable decline of the American experiment. Decius accused conservatives of being self-motivated, selling their ideals to think tanks, and selling out to the Davos class. Trump was hardly a perfect candidate, Decius conceded, but the alternative was an America run by progressives who appeared, in his estimation, hellbent on eliminating borders, pushing America’s wealth outside, and letting the wrong people in. “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,” he wrote. “This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta … think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.”

The “Flight 93” essay, as it came to be known, horrified the Review’s staunchly conservative readers. “It was as if PETA had published a barbecue cookbook,” one former Review contributor, who insisted on anonymity, told me. Within hours, several members of the conservative establishment rushed online to condemn Decius’s vision as xenophobic and authoritarian. “It’s the Burning Man of straw men,” wrote Ben Howe at Red State. Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, loved it, reading entire paragraphs of the essay to his 13 million listeners over the course of several shows. “I’m telling you, folks, it is really good,” he said, enviously. “I was silently jumping for joy because it contains so much of what I said. But it’s said so well here and so pointedly and the gloves off.”

“The Flight 93 Election,” however, was not written by some kook or Limbaugh enthusiast, or even a fringe member of the alt-right. Earlier this month, The Weekly Standard revealed that the author was indeed Michael Anton, a former George W. Bush–era speechwriter, and private-equity executive, with a propensity for fine suits and crisply folded pocket squares, who occasionally moonlighted over the years in conservative scholarship. “I’m a hypocrite. But ‘hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue’, right?” Anton told me, acknowledging some of what he called his “blue state” tastes. “I can suppress the fact that I’m awake to these realities, or I can admit it and speak out.”