Free Republic

VIDEOOn the day after the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea was blown up, former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski (husband of American writer Anne Applebaum) tweeted his THANK YOU to the USA. Soon afterwards, when he found out the new taboo against the blaming the OBVIOUS culprit, he quickly deleted that tweet.

[G]athered in a basement on a quiet, tree-lined street, the Belarusians preparing to leave Warsaw to join the Ukrainian army look more like a bunch of computer programmers getting ready for a long car trip. Maybe that’s because they are a bunch of computer programmers—or anyway, some of them are—gathered in a basement on a quiet, tree-lined street, getting ready for a long car trip...If they are identified, members of their families could be visited, harassed, even arrested by the Belarusian police. “Our relatives are hostages,” one of them told me. Already, mothers of Belarusian soldiers fighting in Ukraine have...

The Atlantic last week hosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” at the University of Chicago, where I’m a student. Barack Obama, Amy Klobuchar, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ben Smith, Brian Stelter, and other boldface names studded the program, alongside many lesser-known members of the prestige press. They would gather, as a news release put it, to explore “the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” The Atlantic gabfest was billed as a space for rigorous dialogue, where the light of truth would scatter the darkness of disinformation. But the dialogue and criticism, it...

This week, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP) and The Atlantic magazine hosted a “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference, and we have to hand it to IOP Director David Axlerod for bringing in true experts on the subject. The conference featured some of America’s greatest purveyors of disinformation, such as Barack Obama, Brian Stelter, Anne Applebaum, and a few token conservatives, including Jonah Goldberg and Adam Kinzinger. The media, government, and academia elites speaking at the conference weren’t expecting to be challenged as they self-righteously spewed more lies—but our team at the Chicago Thinker was prepared...

I met Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, in the recording studio that occupies the basement of Steve Bannon’s stately Capitol Hill townhouse, a few blocks from the Supreme Court—the same Supreme Court that will, according to Lindell, decide “9–0” in favor of reinstating Donald Trump to the presidency sometime in August, or possibly September.

Major U.S. media outlets are living in an alternate fantasy world in which the Biden scandal is a 'miasma' meant to confuse and mislead gullible Americans. It’s hard to read Anne Applebaum’s recent article on the Hunter Biden scandal at The Atlantic without guffawing at the outlandishness of her argument, which is that the whole thing amounts to a shadowy “psy-op” that’s too complicated to understand—a “miasma” conjured up by unreliable Fox News characters trying to create a “foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened.”Applebaum’s approach is emblematic of the mainstream...

"Apocalypse Now" would have been a fitting title for this Morning Joe segment today. It featured three women painting a terrifying portrait of life under President Trump, and a prediction of further doom to come. First up was Gail Helt, who claimed that by appearing at St. John's church with a Bible, President Trump was attempting to "conjure a divine image" like the North Korean despot Kim Jong-un. Poor Professor Helt proclaimed herself "unnerved" and "terrified," and her voice and demeanor did indeed reflect that. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

It looks, at first, like one of a zillion unfunny video clips that now circulate on the internet: “Once Upon a Virus” features cheap animation, cheesy music, and sarcastic dialogue between China—represented by a Lego terra-cotta warrior with a low, masculine voice—and the United States, represented by a Lego Statue of Liberty with a high, squeaky voice. They “speak” in short sentences: “We discovered a new virus,” says the warrior. “So what?” says the Statue of Liberty. “It’s dangerous,” says the warrior. “It’s only a flu,” says Statue of Liberty. “Wear a mask,” says the warrior. “Don’t wear a mask,”...

Even inside a hotel so secure that it has body scanners at the entrance and snipers on the roof, US Vice President Mike Pence travels with a vast security detail. Its main function, it seems, is to elbow people out of the way so that the vice president and his unsmiling wife can walk through a lobby, crowded with European officials and military brass, and speak to no one. Which is perhaps unsurprising, for Pence was heading to the main forum of the Munich Security Conference - an annual event whose origins lie deep in the Cold War - to...

... Watching Donald Trump bluster and bluff his way through a presidential campaign, I wonder if we underestimate the ways in which Internet vitriol has broadened the parameters of political debate. We are "shocked, shocked" by Trump's language, but all of it is exactly the sort of thing anyone can encounter in the normal course of reading about politics online. John McCain isn't a war hero? I'll bet he finds worse insults than that on his Facebook page, and so does everybody who writes about him. All Mexicans are rapists? I open my Twitter account every morning to find similar...

Over and over again — throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels — I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people...

Putin has invaded Ukraine. Is it hysterical to prepare for total war with Russia? Or is it naive not to? WARSAW, Poland—Over and over again—throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels—I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next....

It's by Anne Applebaum. It said that Lenin saw common criminals(thieves, pickpockets, murderers) as potential allies. He blamed the 'exploitation of the masses' where removal of the exploiters would curb the excesses and crime. I think that this is why the Left is always standing up for the illegals, the sucker punchers, the felon vote-u name it. They will use them and THEN deal with them their way. They're sick.

Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more -- presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer. DHS serves only one clear purpose: to provide unimaginable bonanzas for favored congressional...

The American author Anne Applebaum, wife of Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister, has been given special police protection after the engine of her jeep exploded in as yet unexplained circumstances. Ms Applebaum, 45, author of a Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Soviet Gulag, was driving through the Jozefow suburb of Warsaw on Saturday when she heard a strange noise in her car and got out to investigate. Shortly afterwards the engine blew up. She was unharmed.

Yesterday, I just considered Anne Applebaum to have a conflict of interest over Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland. After her response to criticism for failing to disclose her husband’s efforts to get charges dropped against the director, it seems clear that Applebaum has lost whatever sense she formerly had — and that her readers are overwhelmingly repulsed by it. In responding to Patterico, Applebaum scoffs at the notion that the 13-year-old girl had been victimized — because she called her mother before the attack. I’m not kidding: Of course, there were some very legitimate disagreements, including two excellent ones from...

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum serves up a sickening rationale to excuse film director Roman Polanski fleeing justice for his rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in the 1970s: the Holocaust.Polanski was arrested today in Switzerland on an arrest warrant based on his fleeing justice in 1977.Wrote Applebaum in a web posting at "Post Partisan":He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later...

...Certainly it is true that when Rowan Williams -- the archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Church of England, symbolic leader of the international Anglican Communion -- called for "constructive accommodation" with some aspects of sharia law, and declared the incorporation of Muslim religious law into the British legal system "unavoidable," practically no insult has been left unsaid....Arguing that his remarks were misunderstood and taken out of context, his office even took the trouble to publish them on his official Web site. I highly recommend a closer look. Reading them, it instantly becomes clear that every syllable of the...

Ninety years ago this week, a Bolshevik mob stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, arrested the provisional government, and installed a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in its place. Though the Russian revolution is no longer widely celebrated (not even by the Russians, who instead commemorate the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow in 1612), I felt it important to mark the occasion. In honor of the anniversary, I reread Ten Days That Shook the World, the famed account of the revolution written by John Reed, the American journalist and fellow-traveler. Then I reread last week's press reports of the...

White House wannabes are fatally flawed By Anne Applebaum Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/08/2007 Approximately one year from now, the American political conventions will be in full swing. The Democrats will be in Denver, Colorado, wearing silly hats and cheering for their presidential nominee. The Republicans will be in St Paul, Minnesota, chasing pigs at the Minnesota state fair and cheering for their nominee. Then, a year from next November, one of the two nominees will become the next president of the United States. That's how the election will work, in principle. The trouble is, at the moment it's impossible...