It's so strange. I've read her book "Iron Curtain" and it was good. She clearly wasn't...unhinged...her whole professional life, but she clearly took some crazy pills and performed some sort of targeted self-lobotomy around 2017 and what we're left with is...this *thing*, this simulacrum of a normal person, and with her Deep Globalist husband and their ilk seem to spend all their time pissing in each other's faces and calling it a Champagne Cocktail. I mean, what's the end game here? If Trump wins do they all hold hands and jump off a cliff together? Can I dare to dream?
"She became a different person at some point" is essential to this what-have-you we're currently living through. Not only is this happening on the level of politics and media, which is one thing - but on a personal level I've also seen this happen to people in the past several years. We're living in a historical moment that encourages and facilitates derangement, whether that be about Trump or viruses or Ukraine, or even about so-and-so in my family did such-and-such to me. Wherever we turn, there's this mind-boggling hysteria and unreasonableness. And we think, "Surely, you can't be serious?" But they are. Are they? Still utterly bewildered by this turn in culture. Someone you thought you knew is suddenly someone else. Like pod people invasion. Why is this happening?
Upscale white America will never forgive downscale white America for the great crime of 2016 and the continuing menace of the Orange One.
They studied hardest, went to all the best schools, have the best jobs, houses, connections, reside on the Right Side of History™, consider themselves a moral and intellectual elite—and all this was challenged, threatened and could be taken away with the next election by a mass of smelly rubes who've never had dinner at an Embassy, don't know proper jargon and the newest mandatory pronouns, and some of whom have never even been to Europe!
Intolerable! This cannot stand!
The aristocrats of our progressive oligarchy have the worst form of power madness: they had felt total power (or imagined such), there were 2 terms of Obama, there was a new leadership class taking their places at various outposts of the Empire, and then some weird-haired TV host came and took it all away—this would be enough to turn anyone into Lady MacBeth.
Think of the Culture War more of upscale white America trying to drown downscale white America in a bathtub. They don't care if their enemy is dead or just comatose, they don't care if they have to go to jail, they don't care if the whole house collapses. They NEED to destroy their enemy to feel safe, whole and sane again.
It's really a total war of elimination fought by other means.
It's a mixture of media malfeasance and them having a tube running directly from their posterior to their nose. They have been high on their own supply for way too long.
Lydwine, I think the "why" is a psychological weakness in mankind. It manifests itself as an inability to discuss issues without anger.
I think it has to do with "Unconscious Thinking" or UT where the mind arrives at results without much conscious thought. UT is important. We cannot talk and do advanced thinking (medicine, engineering, construction, and most skills) without UT.
This is usually a good thing but what if you develop false UTs? Then your mind tries to defend them. An attack on any UT invokes frustration. Develop a lot of false UTs and you become deranged and flee discussions on topics that challenge your false UTs.
Most regular people can correct their false UTs. But as you become more "educated" that ability diminishes.
Real thinkers with false UTs eventually adapt and fix their UTs. Tulsi, Elon, RFK are examples of those who transitioned. It can take time.
But many people cannot. They succumb to the false messaging due to political correctness (PC) techniques that make people falsely choose between the PC narrative and being a good person - despite the complexity of the subject matter. Like a blood clot, the PC infected mind develops "mind clots" which limit their minds to only think outside uninfected areas. When the affliction gets really bad the injured becomes deranged -- they cannot discuss or absorb facts, they take challenges personally, get angry and will lie, cheat, and hurt others before rethinking their false UTs. These people are the most dangerous.
It explains why so many dems are angry, have TDS, will ignore the facts in front of them and hurt others to defend their false thinking.
Anyway, that is just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I do not think so.
Academia is a world of loyalty-tests, always was too. It's just the colours of the team jerseys that keeps changing.
Presumably, she realised subconsciously that she had to pick a side when it came to Putin's Russia and all related issues, and from there all else is rationalisation to shield herself from self-realisation of what she's been doing ever since.
I've seen that happen in real time to one or two people; titles, laurels, position, tenured, et cetera. Intelligent, well-spoken, and so on. But when the Word came down that the institution would employ to persons to sit-in on the meetings deciding on course literature, and that such literature had to be "representative" (i.e. race, sex and sexuality-quotas), they not only acquiesced but chomped at the bit to show their loyalty.
No loyalty, no renewed tenure. No grants. No bookdeals. No getting invited to a Royal Hunt. Certainly no invites to the Nobel Prize Gala.
The scary part is how all that can happen without the person "being the happening" realising or perceiving it.
That behaviour used to be called "craven" and you're right. As someone who worked in academia for more than a decade you've described the phenomenon perfectly.
I'm trying to be (uncharacteristically, perhaps) charitable to her and others like her. If they have stumbled into craven-ness, they can find the path again.
But if they have consciously and knowingly - or worse, purposefully - chosen it?
Being charitable to these people is the healthiest response, but it's difficult. (Notice how often "cult" shows up in trying to understand this--cult, culture, difficult, occult, etc.?)
There are true believers, there are those who stumble into it (i.e., useful idiots), but the worst are the craven ones (i.e., narcissists). The narcissists know it's B.S., but it's an effective weapon to wield against their enemies, real or perceived.
A lot of peeps I know became a different person, espousing incoherent and sadistic ideas, round about 2020. And then they got more incoherent and more sadistic in 2021. Thereafter: brain fog, it's a thing.
Yes, I was just going to mention "Gulag." She seemed quite "normal" and rational when she wrote that forward. Now I'm wishing I had Jordan Peterson's version.
I think during US hegemony and the heady boom of recent decades, it was easy to seem sane as they pontificated from golden perches . Now, I think you see who people always were and are during times of stress : their own true selves revealed.
I think part of it is when Putin and Russia went from being seen as the slow cousin from the countryside, to how it has been spoken of by the establishment since ca 2008, the year Putin stopped the USA from taking control, via private proxies, of Russian natural resources.
News reporting and statements from "experts" and politicians pre-2008 and post are very, very different. Putin was endorsed by the USA to take the reins after Yeltsin, as the latter as becoming a liability, and Putin was seem as a good compromise between the remnants of the old hardcore KGB nationalists and the younger ROC-connected up-and-coming crop of movers and shakers.
However, Putin played the American factions thinking him a good dupe like a fiddle, surprising them with being an actual real nationalist (and a gangster and a KGB-officer too, let's not kid ourselves about the man being perfectly ruthless if needed) with a huge chip on his shoulder about how the USA (in his view) via the World Bank, the IMF and the USA's lapdogs (Britain first and foremost) had humiliated and aimed to impoverish Russia and turn it into a resource-colony during the 1995-2005 period.
As Applebaum et al is connected to the Obama-Hillary sphere of powerbrokers in the USA, and they in turn were heavily involved with the individuals seeking to take control of Russia's resources, it is no wonder (in my mind) that the main reason they turned on Putin and Russia is precisely that he stopped them. Russia is after all not Iran in the 1970s or Irak in the 1990s, and as a Russian former officer in the KGB (specialising in among other things communication/information) Putin is exceedingly knowledgeable in history, to a degree his western counterparts cannot even comprehend.
And finally, if we are to impose pol sci-terms, Putin belongs to the school called Realpolitik, while virtually the entire western intelligentsia - politics, media, business - instead are using the End of History-hypothesis, Hayek/Friedman-neoliberal economic theory, and 1960s onwards American mulitculturalist (heavily influenced by an unholy mix of Adorno-style Marxism and French postmodern "new philosphy" of the 1970s) views on all issues related to ethnicity, religion and culture.
Applebaum also recently said that "it required literal, physical bravery" for Liz Cheney to endorse Kamala Harris, in effect proving that Applebaum literally has no idea what real bravery looks like.
Orwell is in full voice in this passage: "Freedom is obedience; failure to obey is domination, a corrupted freedom of cruelty. Only our submission to centralized political authority guarantees our future as free people." Freedom is slavery anyone?
Every time I hear about Applebaum, I think, "she's done it, she's attained peak retard." But she always manages to spy an even taller peak to climb from her new vantage. I remain here in the foothills, in awe.
It’s always corrupt federal bureaucrats that have stolen freedom from people. Look at the history of the BIA and how many of its agents used to steal the supplies and sell them for personal gain letting Indians starve and worse. Just what we’re seeing now with tax dollars diverted to illegals and hurricane victims left on their own. Not a lot to trust in government.
The 1935 federal Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) seized millions of acres of privately deeded land from individual Indians on the reservations and converted it into non-transferable tribal property. They turned the reservations into the hopeless hellholes that they remain today. "Nothin' ain't nothin' but it's free." Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. The feds took their land.
Applebaum has always presented herself as a Russia expert, and she swallowed the "Russia collusion" nonsense hook line and sinker, and so even if in her heart she knows that was a lie she is unable to walk that back as that requires her to break with the tribe and we knows what happens to apostates from the cult.
They are like sharks, if they stop they die so they can only continue forward.
Which is why it will be a miracle if we don't break up into different sections in the good old North America. I'm about to the point where I'd welcome it as I have zero in common with the death and destruction cult.
I'm headed to Europe in the spring. I can't wait to hear what friends and strangers think about our odd politics. A relative in Madrid has a twelve year old son who loves Trump and gladly wears the merch. Several years ago our Czech relatives in Praha weren't thrilled about Trump but I wonder what they think now? Can't wait to find out.
I've been saying this for awhile now, even if DJT wins, we are never getting rid of these insane people. They will continue to indoctrinate the young in perpetuity, if we let them and eventually we'll collapse.
Something's gotta give. The question is who or what? And of course, when?
I was just driving home from the coop this afternoon and I'm starting to see more H/W signage and told my mother that when I see someone with a H/W sticker on their vehicle, I have this compelling desire to bitch slap the person and yell "SNAP OUT OF IT"!!
Personally, an accounting would have to be made whereby those that want what the deep state are offering get a front row, first hand, live action experience for themselves. That's when the lightbulb might go off for many. Or we have a "come to Jesus" meeting or major nationwide catastrophe. (James Howard Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation passed on a tidbit today that military resources are geared up for a major deployment next week)
See most DJT supporters know exactly who he is and isn't, and we accept him precisely the way he is. The H/W supporters want their joyful illusion.
The "intellectual" elite are just brainwashed and high and quite full of themselves.
That wasn't painful for them. They got to be self righteous, virtuous above all others, stay home in their sweat or yoga pants and still "work"/get paid or go out and burn things down. All in all, a good time was had by many. In reality that was a cake walk compared to how it will go the next time or should the civil unrest that is coming spill out of the cities.
You should hear some of the young folks struggling in affected area in TN, NC and GA. They've never really experienced prolonged privation. Nor were many very prepared. Those that were, are just rolling with it, helping others. If you extrapolate that out, a large event like a nationwide CME or EMP, would hit pretty hard. Then they will see, the ones not too far gone. For the die hard, fully engulfed by the mind virus ones, they will fall apart quickly and self destruct. In my humble opinion. That's the only way we'll be rid of them.
Good fiction, if you're interested, is Blue Dawn by Blaine Pardoe. Very timely.
This is one of the points I try to drive into my civics students: "all men are created equal" is utterly nonsensical if you don't start from "man made in the image of God". If you're just a smart ape, who gave you those rights?
It's amazing to me that the people most obsessed with "human rights" are also the most obsessed with eradicating the belief in the source of those rights. "Crazy like a fox", or just plain dumb? Now sure.
Whenever i read about people like ones in this substack, I'm brought back to my high school and university days. They remind me of the second-rate "thinkers' who would bloviate on and on running in circles in circular sophistry making the whole class spin. Or the ones who would form a long-winded question near bell time filled with prefaces and caveats - and sometimes sycophancy - holding up a class of rolling eyes. Those stupid people who think they're ahead in a race but are too stupid to realize they've been lapped are now in positions of power and influence.
The Cunning of Freedom by Ryszard Legutko is a great summary of the 3 historical definitions of freedom / liberty: negative, positive, and internal. None bear any resemblance to Anne or Peter's definition.
"how do mean locals turn into angels when they move to hold office in the District of Columbia"
The Potomac River is actually an arm of the River Styx and thus a form of purgatory.
Ironically, the quote I started my civics class with last Monday was Madison's "if men were angels..."
"If freedom is “the Bill of Rights” and “the freedom to choose who rules you,” then no human being on the planet was ever free before the Bill of Rights was ratified, and no one outside the United States currently has freedom."
To me, this reads as a very common sentiment among Americans of Anglo-Saxon heritage, if I'm to be honest. It is often present as an undertone in any arguement comparing USA to European nation X (or to Europe as a whole): that only the USA has freedoms and liberties for its citizens, while us others are being allowed by our governments to do things.
I'm not making any judgment here, certainly not to the merit or lack thereof of such a claim either way, I just want to make that very clear - I'm just offering a foreigner's perspective and experience (personal and professional, if pol sci counts as professional these days) on that particular.
Random question, and I tried to find out online but failed: is Anne Applebaum related to Barbara Applebaum (the famous racist disciple of the even greater racist Noel Ignatiev)? If so, that would certainly explain things, maybe, or possibly just raise uncomfortable questions.
The Tim Snyder-quote is hilarious. These three cosmopolitans (what globalists used to be called the last time the unholy alliance of state and capital made a real bid for controlling the world - the Russian Revolution and what followed put the lid on that until the 1990s), Applebaum, Snyder and Pomerantsev really hasn't the first clue what the word "government" means at all, do they? They use that term as if is synonymous with "ruler" or "overlord". It /may/ mean the same thing, obviously, but it doesn't have to.
I'll give them one thing: "democracy" must mean more than "voting", else the DPRK or Irak under Saddam would be democracies too. (Though giving them that is akin to awarding a student 1 point on a test for getting their own name correct.)
But if that "more" is a set of principles, the those principles needs be codified and defined and said code and definition anchored in culture - which means "democracy" therefore cannot have a global or universal meaning anymore, which means they are stuck forever trying to reconcile being anti-imperalist (and anti-racist, and anti-supremacist and all the rest) with a self-imposed moral imperative to force their definition of "democracy" unto all others, no matter differences in culture, ethnicity, religion - or whether or not a population /wants/ their "democracy" in the first place.
Anyway, random thoughts spawned by your summary. Always nice when a text stirs up the old leaves on the bottom of the mind's well.
James Madison was pressured into writing the Bill of Rights, because others were afraid that, without them, there was no telling what the federal government might do. Madison resisted because he felt that if they had a BoR, people might start thinking that's the EXTENT of their rights. Better, Madison thought, to name nothing, so that ALL rights were always under consideration. It's as if Madison knew that, someday, there would be idiots like Applebaum.
"...that only the USA has freedoms and liberties for its citizens, while us others are being allowed by our governments to do things."
Did you check with your government before you sent this?
No, wait, don't answer. My version of an answer would be to flip the premise, and say that our government increasingly views itself as allowing us to do things, and regards a written Bill of Rights as a minor nuisance. Another ten years on this trajectory....
"Did you check with your government before you sent this?"
Hah! Yes, that's exactly it! I've even heard that one in real life, in debates, with different phrasings.
I think the root difference here is (and I'm only looking from a Swedish perspective) that we had, for the longest time, /greater/ freedom of speech than almost all others and this was tied into greater freedom of expression and information than all other nations.
The law regulated FoS thusly: threats and sharing of classified/confidential information, and outright libel/slander, and making false accusations is prohibited. And the old law which I grew up under specified that the state may take no action unless those are violated (f.e. a nurse looking in a patient's file and gossiping about it, or someone spreading rumours that X is an alcoholic).
Further, the law via court praxis also noted that the more public a figure you were, the more you had to tolerate others giving you a hard time in music, art, satire, et cetera.
Point of that recap? That the USA and European nations approached the issue from opposite ends: you started out with the 1st Amendment, and has steadily moved towards greater and greater control of speech/expression; first via private corporate media, then via state collusion with same (WW2), then Hollywood and the CIA during the Cold War, then Social Media Big Tech and the six companies owning virtually all of US media co-operating and being alloyed with the State, allowing it to round the 1st with impunity.
Whereas many European nations started with censorship (initiated by the Christians by the way, exactly in the same way the moslems do it today) which was gradually chipped away at down the years, until Globalisation set in post-2000.
What confounds debate on this is of course that it is completely impossible to know how it developed in all nations/cultures - even for residents of same! - due to the amount of information needed to be plown through; even when the law seem easy enough, court praxis and precedence is another factor, as is private control of media which leads to the old "Shouldn't the owner be allowed to decide what he wants to publish?" which leads to "Yeah but that must be viewed in the light of market share/capture and cartel-formation" which leads to "We need to regulate access and content so all voices can be heard" which leads to "You can't print this or that if you want to qualify for grants/access" which leads right back into censorship.
I'll say this: bringing up the 1st Amendment when debating FoS over here is a surefire way to get the Good Guys mad at you. They somehow struggle to reconcile their stated position (free speech for all) with their real one (FoS but only if you say what they approve of), without making it obvious. Same as on your end I suppose?
It's so strange. I've read her book "Iron Curtain" and it was good. She clearly wasn't...unhinged...her whole professional life, but she clearly took some crazy pills and performed some sort of targeted self-lobotomy around 2017 and what we're left with is...this *thing*, this simulacrum of a normal person, and with her Deep Globalist husband and their ilk seem to spend all their time pissing in each other's faces and calling it a Champagne Cocktail. I mean, what's the end game here? If Trump wins do they all hold hands and jump off a cliff together? Can I dare to dream?
I have "Gulag" on my bookshelf. She became a different person at some point.
"She became a different person at some point" is essential to this what-have-you we're currently living through. Not only is this happening on the level of politics and media, which is one thing - but on a personal level I've also seen this happen to people in the past several years. We're living in a historical moment that encourages and facilitates derangement, whether that be about Trump or viruses or Ukraine, or even about so-and-so in my family did such-and-such to me. Wherever we turn, there's this mind-boggling hysteria and unreasonableness. And we think, "Surely, you can't be serious?" But they are. Are they? Still utterly bewildered by this turn in culture. Someone you thought you knew is suddenly someone else. Like pod people invasion. Why is this happening?
Upscale white America will never forgive downscale white America for the great crime of 2016 and the continuing menace of the Orange One.
They studied hardest, went to all the best schools, have the best jobs, houses, connections, reside on the Right Side of History™, consider themselves a moral and intellectual elite—and all this was challenged, threatened and could be taken away with the next election by a mass of smelly rubes who've never had dinner at an Embassy, don't know proper jargon and the newest mandatory pronouns, and some of whom have never even been to Europe!
Intolerable! This cannot stand!
The aristocrats of our progressive oligarchy have the worst form of power madness: they had felt total power (or imagined such), there were 2 terms of Obama, there was a new leadership class taking their places at various outposts of the Empire, and then some weird-haired TV host came and took it all away—this would be enough to turn anyone into Lady MacBeth.
Think of the Culture War more of upscale white America trying to drown downscale white America in a bathtub. They don't care if their enemy is dead or just comatose, they don't care if they have to go to jail, they don't care if the whole house collapses. They NEED to destroy their enemy to feel safe, whole and sane again.
It's really a total war of elimination fought by other means.
It’s a Fourth Turning, crazy sh!t is normalized
It's a mixture of media malfeasance and them having a tube running directly from their posterior to their nose. They have been high on their own supply for way too long.
Cluster B Personality Disorder https://christopherrufo.com/p/institutionalized-derangement
Psych meds and social media (?)
The social media-driven decline of deep reading hits hard.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
These 19 or 20-year-olds aren't much older than the iPhone, or Twitter. They're ~ the same age as Facebook.
I like that you can listen to an audio of the article if you don’t want to read it. Kind of says it all.
Goes deeper IMO
Exactly so...... mind boggling, head spinning, jaw dropping Incredulity is my permanent default mode of day to day existence....
I’m living this too. Friends I thought I knew have become strangers to me.
It's so disorienting. People really can become different people. I guess I only every thought about that in a hopeful way. Not anymore.
It's like they joined a cult or something.
Deb, it really is that simple. The cult(ure) of death.
I think you'll find the reason why here:
https://notesfromthepast.substack.com/p/how-communists-took-over-america
Now you've got me wanting to watch my DVD of Invasion of the Body Snatchers again. The good 1956 original.
"Their bodies were the hosts of an alien form of life"
"You're in danger! They're after our wives and our children! You're next!"
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) End of Movie - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxhn43IZ5RI&t=2s
Lydwine, I think the "why" is a psychological weakness in mankind. It manifests itself as an inability to discuss issues without anger.
I think it has to do with "Unconscious Thinking" or UT where the mind arrives at results without much conscious thought. UT is important. We cannot talk and do advanced thinking (medicine, engineering, construction, and most skills) without UT.
This is usually a good thing but what if you develop false UTs? Then your mind tries to defend them. An attack on any UT invokes frustration. Develop a lot of false UTs and you become deranged and flee discussions on topics that challenge your false UTs.
Most regular people can correct their false UTs. But as you become more "educated" that ability diminishes.
Real thinkers with false UTs eventually adapt and fix their UTs. Tulsi, Elon, RFK are examples of those who transitioned. It can take time.
But many people cannot. They succumb to the false messaging due to political correctness (PC) techniques that make people falsely choose between the PC narrative and being a good person - despite the complexity of the subject matter. Like a blood clot, the PC infected mind develops "mind clots" which limit their minds to only think outside uninfected areas. When the affliction gets really bad the injured becomes deranged -- they cannot discuss or absorb facts, they take challenges personally, get angry and will lie, cheat, and hurt others before rethinking their false UTs. These people are the most dangerous.
It explains why so many dems are angry, have TDS, will ignore the facts in front of them and hurt others to defend their false thinking.
Anyway, that is just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I do not think so.
Academia is a world of loyalty-tests, always was too. It's just the colours of the team jerseys that keeps changing.
Presumably, she realised subconsciously that she had to pick a side when it came to Putin's Russia and all related issues, and from there all else is rationalisation to shield herself from self-realisation of what she's been doing ever since.
I've seen that happen in real time to one or two people; titles, laurels, position, tenured, et cetera. Intelligent, well-spoken, and so on. But when the Word came down that the institution would employ to persons to sit-in on the meetings deciding on course literature, and that such literature had to be "representative" (i.e. race, sex and sexuality-quotas), they not only acquiesced but chomped at the bit to show their loyalty.
No loyalty, no renewed tenure. No grants. No bookdeals. No getting invited to a Royal Hunt. Certainly no invites to the Nobel Prize Gala.
The scary part is how all that can happen without the person "being the happening" realising or perceiving it.
That behaviour used to be called "craven" and you're right. As someone who worked in academia for more than a decade you've described the phenomenon perfectly.
I'm trying to be (uncharacteristically, perhaps) charitable to her and others like her. If they have stumbled into craven-ness, they can find the path again.
But if they have consciously and knowingly - or worse, purposefully - chosen it?
Am not aware of a nice way to say ‘bootlicker.’
Being charitable to these people is the healthiest response, but it's difficult. (Notice how often "cult" shows up in trying to understand this--cult, culture, difficult, occult, etc.?)
There are true believers, there are those who stumble into it (i.e., useful idiots), but the worst are the craven ones (i.e., narcissists). The narcissists know it's B.S., but it's an effective weapon to wield against their enemies, real or perceived.
Its a mimetic society. https://luca-dellanna.com/mimetic-societies/
TDS claims them all
Her book “Iron Curtain” is also outstanding.
Yes, it is very sad what happened to her, and unfortunately, she is far from the only one. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
They cannot see what is actually happening:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-soft-totalitarianism
A lot of peeps I know became a different person, espousing incoherent and sadistic ideas, round about 2020. And then they got more incoherent and more sadistic in 2021. Thereafter: brain fog, it's a thing.
covid shots might have something to do with that maybe
Mitochondrial dysfunction
Or people loose their marbles , nymusicdaily 🧐
lots of marbles rolling around out there
Your not kidding nymusicdaily
when she gained a name, it became worthwhile for government propaganda efforts to pay for her to spout all of this nonsense.
I wonder how many jabs she's gotten.
she's at johns hopkins (co-sponsors of event 201) so i would imagine all of them. are they up to 10 yet?
"She became a different person at some point."
Maybe they're just finally being honest about who they really are.
Yes, I was just going to mention "Gulag." She seemed quite "normal" and rational when she wrote that forward. Now I'm wishing I had Jordan Peterson's version.
I think during US hegemony and the heady boom of recent decades, it was easy to seem sane as they pontificated from golden perches . Now, I think you see who people always were and are during times of stress : their own true selves revealed.
I think part of it is when Putin and Russia went from being seen as the slow cousin from the countryside, to how it has been spoken of by the establishment since ca 2008, the year Putin stopped the USA from taking control, via private proxies, of Russian natural resources.
News reporting and statements from "experts" and politicians pre-2008 and post are very, very different. Putin was endorsed by the USA to take the reins after Yeltsin, as the latter as becoming a liability, and Putin was seem as a good compromise between the remnants of the old hardcore KGB nationalists and the younger ROC-connected up-and-coming crop of movers and shakers.
However, Putin played the American factions thinking him a good dupe like a fiddle, surprising them with being an actual real nationalist (and a gangster and a KGB-officer too, let's not kid ourselves about the man being perfectly ruthless if needed) with a huge chip on his shoulder about how the USA (in his view) via the World Bank, the IMF and the USA's lapdogs (Britain first and foremost) had humiliated and aimed to impoverish Russia and turn it into a resource-colony during the 1995-2005 period.
As Applebaum et al is connected to the Obama-Hillary sphere of powerbrokers in the USA, and they in turn were heavily involved with the individuals seeking to take control of Russia's resources, it is no wonder (in my mind) that the main reason they turned on Putin and Russia is precisely that he stopped them. Russia is after all not Iran in the 1970s or Irak in the 1990s, and as a Russian former officer in the KGB (specialising in among other things communication/information) Putin is exceedingly knowledgeable in history, to a degree his western counterparts cannot even comprehend.
And finally, if we are to impose pol sci-terms, Putin belongs to the school called Realpolitik, while virtually the entire western intelligentsia - politics, media, business - instead are using the End of History-hypothesis, Hayek/Friedman-neoliberal economic theory, and 1960s onwards American mulitculturalist (heavily influenced by an unholy mix of Adorno-style Marxism and French postmodern "new philosphy" of the 1970s) views on all issues related to ethnicity, religion and culture.
If that makes sense?
Yes it does. Good post!
Excellent summation.
Vaccine injuries?
"spend all their time pissing in each other's faces and calling it a Champagne Cocktail"
lolololol
u killin me
Like!Like!Like!
The Pointer Sisters know the soundtrack to freedom for the apparatchiks.
“Jump!”
With you on that one. What a visual
Applebaum also recently said that "it required literal, physical bravery" for Liz Cheney to endorse Kamala Harris, in effect proving that Applebaum literally has no idea what real bravery looks like.
https://x.com/anneapplebaum/status/1842251674452152361
I don’t know what country these people live in, whose history they think they know, or whose civics they think they learned, but it’s not the USA.
May posterity forget they were ever our countrymen.
Orwell is in full voice in this passage: "Freedom is obedience; failure to obey is domination, a corrupted freedom of cruelty. Only our submission to centralized political authority guarantees our future as free people." Freedom is slavery anyone?
Bingo!
Every time I hear about Applebaum, I think, "she's done it, she's attained peak retard." But she always manages to spy an even taller peak to climb from her new vantage. I remain here in the foothills, in awe.
LOLOL
It’s always corrupt federal bureaucrats that have stolen freedom from people. Look at the history of the BIA and how many of its agents used to steal the supplies and sell them for personal gain letting Indians starve and worse. Just what we’re seeing now with tax dollars diverted to illegals and hurricane victims left on their own. Not a lot to trust in government.
The 1935 federal Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) seized millions of acres of privately deeded land from individual Indians on the reservations and converted it into non-transferable tribal property. They turned the reservations into the hopeless hellholes that they remain today. "Nothin' ain't nothin' but it's free." Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. The feds took their land.
Applebaum has always presented herself as a Russia expert, and she swallowed the "Russia collusion" nonsense hook line and sinker, and so even if in her heart she knows that was a lie she is unable to walk that back as that requires her to break with the tribe and we knows what happens to apostates from the cult.
They are like sharks, if they stop they die so they can only continue forward.
Rewriting history is an essential part of narrative control.
If you control the past you control the future.
Yes, these people are vile.
Snyder is another regular on Maher.
Its amazing what the result of Trump has been, the utter derangement of the progressive left.
Which is why it will be a miracle if we don't break up into different sections in the good old North America. I'm about to the point where I'd welcome it as I have zero in common with the death and destruction cult.
A new country full of lunatics who hate us right next door. What could go wrong?
There might be a war after which we are forced to merge with them… wait.
After the walls are up, should be fine. Unless they build one of those zombie towers.
See:
Israel
I'm headed to Europe in the spring. I can't wait to hear what friends and strangers think about our odd politics. A relative in Madrid has a twelve year old son who loves Trump and gladly wears the merch. Several years ago our Czech relatives in Praha weren't thrilled about Trump but I wonder what they think now? Can't wait to find out.
Chris, this one is making my head hurt!
I see no other possible solution to this problem than drawing that line and asking them to stay on their side of the line and leave us alone.
But of course, that’ll never happen.
I've been saying this for awhile now, even if DJT wins, we are never getting rid of these insane people. They will continue to indoctrinate the young in perpetuity, if we let them and eventually we'll collapse.
Something's gotta give. The question is who or what? And of course, when?
I was just driving home from the coop this afternoon and I'm starting to see more H/W signage and told my mother that when I see someone with a H/W sticker on their vehicle, I have this compelling desire to bitch slap the person and yell "SNAP OUT OF IT"!!
Personally, an accounting would have to be made whereby those that want what the deep state are offering get a front row, first hand, live action experience for themselves. That's when the lightbulb might go off for many. Or we have a "come to Jesus" meeting or major nationwide catastrophe. (James Howard Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation passed on a tidbit today that military resources are geared up for a major deployment next week)
See most DJT supporters know exactly who he is and isn't, and we accept him precisely the way he is. The H/W supporters want their joyful illusion.
The "intellectual" elite are just brainwashed and high and quite full of themselves.
Orwell was right, he was just off by 40 years.
You would have thought that the Covid disaster had taught them SOMETHING about government overreach. .
But no, it didn’t. So I’m not real hopeful about another catastrophe teaching them anything.
That wasn't painful for them. They got to be self righteous, virtuous above all others, stay home in their sweat or yoga pants and still "work"/get paid or go out and burn things down. All in all, a good time was had by many. In reality that was a cake walk compared to how it will go the next time or should the civil unrest that is coming spill out of the cities.
You should hear some of the young folks struggling in affected area in TN, NC and GA. They've never really experienced prolonged privation. Nor were many very prepared. Those that were, are just rolling with it, helping others. If you extrapolate that out, a large event like a nationwide CME or EMP, would hit pretty hard. Then they will see, the ones not too far gone. For the die hard, fully engulfed by the mind virus ones, they will fall apart quickly and self destruct. In my humble opinion. That's the only way we'll be rid of them.
Good fiction, if you're interested, is Blue Dawn by Blaine Pardoe. Very timely.
They can never leave us alone.
If you don’t recognize God it is hard to postulate God given inalienable rights. Our country and culture are lost without Judeo-Christian values
This is one of the points I try to drive into my civics students: "all men are created equal" is utterly nonsensical if you don't start from "man made in the image of God". If you're just a smart ape, who gave you those rights?
It's amazing to me that the people most obsessed with "human rights" are also the most obsessed with eradicating the belief in the source of those rights. "Crazy like a fox", or just plain dumb? Now sure.
Whenever i read about people like ones in this substack, I'm brought back to my high school and university days. They remind me of the second-rate "thinkers' who would bloviate on and on running in circles in circular sophistry making the whole class spin. Or the ones who would form a long-winded question near bell time filled with prefaces and caveats - and sometimes sycophancy - holding up a class of rolling eyes. Those stupid people who think they're ahead in a race but are too stupid to realize they've been lapped are now in positions of power and influence.
Stupid people rule over us.
I’ve worked with them for decades. I hated them.
The Cunning of Freedom by Ryszard Legutko is a great summary of the 3 historical definitions of freedom / liberty: negative, positive, and internal. None bear any resemblance to Anne or Peter's definition.
"how do mean locals turn into angels when they move to hold office in the District of Columbia"
The Potomac River is actually an arm of the River Styx and thus a form of purgatory.
Ironically, the quote I started my civics class with last Monday was Madison's "if men were angels..."
LOL.
If a foreigner is allowed a few questions?
"If freedom is “the Bill of Rights” and “the freedom to choose who rules you,” then no human being on the planet was ever free before the Bill of Rights was ratified, and no one outside the United States currently has freedom."
To me, this reads as a very common sentiment among Americans of Anglo-Saxon heritage, if I'm to be honest. It is often present as an undertone in any arguement comparing USA to European nation X (or to Europe as a whole): that only the USA has freedoms and liberties for its citizens, while us others are being allowed by our governments to do things.
I'm not making any judgment here, certainly not to the merit or lack thereof of such a claim either way, I just want to make that very clear - I'm just offering a foreigner's perspective and experience (personal and professional, if pol sci counts as professional these days) on that particular.
Random question, and I tried to find out online but failed: is Anne Applebaum related to Barbara Applebaum (the famous racist disciple of the even greater racist Noel Ignatiev)? If so, that would certainly explain things, maybe, or possibly just raise uncomfortable questions.
The Tim Snyder-quote is hilarious. These three cosmopolitans (what globalists used to be called the last time the unholy alliance of state and capital made a real bid for controlling the world - the Russian Revolution and what followed put the lid on that until the 1990s), Applebaum, Snyder and Pomerantsev really hasn't the first clue what the word "government" means at all, do they? They use that term as if is synonymous with "ruler" or "overlord". It /may/ mean the same thing, obviously, but it doesn't have to.
I'll give them one thing: "democracy" must mean more than "voting", else the DPRK or Irak under Saddam would be democracies too. (Though giving them that is akin to awarding a student 1 point on a test for getting their own name correct.)
But if that "more" is a set of principles, the those principles needs be codified and defined and said code and definition anchored in culture - which means "democracy" therefore cannot have a global or universal meaning anymore, which means they are stuck forever trying to reconcile being anti-imperalist (and anti-racist, and anti-supremacist and all the rest) with a self-imposed moral imperative to force their definition of "democracy" unto all others, no matter differences in culture, ethnicity, religion - or whether or not a population /wants/ their "democracy" in the first place.
Anyway, random thoughts spawned by your summary. Always nice when a text stirs up the old leaves on the bottom of the mind's well.
James Madison was pressured into writing the Bill of Rights, because others were afraid that, without them, there was no telling what the federal government might do. Madison resisted because he felt that if they had a BoR, people might start thinking that's the EXTENT of their rights. Better, Madison thought, to name nothing, so that ALL rights were always under consideration. It's as if Madison knew that, someday, there would be idiots like Applebaum.
"...that only the USA has freedoms and liberties for its citizens, while us others are being allowed by our governments to do things."
Did you check with your government before you sent this?
No, wait, don't answer. My version of an answer would be to flip the premise, and say that our government increasingly views itself as allowing us to do things, and regards a written Bill of Rights as a minor nuisance. Another ten years on this trajectory....
"Did you check with your government before you sent this?"
Hah! Yes, that's exactly it! I've even heard that one in real life, in debates, with different phrasings.
I think the root difference here is (and I'm only looking from a Swedish perspective) that we had, for the longest time, /greater/ freedom of speech than almost all others and this was tied into greater freedom of expression and information than all other nations.
The law regulated FoS thusly: threats and sharing of classified/confidential information, and outright libel/slander, and making false accusations is prohibited. And the old law which I grew up under specified that the state may take no action unless those are violated (f.e. a nurse looking in a patient's file and gossiping about it, or someone spreading rumours that X is an alcoholic).
Further, the law via court praxis also noted that the more public a figure you were, the more you had to tolerate others giving you a hard time in music, art, satire, et cetera.
Point of that recap? That the USA and European nations approached the issue from opposite ends: you started out with the 1st Amendment, and has steadily moved towards greater and greater control of speech/expression; first via private corporate media, then via state collusion with same (WW2), then Hollywood and the CIA during the Cold War, then Social Media Big Tech and the six companies owning virtually all of US media co-operating and being alloyed with the State, allowing it to round the 1st with impunity.
Whereas many European nations started with censorship (initiated by the Christians by the way, exactly in the same way the moslems do it today) which was gradually chipped away at down the years, until Globalisation set in post-2000.
What confounds debate on this is of course that it is completely impossible to know how it developed in all nations/cultures - even for residents of same! - due to the amount of information needed to be plown through; even when the law seem easy enough, court praxis and precedence is another factor, as is private control of media which leads to the old "Shouldn't the owner be allowed to decide what he wants to publish?" which leads to "Yeah but that must be viewed in the light of market share/capture and cartel-formation" which leads to "We need to regulate access and content so all voices can be heard" which leads to "You can't print this or that if you want to qualify for grants/access" which leads right back into censorship.
I'll say this: bringing up the 1st Amendment when debating FoS over here is a surefire way to get the Good Guys mad at you. They somehow struggle to reconcile their stated position (free speech for all) with their real one (FoS but only if you say what they approve of), without making it obvious. Same as on your end I suppose?
Excellent comment