Ian

🇵🇱 Speaking of the Applebaums... Back in February, Tusk posted this photo of himself reading "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World," with the caption: "In the time of strategic uncertainty, it's worth knowing who we're dealing with." The author is Anne Applebaum, a Jewish-American journalist at The Atlantic, Pulitzer winner, and wife of Tusk's Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski. So the Prime Minister promoted a book by his own Foreign Minister's wife, about the dangers of leaders who grab institutions by force. Nine months later, his government sent riot police to the Constitutional Court. Applebaum isn't just a journalist. She's a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins, where she runs a program on "disinformation," a former senior fellow at the Washington think tank CEPA, where she led a project on "countering Russian disinformation" in Eastern Europe, and has sat on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government-funded body that bankrolls NGOs and media abroad. In "Autocracy, Inc." she lumps Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and others into one global network of "dictators," a worldview where anyone outside the Western camp is an enemy and every domestic critic is a potential foreign agent. Sound familiar? It's the same logic Tusk used last night to blame the Constitutional Court crisis on "Russian bots."