SPENGLER: Anne Applebaum’s Pride And Prejudice.

Anne Applebaum’s list of little Hitlers includes some ex-friends who came to her 1999 New Year’s Eve party in Poland, when her husband Radek Sikorski was a foreign ministry official, as well as former acquaintances like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The renegade party guests somehow morphed from democracy activists into Nazis, because they suffer from “authoritarian personalities,” Applebaum avers. Also on her list are “the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with differences, the British right and the American right, too.” It is hard to separate Applebaum’s ideological rancor at friends who moved away from the liberal dogmas of 1989 and her personal disappointment over her husband’s career.

Boris Johnson a crypto-fascist? Who but the overwrought Ms. Applebaum noticed! She would have a pint at the pub with Johnson when she was Deputy Editor of the Spectator and he was Mayor of London, but since then she has discovered that the Prime Minister is a liar, a home-wrecking philanderer, and a budding authoritarian due to his opposition [Sic? — Ed] to Brexit. She claims that the rising fascists of the British Isles duped their compatriots into voting Leave by lying about money that might be saved for the National Health Service.

This account of Brexit, like everything else in the book, is utterly mendacious. Whatever one thinks of the “Leave” party’s case, Britain faced an authentic crisis over European Community-mandated immigration. Applebaum does not mention that Britain was inundated by 300,000 Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants after those impoverished countries joined the EC in 2014, nor that Britain petitioned the EC in vain for relief from mass immigration. Democracy appeals to Applebaum only when people vote the way she thinks they should. In a textbook example of what William Empson called unintended irony, she champions the imperious, unelected bureaucracy of the European Community as the savior of democracy against alleged authoritarians who won a popular plebescite by a margin of 52 to 48 percent.

Leo Strauss ridiculed the sort of polemical caricature he dubbed reductio ad Hitlerum, and if it is possible to write a caricature of a caricature, Applebaum has managed it. She trots out Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “authoritarian personality,” that is a lonely individual who “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.’” Along with Arendt, Applebaum quotes the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, who claimed that a bias towards authoritarianism stemmed from such personality traits as repressed homosexuality. Whether one takes Arendt and Adorno seriously or not, when they used the term “authoritarian personality” they meant to reference actual supporters of Hitler and Stalin who murdered tens of millions of people.

Of course, for Applebaum, some authoritarian personalities are more equal than others: The Atlantic Must Stop Covering For The Chinese Communist Party.

China does not just want to hide their mishandling of the outbreak, but they want to blame the origin of the virus on the United States and paint themselves as heroes saving the rest of the world from the pandemic they started. China’s Communist Party-controlled newspaper, People’s Daily, attributed shipments of masks and other medical equipment to countries like Iran and Italy as their love and care for all people. The Washington Post reported that those shipments were not donations, but exports purchased by those countries.

Not to be deterred by facts, however, Atlantic Staff Writer Anne Applebaum upheld the lie that China was “sending aid” to Italy out of the goodness of their hearts.

In an article titled “The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff,” Applebaum makes the case for why the Trump administration is just as bad as the Chinese Communist Party. Applebaum initially describes China’s failings in handling the virus, but then compares Trump to officials in Wuhan for being “concerned about the numbers—the optics of how a pandemic looks.”

She acknowledges China’s threats against it’s own doctors, but shifts blame away from the Chinese Communist Party because they did not instruct “anyone in the United States not to carry out testing.” She writes “many of those recounting China’s missteps have become just a little bit too smug.”

That’s what Xi said.