2024, summarized: You’re sitting in a ballpark, watching a baseball game. The person sitting next to you has a radio, tuned to the play-by-play announcer. You watch the batter drill a line drive up the left field line. The third baseman dives for it, missing, and the batter races around first and keeps going, as the third base umpire throws out an arm to signal that it’s a fair ball. “A swing and a miss for strike three,” the announcer says on the radio. “That’s Ohtani’s second strikeout of the game.” You squint at the radio. “That’s not true,” you say, pointing at the field. “He’s sliding into second.” An usher comes running down the stairs. “Excuse me!” he shouts. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for disinformation! Do I need to call security?”
On October 4, the relentlessly appalling Anne Applebaum hosted a podcast at The Atlantic website on the topic of American freedom. . . .
Opening the discussion, Applebaum and co-host Peter Pomerantsev “explain” that there are two competing models of freedom in the American past. One model is adherence to American political norms, centered on submission to the authority of the federal government. Read this carefully: . . . Freedom is choosing who rules you.
Plus: “Just a few days ago, I argued that whole layers of high-status American political and cultural figures are ‘no longer culturally American.’ They don’t see the country, they don’t like the country, and they don’t have the most basic American instincts.”