American journalist Anne Applebaum, the wife of Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, continued to vent her frustration over the U.S. presidential election results in an interview with Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland. Despite being seemingly obsessed with hating Trump, as well as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, this time, reports wPolityce, she takes special aim at Elon Musk.
Still promoting her new book, “Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run The World,” the author spoke, among other things, about the need to look for “new solutions” and “new alliances” after Trump’s victory.
RND asked how liberals can wrest the idea of ”freedom of speech” away from the right. Applebaum replied that it was by calling out the “hypocrisy” of those referred to throughout the interview as called either “far right” or “populist.”
“There’s nothing more hypocritical than Elon Musk saying he wants to practice ‘free speech’ on X, then changing the algorithm to favor the far right,” said the wife of Polish diplomat Radosław Sikorski.
“Elon Musk blocks accounts when foreign leaders or dictators ask him to. He does anything but defend free speech,” she stated.
Asked about Musk calling the German vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, a fool for advocating regulating social media, Applebaum said: “And he will continue to ridicule him and others until we regulate social media,” insisting that this is not about content moderation or censorship but structuring platforms to make them legally responsible or somehow demonetizing “outrage and anger.”
“Maybe that’s the motto for the next four years: don’t be afraid of extremist American billionaires,” RND stated.
Regarding Trump, she did focus on how he and other “far right” leaders from Putin to PiS’ Kaczynski run on a campaign of ‘catastrophism,” saying that “they use this image of catastrophe and failure because they want us to sweep away the institutions and replace them with a single leader.”
Before the U.S. election, Sikorski’s wife did a podcast for Bloomberg entitled “Applebaum says Trump 2.0 could be good news for dictators.” An Atlantic article she wrote was titled, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.”
She has also made note of Trump’s “praise” for Orbán.
Aside from his foreign minister’s wife’s rage against a Trump administration and any parties that helped him get back to the White House, PM Tusk himself is in no way off the hook, given the dossier of insults his government has hurled at the president-elect. The question is how far Poland wants to antagonize relations with the U.S.
And just last week, FM Sikorski appointed Bogdan Klich to serve as head of mission in Poland’s embassy in D.C. Klich was formerly senator and defense minister.
Due to opposition from President Andrzej Duda over his serving as ambassador, Klich will be chargé d’affaires at the embassy. “It is reckless that Mr. Klich, who made completely irresponsible statements about the future President of the United States, Donald Trump, is to become the head of the embassy in Washington,” Duda told reporters.
“I believe it is unwise from a diplomatic standpoint. I don’t know if this is some kind of provocation against President Donald Trump or his collaborators. It’s hard for me to answer that question,” he added.
In an X post from 2022, Klich called the president-elect “unbalanced” and undemocratic: ”The testimony before Congress that #Trump wanted to join the rebels occupying the Capitol is terrifying, but not surprising. Let us remember that it was friendship with this unbalanced politician who did not respect democracy that was supposed to be, according to #PiS, a guarantor of Poland’s security.”
In yet another, he went after Trump for being a “convicted criminal.”
