Along with Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, and other once respected intellectuals, we now see the same anti-Trump lunacy infecting Atlantic Monthly writer Anne Applebaum, whose self-important loathing for Trump has descended into outright anti-Americanism.

In her case, the transmission vehicle is the coronavirus.

First, she wrote a badly reasoned Atlantic Monthly piece claiming that American had finally gotten its comeuppance in the coronavirus pandemic just as the Japanese got theirs before the Meiji Restoration, when they realized how far behind they were relative to some other countries' technology (really?).  "Called America's bluff," she put it, implying our entire nation was some kind of con.

Then she put out this ridiculous tweet:

China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid. The US has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower? https://t.co/TsM3Eu7KR7

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) March 12, 2020

Is there anyone who cares about such hierarchies at a time like this?  What most people are thinking is that China is responsible for this virus, period, and needs to be held accountable.  Whether it was through tolerating the eating of bat soup in Wuhan wet markets or accidentally releasing the virus through an infected worker from a government lab into that same Wuhan wet market (such geniuses to position them next to each other), it's responsible.  It has since failed to contain the spread of the virus, has lied repeatedly about its origins, covered up evidence, refused aid from the U.S., and is busy throwing dissidents and whistleblowers into prison over the whole thing to keep the press good.  It's also trying to falsely pin the crisis onto the U.S. and might even be trying to spread the disease to top U.S. officials, as a suspicious recent incident demonstrates.

China's behavior has been nothing short of reprehensible, and yes, this communist regime, unlike the free government in the U.S., may just topple as a result of this behavior, too.  The Chicoms at a minimum are acting as though it might happen.

Yes, we are the superpower here, and that goes without saying.  Applebaum is, after all, tweeting in English.  Her weird obsession with hierarchies makes her sound like a six-year-old demanding to settle some kind of score with a rival by asking, "Who's the biggest?"

Besides that, she was actually tweeting a dishonest claim, that the Chicoms, out of that big communist heart of theirs, were giving Italy aid while America did nothing.  It wasn't even true — the Italians paid for the medical supplies, and the Chicoms were fulfilling a previously made contract.  But never put it past the Chicoms to put a good propaganda opportunity to waste now that they know that Applebaum will carry the water for them.

Naturally, she got "ratioed" for this tweet — a Twitter term meaning the negative replies she got outnumbered her "likes" and retweets.  To read these comments, at least five to one negative, is a thing of awe.  If it wasn't precisely a true ratio, it was enough to make her jump in and attempt to defend herself by criticizing her critics.  It seems to have worried her.

People who insist on misunderstanding this tweet should look in the mirror. Our president has lied and covered up this disease; he announced a travel ban, without warning his allies, as a fake cure. You think he is a model for the world?

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) March 13, 2020

The Federalist noted that she and her cohorts at the Atlantic Monthly were mouthing outright Chinese propaganda, too.  Here's the Federalist's summary of her American "comeuppance" piece, titled "How the Coronavirus Called America's Bluff":

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 [sic] 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."

Umm, if China's got a lot of missteps and we should avoid being "too smug" why does that not apply to leftist gloats about President Trump's supposed missteps?  The other thing is, China's "missteps" — putting a government infectious disease lab next to a Wuhan wet market, letting someone get ill from its byproducts, spreading it through the market, destroying the evidence of its origins, jailing whistleblowers and dissidents, hurling people into pens like livestock where if they didn't have coronavirus when they went in, would surely have it when they came out — were some doozies of "missteps." To even call those outrages which contributed to the global spread of a pandemic and shut down the world economy 'missteps' is not just the mother of all understatements, it's full blown Chicom propaganda.

Here's another thing: She dumped her U.S. citizenship for Polish citizenship after marrying some Polish functionary. I don't know all the rules of dual-citizenship, but her loyalty now is to another country, or in a de facto way, the European Union. When she speaks of "our," it leaves a funny taste in the mouth given that she's sworn loyalty to Poland. Who is this "our" you speak of, Kemosabe?

Apparently stung by that criticism or worried about her credibility, Applebaum attempted to bolster her street-cred against communism on Twitter by citing a column she wrote on China last year, as well as her book on the Soviet Gulag written several years ago. She wants you to read that column "very carefully."

But she missed the point. Her animating motivation for this nonsense is her Trump-hate. It's not of the neo-con variety, but of the Eurotrash variety.

Like a lot of Trump-haters, she's spent massive amounts of time in Europe, and as mentioned earlier, apparently dumped her U.S. citizenship for Polish citizenship, and is a bigtime embracer of the European Union. It's also worth noting that she has a long history as a Soros acolyte. She went to the very far left United Nations Beijing Women's conference as a correspondent. She's above all a European Union-defending globalist and if jumping in bed with China will advance Trump-hate, she'll jump in bed with even China.

Yes, she has written fairly well regarded books in the past on the evils of communism, but they may be in for a re-look, given her associations with George Soros's "open society," which today is being reviled in Eastern Europe. Soros-ism seems to be at the root of her past endeavors.

I was a tutorial student at St Antony's College at Oxford, right around the same time she was in the early 1980s. I didn't know her, but I know what the atmosphere was like in the St Antony's Russian Studies divisions - very leftwing, very anti-Thatcher, but not utterly in denial of truth. The Polish community was strong, and one professor was aligned with a then-little-known tycoon named George Soros in a bid to free eastern Europe, in what the first seeds of Soros' spread of his globalist ideas through the world. Dissident expats at the time were viewed with contempt, something my great tutor, Dr. Harry Shukman, noted to me in the mid-1990s at a later meeting, and as he told me then, should not have happened. Shukman, who died in 2012, did the world a tremendous service in saving Soviet records and files during the brief period when they were open by translating and cleaning up the memoirs of a defecting Soviet general. Applebaum was right in the middle of that and now it shows.

Now she's lost her sense of right and wrong, her sense of good and bad, based on her crazy loathing of Trump, which now extends to America itself. In the same way an alkie or a drug addict craves illicit substances over life itself, Applebaum's hate of Trump is the drug that rules her mind. She can't even keep her once clear perspective straight — and criticize China as she may, the coronavirus combined with her static hate of Trump has driven her to state things that make the Chinese very, very happy.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of image from Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland // CC BY-SA 2.0 and Pixabay public domain images.