Very pleased to be joined by the historian and author,

Ann Applebaum, one of the most insightful commentators on domestic and global affairs,

and particularly this revanchist movement we see in the United States across Europe that is hostile to the liberal democratic values and the systems that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, and though imperfect, have largely kept global peace for 80 years and have certainly advanced human progress at a level

that I think sometimes both beggars imagination and is not widely known. But welcome Ann Applebaum.

Thanks. Thanks.

Glad to be here.

There is a person that you remind me of historically, who I've never met, but who I've

read a great deal of.

And that's Dorothy Thompson.

And she had the distinction of being the first journalist, an American, kicked out of Hitler's Germany, out of the right, I think, wrote the greatest column explaining fascism and the affinity of people towards it in a New Yorker column, you know,

speculated, guess who the Nazi is as a dinner and parlor game?

She talked about the collapse of democracies as an eyewitness before Senate testimony in 1937. She was an

FDR new dealer, but was absolutely opposed to his court packing scheme and deeply worried about it.

When she talked about the collapse of democracy, her main point was that people just are not

willing to fight for a concept and an idea that they think has failed them

with regard to their life, their economic prosperity,

but they are willing to fight for that economic prosperity

at the expense of their democracy. And so as we stand at this moment in the United

States where Biden, if the election were tomorrow, by all accounts and all the polls,

lose the election to Trump, I don't think we're faded to that. We have Elise Stefaniac on

national television talking about the January 6 perpetrators,

three years later, or hostages, so on, so on and so forth. How do you see all of this in its

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