Author, historian, comical point-misser

Anne Appelbaum doesn't understand the real issue with Hunter Biden's laptop.

On the more-addictive-than-meth website TV Tropes, there’s an entry for “comically missing the point,” where a character in a movie or television show interprets something in a completely inexplicable way. Usually, it’s the lovably dumb or naive character who’s the butt of the joke.

The show that made me want to become a lawyer.

Anne Applebaum, author of several acclaimed books on the Soviet Union and its domination of Eastern Europe, and an insightful commentator on the rise of authoritarianism in America and beyond, is neither dumb nor naive. And that’s what made this so jarring:

Journalist and author Anne Applebaum dismissed a question Wednesday about the influence Hunter Biden’s laptop could have had on the outcome of the 2020 election, stating that it is “totally irrelevant” and that she personally is not interested in it.

At the University of Chicago’s Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference on Wednesday, Applebaum was asked about suppression of the story by most of…