I was walking through Lublin with my head down, angry tweeting, the way I do. I wasn’t looking where I was going and I walked straight into a man. I said sorry about six times. I felt like an idiot. And then I looked up.

I was standing in the middle of a crowd. Hundreds of people. Old couples, kids, guys coming off work, whole blocks of Poles moving around me on a summer evening.

Not one of them was on a phone.

I want you to understand that I checked. I put my phone in my pocket and I walked for an hour, and in that hour the only time I saw anyone pull out a phone was to take a picture of their family. Nobody was scrolling. Nobody was filming a stranger. Nobody was walking into anybody because they were arguing with a bot in their mentions the way I had been thirty seconds earlier.

I have been to a lot of countries. I have never had a moment like that, where the thing I do for a living was exposed to me as the small ugly habit it is, by a crowd of people who were simply not doing it.

That was Poland. I need to tell you how I got there, because I did not want to go.

THE PART YOU’RE GOING TO ATTACK ME FOR

Here is the disclosure, up front, before anyone does me the favor of finding it out.

I got invited by my friend Sarah Fields. Sarah is an investigative reporter out of Texas, she is the reason I said yes to anything at all, and I will get to her. It was an influencer trip. I did what I always do before I get on a plane for somebody, which is I went and looked at where the money came from.

The money traced back to Miriam Adelson.

If you have followed me for any length of time, you know what I preach. Stay away from foreign influence. Not “be careful with it.” Stay away from it. It is one of my hardest lines and I have burned relationships over it.

And I want to be precise about what that line actually is, because people love to pretend I only ever aim it in one direction.

Qatar has poured a fortune into American universities and American think tanks, and I have yet to meet a single person who took that money and came out the other side with a worse opinion of Qatar. Funny how that works. Russia runs influence the way it has always run influence, patiently and cheaply, and it does not care which side of our politics it rents this decade. China buys our farmland, our supply chains, a say over what our film studios are allowed to put on a screen, and consulting gigs for the children of people who write our laws. Mexico’s government lobbies our Congress about our own border. The Gulf states buy our athletes, our golf tour, and our former officials roughly ten minutes after they leave office. Half of Washington’s foreign policy establishment is on a retainer from somebody who does not vote here.

Every one of those is foreign influence. I have never once seen a version of it that made an American institution more honest. That is the rule, and it applies to everybody, and I do not carve out exceptions for the ones my own side likes.

So here is where I have to correct something I have heard said carelessly, including by people who were getting ready to say it about me.

Miriam Adelson is an American citizen. The funding for this trip came through an American company. Dual citizenship does not make an American’s money foreign, and if I started pretending it did, I would be doing exactly what has been done to me for the last decade, which is having my loyalty measured by my last name. So it does not clear my foreign influence bar, because it never had to. That is simply not what this was.

And I am not going to tell you what kind of person she is, because I do not know. I have never met Miriam Adelson. I have never spoken to her. I have heard things about her, the same way people have heard things about me, and I have watched what gets said about a person by people who have never been in a room with them. So I will not judge her off that. If I ever see concrete evidence, or if I ever sit down with her myself, I will tell you what I think then. Until then I have nothing to offer in either direction and I am not going to manufacture it.

What I stayed, the whole time, was skeptical. Not of her. Of the arrangement. Somebody else paid for me to be somewhere, and there is no amount of hospitality that makes me stop noticing that. I have the same reflex about every paid trip, every junket, every conference that flies you out and puts you up, and I did not switch it off in Warsaw and I have not switched it off since.

I was also cautious about the frame. The itinerary turned out to be built almost entirely around Jewish history. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Majdanek. The Jewish cemetery, the Jewish museum, Tykocin. Everyone on the trip was American, every site was Polish, and the whole frame sat next to the most radioactive subject in American politics at the exact moment it was at its hottest.

I want all of that in writing, because going on this trip did not convert me on any of it. Anyone who reads this and comes away thinking I got flipped is not reading carefully.

Why did I go anyway? Because you can hold a line and still go look at something with your own eyes. Because I have spent my whole adult life being described by people who never met me, and I think that is a cheap way to know things. And because the fastest way to find out whether somebody wants something from you is to show up and see whether they ask.

They never did.

Not one time on that trip did anyone ask me to post anything. Not once. I could have flown to Warsaw, eaten their food, walked their itinerary, gotten on a plane and never mentioned to a single follower that I had left Miami. There would have been no phone call. There would have been no problem. I said where I stood early, and the conversation that came back was a pleasant one. We brought you here to see the country. Look at it. Do what you want with it.

I have been on trips with people who wanted something from me. That is a texture you learn to feel. This did not have it.

So the rest of the world can write about the camps, and most of the group did, and that is their business. I am not going to write the article everybody else wrote. What I actually came home with was the people.

THE DELEGATION TEAM

I am going to call them the delegation team, because that is what they were. A team. They get my respect here and they get their privacy, which in this line of work is worth more than a mention.

The one name I am keeping is Dan, our guide, because he is the one who will end up in a book someday.

Genuinely educated, the kind of guide who does not do the memorized speech, who answers the follow up question and then the follow up to the follow up. I had conversations with him that had nothing to do with the itinerary and everything to do with how a country carries the worst thing that ever happened to it. Majdanek sits right on the edge of Lublin. It was never hidden. There was no forest to bury it in, no remote siding. The people of the city could see it from the road. You stand there and you understand something about proximity that no book gives you.

I am not going to do the Holocaust chapter here. Better writers have, and I was a visitor, and I don’t think two weeks entitles anybody to a thesis. I will say only this: I went, I stood there, and I did not come home the same on that subject. That is as much as I am prepared to put in an article.

THE PEOPLE I ACTUALLY WENT WITH

Sarah Fields first, because she is the reason I was there.

Sarah is out of Texas and she works the way real reporters used to work, off public records and court filings and documents she has to fight to get. She is the one who dug into the Karmelo Anthony case and would not let it go. She has paid for that work. She has been swatted. Her family has had false reports filed on them. She sued the defendant’s father over the campaign against her and she won her appeal. When I say she has lost things doing this job, I am not being poetic.

I love that woman. I say that plainly. She is one of the most thoughtful and passionate human beings I have ever met, she is relentless in a way that has cost her real things, and she is one of the best people I know. There is no version of my life where I am not glad she is in it.

And here is what I want people to understand about Sarah, because it is the same thing I want people to understand about me. She did not know anybody either. She had met Joe. That was it. She walked onto that trip the way I did, an outsider with a reputation that arrives in the room before she does.

I watched her get into it one night on a street corner in Warsaw with a local guy, a real argument, the kind that draws a small crowd. I am not going to reproduce it, because it was a conversation and not a performance and it was not mine. I will tell you how it ended. It ended with the two of them agreeing that they were not going to agree, and saying so out loud, and standing there together anyway.

That is the whole trip in one scene, if you want it.

Joe, who most of you know as The Older Millennial, I only knew from video. He’s a veteran, he is well traveled, he is well spoken, and he is a lot more thoughtful in person than the format he works in allows him to be. I disagree with him on a few things. I would go somewhere with him again tomorrow.

Stefan Tompson is the one I connected with hardest, and I did not expect that. He is Polish and South African, born in London, raised partly in South Africa, and he lives in Warsaw now and speaks the language like he was born to it. He is the man behind Visegrad 24. He walked me through the castle in Krakow and gave me the history of the crypts underneath it, which kings are down there and which men had no business being buried among them, and why Poles are still arguing about a plane crash from 2010. Our worldviews line up almost exactly. He invited us into his home. When I say I made connections on this trip, he is the first name I think of.

Lance is a kid, and I mean that as a compliment. Extremely energetic, extremely passionate, and completely unbothered by how any of it looks. He is the future and he does not need my permission to be.

Emily I connected with because she is close to my vibe, not on everything, but close enough that we could talk without translating. Megan, Stephen, Fabian, Maddie, Greg, Priya. I am not going to write paragraphs about people who did not sign up to be written about, but they were all there and they were all part of it.

Here is the thing I actually want on the record.

I go on a lot of trips. There is always somebody. Somebody you avoid at breakfast, somebody whose politics you have to route around, somebody you just don’t want to be near. On this trip there was not one. Not one person I could not sit with. We went out every night. I don’t drink, and it did not matter, because I was there for the room and not the bar. We sang karaoke. We walked Warsaw and Krakow and Lublin at hours when I would not walk certain American cities, and it never once occurred to any of us to be careful.

I have never had a group trip go like that. I have never had one come close.

THE COUNTRY

Poland is clean. I know how that sounds as an observation. Let me make it concrete.

I made a game out of it on the bus with a couple of the others. Find one piece of trash. One gum wrapper on the sidewalk, anywhere. We drove across a whole city looking. We did not find it.

I travel constantly and I say this maybe once a decade. If I left the United States, if there were one other country where I could see myself living, it is Poland.

THE PART WHERE I GET PEPPER SPRAYED IN POLAND

I have a condition. Somehow I always find trouble. It does not matter what continent I am on or how nice the trip is or how well the evening was going. Trouble has my number and it does not make an appointment.

We were at a nightclub in Krakow. I stepped outside for a cigarette and sat down next to the bouncer.

This man looked like he had personally served in both World Wars. Hardened is the only word for it. Not big for the sake of being big. Built like somebody who had been doing this job a very long time and had stopped being impressed by any part of it.

Two men walked up and tried to get in. I do not speak Polish and I could not follow a word of it, but you never need the words. He said no. They argued. His aggression was calm and it was high at the same time, and if you have ever done security you know exactly how dangerous that particular temperature is.

They tried to walk in anyway.

He clotheslined both of them. One swipe. Both on the floor.

They got up. They squared up. And then he reached behind his back.

I have spent enough of my life in enough situations to know what a man reaching behind his back usually means, and my brain filled in the blank before I could stop it. I got up and I moved. Not far. Far enough.

What came out was not a pistol. It was the largest can of pepper spray I have ever seen in my life, and he used it the way a man spray paints a fence. He did not aim. He covered. He painted the two of them orange from about two feet out, side to side, top to bottom, finishing a job he had clearly been given a thousand times before.

And then the cloud came for me.

If you have never been in it, pepper spray is not pain the way you are expecting pain. It is a door closing. It goes into your eyes and your eyes simply quit, and it goes down your throat and your throat stops taking instructions from you. You cannot get a full breath, and every breath you do manage makes it worse, because all you are doing is pulling more of it in. Your face runs. Your skin lights up like a burn. There is nothing to do but stand there and take it and wait for your own body to hand you back to yourself.

It put me down for an hour and a half. I went back inside and stood at a sink washing my eyes out, trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person.

And when I could think again, the first thing I felt was recognition.

I took a face full of gas on a street in Miami when I was fourteen years old, over a little Cuban boy named Elian, and it is one of the first things I remember clearly about who I am. Twenty six years later, in Krakow, on a nice trip somebody else paid for, standing outside a nightclub minding my own business, the same thing walked up and tapped me on the shoulder.

Later that night, on the way out, I grabbed somebody who could translate and asked the bouncer what that had been about. He said he knew those two. They were foreigners, he had dealt with them before, and that was the whole explanation he felt was necessary.

I will be honest about my reaction, because I have been chewing on it since. I enjoyed it. Not the spray. The interaction. There was something clean about watching a man do a job he had done a thousand times, at exactly the temperature the job required. No speech. No phone out. Nobody filming.

And now I get to say I was pepper sprayed in Poland.

DOMINIK

I run a security company called Gunir. One of the people we cover stateside is Dominik Tarczynski, a Polish member of the European Parliament. I have known him a while, and in Warsaw we had him out to dinner and sat there until the table cleared.

I want to spend a minute on him, because most Americans who know the name only know the clip, and the clip does not do him justice.

Dominik is one of the most pleasant men I have ever worked around. That is not a small thing to me. I have spent years in rooms with people who hold power, or want it, and almost all of them carry it into the room with them. He does not. He is warm before he is anything else. He asks you about you, and he actually waits for the answer, which is a rarer skill in politics than anybody admits.

He is also seriously intelligent, and it comes out sideways rather than as a performance. He knows the history of his own country the way an American politician knows a talking point, which is to say not at all comparable. He talked me through Polish politics, then turned around and talked me through American politics with a fluency that embarrassed me a little, because he knew things about our system that most of our own commentators do not bother to learn. He has the whole thing loaded, and he never once used it to make me feel small.

And he is humble, which is the part that stays with me. This is a man who has stood in front of the European Parliament and taken the entire chamber head on, and at a dinner table in his own city he was the least interested person there in talking about himself. He wanted to know what I thought. He listened to it. He pushed back where he disagreed with me and he did it without a raised voice.

I have met a lot of politicians. I have protected a few. He is the only one I would want to sit next to at a dinner where nobody was watching.

IMMIGRATION, AND WHY THEY SAY “BE LIKE POLAND”

We talked about the border most of the night.

Poland’s pressure point is Belarus. Since March 2025 there has been a law in force allowing Poland to suspend the right to even file an asylum claim at that border, and it has been renewed seven times and it is still in force today. There is an exclusion zone. There is a wall, thousands of troops, thermal and electronic surveillance. In 2024 Poland went further and stripped criminal liability from soldiers who breach the ordinary rules of engagement while repelling an attack at the border. A soldier who fired twelve rounds toward a group forcing the barrier was prosecuted for it, and this past May he was acquitted, on the grounds that he had been doing his constitutional duty.

Attempted crossings from Belarus dropped more than 98 percent in a year.

Read that again. Ninety eight percent. Not a pilot program. Not a commission. Not a bipartisan working group that reports back in eighteen months. A wall, a law, soldiers who are allowed to do their job without a prosecutor breathing on them, and a border that closed.

Poland decided, out loud and in law, who comes in and on what terms. It enforces that at the line, instead of arguing about it in a courtroom eight years later or on the floor of the Senate for twenty. And it is completely unembarrassed. Nobody in Warsaw is apologizing to anybody. There is no permanent national flinch about it, no ritual where the government explains that of course it feels terrible. They looked at what was being done to them, they said no, and they meant it.

We tell ourselves America is the best country in the world. Generally I believe that. But I hate having to say this: on immigration, Poland makes our system look like exactly what it is. Not because they are crueler. Because they are serious.

And if you ask me whether I would support the United States drawing a harder line than we currently do at our own border, my answer is yes, absolutely, and I am not going to soften it for anybody.

WHEN IT COMES TO IMMIGRATION, BE LIKE POLAND.

“Be like Poland” is their saying over there, and they say it with their chest out. That is really good. That is clever. We should steal it.

And it is not just Poland. I saw it firsthand in Belfast, because I was in Belfast, and I wrote about what I found there. I see it in Venezuela and Colombia. I am going to Brazil for the election, where Bolsonaro sits in prison, where he has been in the ICU, and where his son is polling in a way that should terrify the people who put him there. President Trump kicked something loose globally, a shift back toward governments willing to say plainly what they are for. Poland is one of the places where you can walk around inside it.

WHAT I ACTUALLY BROUGHT HOME

I went on a trip I did not want to go on, on an itinerary I did not choose, having gone looking for a reason not to get on the plane.

Nobody asked me for anything. They were good to me. The conversations were pleasant, including the hard ones, including the ones where I told them where I stand and they told me where they stand and nobody left the table angry.

And I came home with over a dozen people I would take a call from at three in the morning. I consider them brothers and sisters now. Something I have said my whole life is that I am always here and always loyal, and that applies to them too, from here on.

That is the article. Not the history. Not the funding. Not the itinerary that everyone else is writing up this week. I have spent years being told what I am by people who have never been in a room with me, and I have gotten used to it. What I am not used to is walking into a room full of strangers and finding out there was not a single one I had to route around.

I am still against foreign influence, all of it, from everybody, and I will be saying so next week about somebody’s money that my own side likes. None of that changed in Warsaw and none of it is going to.

What changed is that there are now over a dozen people in this world who can call me at any hour, and I will pick up.

I would go back tomorrow.

Enrique “Noble” Tarrio runs Gunir, a private security company. Gunir.net.