Michelle Obama Instructs Children of Oceania: Monitor Your Parents For Thoughtcrime

“There can be no aspect of your daily life that’s removed from politics,” Jim Treacher writes at the Daily Caller, “Now you will be monitored by your own children for expressing unapproved opinions. You’d better watch what you say at the dinner table, Mom and Dad.”

First lady Michelle Obama is encouraging students to monitor their older relatives, friends and co-workers for any racially insensitive comments they might make, and to challenge those comments whenever they’re made.

The first lady spoke on Friday to graduating high school students in Topeka, Kansas, and in remarks released over the weekend, Obama said students need to police family and friends because federal laws can only go so far in stopping racism.

“[O]ur laws may no longer separate us based on our skin color, but nothing in the Constitution says we have to eat together in the lunchroom, or live together in the same neighborhoods,” she said. “There’s no court case against believing in stereotypes or thinking that certain kinds of hateful jokes or comments are funny.”

And you never know what sorts of hateful jokes or comments you might hear at church. Churches like Trinity United in Chicago, to pick one entirely at random:

Of course, it’s not all that difficult to program children to snoop on their parents and adults in general for thoughtcrime:

‘Have you got a spanner? -said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the angle-joint.

‘A spanner,’ said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps the children -’

There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.

‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought-criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!’

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’ the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.

Yes, parents love being told by their kids that they’re racists — and that they’re misogynists who hate women as well — women such as Gaia, as this infamous MasterCard commercial from a few years ago reminded TV viewers:

The above post from Jim Treacher dovetails well with something Peter Wehner writes today at Commentary — or at least with my criticism of Wehner’s post, which is titled, “When the Right Turns on America.” Quoting a speech by Wayne LaPierre at the NRA’s annual conference, in which LaPierre asked, “Do you trust this government to protect you? We are on our own,” Wehner went on to write:

Mr. LaPierre is not the only one who describes America in dystopian terms these days. Earlier this year Dr. Ben Carson, a Tea Party favorite who is considering a run for the presidency in 2016, said America is “very much like Nazi Germany.” Michele Bachmann, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate, has said the Affordable Care Act is evidence of a “police state.” This kind of language–America is bordering on or has basically become a tyranny–is common currency within some quarters of conservatism.

Now it is one thing to believe, as I do, that in some important respects America is in decline and that President Obama is in part responsible for that decline. I agree, too, that there are some alarming problems and trends facing the United States just now, which many conservatives are attempting to address in a responsible fashion.

But it is quite another thing to describe America as the New Left did in the late 1960s, when America itself was spelled with a “k” (“Amerika”) in an effort to identify it with Nazi Germany. Among the young and left-wing academics there was talk about the need for revolution. The United States was viewed as fundamentally corrupt. Once upon a time conservatives fought against this. Today, however, some on the right are turning on America. They employ language you would associate with Noam Chomsky.

Read the whole thing and make up your own mind, but I think Wehner is ignoring a huge difference between the angry New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, and today’s conservatives: The New Left was (and is) solipsistic; it believed that everyone, from the Founding Fathers to earnest New Deal liberals, Rockefeller Republicans and proto-Buckley-style conservatives were all the enemy. Its poisoned efforts can be seen today in an academic left that believes that history is nothing but Original Sin all the way down, discounting Columbus’ discovery of America, America’s founding, and virtually all of American prior to the JFK era (or FDR if they’re feeling generous) as invalid or evil. And in an MSM that feigns to believe that it is pure and without ideological bias; that only to those their right have an ideology.

In contrast, conservatives and libertarians are mindful of the statement President Reagan made in his first inaugural address that “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”

When Wayne LaPierre states, “We are on our own,” unlike the New Left of the 1960s, he’s not attacking America and its citizens, merely its elected officials and underlying bureaucracy, both of which increasingly believe themselves to be an isolated caste, removed from the rest of their fellow men, whom they were hired to serve.

Mmmmm........Michelle is looking---and sounding--- more and more like a candidate everyday. News clips of her making that speech shows she's been coached well. The way she used one hand to subtly gesticulate while making her points was the tipoff.

Let's go back to her last trip on the taxpayers' dime. Moocher's pricey China trip was "sold" to Americans as a "non-political" visit...she was just there to chat up education. But all of her appearances and inane remarks were connivingly structured for one purpose: to set herself up as a future candidate....and doing it on our dime.

MISSION CREEP Then the WH let loose with the final explanation....that her trip, and the tripe she was pedaling, was "soft diplomacy" --to "ease tensions" between the US and China.

Come again? Who elected this self-serving creep? Who gave her diplomat credentials?

My guess was that Obama is still in the dog house and was bribing her after the Mandela Memorial blonde fiasco. Moocher got the $12,000 Herrara dress, a state dinner to hostess, and the trip to China to burnish her credentials as a candidate .....so far.

I just hope Valerie Jarett doesn't get carpel tunnel syndrome wire-transferring funds offshore for campaign expenses.

=========================================

GHETTO GIRL MAKES GOOD After Obama's 2008 election, hopes were high that Michelle Obama’s political appeal and charisma would enable her to transform it into something that reflected the role of modern women as equal participants in the political process.” That never happened----having been burned by the intense criticism she received on the campaign trail when she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”

Benghazi...

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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