Free Republic

Americans are living in an Orwellian state argue Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick, as they sit down with RT to discuss US foreign policy and the Obama administration’s disregard for the rule of law. ­Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the “nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him.” “He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them,” Stone told RT. “It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the...

All of Ronald Reagan's formative years, from birth until he landed his first job across the Mississippi 21 years later, were lived in rural northwestern Illinois except for about ten months in Chicago. In all but one case, his rural boyhood homes have been preserved. His birthplace in Tampico looks as it did when he was born and is open to the public. So is his teen years home in Dixon. The house the Reagans lived in for two years in Galesburg has been lovingly restored by its private owner. Their house in Monmouth is the only home that is...

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate. Now the AP is throwing out Homophobia and Islamophobia on the grounds that they are inaccurate and conflate prejudice with mental illness. And that has led to outrage hysteria from the usual organs of the left who like sticking to their politicized words once they’ve made enough people aware of them. “Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for...

“The intelligence community had it right, and they had it right early,” said chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.). The CIA “talking points” on Benghazi initially identified the attackers as al Qaeda or al Qaeda-linked terrorists but senior administration officials removed the reference, Rogers said on NBC’s Meet the Press.Meanwhile, White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters traveling with the president on Saturday that the White House made only minor changes in the first comments by a White House official on the Benghazi security scandal.“We were provided with points...

I come to you today hat in hand. I owe you all an apology. As you may recall, my election prognostication was something that looked just like 1984: 1984 bitmap from by hard drive; this is the one I intended to reflect: So, I’m sorry, okay? I feel my inaccurate prognostication may be partially responsible for some of the PEDS (post election depressive syndrome) that we’ve all been experiencing. So today, in order to assist you in throwing off the lingering effects(snip) (snip) For one thing, the images on my hard drive both shared the identical title, “1984.” As you...

In yet another mass email to its supporters, the Obama campaign is again demanding money. However, the wording reveals a rather Orwellian secret: the campaign knows if you have donated or not based solely on the email address they are tracking. The email, from campaign manager Jim Messina, starts average enough. Messina touts the President and the money they've raised. For example, "more than 1.8 million Americans -- 567,044 of whom were first-time donors -- giving an average donation of just $53. And 98% of the donations were $250 and under." But things turn south very quickly. The email quickly...

War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength Published during the Soviet Union's rise as a global superpower, George Orwell's 1984 offers a prescient window into the soul of the propaganda apparatus of a utopia dictatorship. While Barack Obama has yet to transform the United States from a constitutional republic, his effort to redesign Old Glory notwithstanding, enough similarities have arisen during his presidency and his campaign for re-election that it is worth taking notice. When reality is refracted through the prism of the state propaganda machine, we lose sight of who we are as a society. Inhabitants of...

Suppose there were a worldwide movement which openly proclaimed its goal of taking over in your country and every country with the purpose of imposing its system on every human beings on earth. Also suppose that this movement had carried out murders and terrorist attacks in your own country, that members of this group promoted violence while gaining political influence. Suppose also that is was highly unfashionable and politically incorrect to speak out against them. I am not speaking of Islam here, but of Communism. The current wave of censorship and denial toward Islam is not a new development. It...

Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentally threatening our freedom on the open road. You may have seen the recent New York Times op-ed that admonished us to start referring to our mobile devices as “trackers” instead of “phones.” Perhaps as ALPR technology spreads we should start saying “tracker” in place of “car,” too. We need statutory protections to limit the collection, retention,...

I hadn't heard of him since I last debunked him some years back but he is still at the same old stall selling the same old secondhand ideas. He has issued a book called "The Little Blue Book: Quotations from Chairman Lakoff" Lakoff's central "insight" is that you must use distorted Leftist language to have any hope of promoting Leftist ideas. But telling that to people who already call racism "affirmative action" and abortion "choice" must be one of the most unoriginal ideas ever proposed. George Orwell beat him to that idea by half a century. I suppose that telling...

Sloppy George Orwell, Photo: WikipediaSloppy language works for cheats and charlatans. In the search for the truth only accurate language will do. Orwell understood the power of language to change the way we think, indeed to fence off some possible options completely.Roger Pielke Snr put out a call today asking for precise definitions and protesting about the misuse of the term “climate change”. But when did this nonsensical term start? Where else, but with the UN. All the way back on May 9th 1992, UN defined “climate change” as man-made. See The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, (paragraph 6):“Climate...

Political writing tends to be bad writing, noted George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Too often it's a tool for deception and obfuscation rather than clear communication. Orwell criticizes particularly those who rely on political catch phrases devised by others, throwing their minds open and “letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.” It's an easy way of avoiding the hard work good writing demands, says Orwell. Catch phrases “will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service...

Margie Omero [above] is a Democratic pollster and president of Momentum Analysis. She’s well-up on the dark art of creating a poll that delivers the results her client seeks. And Marge is pissed off that her competitors keep publishing poll results which show that most Americans don’t support gun control. So the Big O has written an open letter for the Huffington Post exhorting her colleagues to go all George Orwell and literally change the “terms” of the “gun control debate.” It’s a clever piece of writing that educates by example; ceding the right to keep (but not bear) arms...

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.

Making houses and cars smokefree is the only way to protect children from second-hand smoke, according to a new government campaign in England. The TV and radio adverts show how pervasive invisible second-hand smoke can be. Breathing it in can damage lungs and cause cancers, research has shown. Snip The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said it wanted to see smoking in cars made illegal, when children are present. "I have no doubt an outright ban on smoking in cars would have the same positive results [as banning drink-driving]” - Prof Terence Stephenson Royal College of Paediatrics &...

This is truly Orwellian: the latest and greatest Executive Branch/Federal Reserve power grab is labeled "consumer protection." I am indebted to correspondent Jim S. who seems to be one of the few Americans to have actually sorted through this monstrosity and gleaned its true nature: an unprecedented extension of Executive (i.e. Imperial Presidency) and Federal Reserve power.

Read Aldous Huxley’s review of 1984 he sent to George Orwell Several months after George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984 was published in 1949, Aldous Huxley sent a letter to his former French pupil. The Brave New World author had received a copy of 1984 from the publisher at Orwell's behest, but his poor eyesight prevented him from finishing the book for several months. In his letter to Orwell, the fifty-year-old author compared the two books' screwed-up futures and saw the Orwellian Oceanic dystopia as a predecessor to his own World State. Wrote Huxley in October 1949: Agreeing with all that...

In the post-news environment, media no longer exists to report, it exists to disseminate glib talking points that sound good at first, but don't stand up to examination. Fact checks, one of the latest media gimmicks, have become another vector for disseminating talking points. So have media blogs which began repeating the same ridiculous thing over and over again.

As I heard Barack Obama and his propaganda minister, Jay Carney, endorsing tax cuts as a vehicle for economic growth, I was reminded, again, of George Orwell's "1984" and the striking similarities between his Oceania and the American left's vision for America. Oceania's Big Brother regime had "four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided," the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Each department was dedicated to the opposite principle suggested by its title. "Truth" disseminated lies. "Peace" promoted war. "Love" enforced uniformity of thought. And "Plenty"...

In George Orwell’s iconic 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ill-fated protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the so-called Ministry of Truth in which his job is to alter or re-write history as propaganda for the ruling party of Big Brother. Now, over sixty years later, we are seeing this very thing taking place in our own nation. Over the weekend I received an email with a link to Leo Donofrio’s latest report. You may know that Mr. Donofrio is an attorney who has fought since 2008 to have Barack Obama (or whatever his name is) held accountable for proving his constitutional...