First one of my right-wing acquaintances shared a meme with a quotation ascribed to George Orwell: "The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." Interestingly, Orwell apparently didn't say this. I found
one source online which claimed it came from
A Collection of Essays, which sounded iffy but turned out to exist -- it just didn't include this sentence. (It's available as an e-book online, which made it easy to search. Amazon's "Look Inside" didn't turn it up either.) Wikiquote
reports that it hasn't been found in Orwell's works, but did appear (not attributed to Orwell) in a "conservative" opinion piece that defended the right-wing shock jock Michael Savage as one of those who speak the truth. Even if Orwell had said it, my friend wouldn't have agreed with him about who speaks the truth and who doesn't.
Then
the item above appeared in my news feed from Yo, Is This Racist? Maybe even funnier. Again, the irony is delicious: calling for a homophobic and/or misogynist epithet to show one's solidarity with downcast, downtrodden gays. The person who submitted it as a question to Andrew Ti's tumblr missed it entirely, as did Ti. Thanks, guys, but no thanks.
