June 04, 2014
Michelle Obama
Source: Shutterstock
Watch out, codgers, curmudgeons and crackpots: Michelle Obama is enlisting your kids to monitor your thoughts. In a recent speech before five Topeka, KS graduating classes, Mrs. Obama encouraged young people to “ask the hard questions and have the honest conversations” any time grandpa makes an ethnic joke, “because that is the only way we will heal the wounds of the past and move forward to a better future.”
“There’s no court case against believing in stereotypes or thinking that certain kinds of hateful jokes or comments are funny,” said Mrs. Obama, with more than a touch of regret in her voice. “So the answers to many of our challenges today can”t necessarily be found in our laws.”
It’s hard not to hear the “yet” hanging in the air.
In other words, watch out, Grandma and Grandpa: There’s a struggle session coming your way. An editorial in The Telegraphon UKIP’s recent successes details the grillings you”re likely to get from junior progressives once Obama’s message fully percolates.
Mrs. Obama has a particularly troubling past; At Princeton she sat on the board of the Third World Center, an organization that once penned a letter accusing every white Princetonian of being “racist … even if they may not realize it.” While holding no official position other than ruining school lunches, Mrs. Obama’s remarks nonetheless represent a sort of semi-official position of the regime: Forward to progress, be on “the right side of history“ (perhaps the creepiest Stalinoid phrase this side of “The People”), hound any and all relics of the past out of polite society.
I don”t want to bust out my chalkboard and start drawing diagrams, but the Obama regime is the apotheosis of 60s Maoist, Third Worldist, New Left radicalism in the same way That Man’s tenure represented the high-water mark of Moscow and the Old Left’s influence in Washington.
Think of Michelle as a sort of Madame Mao to his Chairman.
Yesterday’s student radicals are today’s establishment. Those who aren”t wielding the levers of power themselves have the ear of those who are; those who aren”t whispering in power’s ear are training up your kids in the chapter and verse of Frankfurt School theology.
Still, the Obama Coalition’s cultural revolution is a rather enfeebled, bargain basement one, with Keystone Kommissars. Mobs exist only on Twitter. Struggle sessions take place via blog post. Professional exile replaces reeducation camps. This is in keeping with the dual nature of contemporary “social justice” leftism: On the one hand, shrill, uncompromising, and vindictive. On the other, tepid, reactive, and fragile.
There’s more in play here than my personal distaste for an elected official’s wife trying to insinuate herself into every Thanksgiving dinner table, peering in like a humorless, teetotaling spinster aunt; America is in the midst of a full-blown moral panic. To wit, Donald Sterling was declared mentally incapacitated for expressing impolitic views in a private conversation that, by the way, was probably recorded illegally. Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel’s head is next on the chopping block. He recently had college emails released proving that he (clutch the pearls) was kind of an immature dork when he was a Stanford frat boy.
