The Words of Melania, Michelle, Manafort, and Orwell

This blog was originally published on Forbes as The Words Of Melania, Michelle, Manafort And Orwell on Tuesday, July 19, 2016.

It took about a dozen minutes after Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night for journalist Jarrett Hill to tweet: “Melania must’ve liked Michelle Obama’s 2008 Convention speech, since she plagiarized it.”

It took about a dozen hours for Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman to respond to the firestorm that erupted in the media and social media overnight. This morning he told CNN: “There’s no cribbing of Michelle Obama’s speech…She was speaking in front of 35 million people last night, she knew that, to think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama’s words is crazy.”

You can see a comparison of the text of the two women’s words with the key phrases highlighted on The Washington Post.

 In 1949, George Orwell published his landmark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which he wrote:

The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. …From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The words of Melania, Michelle, Manafort, and Orwell speak for themselves.

This blog was originally published on Forbes as The Words Of Melania, Michelle, Manafort And Orwell on Tuesday, July 19, 2016.