Covington Hate Hoax Echoes ‘Facecrime’ Passage from Orwell’s ‘1984’

Social media users compared the hate hoax against the Covington Catholic high school kids to a passage about “facecrime” from George Orwell’s landmark novel 1984 this week.

The Covington Catholic incident, where a pro-Trump student faced media wrath for smirking at a Native American man who was harassing him, was compared by social media users to a passage about “facecrime” from George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984, which reads: “to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.”

One Ivy League professor accused the student of having “the smiling face of Whiteness,” while television host Reza Aslan asked his Twitter followers, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”

NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie also remarked, “There is something aggressive about standing there, standing your ground.”