The New York Times’s 1619 Project is an attack on “the American way of life” that aligns with the Chinese Communist Party, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“They want you to believe Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed,” Pompeo said Thursday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology.”
Pompeo issued that rebuke at the unveiling of a new report from the Commission on Unalienable Rights, a panel he convened last year to provide “an informed review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy.” He acknowledged the historical perpetration of human rights abuses by the U.S. government — including slavery, that “we expelled Native Americans from their ancestral lands,” and foreign policy decisions that violated the sovereignty of other nations. But he maintained that this history has been distorted into “a slander” of the American people.
“Our founders also knew the fallen nature of mankind,” Pompeo said. “So, in their great wisdom, they established a system that acknowledged our human failings, checked our worst instincts, ensured government wouldn’t trample on these unalienable rights.”
Pompeo also said that “the New York Times refused to publish” an op-ed on the report by Mary Ann Glendon, a mentor and emeritus Harvard professor who chaired the commission, before making a joke about the recent controversy over the newspaper’s decision to fire the editor who published an opinion column written by Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican.
“You are even more dangerous than Sen. Tom Cotton,” he said to Glendon.
And he blamed the 1619 Project for the recent wave of efforts to topple historic statues, issuing a condemnation that seemed to distinguish between monuments to Confederate leaders and memorials erected in honor of other icons of American history.
“Some people have taken these false doctrines to heart,” he said, referring to the 1619 Project. “The rioters pulling down statues thus see nothing wrong with desecrating monuments to those who fought for our unalienable rights — from our founding to the present day.”
Some have called for taking down the statues of Founding Fathers who were slave owners.
Pompeo delivered the address just hours after the Chinese Foreign Ministry described the United States as “the world's No. 1 human rights abuser” and accused Pompeo of lying about Beijing’s treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
“There is racial discrimination everywhere, and the wealth gap is just shocking,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. “Before opening his mouth, he should ask how the late Mr. Floyd and minorities in the U.S. think of human rights in the U.S. and how the innocent lives lost in Iraq, Syria, and other countries think of the U.S. human rights record.”
Pompeo reiterated that the Chinese Communist Party is using Uighur Muslims as “slave labor” and affirmed the moral superiority of the U.S. government over that of Beijing.
“Our exceptional nation secures infinitely more freedom for its citizens than the CCP will ever permit,” he said. "America uniquely among nations has the capacity to champion human rights and the dignity of every human being made in the image of God, no matter their nation.”
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