Secretary of State Pompeo Slams 1619 Project Examining Slavery: ‘A Slander on Our Great People’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the New York Times’ 1619 Project in a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia Thursday afternoon. During his address, he said the project must make the Chinese Communist Party “gleeful” and called it a “slander on our great people.”
The 1619 Project, an ongoing re-examination of US history around slavery, was first released in August 2019. While some historians have offered criticism about the project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of its co-creators, won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary this year for the extensive essay. The 1619 Project is currently being adapted for film and TV with Oprah Winfrey on board.
“They want you to believe the Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed,” Pompeo said on Thursday, before accusing the Times of engaging in Marxist propaganda. “The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout their ideology.”
“The rioters pulling down statues thus see nothing wrong with desecrating monuments to those who fought for unalienable rights — from our founding to the present day,” Pompeo said. “This is a dark vision of America’s birth. I reject it. It is a disturbed reading of history. It is a slander on our great people. Nothing could be further from the truth!”
Pompeo also praised the Constitution — which infamously only counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for taxation and representation purposes — as a “glorious document” and bashed the project for framing the United States as being “founded for human bondage.”
In response, Hannah-Jones quote-tweeted Pompeo’s speech, which he posted to Twitter, and responded, “What a time.”
What a time. https://t.co/MP1hKtpCQi
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 17, 2020
Watch above.
