On our dime, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Philadelphia, during a pandemic, to attack p

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On our dime, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Philadelphia, during a pandemic, to attack prize-winning journalism at the National Constitution Center

The @NYTimes’s 1619 Project wants you to believe our country was founded for human bondage. What a dark vision of America’s birth. What a disturbed reading of history. What a slander on our great people.

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Or as Heather Cox Richardson explains:

Snip

Hogan is not the only one eying the future. Today Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote a Washington Post op-ed and gave a fiery speech in Philadelphia to launch the draft report of the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, a committee he organized a year ago to reexamine “the nation’s founding principles.” To chair the committee, he tapped conservative legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon, who is staunchly and vocally opposed to abortion.

The commission’s report looks laughably like a campaign document, and, of course, Pompeo has been in hot water for throwing official dinners clearly designed to build his own political base. In the report’s 60 pages are large images of America’s most famous leaders—the Framers, Abraham Lincoln, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan—and at pride of place, on its second page, is a big color photo of Pompeo himself. Trump is nowhere to be seen.

The report lays out a version of American history and human rights designed to appeal to the evangelicals who count Pompeo as their own. It begins by stating that the primary tradition “that formed the American spirit” was “Protestant Christianity… infused with the beautiful Biblical teachings that every human being is imbued with dignity and bears responsibilities toward fellow human beings, because each is made in the image of God.”....

The commission goes on to limit support for human rights to those issues that are covered in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are “widely recognized and accepted by the American people, through their democratically elected political representatives,” and are accepted by most peoples around the world as legitimate. This leaves out LGBTQ individuals, of course, as well as many women and girls. It also puts the definition of human rights in the hands of whichever party controls Congress, indicating that Pompeo expects Republicans to do so for a long time.