In a statement posted to his
Twitter account on his last full day on the
Job,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complained that "censorship, wokeness, political correctness ... all points in one direction — authoritarianism, cloaked as moral righteousness." He continued his diatribe in a caption above the image of the statement. "Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms, they're not who America is," he wrote, adding that they "distort our glorious founding" and allow foreign enemies to "stoke" societal divisions to weaken the
United States.
The debate about political correctness and so-called "cancel culture" is fairly ubiquitous these days, so while his stance on those matters may have elicited some eye rolls, critics were probably not surprised. Describing multiculturalism as anti-American, however, struck a nerve. Some commentators suggested the words were bigoted, while others added that it's Pompeo himself who is distorting America's founding by pushing such an argument.