Pompeo Takes Shot at Google for Forgetting America's 'First Principles'
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered the keynote address at Claremont Institute’s 40th Anniversary Gala and criticized Google for forgetting America’s principles.
In his speech on May 11, he delivered a short historical sketch of the United States’ place in the world in the past and in the present.
Pompeo, who was receiving the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award, drew a warm response from the crowd for touching on some of the highlights of American history. But he also noted events in the fairly recent past that were lowlights.
The United States, he said, “had lost sight of respect — not for other nations, but for our own people and for our ideals.”
“We cozied up to Cuba. We struck a terrible agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran that put the regime’s campaigns of terrorism and proxy wars on steroids,” Pompeo said.
“And many of our leaders were more eager to delight the Davos crowd than champion the principles that have made us the greatest nation that civilization has ever known.
“By the way, the Claremont Institute sadly knows, I could also name a certain tech company that we spoke about earlier that’s forgotten our first principles too,” he said.
The reference was to a decision Google made to shut down Claremont’s efforts to advertise the Pompeo awards dinner.
The whole speech can be seen here:
As Claremont President Ryan Williams explained in an article in The American Mind, a Claremont publication, Google made the decision to reject the advertising based on an essay Williams published titled “Defend America – Defeat Multiculturalism.”
“Google, either its algorithm or some individual, had a look at my essay launching our new campaign for a unifying Americanism, ‘Defend America—Defeat Multiculturalism.’ They decided it to be in violation of their policy on ‘race and ethnicity in personalized advertising’ and shut down our advertising efforts to American Mind readers.
“We weren’t ‘advertising’ anything in the essay, of course, but the relevant section of their policy lists ‘racially or ethnically oriented publications, racially or ethnically oriented universities, racial or ethnic dating’ as examples of violations.”
Google eventually rescinded its decision, but not before drawing negative publicity on conservative sites like The Western Journal, National Review, Powerline and The American Thinker.
Pompeo also gave an idea of how powerful he thinks the conservative movement is with a joke near the beginning of his speech.
“I heard about this little dust-up about the advertisement for this dinner,” he said. “It said they wouldn’t let us post because of the ‘offensive material.’ I was like, ‘is that me?’
“But I also know, no advertisement and with this crowd, you’d have needed a much bigger room.”
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