Mike Pompeo and Education Secretary Betty de Vos sent joint letters yesterday to the State Commissioners of Education and to Presidents of American Institutions of Higher Education and Affiliates, calling on all of them to close all university-level Confucius Institutes and K-12 “Confucius Classrooms” by the end of this year. The duo charged that these are not language and culture programs, but “an important element of the PRC’s global influence campaign,” spreading “authoritarian” values.
Pompeo then gave no less than five interviews on Thursday morning alone, in which he hammered at the “danger” these programs allegedly represent, with ravings befitting bomb-loving Dr. Strangelove. “They now reach tens of thousands of U.S. schoolchildren every day, and so they need to be shut down. The Confucius Institutes effectively have allowed the Chinese Communist Party government to take up a physical presence in the halls of our children’s schools here in the United States. It’s unacceptable… We’d like to have them all shut down and have the people who are engaged in this on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party who are here traveling on visas no longer having access to our classrooms,” he told Indianapolis’s Tony Katz, for example.
“We all have to be on guard… Every one of us has an individual responsibility … to identify” disinformation from Russia as well as China,” he repeated throughout the morning. Their “public information efforts are aimed often at posing real risk to our democratic values.”
Poor Pompeo. He couldn’t get away with just talking about “malign actors.” In four of the five interviews, he also had to give excuses for why President Trump had called him out the other day for stalling disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
