Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday revealed that the Trump administration has officially shut down the Global Engagement Center (GEC), describing it as a key move in dismantling what he called the “censorship-industrial complex.”
“Today, it is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio wrote in a Federalist op-ed titled, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.”
Rubio explained that in 2016, the Obama administration expanded the GEC’s mission. What had originally been a center focused on countering terrorist propaganda was restructured to fight a wide range of “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
According to Rubio, this was part of a calculated shift. He pointed to Rick Stengel, who led the GEC under Obama, claiming that Stengel used the term “democracy” to justify silencing voices he disagreed with. “This pivot was no accident. Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect ‘democracy’ while redefining it so that ‘democracy’ came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like.”
Rubio continued, “In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, ‘Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.’ That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about, ‘why America needs a hate speech law.’”
He noted that the GEC played an active role in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that tracked what it considered disinformation during the 2020 election. “The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration,” Rubio stated.
Rubio criticized the GEC’s use of taxpayer money, saying it channeled millions of dollars into global organizations pushing for speech regulation under the pretense of fighting disinformation. “With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation,’” he wrote.
He explained that he chose to publish the piece in the Federalist because that outlet, along with others like the New York Post, had been unfairly targeted. He cited the Global Disinformation Index, a group funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars, which labeled right-leaning news sites as high-risk for spreading disinformation while rating left-wing platforms such as HuffPost and ProPublica as low-risk.
Rubio argued, “The entire ‘disinformation’ industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment from the voices of forgotten Americans. Everything it does is the fruit of the poisoned tree: the hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and ‘meddling’ is what caused President Trump’s victory in 2016, rather than a winning political message that only he was offering.”
He concluded, “The Trump administration rejects this anti-American attitude. The American people don’t need an obscure agency to ‘protect’ them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business. This administration will fight false narratives with true narratives, not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one ‘truth’ be visible online.”
In addition to the op-ed, Rubio also hosted a live discussion with Mike Benz, a former State Department official and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).
{Matzav.com}