Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the Global Engagement Center as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter 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 an op-ed for the Federalist, titled, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.”
Rubio wrote that, in 2016, the Obama administration changed the GEC’s focus on combatting international terrorism cover any and all “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
Rubio explained:
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.
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.”
The Secretary of State said that GEC was an “enthusiastic partner” in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) which monitored alleged disinformation about 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 noted.
“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,’” Rubio continued.
He said he decided to publish his op-ed in the Federalist as one recipient of American taxpayer dollars was the Global Disinformation Index, which ranked news outlets based on the likeliness that they would spread disinformation.
As Breitbart News detailed, the top ten outlets most at risk of spreading disinformation were center-right leaning outlets, such as the Federalist and the New York Post, while some of the outlets least likely to spread disinformation were left-leaning outlets such as HuffPost and ProPublica.
Rubio contended, “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.”
“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,” Rubio added.
Rubio also hosted a live discussion with Mike Benz, a former State Department official and the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
