Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote an article in The Federalist last week declaring, “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.”
The Global Engagement Center (GEC) was a major player in the censorship-industrial complex that Democrats have been building over the course of decades. Like all government “good intentions,” the GEC started out as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), and it was used specifically to monitor terrorist propaganda in the Middle East and advise administrations on counter-tactics. It was dubbed the GEC in 2016 under President Barack Obama, at which point it began to turn toxic. It became a weapon honed to attack and censor speech that Democrats didn’t like.
In 2020, during the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, the GEC’s tentacles were felt all across the country (and the globe). News organizations weren’t allowed to question the origins of COVID, and specific news outlets were put on a blacklist both at home and abroad. The UK’s Global Disinformation Index (GDI) named 10 conservative publications as “riskiest online news outlets.” Big Tech was also involved in silencing conservative voices, limiting their reach, and bullying advertisers into taking business away from the “undesirables.”
Under President Joe Biden, the censorship was turned up to a 10. As our Douglas Andrews reported last month:
As it turns out, the Biden administration spent the last four years undermining the First Amendment at every turn. According to a 38-page report from the Media Research Center, the people in charge of the Biden White House concocted 57 distinct initiatives for defiling the First Amendment. These censorship efforts included “coercing and colluding with Big Tech platforms to silence his opponents; using taxpayer dollars to fund censorship organizations that pledged to cancel conservative voices; enlisting foreign agents to suppress stories from right-leaning media outlets; and weaponizing federal agencies to target those critical of the administration.”
The Global Engagement Center helped coordinate this network of censorship. Congress voted not to fund the GEC this past December; however, Biden kept it alive by renaming it the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, hoping it would eke out its existence in the shadows until the next Democrat entered the Oval Office.
Secretary Rubio and President Donald Trump have put an end to that ambition. Trump has also taken the sage advice of Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, who called for the dismantling of the entire censorship octopus.
Schmitt called out specific government entities that were aiding and abetting government censorship in the marketplace of ideas. In an X thread last month, he said: “Seemingly every agency was a partner in building this system. FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, State Department, Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, USAID — even FEMA. Through grants and partnerships, these agencies funneled countless tax dollars to censorship groups.”
Many of these government entities have either been audited by DOGE or are in the process of being cleaned up.
As Rubio eloquently put it:
Bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America’s long free speech history. … Finally, as we recommit this country to its core constitutional free speech principles at home, we will remain vigilant abroad — not just against threats from adversaries such as Communist China but also from less expected countries where authoritarian censorship is gradually strangling true freedom of speech. We are not afraid. At her birth, America was a lone beacon of freedom to the world. If necessary, we will happily be that lone beacon once again.
The Left seems content to silence all ideas that do not adhere to its ideology. That is why tribalism has gotten so extreme: Leftists are horrified at the idea of any of their fellow comrades talking to someone who is conservative; their radicals actively encourage assassination culture; and many would happily cut off family members who think differently from them.
Our American experiment, a government “by the people, for the people,” can only survive if every voice has a chance to compete in the marketplace of ideas. The Trump administration has taken steps to ensure free speech and placed power back in the hands of the American people.
